The Empirical Ambitions of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

by Roger Maioli

A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Baltimore, Maryland

August, 2015

© 2015 Roger Maioli All Rights Reserved

Abstract

My purpose in the following pages is to provide a revisionist account of empiricism’s influence on the rise of the British novel. For the most part, scholarship on eighteenth- century fiction has suggested that empiricism and the novel were collaborators in a common mission. According to this tradition, the novel’s realism owed much to themes and reportorial procedures that were typical of empiricism, while the empiricists found in the novel a powerful pedagogic ally, capable of bringing socio-ethical knowledge to readers uninterested in philosophical writing. While much can be said for this account, its picture of a collaboration between empiricism and the novel is hard to reconcile with the deep distrust of fictions that characterized the empiricist outlook. Classical empiricists from

Francis Bacon to David Hume saw imaginative literature not as a vehicle for knowledge, but as a source of delusion; and they made no exception of the novel, for all its empirical ambitions.

While little is made of the empiricist distrust in extant studies of the rise of the novel, it influenced the theory and practice of prose fiction for many decades after the mid- eighteenth century. In the chapters that follow I trace and examine that influence, by first reconstituting David Hume’s case against the novel and then showing that his challenge did not go unheeded. A number of British novelists — including Henry Fielding, Charlotte

Lennox, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen — recognized the issues that worried Hume and addressed them in their theory and practice as novelists.

The central issue faced by Fielding, Lennox and their successors was to explain how it

ii is that events that never took place can qualify as sources of empirical knowledge. They approached the issue earnestly but unsystematically, and my central task has been to reconstitute the broader perspective suggested by their fragmentary reflections. Some novelists, like Fielding, argued that literary characters are empirical generalizations that synthesize, through a process of induction, the regularities observable in human nature; others, like Sterne, proposed that the reader’s emotional investment in the fate of fictional characters constitutes a form of virtual experience, with the same epistemic value of actual encounters with others. In each case, they asserted the novel’s ability to convey knowledge by arguing that fictions can be valid surrogates for direct experience.

In tracing their efforts to affirm the empirical status of prose fiction, I hope to demonstrate two things: first, that empiricism influenced the development of the novel not only by providing novelists with formal and thematic opportunities, but also by pressing them to justify their pedagogic ambitions; and second, that in seeking to align literature with an epistemology suspicious of fiction, such novelists helped inaugurate a mode of argumentation that has retained its urgency ever since. As I argue in my conclusion, the debate surrounding the empirical ambitions of the novel prefigured similar debates in modern aesthetics — particularly among philosophers and literary critics who defend the value of literary studies in the face of scientistic scepticism.

Advisor: Frances Ferguson

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Dedication

I was still a grumpy boy, living in the São Paulo countryside, when my father first said: “You’re going to be a doctor.” A “doctor,” in my father’s usage, was someone who worked at an office with a pen, and who was therefore more genteel than himself or the rest of our family, who worked in farms and plants with spades and hammers. My mother approved of the plan as long as it didn’t take too much reading, for reading, she warned, will in time require glasses. The glasses soon came, but the doctorate took much longer. I never succeeded at explaining to my parents what I have been doing since I quit my previous careers as a mechanic and then translator to get started on the academic track. Neither of them has ever read a book, and they left school too early to have a clear sense of what “literature” is. (Granted: I don’t have it either.) But they are elated that I am finally becoming a doctor (and, even more importantly, that I will have an office!). Some of it was my doing, but a lot of it was due to them, to all the things they know without the aid of books, and to all the things, small or immense, that they alone could have done for me, and did. I dedicate this dissertation to them.

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Acknowledgments

Everyone writing a doctoral dissertation knows at least two things. The first is that it can’t be done. Even if it eventually gets done and the tome is out there, weighing a pound, one still senses that there is something unbelievable about it. In looking back to trace how the pages that follow came to be, I remember an opening phase when my output was close to zero pages a year, followed by a period of steady but glacial progress. At some point I learned to do a little bit every day and trust the future to add up the bits. The trick was to find the stability to keep going. And this, as dissertation mongers also know, can’t be done alone. I found my stability with Paige Glotzer, my once friend and now dear partner, who gave me light and made me feel at home in a country that had been very foreign before.

Thank you, Paige.

English literature was itself a foreign country when I first became interested in it twenty years ago. Having learned the rudiments of the language, I thought it made sense to tackle my subject head on, and decided to begin with Tristram Shandy. It amazes me to think that I managed to get through a couple of chapters, and even more so that I gave the trade a second thought after that opening round. There too I had the support of a special someone who made small defeats look small indeed. The long distance eventually set us apart, but much of what she gave is present here. Thank you, Bia.

Among the stock types peopling the strips of PhD Comics is the unhelpful advisor, a figure many of my colleagues claim to find true to life. Luckily, that is a problem I never had to deal with. Frances Ferguson was the best advisor I could have hoped for. Those familiar with her accomplishments and intelligence will be unsurprised to know that I found her

v example inspiring and her advice precious. But Frances’s qualities as an advisor go well beyond her brilliance. She seems to work from the assumption that even the most imperfect piece of writing may have cost the author some pains, and she honors that by dosing the necessary criticism with equally needed encouragement. Her responsiveness and dedication is proverbial among her advisees, and were never more evident to me than after she left Hopkins to take up her current position at UChicago. She was missed in person, but her guidance remained present.

This project also benefitted from the personal and intellectual support I received from friends, colleagues, and professors. On the personal front, my greatest debt is to my two roommates, Luiz Vieira and Patrick Giamario, who were generous friends and patient listeners all along. Nan Zhang, my first and still one of my best Hopkins friends, provided an example of professionalism and intellectual integrity. I was schooled in manners, fortitude, and all things American by a number of great people, including Lauren Macdonald, Erica

Tempesta, Túlio Zille, Stefanie Falconi, Jacob Chilton, Elizabeth Brogden, Colleen Dorsey,

Carolyn Oliveira, Hitomi Koyama, Rodrigo Sekkel, Robert Day, and Jessica Valdez. I learned much about PhD programs from Wladimir Lyra, Kevin Ryan and Kenneth von Zeipel, and only made my way into Hopkins thanks to the wisdom of Saroja Ganapathy and Sujata Das

Gupta.

Patrick Fessenbecker and John Hoffmann, two gifted scholars who are making signal contributions to their fields, read substantial portions of this dissertation and helped make it better. I also benefitted from conversations with Katarina O’Briain and Will Miller. My college professors Márcia Consolim, Carlos Camargo, Nilton Nicola, and Valdir Baptista were my first role models and provided much needed guidance at the initial stages of my academic career. My subsequent professors both in Brazil and in the United States helped me understand and hopefully meet the standards of professional scholarship, and I am

vi particularly thankful to Marcos Soares, Amanda Anderson, Simon During, and Jonathan

Kramnick. I learned much from the seminars I took with Sandra Vasconcelos, Franklin de

Mattos, and Maria Augusta da Costa Vieira at the University of São Paulo, and Walter

Stephens, María Portuondo, Richard Halpern, Drew Daniel, Mark Thompson, and Hent de

Vries at Johns Hopkins. Carrie Shanafelt and Jenny Davidson kindly shared unpublished work with me, for which I am thankful. I found a special interlocutor, teacher, and friend in

Jared Hickman, who welcomed me as his research assistant for the summer of 2013. And I had the great pleasure of knowing and working with Patrick Boner, a brilliant historian of science now devoted to the cause of Teach for America. Danke vielmals, Herr Boner.

I am very grateful to Pat Kain and Will Evans, from our Expository Writing Program, for their mentorship and collegiality during my time teaching in the program. I am looking forward to joining them again as a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow during the next academic year.

Versions of chapters 2 and 3 have appeared in print in SEL Studies in English

Literature 1500-1900 and Eighteenth Century Fiction. I thank the editors for their permission to reproduce that material here.

Special thanks to my two brothers, Vagner and Fabiano, for believing in me and being around in good and bad times.

The many hours I spent on this text were made more pleasant by a faithful work companion: Azul, our betta fish, who lived next to my desk and brought me daily joy. Nature decided he wouldn’t see the final product of our teamwork, and we buried him yesterday.

May you live on in this note, little buddy.

Baltimore

June 6, 2015

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1: Maps of Worlds Unseen: Empiricism and Knowledge in the Novel ...... 8

1. Empiricism and the traditional defense of poetry ...... 9

2. Empiricism and the novel ...... 20

3. Literary cognitivism: a modern parallel ...... 32

4. Chapter summaries ...... 36

CHAPTER 2: David Hume and the Empiricist Challenge ...... 40

1. The falsity of fiction and the truth of history ...... 43

2. Thought experiments and empirical knowledge ...... 49

3. The cognitive value of the novel ...... 56

4. Hume’s anticognitivism ...... 61

CHAPTER 3: Empiricism and Fielding’s Theory of Fiction ...... 63

1. Moral epistemology in Fielding’s novels ...... 66

2. Joseph Andrews and “true history” ...... 70

3. Probability in Tom Jones ...... 77

4. The limits of Fielding’s theory ...... 84

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CHAPTER 4: Varieties of Propositionalism: Lennox, Austen, Godwin ...... 91

1. The Female Quixote ...... 93

2. Northanger Abbey ...... 108

3. Caleb Williams...... 123

CHAPTER 5: Laurence Sterne and the Experience of Reading Fiction ...... 142

1. Tristram Shandy as a psychological experiment ...... 145

2. Tristram Shandy as a philosophical enquiry...... 156

3. A Sentimental Journey as virtual experience ...... 167

CONCLUSION ...... 184

Works Cited ...... 202

Biographical Note ...... 224

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Introduction

Between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the philosophy and the prose fiction of Great Britain came to evince an unprecedented interest in the particulars of experience.

Classical empiricism from Francis Bacon to David Hume redirected the attention of philosophers from the stratosphere of rationalism to the discrete data of the senses. At the same time, fictionists from Aphra Behn to Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding turned their gaze from the high plains of romance towards the minute details of everyday life.1

Modern historians of the novel have come to see these two developments as aspects of a single tendency in Western culture. In his highly influential The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian

Watt described the shift towards particularity in British philosophy and literature as the common expression of a new world picture that had been taking shape since the

Renaissance, “one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.”2 Philosophers and novelists were common inheritors of this worldview, which they promoted by means of analogous methods. In Watt’s account, the procedures developed by the empiricists to investigate the world of experience and document their

1 Two recent discussions of literary attitudes towards particularity in the period are Jenny Davidson, “The ‘Minute Particular’ in Life-Writing and the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48, 3 (2015), 263-281. and Leo Damrosch, “Generality and Particularity,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 381-393. See also Scott Elledge’s seminal essay “The Background and Development in English Criticism of the Theories of Generality and Particularity,” PMLA, Vol. 62, N. 1 (1947), 147-182.

2 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 31.

1 findings applied beyond the boundaries of philosophical writing; they were equally recognizable in the “formal realism” that came to characterize the new fiction. “The novel’s imitation of human life,” says Watt, “follows the procedures adopted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth” (31). Like the new philosophy, the rising novel endeavored to portray the circumstantiality of observable life with faithfulness, and it did so in order to “report the truth” and thus enlighten its readers about the world.

From this perspective, the realist novel was more than romance descended from the clouds to please a lowlier taste. It was an agent of the Enlightenment. Through its subject matter and its methods, the novel participated in the contemporary campaign to popularize knowledge of the observable world by means of accessible, unadorned reports.

Watt’s belief that the rises of empiricism and the novel were connected has met with its critics, but the main tendency of later scholarship has been to reaffirm and refine rather than to contest it. The original thesis was given extensive elaboration in Michael McKeon’s monumental The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, and subsequently taken in new directions in a number of studies by J. Paul Hunter, John Bender, Jonathan Lamb, Jonathan

Kramnick, Cynthia Wall, and others.3 For all their variety, these studies broadly conform to

Watt’s “collaborative” model; they present empiricism and the novel as allies in a common

3 Hunter sees a link between the novel’s exploration of subjectivity and the tradition of “meletetics” (or occasional meditations on apparently trivial things) practiced by writers such as Robert Boyle; Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2, 4 (July 1990): 1-17. Bender discusses the novel as part of a cultural system that also includes scientific hypotheses, which novels, by being explicitly fictional, help to validate. Bender, “Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis,” Representations 61, Special Issue (Winter 1998): 6-28; see also note 41 and Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). Lamb links the empiricist distinction between wild and governed uses of the fancy to different genres in prose fiction, suggesting that the realist novel has the same epistemological status as Locke’s notion of personhood; see his “Locke’s Wild Fancies: Empiricism, Personhood, and Fictionality,” The Eighteenth Century, 48, 3 (Fall 2007): 187- 204. In a similar line, Kramnick suggests that the novel’s representation of thinking processes corresponds to empiricism’s imagistic theory of mind, in “Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel,” The Eighteenth Century, 48, 3 (Fall 2007): 263-285. Cynthia Wall, in The Prose of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), relates the changes in eighteenth-century styles of description to the emerging scientific practices and the epistemological attitudes of empiricism.

2 mission, the latter either mirroring or appropriating the interests, methods, and pedagogic goals of the former. The overall picture is this: like empiricism, the novel seeks to collect, organize, and make sense of the data of sensory experience, giving pride of place to the here-and-now of English life and inspecting with clinical thoroughness the inner workings of human subjectivity, always in a stylistic register in which denotation trumps adornment.

The ultimate goal, again, is a cognitive one. Defoe and Richardson, no less than Locke or

Hume, base their writings on the particulars of experience in order to help their readers understand and navigate the real world. The empirical genesis of Moll Flanders or Clarissa enhances the power of these novels as vehicles for socio-ethical knowledge, making them imaginative counterparts of the political treatise or the moral essay.

As far as the attitude of eighteenth-century novelists go, this collaborative model has much to recommend it. Fictionists in the period consistently capitalized on the purported connection between the protocols of empiricism and the novel’s pedagogic value. Stressing the moral accompanying the fable was a routine gesture in the addresses to the reader that prefaced most narratives at the time, and the moral was usually characterized as a type of empirical inference — a set of conclusions to be drawn from the dizzying array of particular facts documented by the novel. The story of Colonel Jack, according to Defoe’s preface, is so rich in lessons “that it would employ a Volume, large as itself, to particularize the

Instructions that may be drawn from it.”4 Richardson went Defoe one better and actually produced the volume, spelling out the lessons to be drawn from his novels in A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the

Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (1755). Since it was a matter of no slight importance that the facts yielding the inferences be authentic, the moral was often

4 Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honorable Col. Jacque. Ed. Samuel Holt Monk (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1.

3 supported by the denial (or, in Richardson’s case, the instrumental disavowal) of the novel’s fictionality. By this well-known maneuver, novelists were able to enlist the epistemic support of empiricism on behalf of their fictions. But the claim to historicity was not indispensible for positing the connection between empiricism and novelistic truth. In fact, the novel’s pedagogic program retained its association with empiricism even after the

1740s, when the old authenticating devices entered their slow descent into obsolescence.

Midcentury novelists like Fielding, who made no attempt to pass their fictions as fact, nonetheless staked the moral value of their novels on their professed faithfulness to observation and experience. In short, whether in the early or the late eighteenth century, many practitioners defended the novel’s cognitive value by affirming its alignment with the principles of empiricism.

Of course, not everyone agreed that they were entitled to do so. The claim to historicity proved highly controversial, and McKeon has documented with unprecedented thoroughness the reaction it elicited from more skeptical quarters. But the revamped commitment to empiricism that characterized the explicit fictions of the midcentury was equally contested, and faced a type of critique that studies of the novel have mostly tended to gloss over. The assumption that empiricism could underwrite the lessons of undisguised fictions had no currency on the philosophical side of that fence, where Watt’s collaborative model would have seemed very alien. Empiricist philosophers for the most part saw no compatibility between their quest for knowledge and what they regarded as the misleading tendencies of imaginative literature. Bacon, Locke, Hume, George Campbell, Adam Smith — all drew a functional distinction between philosophy or history, both of which seek to instruct, and “poetry,” whose purpose is merely to please. Bacon spoke for generations of empiricists when he declared: “For those who propose not to divine and guess but to discover and know, and make it their purpose not to fabricate apish mockeries of worlds

4

[simiolas & fabulas Mundorum] but to examine and, in a way, dissect the nature of the real world itself, everything should be sought from the things themselves.”5 Nature, rather than reason or the imagination, is the proper court of appeal for empirical knowledge. Books,

Bacon acknowledges, can be suitable replacements for the observation of nature, as long as their narration “is unsullied and undefiled by fables and vanity” (41). While the realist novel was less guilty of wild inventions than the forms of fiction Bacon was acquainted with, the empiricists who witnessed its emergence made no exception of it; in fact, they found that the novel’s realism only heightened the risk of delusion. As Hume complained, young readers were often blinded by the “false representations of mankind” offered by novels and romances.6 James Beattie, who dissented from Hume on almost everything, nonetheless concurred that novel reading “breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge,” and “withdraws the attention from nature, and truth.”7 Rather than an outpost of empiricism bringing enlightenment to a broader audience, the novel struck the empiricists as a vulgar peddler of misconceptions.

Unlike the response to the early claim to historicity, the proscription of explicit fictions by eighteenth-century empiricists has played no substantial role in discussions of the alignment between empiricism and the novel. To some extent the omission is understandable. After all, studies of the topic undertaken from the perspective of literary studies are interested in what empiricism means for the novel, not vice-versa.8 Conversely,

5 Francis Bacon, The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Texts. Ed. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely. Vol 11 of The Oxford Francis Bacon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 37. Further references will be to this edition unless otherwise noted.

6 Hume, “Of the Study of History,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. edn. (1985; rprt. Indianapolis IN: LibertyClassics, 1987), 564.

7 James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (Dublin: Exshaw, Walter et al., 1783), vol. 1, 320.

8 An exception is the pioneering work of Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, who studies the importance of romance and romance reading for empiricist accounts of the self. See her Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680-1740 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012).

5 philosophical studies of empiricist aesthetics have prioritized broad theoretical questions over the empiricists’ applied criticism. As a result, we still lack an appropriate account of what the novel meant for those thinkers whose philosophical principles it ostensibly shared. While understandable, however, this omission is by no means inconsequential.

There are two reasons why it should concern us. The first is that the perspective of the empiricists has direct implications for our picture of the parallel rises. As will be seen in

Chapter 1, extant accounts of empiricism’s relation to the novel have tended either to suggest that empiricism lost its purchase on prose fiction as the claim to historicity waned, or that the explicit fictions following the 1740s fostered the empiricist enterprise in ways that were envisioned and even endorsed by the classical empiricists. Taking account of the empiricist standpoint thus serves a corrective function. The second reason why it deserves attention is of a more constructive nature. As I hope to show, the concerns emanating from the empiricist camp were recognized by many of its targets, eliciting creative responses from fictionists who acknowledged the challenge but refused to capitulate. Novelists including Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen admitted that prose fiction’s appeal to observation and experience posed a theoretical problem: that of explaining how it is that characters and events that never were nor ever will can in any sense be “empirical,” so as to warrant inferences about the real world. And they proceeded to address that problem both in their theories of fiction and in their creative practice. In other words, by triggering this reaction, the empiricist suspicion of the novel became a productive force behind the genre’s development, in ways that still need to be adequately recognized.

The aims motivating the present project are two: to reconstitute the empiricist case against the novel and then trace its influence on the theory and practice of prose fiction in the decades following the 1740s. The reason for conjoining these two lines of enquiry is that

6 most novelists addressed the empiricist challenge in an ad-hoc, unsystematic fashion, so that the common purpose of their dispersed reflections only becomes recognizable once the challenge itself is brought into full view. Taken together, the empiricist perspective and the responses it elicited bring into relief an untold part of the story of the two rises, one marked by a spirit not of collaboration, but of negotiated antagonism. My account of that tension aspires to depth rather than extensiveness. Both the philosophical challenge and the attempted solutions allowed for much individual variation, and I decided that paying close attention to a selection of influential cases would be more illuminating than covering in their bare outlines a greater number of examples. My hope is that the approach I take here will seem cogent enough to be tested more broadly, as I believe it can be fruitfully applied to figures I discuss only in passing or not at all — such as Robert Boyle, George Campbell, and

John Stuart Mill in the empiricist camp, or Richardson, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth

Inchbald among the novelists. That said, I do devote some attention to the broader developments my case studies instantiate, both in Chapter 1 and in my concluding remarks.

I begin by considering the impact of empiricism on the longstanding debate about literature and knowledge. The changes set in motion by the new epistemology redefined the traditional hierarchy of genres, with very direct consequences for the place of the novel in the intellectual landscape. Recovering these developments is the purpose of my first chapter, to which I now turn.

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CHAPTER 1 Maps of Worlds Unseen: Empiricism and Knowledge in the Novel

May God never allow us to publish a dream of our imagination as a model of the world.

Sir Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna

The rise of British empiricism put imaginative literature in a tight spot. It discredited the cognitive defenses of poetry the Renaissance owed to Antiquity, pressing poets and fictionists to either resign their cognitive ambitions or reaffirm them in accordance with new rules. The challenge was met in at least three different ways during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Romantic poets denied empiricism’s authority to decide on matters of knowledge, whereas novelists who accepted that authority either declared their aesthetic autonomy or tried to bring the novel into alignment with the epistemology of the day. The last development is the one that concerns me here. In order to contextualize my discussion, I set up in this chapter the broader intellectual stage on which my central figures played their roles. What follows is accordingly an account of how empiricism altered the old conceptions of imaginative literature, and of what that means for our current accounts of the relationship between empiricism and the novel. I will also suggest that the body of theoretical reflection that emerged in response to this change places the rise of the novel at a crucial juncture in intellectual history, a moment when the age-old debate about literature and knowledge took an unprecedented and irreversible turn.

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1. Empiricism and the traditional defense of poetry

In a famous passage of the Poetics, Aristotle asserts with epigrammatic pithiness the superiority of poetry over its more prosaic cousin: “Poetry is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history; poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars”

(1451b).9 Aristotle’s maxim became a staple of poetical treatises after the original Poetics resurfaced in Renaissance Italy, reappearing virtually unchanged in artes poeticae by Gian

Giorgio Trissino, Francesco Robortelli, Antonio Minturno and a number of other commentators.10 It found fertile soil in Britain as well, where the universality of poetry was celebrated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, from Sir Philip Sidney and George

Puttenham to Lord Shaftesbury and George Turnbull. Despite occasional opposition, the critical climate of that period favored the idea that poetry, by communicating unchanging truths about the cosmos, was more enlightening than history, sometimes even than philosophy.

Views on what exactly made poetry “universal” tended to vary, but as far as the transmission of knowledge is concerned universality has a clear advantage over particularity. Because the universal refers to the perennial rather than the contingent features of reality, it yields transferrable principles rather than merely local truths. Sidney puts this point incisively: “The historian ... is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is (to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things) that his example draws no necessary consequence and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.”11 At the basis of

Sidney’s stance is a suspicion of a type of reasoning whose philosophical standing had never

9 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2d edn. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 95. Parenthetical references are in Bekker numbers.

10 For a detailed discussion, see Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), particularly 129-143.

11 Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesy, ed. Lewis Soens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 16.

9 been high: induction by incomplete enumeration.12 The historian fails to convey a useful doctrine because “he stand upon what was (as if he should argue because it rained yesterday, therefore it should rain today)” (8). Past events, for Sidney, may have been the products of fortune, and consequently provide no reliable guidelines for regulating one’s future conduct. The stories told by the poet, by contrast, are not grist for the reader’s inductive mill, but instantiations of general truths that are already well established. Poetry thus folds the concrete examples of history under the abstract precepts of philosophy.

But how does the poet gain access to those precepts? It cannot be from observation, since Sidney himself admits that “right poets ... borrow nothing of what is, has been, or shall be” (12). The Defense of Poesy offers no straightforward answer to this question. But we get a sense of what Sidney’s answer would have been from his remark that “[t]he skill of each artificer stands in that Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself ... [T]hat the poet has that Idea is manifest by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them” (10). The implication seems to be that whatever universal truths find their way into the poem stem from an “Idea or fore-conceit of the work” which, as Sidney makes clear, comes less from sense perception than from “the zodiac of [the poet’s] own wit”

(Defense of Poesy, 10, 9). The reader, in turn, should go back to that original source, and

“frame his example to that which is most reasonable, be it in warlike, politic, or private matters” (20).

This rationalist doctrine was not unique to Sidney. It reappears in a number of subsequent sources, receiving lucid expression more than a century later in the work of

John Dennis:

To follow Nature in giving a draught of human Life, and of the manners of Men ... is not to draw after particular Men, who are but Copies and imperfect Copies of the

12 For a helpful historical survey, see J.R. Milton, “Induction before Hume.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 38, No. 1 (March 1987), pp. 49-74.

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great universal Pattern; but to consult that innate Original, and that universal idea, which the Creator has fix’d in the minds of ev’ry reasonable Creature, and so to make a true and a just Draught. For as ev’ry Copy deviates from the Original both in Life and Grace, and Resemblance, a Poet who designs to give a true Draught of human Life and Manners, must consult the universal Idea, and not particular Persons.13

While Dennis shares the traditional preference for universals over particulars, this aspect of his doctrine has no Aristotelian backing.14 Universals, for Aristotle, exist not on a higher plane of Ideas, but in things, and the only way to develop ideas of them is by means of sensory experience. In this regard, Aristotle is an empiricist.15 By contrast, Dennis’s reference to “that innate Original, and that universal idea” is radically anti-empirical, involving a Christianized appeal to Plato’s theory of Ideas.16

While it might seem perverse to enlist Plato’s aid on behalf of a defense of poetry, the move was neither unique nor new. It was originally made by Cicero, who invoked Plato to explain the origins of our conception of perfect eloquence. Cicero’s explanation relies on an analogy between oratory and sculpture:

Surely [Phidias], while making the image of Jupiter or Minerva, did not look at any person whom he was using as a model, but in his own mind there dwelt a surpassing

13 Dennis, “Reflections Critical and Satyrical, Upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay upon Criticism,” The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward N. Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), Vol. I, 418, n. 1.

14 According to Dennis, “Tragedy and Epick Poetry are more grave and more philosophical than History, because they are more general, so they are more persuasive than Philosophy, because they are more delightful.” “Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroic Poem. With Some General Critical Observations, and Several New Remarks upon Virgil.” The Critical Works of John Dennis, Vol. 1, p. 70.

15 Aristotle defines sense perception as our capacity to apprehend first principles, and ultimately universals. The relevant statements are Posterior Analytics, II, 19, and Metaphysics, I. He notes in the former: “It is plain that we must get to know the primitives by induction; for this is the way in which perception instills universals.” Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 74.

16 Sidney’s commitment to the theory of Ideas is less explicit than Dennis’s, but critics have often taken his position to be nonetheless Platonic. See, for instance, Mark Roberts, “The Pill and the Cherries: Sidney and the Neo-Classical Tradition,” Essays in Criticism, XVI, I (1966), 22-31. For a more qualified view, see Wesley Trimpi’s “Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance. Vol. III. Ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 187-198.

11

vision of beauty; at this he gazed and all intent on this he guided his artist’s hand to produce the likeness of the god. Accordingly, as there is something perfect and surpassing in the case of sculpture and painting — an intellectual ideal by reference to which the artist represents those objects which do not themselves appear to the eye, so with our minds we conceive the ideal of perfect eloquence, but with our ears we catch only the copy. These patterns of things are called ἰδέαι or ideas by Plato, that eminent master and teacher both of style and of thought; these, he says, do not “become”; they exist for ever, and depend on intellect and reason.17

The story of how Phidias modeled his statues on Platonic ideas was retold by Seneca the

Elder and by ancient Neoplatonists, achieving canonical status in discussions of art in Italy from the Trecento to the Seicento; we find Sir Joshua Reynolds lamenting its popularity as late as the last third of the eighteenth century.18 Its central insight — that the arts “give no bare representation of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives”19 — shielded artists from Plato’s attack in the Republic by redefining and in some cases doing away with the notion of mimesis. Cicero’s analogy with eloquence shows that the theory applied just as well to the craft of the wordsmith as to that of the sculptor, and his early modern inheritors were happy to apply it with equal latitude. Witness John

Dryden’s Parallel of Poetry and Painting, where Dryden translates with qualified approval the Neoplatonic theories of Giovanni Pietro Bellori, adapting them to the context of poetical

17 Cicero, Orator, in Brutus; Orator, trans. H.M. Hubbell, (Cambridge, MA, and London: Loeb Classical Library, 1962), section ii, §8-10, 311-313.

18 Reynolds’s response to Cicero provides one of the clearest illustrations of the nominalistic tendencies surveyed in this introduction. While a staunch Neoclassicist, Reynolds rejects the theory of Ideas in favor of a naturalistic model. In explaining how art achieves universality, he insists that the student of painting “never travelled to heaven to gather new ideas,” and that “ideal perfection and beauty ... are not to be sought in the heavens, but upon the earth.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art. Ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959), 43.

19 This particular formulation is offered by Plotinus in the Enneads, V, viii. Cited in William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1957), 117.

12 composition.20 As poetical treatises made room for the appeal to Ideas, Aristotle’s notion of the universality of poetry came to rest on a Platonic theory of knowledge, and this unlikely collaboration became a pervasive feature of early Neoclassicism.21

While not inevitable, the theoretical rapprochement between the Poetics and the

Republic provided the strongest grounds for cognitive defenses of poetry in the period between the Renaissance and the early eighteenth century. The argument it supplied is disarmingly simple: poetry is cognitively valuable because it communicates timeless truths, which poets discover not by means of inductive inferences from particulars, but by consulting their own ideas of universals. While modern proponents of this view often dispensed with Plato’s ontology of Forms, they nonetheless espoused the anti-empirical implications of the appeal to Ideas. Like Sidney and Dennis, they were suspicious of the products of the senses and favored instead the paradoxical notion that just representations of nature should portray it as otherwise than it seems to be. “Among us,” as the Florentine critic Agnolo Segni pointed out, “there is no perfection, or any semblance of what ought to be; but when a fable imitates that perfection and its truth, it is poetry.”22 Should the poet attend to the actual state of earthly things, Dennis warns, then “whenever a just and discerning Judge comes to compare that Draught with the original within him, he

20 Dryden’s source is Bellori’s Vite de’ Pittori (1672). Dryden accepts Bellori’s view only in relation to epic poetry, while favoring observation in the case of comedy and tragedy. See “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting” in Essays of John Dryden. Ed. W.P. Ker (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), Vol. II, 115-153.

21 The most comprehensive study of the interactions between Platonic and Aristotelian models of mimesis is Stephen Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); see Chapter 12 for the post-Renaissance period. For Cicero’s influence on Renaissance mimetic theory, see John Stephens’s The Italian Renaissance: The Origins of Intellectual and Artistic Change before the Reformation (New York: Routledge, 1990), especially 88-98. The canonical discussion of how the Platonic Idea came to play a role in early modern defenses of the arts is Erwin Panofsky’s Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Trans. Joseph J.S. Peake (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968). The persistence of this tradition into literary neoclassicism is traced in a classical article by Louis I. Bredvold: “The Tendency toward Platonism in Neo-Classical Esthetics,” ELH Vol. 1, 2 (September 1934), 91-119.

22 Segni, Ragionamento sopra le cose pertinenti alla poetica (Fiorenza, 1581), 64-67. Quoted in Hathaway, Age of Criticism, 139.

13 immediately finds that that Draught falls extremely short of the Truth of Nature, and immediately disapproves of it, as a second, ungraceful, faint, unresembling Copy”

(“Reflections,” 418, n. 1). The doctrine that poetry should improve upon nature is also championed by Dryden, Sidney, Puttenham, Shaftesbury and others, retaining its currency even among later critics with little investment in the theory of Ideas, such as Addison,

Johnson, Reynolds and most eighteenth-century neoclassicists.23 The cognitive value of poetry, from this perspective, depended on the poet’s insight into realms that were more orderly and more stable than the disorienting world of the senses.

One hardly needs to say that such a theory and its corollaries were unlikely to appeal to the opponents of rationalism. Baxter Hathaway observed, quite pointedly, that

“literary critics in all ages have assumed that poetry is some kind of reconciliation of the universal and the particular, but the important question for any given period is the extent to which the taste and metaphysics of the time move the emphasis one way or the other from dead center” (130). Move the emphasis is what empiricism did, and it did it radically. In fact, it moved it all the way towards the particular.

From the very beginning, the driving purpose of empiricism was to rebuild our picture of the world from the ground up, allowing the multifariousness of nature to take precedence over the neat constructs of the mind. Bacon’s Instauratio Magna provided the movement with a method and a statement of purpose: “seeing how the commerce between the Mind and Things ... could be entirely restored, or at least put on a better footing” (3).

Reason left to its own resources was unequal to this task; it was “some stately pile with no

23 Even at this later stage, when Platonism was weakening its grip on poetics, neoclassical doctrine still tended to rank mental idealizations above the unsieved crudities of nature as objects for poetical imitation. Such a persisting interest in “the representation of Nature ... wrought up to a higher pitch,” as Dryden describes it (Essays, 100), was due for the most part to the requirements of poetic justice and to the new theories of the sublime. Already in Dennis the urge to improve upon nature is partly due to that critic’s confidence in the rhetorical efficacy of the sublime. For the intersection between the Longinian sublime and the Aristotelian- Platonic synthesis, see Scott Elledge’s “Background” (cf. note 1), especially 156-168.

14 foundations,” and Bacon assigned the senses the important task of building one (2). His method consisted in an unprecedentedly complex system of induction, involving elaborate versions of those inferences from experience Sidney had contemptuously dismissed. The end of inductive logic, according to Bacon, “is to teach and instruct the intellect not to batten on and embrace abstract things with the mind’s fragile tendrils (as common logic does), but really to slice into nature ... in such a way that this science may emerge not just from the nature of the mind but from the very nature of things” (443). And things, pace Aristotle, are all particular. Empiricism replaces the ontological realism of the old view with a radical nominalism, according to which “there [is] nothing in the world Universall but Names; for the things named, are every one of them Individuall and Singular.”24 This shift in ontology has direct epistemological consequences. It means that general propositions about the world, rather than truths derived from the contemplation of universals, are just fallible generalizations from our perceptions of particular things, and remain accountable to the latter. This conviction, echoed by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and others, confirmed Bacon’s original belief that “mean and small things discover great better than great can discover the small.”25 For the empirical student of nature, particulars are the stuff universals are made of, and through them runs the way to knowledge.

The focus on particulars walked hand in hand with the transition from the products of reason to those of the senses. But while privileging sense perception, the empiricists nonetheless kept language at the center of their program. Because individual perception is

24 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics, 1982), 1.4, 102. Locke puts it even more tersely: “All things that exist are only particulars,” and Hume echoes Locke: “Every thing, that exists, is particular: And therefore it must be our several particular perceptions, that compose the mind.” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), 3.3.6, 410. David Hume, “An Abstract of ... a Treatise of Human Nature,” in A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 414.

25 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning. In Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 178. Further references will be to this edition.

15 unavoidably limited in time and place, Bacon foresaw that the new worldview would only emerge from a collaborative endeavor, with individual observations being recorded for collective retrieval by means of the written word. The first task he assigned to advancers of learning was thus to compile “a substantial and severe collection of the Heteroclites or

Irregulars of nature, well examined and described” (Advancement, 176). Such catalogues of data were meant to spare future researchers from looking again into the same old corners.

Here as elsewhere Bacon was prescient. The culture of experimentation that eventually emerged around the Royal Society, as Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer have demonstrated, depended above all things on writing, on “a literary technology by means of which the phenomena produced [in the laboratory] were made known to those who were not direct witnesses.”26 What Shapin and Shaffer call “virtual witnessing” — “the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication” (60) — allowed private perceptions to enter public circulation by proxy. Words read carried the value of things seen.

The shift towards nominalism nonetheless entailed a certain suspicion of language.

The reasons are several: the fact that there are infinitely more things in the world than words in language, the fact that common nouns must spread over classes of things and thus erase individual differences, and, most worrisome for the empiricists, the fact that the lexicon they had available was seriously marred by semantic ambiguity.27 Like gestures and symbols, words were for Bacon the coins of intellectual things [numismata rerum

26 Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 25.

27 I will have little to say about the first two problems, as the epistemic challenges they raise would apply not only to imaginative literature but to all linguistic representation. A penetrating discussion of how these challenges inflected first-person narratives and the modern linguistic turn is provided by Elena Russo in Skeptical Selves. Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. 8-23, 58-66.

16 intellectualium],28 but even at the height of his optimism he knew that the extant coinage was imperfect. When Bacon denounced the Idols of the Marketplace or Locke complained about the abuse of words, they were concerned that the constitutive units of natural languages aligned only imperfectly with the constitutive units of the sensory world; and they felt that some minimal alignment had to be secured if words were to stand for things and thus function as epistemic currency.29 At times this requirement was phrased quite literally, as in Thomas Sprat’s injunction that scientific language should “return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words.”30 More usually, it took the form of a ban on non-denotative language, a ban with very direct consequences for the cognitive status of poetry. Locke’s famous indictment is particularly uncompromising:

Since wit and fancy find easier entertainment in the world than dry truth and real knowledge, figurative speeches and allusion in language will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. I confess, in discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight than information and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed from them can scarce pass for faults. But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for

28 Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), in The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. II, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1861), 413. For a full English translation of De Augmentis (by Spedding), see Vol. IV of the Works.

29 The alignment actually involved two levels of correspondence — that between words and ideas and that between ideas and things — and the empiricists had much to say on both. Most of them (Bacon is the notable exception) believed that the first level of correspondence could be guaranteed by “fixing” the language through careful definitions. There was no consensus on how to secure the alignment on the second level, but there was nonetheless a general agreement that natural philosophy remained perfectly feasible.

30 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (1667), reproduced in J.E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), Vol. II, 119. Sprat’s condemnation of metaphors, as Brian Vickers has convincingly shown, was less wholesale than is commonly assumed; it applied mostly to scientific writing. Vickers, “The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment,” in Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth. Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles: University of California, 1985), 23.

17

nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats. (ECHU 3.10.34).

Commenting on this passage, E. Audra and Aubrey Williams aptly observe: “The ultimate effect of such a line of thought would be the trivialization of poetry itself: the faculty of Wit and the figurative language it inspires are seen as unrelated to truth and real knowledge, to

‘things as they are’. Since figurative language is of the essence of poetry, the denial of its ability to express truth is the denial of the value and dignity of poetry.”31

Indeed. Samuel Parker, a fellow of the Royal Society, leveled the same charge directly at the Platonists: “I that am too simple or too serious to be cajol’d with the frenzies of a bold and ungovern’d Imagination cannot be perswaded to think the Quaintest plays and sportings of wit to be any true and real knowledge.”32 While most empiricists were more susceptible than Locke and Parker to the charms of poetry, the distinction between those uses of language that serve the purpose of “information and improvement” and those that afford “pleasure and delight” was standard in empiricism. Bacon’s faculty psychology,

Hobbes’s ranking of judgment over fancy, 33 Hume and Campbell’s hierarchies of the ends of discourse, Bentham’s equation of poetry with the game of push-pin — they all associate poetry with the imagination, the passions, and pleasure, while keeping these spheres of human experience away from the domain of knowledge. From such a perspective, writing that aspires to teach has to be referential and unambiguous, while semantic blurriness or flights of the imagination are the sure way to mistake, delusion, and madness. As Peter Gay

31 E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, “Introduction” to An Essay on Criticism. In Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London and New York: Routledge, 1961), p. 217.

32 Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie. Quoted in George Williamson, “The Restoration Revolt Against Enthusiasm,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1933), 592.

33 See Leviathan, 1.8, 136. In spite of his famous condemnation of metaphor, Hobbes’s was more tolerant of figurative language than critics have usually claimed. For a balanced account, see Andreas Musolff, “Ignes Fatui or Apt Similitudes? — The Apparent Denunciation of Metaphor by Thomas Hobbes,” in Hobbes Studies XVIII (2005), 96-112.

18 puts it, “it became the task of the critical philosopher to keep poetry from contaminating philosophy, to enjoy pleasing fictions without taking them for truths.”34

A direct consequence of these stipulations was the rise of history over poetry as the most instructive type of narrative. Bacon, again a herald of the times to come, regarded poetry “rather as a pleasure or play of wit than a science,”35 while finding history “of most, and I had almost said of only use” for the study of mankind.36 His successors echoed his words, and historians delivered on their hopes. Over the course of the eighteenth century, history slowly moved away from its limited role as exemplar history (or moral philosophy taught through example) towards the philosophical history practiced by Montesquieu,

Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon — history seen as a repository of facts for the study of nature, mankind, and human societies, the precursor of the modern disciplines of sociology and anthropology.37 Slowly but irresistibly, the empiricist preference for forms of writing that record the intricacies of nature turned Aristotle’s famous maxim on its head. By the new standards, history was more philosophical than poetry, precisely because it was about particulars.

The reason for this reversal is not only that empiricism shifted the lenses of

34 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment. An Interpretation. Vol. II. The Science of Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 215.

35 Spedding’s translation. The original reads: “Poësis (quæ principio phantasiæ attributa est) pro lusu potius ingenii quam pro scientia habenda.” De Augmentis Scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, IV, 406, and II, 360.

36 “Advice to Fulke Greville,” in Bacon, The Major Works, 105. It is certainly possible to exaggerate Bacon’s aversion to poetry, the value of which he recognizes elsewhere. In particular, Bacon acknowledges the value of “parabolic poetry” — the poetry of the Bible — and also poetry’s ability to cater to man’s desires in a way that unembellished nature cannot. Still, Bacon insists that “it is not good to stay too long in the theater [i.e. the province of the imagination]: let us pass on to the judicial place or palace of the mind, which we are to approach and view, with more reverence and attention” (Advancement, 186, 188).

37 In this connection, see George Nadel, “Philosophy of History before Historicism,” History and Theory, Vol. 3, 3 (1964), 291-315; Dario Perinetti, “Philosophical Reflection on History,” The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Philosophy, Vol. II, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1107-1140; and Michel Baridon, “Historiography,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 282-301.

19 philosophy from universals to particulars. It is also that the new theory of knowledge pulled the rug from under the old defense of poetry. For the Aristotelian-Platonic tradition, what allowed poetry to prove its cognitive value — to show that the truths it voiced were genuinely that (truths) — was not any correspondence between the world of a poem and the world of the senses, but an act of rational communion. Readers were supposed to possess the same faculty that had granted the poet unmediated access to the truth, an intuitional power allowing them too to recognize the universal without consulting the particular. Empiricism ruled out this procedure by proscribing a priori conclusions beyond the small sphere of deductive reasoning. Propositions about the world had to submit their claims not to the test of reason, but to a comparison with nature. By the same token, narratives were cognitively valuable as long as their lessons were borne out by the state of the world, not as the mind intuits it to be, but in all its observable complexity. Given such a requirement, the preference for factual over fictional narratives — for history over poetry

— followed as a matter of course.

2. Empiricism and the novel

It would be hard to overstate the cultural repercussions of these developments in the early modern period. As Michael McKeon has extensively demonstrated, the epistemological crisis set in motion by empiricism affected writing not only within the precincts of scientific societies, but virtually everywhere. We find an unprecedented concern with factual documentation in the incipient journalism of the late seventeenth century, in travel narratives written in response to Royal Society stipulations, in the genres of spiritual and criminal autobiography, in continental and British iterations of the picaresque, and especially in the narratives we have come to designate as novels. McKeon describes the crisis as a dialectical movement of double negation, in which the empirical alternative to

20 outdated forms of knowing was itself castigated for its excesses by a skeptical reaction. In

McKeon’s well known terminology, adepts of “naive empiricism” denounced the old standards of narrative truth associated with “romance idealism,” but were in turn subjected to a counter-critique by the more conservative upholders of “extreme skepticism.” In the particular context of prose fiction, extreme skeptics included writers like Swift and Fielding, who sought to unmask naive empiricists like Defoe and the early Richardson for their overly literal understanding of the relationship between narrative and world — and in particular for their attempt to pass their stories off as genuine accounts of actual events.

The false claim to historicity, as noted already, was an effective way of recognizing the authority of the new dispensation while averting its consequences. It allowed novelists from the first half of the eighteenth century to affirm the cognitive value of their novels in an empiricist fashion without bothering to respond to empiricism’s indictment of imaginative literature. As McKeon shows, extreme skeptics made it their business to lay bare and implode the authenticating façades of naive empiricism, so as to put its practitioners back where they belonged: on the fiction side of the fact-fiction divide.

However, as McKeon also makes clear, the rejection of naive empiricism by its skeptical critics was not a rejection of empiricism per se. For all their conservative tendencies, skeptics like Swift and Fielding were not motioning for a return to the romance tradition, which they too rejected as unempirical. I think McKeon is absolutely right here, but I also find that his account of extreme skepticism does less than justice to the full consequences of this admission. The reason will be apparent if we zoom in for a moment on the details of his argument.

The persistence of empiricism within the skeptical camp makes the resulting position rather puzzling. In criticizing romance idealism, the skeptics implied that the empiricist standard of narrative truth was binding; but in dispensing with the claim to

21 historicity they deprived themselves of the only device available to protect fiction from the demands of that standard. McKeon recognizes the dilemma and describes the skeptical position as unsustainable: “How tenuous must be that secret sanctuary of truth, distinct both from romance and from too confident a historicity, which is defined by the metacritical act of double negation?”38 The question, posed this way, is clearly rhetorical. Extreme skepticism for McKeon is not a stance in possession of its own defense of fiction, but “an untenably negative midpoint” between the idealism of romance and the pseudo-historicity of the new novel, a midpoint “in constant danger of becoming each of them by turns.” What eventually emerges from this impasse, according to McKeon, is a doctrine of realism that paves the way for the novel’s aesthetic emancipation. It helps to quote McKeon’s remarkable summary:

In the later eighteenth century, the rejuvenated Aristotelian notion of the universal truth of poetry will aid in the formulation of the modern belief in the autonomous realm of the aesthetic. And although thoroughly indebted to empirical epistemology, most of all for its argument that the several realms of knowledge are separable from each other, the belief in the autonomous aesthetic could gain ascendancy only when the coarser and more material vestiges of empirical thought — especially the claim to historicity — had been ejected by the body of knowledge which in modern thought is designated as the last and lonely refuge of transcendent spirit, the sphere of artistic experience. Doctrines of literary realism, which rise from the ruins of the claim to historicity, reformulate the problem of mediation for a world in which spirituality has ceased to represent another realm to which human materiality has only difficult and gratuitous access, and has become instead the capacity of human creativity itself. (119-120)

This passage has been described as impressive but overly general.39 It may be unfair to

38 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002 [1987]), 118- 119.

39 Ralph Rader, “The Novel and History once more: A Response to Michael McKeon’s ‘Reply,’” Narrative 1, 2 (1993), 177.

22 blame McKeon for rushing over a period that falls outside the main scope of his study

(1600-1740), but one does wish he had been more thorough in relation to one particular issue. The novel’s aesthetic emancipation, as I argue towards the end of this study, does not immediately follow the caducity of the claim to historicity; on the contrary, it only takes place over the course of the nineteenth century. For decades after the 1740s, authors of explicitly fictional novels still stressed the moral rather than the aesthetic function of realism, while keeping the “rejuvenated Aristotelian notion of the universal truth of poetry” under the authority of sense perception. The epistemology espoused by the most reflective novelists in the intervening period — including Sterne, Burney, and Austen — was much closer to that of empiricism than to the Aristotelian alternative. Even avowed Aristotelians like Fielding asserted that universal truths had to remain earthbound, rooted in observation and experience. But if this is the case, then how did these writers address the conflict, now no longer deferred by the claim to historicity, between the epistemology of empiricism and the cognitive ambitions of fiction?

McKeon’s account, for all its breadth and indisputable merit, leaves this question not only unanswered, but unasked. The reason for this is not far to seek. According to The

Origins of the English Novel, those writers who abandoned the claim to historicity retained at most a negative commitment to empiricism. Extreme skeptics, for McKeon, invoked empiricism as a test of truth which romance was meant to fail, but not as one which they themselves aspired to pass. What their position seemed to entail was the radical conclusion that there may be no such thing as narrative truth (119), a conclusion they staved off by revitalizing the Aristotelian truth of poetry as a viable alternative to the empirical standard.

By framing the history of the novel this way, McKeon brackets out the fact that many of the explicit fictions that followed the 1740s remained as committed to empiricism as the pseudo-historical narratives they had left behind. Consequently, the question of how

23 fictionists justified their empirical ambitions does not even emerge.

That McKeon limits empiricism to its “naive” version has already been noted by

Everett Zimmerman, who provides in The Boundaries of Fiction (1996) an insightful assessment of the novel’s persisting engagement with empiricism. Zimmerman argues, contra McKeon, that midcentury novelists like Fielding and Sterne adopted a narrative perspective that was fundamentally empirical, one “rooted in time, place, and individuality, not in abstract truth and universality.”40 And they sought to consolidate their position by blurring the boundary between history and fiction. The core of the arguments they developed, according to Zimmerman, was that history is itself fictional in ineluctable ways.

Because the traces of the historical record are always scanty, they cannot be organized into meaningful narrative sequences without accompanying acts of creativity on the part of the historian. Zimmerman accordingly claims that “from the perspective of the developing novel, history is limited in ways that require the supplementation of fiction, while it also exhibits the same fictionality as novels in its construction of meaning through the linkages of plot” (63). History and the novel are thus reduced to a common denominator where empiricism must allow room for fictionality. A related argument was developed more recently by John Bender, who is indebted, like Zimmerman, to Shapin and Shaffer’s notion of virtual witnessing. Bender situates the realist novel within the Enlightenment culture of experimentation, claiming that just as reports of scientific experiments could replace direct observation for an absent audience, novels were “sites of experiment issuing into surrogate experience.”41 Tom Jones is for Bender a prime example of this process, as it “puts its leading character into the laboratory and asks readers to observe his behavior side-by-side with the

40 Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction. History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996, 21.

41 Bender, “Novel Knowledge. Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 286.

24 narrator” (290-1). While Bender aligns the novel with scientific writing rather than historiography, he agrees with Zimmerman in describing the realist fiction of the midcentury as a self-conscious extension of empiricism. For both critics, novelists working in the aftermath of the 1740s defended the novel’s cognitive status by appealing not to

Aristotle, but to the authority of the senses.

But did they? The answer, of course, will vary by case. Many or maybe even most novelists were all too happy to sing the pedagogic virtues of their novels without worrying about philosophical technicalities. Some, like Edward Kimber, stuck to the pretense of historicity, while others, like William Donaldson, declared as early as the 1760s that the novel’s function was not to teach, but “to amuse, and divert away a serious fit from his splenetic readers.”42 But amidst the crowd of writers who resorted to fiction as a way of making a living there were those who seriously believed in the genre’s pedagogic promise, and especially in the ability of novels to expand the direct experience of readers.

It is worth distinguishing between two ways in which novels were thought to do this, as the link with empiricism is not the same in both cases. The first approach subjected realism to the dictates of poetic justice. As a pedagogical device, poetic justice works not by expanding the reader’s knowledge of the real world, but by conditioning their moral responses, even if at the cost of deception. Consider, for example, John Hawkesworth’s argument that because we tend to prefer physical to moral qualities “it should be the principal labour of moral writers, especially of those who would instruct through fiction ... to remove the bias which inclines the mind rather to prefer natural than moral endowments; and to represent vice with such circumstances of contempt and infamy, that

42 William Donaldson, The Life and Adventures of Sir Bartholomew Sapskull, Baronet (London: Printed for J. Williams, 1768; reprt. New York and London: Garland, 1975), 2. For Kimber, see note 53.

25 the ideas may constantly recur together.”43 What is empiricist about this heuristic model is its reliance on associationist psychology; undesirable “biases” are eliminated not through the intuition of a superior truth, but by means of psychological habituation. Hawkesworth knows that deep down this is a form of brainwashing. No such distributive justice obtains in the real world, but this is precisely why he finds fiction so useful. Unlike actual experience, fiction can associate the ideas of vice and infamy in the reader’s mind, planting there the belief that only goodness leads to prosperity. The goal is not knowledge, but discipline. As a reviewer of Hawkesworth’s Almoran and Hamet (1761) puts it, “the majority [of readers] must be entertained with novelty, humoured with fiction, and, as it were, cheated into instruction.”44 While well-meaning, such a pedagogical model runs counter to the empiricist quest for knowledge. The lessons of poetic justice, reliant as they are on the unnatural association of ideas, are epistemologically indistinguishable from the superstitions instilled into children by the tall tales of nurses, a recurrent target of empiricist censure.45

The second model favored a more uncompromising realism, conceiving of novels not as improvements upon but as extensions of the real world. Its central assumption is memorably spelled out by the novelist John Cleland. In his review of Smollett’s Peregrine

Pickle, Cleland points out that whereas romances “transport the reader unprofitably into the clouds,” novels “pay truth the homage of imitation ... [A]s the matter of them is chiefly taken from nature, from adventures, real or imaginary, but familiar, practical, and probable to be met with in the course of common life, they may serve as pilot’s charts, or maps of those

43 The Adventurer, 16, December 30, 1752. Reproduced in Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance 1700-1800. A Documentary Record (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 199.

44 The review is by Owen Ruffhead. The Monthly Review, XXIV, May 1761. Reproduced in Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 240.

45 See, for instance, Bacon, Instauratio Magna, 41; Hobbes, Leviathan, I.v, 116; and Locke, Essay, II.31.10, 397-8. In a somewhat different critique, novelists like Frances Sheridan objected that poetic justice would have little effect on readers habituated to observing constant injustice in real life. See her Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (London and New York: Pandora, 1987, 4-5.

26 parts of the world, which every one may chance to travel through; and in this light they are public benefits.”46 As long as novels remain faithful to nature, Cleland believes that they can replace direct acquaintance with the world. The experienced novelist is thus able to chart out the safe routes and the dead ends that await the less well travelled reader. This view of novels as maps of future possibilities speaks very directly to Bender’s argument, in ways that were spelled out by Lennox in The Female Quixote:

[W]hen the Sailor in certain Latitudes sees the Clouds rise, Experience bids him expect a Storm. When any Monarch levies Armies, his Neighbours prepare to repel an Invasion./This Power of Prognostication, may, by Reading and Conversation, be extended beyond our own Knowledge: And the great Use of Books, is that of participating without Labour or Hazard in the Experience of others.47

The claim here, in Bender’s reading of Lennox, is that the novel’s rhetoric “allows, even demands, that readers add to their stock of knowledge through assent to the truth of absent experience” (293). The procedure at play is not the communication of universal truths. It is the inference of empirical principles from a body of evidence that includes both the novel and the reader’s own experiences. The novel’s lessons thus rely on the same inductive logic condemned by Sidney, echoing quite closely the empiricist program for philosophical history. As Lennox’s Doctor puts it, “We can judge of the Future only by the Past,” but the past consists both of our stock of personal experiences and of our exposure to the imaginary events described in novels.

In taking novels as affording grounds for inferences about the future, Cleland and

Lennox are placing the genre squarely within the empiricist camp.48 There is good reason, therefore, to take Zimmerman and Bender’s re-evaluations of the novel’s epistemological

46 The Monthly Review, IV, March 1751. Reproduced in Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 162.

47 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 9.11, 372.

48 Lennox’s position is in fact somewhat more complex than this, as will be seen in Chapter 4.

27 allegiances as welcome adjustments to McKeon’s account. But in highlighting the novel’s empirical ambitions these critics have also tended to downplay a factor which McKeon was right to emphasize: the extent to which empiricism became a liability for those novelists who admitted the fictionality of their works. The history of the novel proposed by

Zimmerman and Bender implies that realism gave the novel a firmer empirical standing than other forms of imaginative literature, allowing it unproblematically to claim equal status with history and experimental reports. In addition, it suggests not only that novels were legitimate sources of empirical knowledge, but also that the intellectual champions of empiricism acknowledged them as such. Noting that Hume allows the historian to fill in the blanks of the records to produce meaning, Zimmerman concludes that Hume “justifies by implication the efforts not only of the historian to understand the past but also of the novelist to create knowledge, narrative fiction serving for the creation as well as the conveyance of knowledge for both the historian and the novelist” (237). Bender concurs.

“The implicit ambitions of the new novel,” he claims, “parallel those Hume voiced for a new human science”; and even though the flexibility of the genre “open[ed] a range of experimental possibilities that Hume does not consider,” Hume’s concession that empirical knowledge is at best probabilistic “could be described as a theory of the novel” (290-1, 300).

The implicit assumption behind these arguments is that the novel’s unprecedented realism allowed it to cross the gulf separating fictional from factual narratives, so as to satisfy, in ways that poetry had been unable to, the strict demands of empiricism.

This was far from being the case. As I argue in detail in Chapter 2, Hume would strongly resist these characterizations of his position. And in this sense he was typical. In spite of its lifelikeness, the novel did not escape the empiricist ban on imaginative literature.

Empiricists writing after the midcentury often redirected the old condemnations of poetry against contemporary prose fiction. In his thoroughly empirical The Philosophy of Rhetoric

28

(1776), George Campbell concedes that imaginative literature can justly aspire to a type of truth he calls “plausibility” — an effect of “the consistency of the narration, from its being what is commonly called natural and feasible.”49 Such truth, however, is of aesthetic rather than epistemological interest for Campbell, who draws a firm distinction between a narrative’s plausibility and what he calls its probability (a measure of its conformity with the empirical evidence). “We know,” Campbell notes,

that fiction may be as plausible as truth ... It deserves, however, to be remarked, that though plausibility alone hath often greater efficacy in rousing the passions than probability, or even certainty; yet, in any species of composition wherein truth, or at least probability, is expected, the mind quickly nauseates the most plausible tale, which is unsupported by proper arguments” (82-3).

This distinction between a narrative’s ability to rouse the passions and its qualifications to teach the mind was also enforced by Adam Smith. When discussing the effects of fiction in

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith grants that novels can promote virtue better than the

“metaphysical sophisms” of the Stoics; but when probing the topic more deeply in his

Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, he insists that a narrative’s fictionality gets in the way of true knowledge.50 After noting that history seeks to both entertain and instruct,

Smith continues:

A well contrived Story may be as interesting and entertaining as any real one: the causes which brought about the several incidents that are narrated may all be very ingeniously contrived and well adapted to their several ends, but still as the facts are not such as have realy existed, the end proposed by history will not be answered. The facts must be real, otherwise they will not assist us in our future conduct, by pointing out the means to avoid or produce any event. Feigned Events and the

49 George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 82.

50 I will have more to say on Smith’s peculiar defense of fictions in Chapter 5.

29

causes contrived for them, as they did not exist, can not inform us of what happend in former times, nor of consequence assist us in a plan of future conduct.51

Fictional narratives, for Smith, are not and should not be used as maps of the future, for the simple fact that they provide no account of the actual past. While history, as Zimmerman shows, was recognized to be partly fictional, there remained for the empiricists a nontrivial difference between narratives that arrange the traces of the past into meaningful sequences and narratives founded on no traces at all. Campbell and Smith’s common emphasis on factuality is very much in keeping with the empiricist critique of mental inventions, calling to mind Bacon’s original warning in the Instauratio Magna: “May God never allow us to publish a dream of our imagination as a model of the world.”52

The distinction, for the purposes of forecasting, between the partly and the fully fictional was not lost on defenders of the novel. As a Bookseller tells Plutarch in one of

Elizabeth Montagu’s fictional dialogues, “when a gentleman has spent his time in reading adventures that never occurred, exploits that never were achieved, and events that not only never did, but never can happen, it is impossible that in life or in discourse he should ever apply them.”53 This is not to say that the position defended by Cleland was untenable; but it does mean that the empirical status Cleland attributes to the novel could not simply be taken for granted, and stood in need of a theoretical defense. By treating the novel’s realism

51 Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 90.

52 Michael Silverthorne’s translation, in Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24. The original reads: “Neque enim hoc siuerit Deus, vt Phantasiæ nostræ somnium pro Exemplari Mundi edamus,” which Rees and Wakely translate as follows: “For God forbid that we give out a fantastic dream for a pattern of the world” (Instauratio, 45).

53 Montagu recognizes but does not fully endorse this position: the Bookseller makes exceptions of Richardson and Fielding. The dialogue is one of four she contributed to Lord Lyttleton’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760). Reproduced in Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 224. See also Edward Kimber’s “Preface” to The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson: “Whilst [books] have the Characters of Romances, People will not give themselves the needful Trouble to inspect the Moral, or, if they do, imagining it the Product of mere Imagination, it passes off as a fine fangled Tale, and makes no deep or lasting Impression. In a real Life founded on Facts, like this, of a Person now in Being, where every Thing may be depended upon, and goes upon the Standard of Truth ... real Service is done to Mankind” (xii).

30 as a sufficient guarantee of its evidentiary value, Zimmerman and Bender understate the hurdles faced by those midcentury novelists who defined themselves as providers of experience. A defense of the novel capable of meeting the empirical test would have to do more than claim affiliation with history or scientific writing. It would have to account for the irreducible difference setting the novel apart from those genres: its apparent disconnect with the world of particular facts.

The central claim of this study, as indicated in my preliminary remarks, is that a number of influential novelists writing after the 1740s sought to do precisely this. While difficult, their task was far from hopeless. After all, the empiricists’ own practice often seemed to belie their theory. As Bender reminds us, Bacon bestowed an implicit approval on utopian fiction with his New Atlantis.54 In addition, empiricists including Berkeley and

Hume adopted the philosophical dialogue as a more appealing alternative to the dry treatise. As Michael Prince has shown, the fictional framework of such dialogues was not merely cosmetic, and came to play an increasingly important role in argumentation as the genre developed.55 In spite of all their strictures, the empiricists often allowed fiction to play at least some constructive role in their philosophical prose.56 This apparent mismatch between their theory and practice can be explained in at least two ways. One would be to say that the empiricists did not feel bound by the terms of their own critique of fictions.

Another, which I will be delving into, would be to assume that there is room, amidst the tangles of empiricist epistemology, for the possibility that certain products of the imagination may be cognitively valuable.

54 A good discussion of the New Atlantis in the context of Bacon’s denunciations of fiction is Sarah Hutton’s “Persuasions to Science: Baconian Rhetoric and the New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 48-59.

55 See in particular Prince’s discussion of Berkeley’s Alciphron, in Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment. Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), esp. 122-130.

56 John Richetti discusses the philosophical work done by empiricist rhetoric in Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1983).

31

The present project is essentially a study of how eighteenth-century novelists explored this theoretical space. Their efforts were seldom systematic, and my first task will be to reconstruct the broader perspectives that lie behind their dispersed statements. Once reconstituted, the defenses of fiction envisioned by Fielding, Lennox, Sterne, Godwin, and

Austen should bear witness to the novel’s continued aspiration to empirical status in the decades following the midcentury. Recognizing that the new genre occupied what McKeon calls “an untenably negative midpoint” between romance and history, these novelists sought to make that midpoint tenable; and they did so not by resurrecting the traditional defense of poetry, but by developing modern alternatives that made fiction accountable to the particulars of experience. Describing their arguments will be the task of Chapters 3 to 5.

For the rest of this chapter I will situate the rise of the novel in relation to more recent developments in the debate over literature and knowledge, explain certain key terms that will feature in my discussion, and map out the terrain lying ahead.

3. Literary cognitivism: a modern parallel

The new defenses of the novel did not “solve” the empiricist challenge. What they did was to help inaugurate a form of argumentation that has retained its urgency ever since. They sought to demonstrate, that is, that works of the imagination do not constitute a separate domain of the intellectual landscape, isolated from science and its empiricist standard of knowledge. They believed that literature can speak of “nature,” the external reality that empirical enquirers investigate through the outlet of the senses. This argument has recognizable successors in the Victorian attempts to reconcile positivism and the arts, in the

Naturalist conception of novels as a form of experiment, and in major strands of the ongoing

32 controversy about the pedagogic value of literature.57 In particular, eighteenth-century defenses of the novel prefigure modern accounts of literature that arose in response to scientistic skepticism.

I am thinking here of the branch of analytic aesthetics devoted to the question of

“literary cognitivism.” The philosopher John Gibson provides a nutshell description of the debate:

The problem of “literary cognitivism” — as contemporary aesthetics has baptized it — is a technical designation for an ancient issue, one that reaches all the way back to Plato and Aristotle and hence Western philosophy’s first excursions into the philosophy of art. In its simplest form, the problem concerns how we might learn from works of imaginative literature, that is, how literature might function to convey knowledge of extra-literary reality. That it can do just this is central to many deep-rooted beliefs we have about the cultural significance of the literary work of art. But explaining satisfactorily just how literature might be able to do so has been a perennial source of philosophical frustration.58

The explanations adduced by modern defenders of literature have varied widely, as have the philosophical assumptions backing them up. Some varieties of literary cognitivism have evaded the empiricist challenge altogether, by defining the knowledge we gain from literature in ways that dispense with empirical verification.59 But a number of modern

57 Peter Allan Dale discusses the blurry divide between the arts and the sciences during the Victorian period in his In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). The link with naturalism is suggested by Bender himself in relation to Zola (“Novel Knowledge,” 284-7).

58 John Gibson, “Introduction. The Prospects of Literary Cognitivism,” in A Sense of the World. Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1.

59 Three different ways of achieving this (while by no means the only ones) are suggested by Noël Carroll, Nelson Goodman, and Bernard Harrison. Carroll, who has written widely on the subject, argues that literature performs its cognitive function not by transmitting empirical knowledge, but by mobilizing, like a thought experiment, the conceptual knowledge that readers already possess. See, for example, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60, 1 (2002), 3.26. Goodman, in turn, radically reformulates the conditions for art in general to carry epistemic weight in Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968), as well as in his many subsequent writings on aesthetics. Equally unconventionally, Harrison’s Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory

33 cognitivists, including Gibson, Mitchell Green, and Hilary Putnam, have continued the old exploration into the theoretical space of empiricism. While granting fiction’s ability to mobilize concepts and consequently imply lessons, they insist that such lessons only have cognitive value if they are borne out beyond the boundaries of the text — not in the realm of

Forms or make-believe, nor in some ideal political state, but in the only sphere that still counts from an empiricist standpoint: the world of sense perception. As Gibson puts it, the philosophical challenge facing literary cognitivism is therefore that of “articulating an adequate account of the relationship between literature and life itself,” so as to show “how it can be that a text that speaks about fictions might nonetheless be able to say something of cognitive consequence about reality” (1, 2).

This was also the goal for Cleland and Lennox, or Fielding and Austen. Such commonality of interests is by no means a coincidence. It is explained by the fact that modern cognitivists are dealing with a recalcitrant issue which eighteenth-century novelists were among the first to encounter. They are responding to the epistemological reorientation brought about by the rise of empiricism, and dealing with the same dilemma faced by those earlier defenders of fiction who found themselves deprived of the

Aristotelian-Platonic scaffold. The dilemma has gained sophistication, and the modern solutions deploy analytical tools with no eighteenth-century equivalent; nonetheless, they have recognizable precursors in the context of the rise of the novel.

While I offer no comprehensive account of the similarities or differences between the two iterations of this debate, I hope to show that one central feature of the modern debate was already fully operative in the eighteenth century. Then as now, cognitivists

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991) attempts to develop a cognitive defense of fiction from a Deconstructive perspective, without asking fiction to refer to an extra-textual reality. It should be added that not all analytic defenses of literature need be cognitive. The main example of a noncognitivist position is that of Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

34 interested in fiction’s ability to speak of the world of experience developed their claims around two different conceptions of knowledge, both of which can be broadly construed as empirical. One group of cognitivists has claimed that literature can make and to some extent justify propositions that hold true of the real world, and accordingly regard novels as valid sources of propositional knowledge.60 Another group has preferred to stress literature’s ability to provide insight into the lived experiences of others, and consider fiction as yielding a type knowledge that defies propositional articulation, and which goes alternatively by the names of experiential or phenomenal knowledge.61 These two possibilities emerged in recognizable form over the course of the eighteenth century, and I will be organizing my account around them.

In order to highlight the germaneness between the past and the present enquiries, I shall be applying some of the modern analytical terminology to my discussion of the early novel. I do it in full awareness that such a practice, if carried too far, raises the danger of anachronism, as it may project onto the threads of past speculation a semblance of order that was never there. But I have endeavored to limit myself to concepts that were fully developed in the eighteenth century yet lacked a name — such as “thought experiment,”

“phenomenal knowledge,” and “literary cognitivism” itself. The main advantage of applying this lexicon retrospectively is that it allows the central issues at stake to be formulated very concisely. Since literary cognitivism, to use Mitchell Green’s definition, is the thesis that

“literary fiction can be a source of knowledge in a way that depends crucially on its being

60 Examples include John Hospers, “Implied Truths in Literature,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 19, 1 (1960), 37-46; Hilary Putnam, “Literature, Science, and Reflection,” New Literary History, 7, 3 (1976), 483-491; Patrick Fessenbecker, “In Defense of Paraphrase,” New Literary History, 44, 1 (2013), 117-139; and Jukka Mikkonen, The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

61 Examples include Dorothy Walsh, Literature and Knowledge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969); Martha Nussbaum, “The Narrative Imagination,” in Cultivating Humanity. A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Catherine Z. Elgin, “The Laboratory of the Mind,” in A Sense of the World. Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, ed. John Gibson et alia (New York: Routledge, 2007), 43-54.

35 fictional,”62 the question for empiricists and novelists alike was whether empiricism and literary cognitivism could be rendered compatible. The new theories of the novel assumed that they could, marking the beginning of the ongoing quest for an empirical version of literary cognitivism.63 The broad outlines of that quest will become apparent from the chapter summaries below, which should help readers navigate the fuller discussion that follows.

4. Chapter summaries

My first step will be to offer a more detailed account of the empiricist case against the novel, focusing on the figure of David Hume, the classical empiricist whose work most closely coincided with the rise to fame of Richardson and Fielding. Hume’s pronouncements on the novel, while occasional and unsystematic, were consistently dismissive of the cognitive value of fictions. Chapter 2 reconstitutes his perspective and then examines the extent to which his anticognitivism stemmed from his empiricist principles. I start by showing that

Hume’s conviction that historical narratives were invaluable sources of empirical knowledge suggests that counterfactual narratives may be just as valuable. Hume acknowledges as much in his frequent use of thought experiments, which employ counterfactual scenarios in support of factual claims; yet he denies that imaginative literature in general and the novel in particular can support counterfactual reasoning. His reason for this — as I show by examining his Treatise of Human Nature, the two Enquiries,

62 Green, “How and What We Can Learn from Fiction.” A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (Wiley- Blackwell, 2010), 352.

63 It is worth clarifying that this form of literary cognitivism bears no necessary relation to “literary cognitivism” as the term has come to be understood within cognitive cultural studies. In the second sense, it designates the application, in literary studies, of insights derived from cognitive science. This is to note a distinction rather than to define allegiances, as I find the second line of cognitivism very fruitful. Two works of particular interest for eighteenth-century studies are Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), and Blakey Vermeule’s The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

36 and the Essays — is that fictional narratives fail to observe the rules that a valid thought experiment should follow. Poetry fails because in Hume’s conception the goals of the poet are better attained through studied deviations from the truth. But the novel fails not because of such aesthetic imperatives (which it often eschews), but because novelists seek to portray the complex dynamics of social life on a scope that is way too vast to be reliably controlled by human prognosis. Like Bacon, Hume found that the mind of man is too fragile to figure forth the world. His anticognitivism, as far as it refers to the novel, is therefore a direct extension of his empiricism.

In Chapter 3 I turn to a possible response to Hume’s strictures. While it is unclear whether Fielding was familiar with Hume’s views, he was uncomfortably aware of the special credentials of history, and one of his goals in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones is to extend those credentials to realistic prose fiction. The challenge he faced was to show that observable life can indeed be transposed into literature without the structural deformations that worried Hume. I argue that an underappreciated function of Fielding’s theoretical interludes is to demonstrate that prose fiction can be anchored on sense perception in ways that satisfy the epistemic standards of empiricism. His first move is to present his characters not as mere products of the imagination, but as embodiments of principles derived inductively from experience. Joseph Andrews, because it provides a survey of the variety of human types as they appear to the senses, is therefore a “true history” with the same epistemic status of factual narratives. In Tom Jones Fielding supplies a test for whether true history indeed lives up to its empirical credentials. He claims that if the events in his novels appear probable to the reader, this is because the reader’s psychology tacitly confirms their fidelity to the habitual course of things. Judgments of probability, in other words, provide a litmus test for a narrative’s empirical status. While quite sophisticated,

Fielding’s theory also raises questions which he left unanswered, and the increasing

37 factuality of his later work may suggest that his earlier novels, in his own view, may not have been as close to life as his theory implied. When Fielding died in 1754, the theoretical gap between empiricism and literary cognitivism remained open, and it was left for later writers to try to bridge it.

Fielding’s theory is a version of what has come to be called propositionalism. It implies that the knowledge imparted by literature can be mined from its narrative bedrock and given a more portable shape as a set of propositions about the world. As a defense of literary knowledge, propositionalism became particularly common in the British “quixotic” tradition — that loose group of novels whose protagonists misread life by looking at it through the lens of fiction. As shown by the examples of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female

Quixote, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, practitioners of this tradition were actively involved in the cognitivist debate, as their critiques of fanciful fiction were often paired with defenses of a more instructive alternative. In order to vindicate their own approach, as I show in Chapter 4, these novelists revisited the old parallels between romance, history, and the novel, composing theoretical variations on the themes examined by Fielding. In each case, their reflections illustrate the dilemmas involved in recruiting empiricism on behalf of the novel. Godwin, in particular, rearticulates with remarkable clarity the positions of Hume and Fielding, setting them up against each other and declaring the impossibility of adjudicating between them. What these three cases show is that empiricist epistemology continued to pose a problem for propositionalism well into the next century — and in fact into our own time.

The cognitivist debate takes a different turn with sentimentalism, and in Chapter 5 I analyze one of its germinal moments: Laurence Sterne’s turn to feeling in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. I start by showing that if Sterne was committed to some form of propositionalism, he never clarified what makes the theory tenable. But he did provide a

38 different, non-propositional defense of literature as a source of knowledge. I argue that the increasing sentimentalism of Tristram Shandy, which is given full expression in A

Sentimental Journey, carried within it a pedagogic model. Sterne suggests that since human beings can sympathize with imaginary others, the forms of understanding that sympathy facilitates between real people can equally obtain between the readers and the characters of a novel. Moreover, the lessons of the sentimental novel, as Sterne imagined them, have no need for propositional statements; they require instead that prolonged participation in the subjectivity of others which literature is so especially suited to provide. In this sense,

Sterne’s pedagogical project anticipates the phenomenalist version of modern literary cognitivism, in both its strengths and weaknesses.

One of the historical consequences of the novel’s fraught relationship with empiricism, as I argue in my conclusion, was realism’s eventual abandonment of its cognitive ambitions. Sterne’s version of cognitivism already suggests that fiction may be essentially different than scientific discourse, and that the value of novels may reside not in the lessons they impart, but in the affective experiences they make available. Interestingly, in moving past the demands of empiricism and asserting literature’s value as a source not of knowledge, but of aesthetic experience, nineteenth-century authors were essentially endorsing the division of intellectual labor already proposed by Locke and Hume — a division which went on to have a long and troubled afterlife.

39

CHAPTER 2

David Hume and the Empiricist Challenge1

On his visits to David Hume in London in 1766, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would often find a copy of his epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse lying on his host’s desk. Months later, after their notorious falling out, Rousseau would reinterpret this apparently flattering detail as an underhanded provocation: “As if I didn’t know M. Hume’s taste well enough to be sure that, of all the books in existence, the Héloïse must be the most tedious to him.” As it turns out, Rousseau was mistaken. We know, from Hume’s private correspondence, that he considered the novel to be Rousseau’s masterpiece, and found it preposterous that

Rousseau should prefer The Social Contract. A few years later, another francophone author with a more generous opinion of Hume’s taste ventured to dedicate a novel to him. This was

Crébillon fils, who wrote to Hume in 1768: “Those who only know you through your works, and who ignore how much tolerance there is in your philosophy, would find me ridiculous in presuming to dedicate a novel to you; but you have proved to me that there is nothing a wise man cannot profit by, if not for his instruction, at least for his entertainment.” Like

Rousseau, Crébillon spoke too soon. Hume had already badmouthed his works on a previous occasion, and refrained from acknowledging the intended honor.2 Taken together, these two misjudgments shed more shadow than light on Hume’s views on the value of

1 A version of this chapter was published as “David Hume, Literary Cognitivism, and the Truth of the Novel,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 54, 3 (Summer 2014), 625-648.

2 The Letters of David Hume, edited by J.Y.T. Greig, 2 volumes (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1932), ii. 389, n. 1, ii, 28, ii, 206, n.4, i, 210, and ii, 206. The passages by Rousseau and Crébillon are originally in French (the English translation is my own). Henceforth cited parenthetically as L.

40 novels. And yet they come from men who claimed to know Hume better than the generality of readers, and to have a finer sense of his overall outlook. Whatever it is that Hume’s taste and philosophy implies about the value of novels, the implication was clearly debatable.

In fact, it remains so to this day. In his important study of Hume’s aesthetics, Dabney

Townsend claims that “unlike Johnson, [Hume] is not philosophically opposed to new forms like Fielding’s novels,” a view endorsed by Claudia Schmidt, who finds that “Hume was more open to innovation in the arts, as seen in his interest in the novels of Fielding, than a strict neoclassicism might have allowed.” By contrast, Jesse Molesworth finds that Hume had a

“low regard for novels in general ... and [those] of Richardson and Fielding in particular.”3 As in the case of Rousseau and Crébillon, these strikingly different assessments are not based on direct evidence of Hume’s attitude towards Richardson or Fielding — since there is none.

While Hume seems to have owned Richardson’s Clarissa and almost certainly owned a

French adaptation of Fielding’s Amelia, he left no remarks about either novelist.4 The only extant evidence that he even read one of them is a letter by one “Tobias Simple,” who claims that Hume spent his last moments reading Tom Jones — a detail unfortunately not borne out by more reliable accounts of Hume’s deathbed conversation.5 In the lack of direct evidence, the critics above, like Rousseau and Crébillon, work by extrapolation. They infer Hume’s general take on fiction from other aspects of his thought, and then apply it to particular novels; and they disagree to the extent that they find Hume’s overall outlook to be either

3 Dabney Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sentiment (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 208; Claudia Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 316. Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), p. 174.

4 See David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton’s The David Hume Library (Edinburgh, 1996), 125.

5 See James Fieser, Early Responses to Hume’s Life and Reputation. Vol. 1 (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 372. Anette Baier claims that Hume helped Madame Riccoboni translate Amelia into French, but Riccoboni’s freely adapted Amélie came out in 1762, a year before she first met Hume in France. Baier was probably thinking of Hume’s assistance with the publication of Riccoboni’s Miss Jenny in England. See Baier’s Death and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 104, and Hume’s Letters, i, 426 and 490.

41 receptive or unreceptive to prose fiction.

Of course this method is cogent in principle. But the presumed connection between

Hume’s philosophy and his view on the novel has never been spelled out in any detail.

Assessments like the ones above tend to be passing remarks along discussions of other topics. And they generally omit the many pronouncements that Hume did make on the novel. As it happens, there has as yet been no systematic attempt to reconstitute the unstated perspective of which Hume’s pronouncements are partial instantiations, or to explain how that perspective relates to Hume’s philosophical outlook.6 These are not trivial lacunae when one’s goal is to evaluate the relationship between empiricism and the novel.

Hume, after all, was the empiricist whose productive phase overlapped most neatly with the novel’s emergence in England. Unlike Bacon or Locke, he was in a position to judge whether the new realism made the novel more cognitively valuable than other works of the imagination. In putting La Nouvelle Héloïse above the Social Contract he seems to be saying that it did, and that prose fiction can stand its ground against works of philosophy. And yet most of Hume’s other remarks on the novel, including his double dismissal of Crébillon,

6 Philosophical studies of Hume’s aesthetics have tended to emphasize his theory of taste rather than his applied criticism. Examples include Peter Jones’s Hume’s Sentiments (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1982), Dabney Townsend’s Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sentiment (New York: Routledge, 2001), and Timothy Costelloe’s Aesthetic and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Routledge, 2007). Studies by literary scholars have prioritized instead the literariness of philosophical writing and the presence of Humean themes in the work of novelists like Fielding and Sterne. Examples include John Valdimir Price’s The Ironic Hume (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1965) and John Richetti’s Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge and London, Harvard Univ. Press, 1983). Even when they take Hume’s practical criticism into account, these approaches emphasize Hume as literature and in literature, while still leaving much to be said about Hume on literature. Three books that pay close attention to Hume’s work as a literary critic, but without saying much about the novel, are Mark A. Box’s The Suasive Art of David Hume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), George Campbell Mossner’s The Forgotten Hume (1946), and Teddy Brunius’s David Hume on Criticism (1952). Two doctoral dissertations from the early 1950s also deserve mention: Charles Noyes’s “Aesthetic Theory and Literary Criticism in the Works of David Hume” (UT 1950) and Ralph Cohen’s “The Critical Theory of David Hume” (Columbia 1952).

42 point in the opposite direction. Sometimes his resistence seems to have been a mere matter of taste; but at other times the issue cuts deeper, and seems to originate in his philosophical convictions.

In the interest of illustrating the tension between empiricism and the novel, I articulate in this chapter the missing link between Hume’s philosophy and his views on prose fiction, with special attention to the question of its cognitive value. My view, to put it briefly, is that Hume’s praise of La Nouvelle Héloïse was an exception. He consistently denied that novels could be vehicles for knowledge, in spite of their professed adherence to the rules of empiricism. His reasons for this were complex. While it would seem unsurprising that a philosopher so renowned for his skepticism should dismiss the truth of fictions,

Hume’s epistemology does not really preclude the possibility of literary cognitivism. As will be seen, his reliance on thought experiments involved a tacit acknowledgement of the heuristic value of fictions. If Hume’s prevailing attitude is nonetheless that of an anticognitivist, it is because he thought that novels do not qualify as thought experiments. In the end, Rousseau and Molesworth were right to suspect that Hume’s overall outlook was unreceptive to prose fiction. But Crébillon was touching on an important distinction when he observed that Hume might find the genre valuable, “if not for his instruction, at least for his entertainment.” Hume seems to have found most novels neither instructive nor entertaining, but he agreed that entertainment was indeed a more appropriate goal for imaginative literature.

1. The falsity of fiction and the truth of history

Overall, Hume’s attitude towards the novel bears considerable resemblance to Locke’s attitude towards figurative language in general. Locke had famously claimed, in his Essay

Concerning Human Understanding (1690), that whoever fills “another man’s head with the

43 fantastical imaginations of his own brain” is “very far from advancing thereby one jot in real and true knowledge,” adding elsewhere that the knowledge of men has “to be had chiefly from experience, and, next to that, from a judicious reading of history.”7 Hume was much less immune to the charms of rhetoric than Locke, but the latter’s attitude finds recognizable echoes in Hume’s essay “Of the Study of History,” where Hume facetiously reproaches a group of imaginary novel readers for their reading habits. What Hume’s young ladies would learn if they traded their novels for works of history include the following

“important truths”:

That our sex, as well as theirs, are far from being such perfect creatures as they are apt to imagine, and, That Love is not the only passion, which governs the male- world, but is often overcome by avarice, ambition, vanity, and a thousand other passions. Whether they be the false representations of mankind in those two particulars, which endear romances and novels so much to the fair sex, I know not; but must confess that I am sorry to see them have such an aversion to matter of fact, and such an appetite for falshood.8

In an echo of Locke’s lament that “’tis in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived,”9 Hume is concerned that the appeal of falsehood might take readers away from more instructive forms of reading. “I may indeed be told that the fair sex has no such aversion to history,” he gibes, “provided it be secret history” (ibid.). While his tone is playful, Hume is seriously concerned that in the absence of corrective readings novels and romances (terms that had not yet become fully disambiguated) will tend to breed misconceptions, as inexperienced readers may treat their representations of the world not only as a source of pleasure, but as a guide to life. Novelists

7 Locke, ECHU, III, x, 30, and “Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study, for a Gentleman,” The Works of John Locke, ed. J. A. St. John (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), vol. II, p. 503.

8 Hume, David, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. edn. (1985; rprt. Indianapolis IN: LibertyClassics, 1987), 564. Further references will be to this edition, cited as E.

9 Locke, Essay, III, x, 34.

44 and romance writers, of course, made no point of discouraging this approach. As Hume would note in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, “the historian exults in displaying the benefit arising from his labours,” while “[t]he writer of romance alleviates or denies the bad consequences ascribed to his manner of composition.”10

The negative attitude towards fiction evinced in “Of the Study of History” reappears elsewhere in Hume’s writings, and was underscored in recent years by Marina Frasca-

Spada.11 The question that remains to be asked is whether the anticognitivism that informs it is entailed by Hume’s empiricism. Whereas Locke’s distrust of figurative language can be easily traced back to his sense that confusion about meaning leads to confusion about referents, the relationship between attitude and principle in Hume’s case is by no means obvious. It might appear that Hume’s epistemology would provide sufficient grounds for a cognitive distinction between historical and fictional narratives. As he points out in A

Treatise of Human Nature, “nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers”

(THN 1.4.7.6). This certainly bodes ill for poets and their peers.12

But things are not that simple, as the imagination in Hume’s philosophy is not just a producer of centaurs; it is also the source of all historical knowledge. To know the past, for

Hume, is to infer it inductively through the workings of the imagination. Consider the following example: we know that “Caesar was kill’d in the senate-house on the ides of

March” (THN 1.3.4.2) because we can establish a chain of causal connections between the

10 Hume, David, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 12. Further references will be to this edition, cited as EPM.

11 Marina Frasca-Spada, “Quixotic Confusions and Hume’s Imagination,” Impressions of Hume, ed. Marina Frasca- Spada and Peter J. E. Kail (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 161-186.

12 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 1.4.7.6. Further references will be to this edition, noted as THN.

45 immediate contents of our senses or memory and those remote events. The initial link in the chain may be a book of history:

Here are certain characters and letters present either to our memory or senses; which characters we likewise remember to have been us’d as the signs of certain ideas; and these ideas were either in the minds of such as were immediately present at that action, and receiv’d the ideas directly from its existence; or they were deriv’d from the testimony of others, and that again from another testimony, by a visible gradation, ’till we arrive at those who were eye-witnesses and spectators of the event. (THN 1.3.4.2).

The murder of Caesar causes ideas in the minds of beholders, which in turn give rise to testimonies, which again produce ideas in other minds... It is almost as though Caesar’s spasms reverberate through the ages, striking our senses by proxy many centuries later, in the form of printed characters. To know the original event is to travel back in time through this causal path, which can only be accomplished by the imagination. Here then is a puzzle.

Hume’s praise of history suggests that the inferences from the present that lead us back to the past are reliable. In fact, he claims that it would be “contrary to common sense to think that ... our posterity, even after a thousand ages, can ever doubt if there has been such a man as Julius Caesar” (THN 1.3.13.4). And yet the most well-known principle in all of Hume’s philosophy is that inferences from the past to the future and vice-versa may be ultimately unreliable. They are products of a principle of the imagination Hume calls custom — “a certain instinct of our nature; which it is indeed difficult to resist, but which, like other instincts, may be fallacious and deceitful” (EHU 12.22; see also THN 1.3.16.9; EHU 4.16, 4.23,

9.6).13 If the imagination may be deceitful, then Hume’s suspicion of the novel seems understandable; but the same cannot be said of his confidence in the truth of history, which now stands in need of an explanation.

13 Hume, David, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L.Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Further references will be to this edition, cited as EHU.

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How to reconcile Hume’s optimism about history with his indictment of the imagination is a version of a broader problem that Hume scholars have had to face since

Norman Kemp Smith rehabilitated the naturalistic aspects of Hume’s thought in the 1940s.14

The problem is that of explaining the apparent conflict between Hume’s skepticism concerning induction and his commitment to an inductive science of human nature. On the one hand, Hume claims that reason can neither draw nor corroborate those inductive inferences at the heart of all empirical knowledge.15 In order to do so, he explains, reason would have to proceed “upon that principle, that instances, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those, of which we have had experience” (THN 1.2.6.4); and this principle, conventionally called the Uniformity Principle, “is a point, which can admit of no proof at all” (AT; see also THN 1.3.6.4-12; EHU 4.18-21). On the other hand, however, Hume was happy to do without reason or demonstrative logic, and just trust the inductive promptings of the imagination. He went on to write history with the same undisturbed confidence with which he produced his inductive philosophy of morals, aesthetics, and politics. Somehow, in turning his eyes from epistemology to these other fields, he found that the problem of induction, or the deceitfulness of the imagination, became much less pressing, for reasons that remain contested.

Some commentators have suggested that there is no actual conflict between skepticism and naturalism in Hume,16 but I am inclined to agree with those who believe that there is and that Hume had no epistemic solution for it. To the extent that he solved the

14 Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1941).

15 Hume uses the word “reason” to mean different things at different times, but when discussing induction he uses it to refer to demonstrative reasoning.

16 Donald Livingston, for instance, sees skepticism as one phase in a dialectical process towards Hume’s true philosophy, a “philosophy of common life”; Miriam McCormick, in turn, argues that radical skepticism is just a “temptation” Hume is able to discern but also to resist. See Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), and McCormick, “A Change in Manner: Hume’s Scepticism in the ‘Treatise’ and the first ‘Enquiry,’” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29, 3 (Sep. 1999): 431-447.

47 problem, it was on pragmatic rather than epistemic grounds.17 What rescues induction from

Hume’s critique, I think, is his distinction “betwixt the principles [of the imagination] which are permanent, irresistable, and universal; such as the customary transition from causes to effects, and from effects to causes: And the principles, which are changeable, weak, and irregular” (THN 1.4.4.1). Hume decides that the first set of principles, including causal (that is, inductive) inferences, “are received by philosophy,” while the latter are not; but he offers no epistemic justification for this decision. What he emphasizes in describing the better principles of the imagination as “permanent” or “irresistable” is not their epistemic trustworthiness, but their inescapability. They are “received by philosophy” because all human activity is necessarily informed by the irrepressible belief in induction, and this includes the practice of philosophy itself. For the empiricist who believes, as Hume does, that “experience is our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact” (EHU 10.3), playing by the rules of induction is an instrumental commitment indispensible for the pursuit of knowledge.

This being the case, Hume concludes, one may pragmatically agree to view inductive inferences as unproblematic, which in turn would make history cognitively valuable. As

Hume puts it, historical narratives are essentially databases, or “collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science” (EHU 8.7); in the process, the imagination lends science an indispensible hand. Of course, deep down the skeptical abyss remains open. Since the imagination, for all we know, may still be deceitful,

17 In what follows I am drawing on Peter Millican’s claim that Hume views induction as “a cognitive process which depends on a non-cognitive sub-process,” so that while making inductive inferences qualifies as “an operation of reasoning,” the inferences themselves cannot be traced all the way down to a cognitive foundation. Millican, “Hume’s ‘Scepticism’ about Induction,” The Continuum Companion to Hume, ed. Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 86. In spite of their differences, a number of commentators agree in viewing Hume’s defense of induction as based on non-epistemic factors. See, for instance, John Lenz, “Hume’s Defense of Causal Inference,” Hume. Modern Studies in Philosophy, ed. V.C. Chappell (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press: 1968), pp. 169-186; Robert Fogelin, “The Tendency of Hume’s Skepticism,” The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Berkeley and London: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp. 397-412; and David Owen, “Philosophy and the Good Life: Hume’s Defence of Probable Reasoning,” Dialogue, 35 (1996), 485-503.

48 the status of historical knowledge is always conditional. It depends on the indemonstrable truth of the Uniformity Principle. The full version of any empirical proposition p is not simply p, but “If nature is uniform, then p.”18 For practical purposes, however, Hume brackets out the condition. His statement about Caesar, if fully spelled out, should read: “[If nature is uniform, then] Caesar was kill’d in the senate-house on the Ides of March” (THN

1.3.4.2); but Hume omits the section in square brackets for the sake of brevity. He is aware that the assertive style resulting from shelving the ifs may sound unsuitably dogmatic for a skeptic, and apologizes for any airs of dogmatism at the close of Book I of the Treatise

(1.4.7.15). But since an epistemic justification for induction will never come, philosophy and historiography should keep moving. And Hume finds that the methodological challenges that await the historian are perfectly surmountable.19

2. Thought experiments and empirical knowledge

While this clarifies the grounds for Hume’s trust in historical knowledge, it also reopens the question about the status of fiction — as we may now ask whether Hume’s partial endorsement of the imagination still precludes literary cognitivism. The first thing to note is that sanctioning induction does not give the imagination a free pass. Hume’s mitigated skepticism remains hostile to the marvelous, as his rejection of miraculous reports best illustrates. Witness also his decision, in his History of England, to pass over the history of pre-Roman times: “The fables, which are commonly employed to supply the place of true history, ought entirely to be disregarded … We shall hasten through the obscure and

18 In all rigor, the full version would be “If nature is uniform, then it is probable that p.” I am using the shorter form for convenience, but it should not obscure the fact that for Hume empirical propositions are probable rather than certain.

19 For a good account of Hume’s methodology as a historian, see David Fate Norton, “History and Philosophy in Hume’s Thought,” David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard H. Popkin (Indianopolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), pp. xxxii-l.

49 uninteresting period of Saxon annals: And shall reserve a more full narration for those times, when the truth is both so well ascertained and so complete as to promise entertainment and instruction to the reader.”20 These are serious vetoes, but I will proceed to argue that the conditional context that makes history an object of knowledge also contains the germs for a defense of literary cognitivism, one which Hume recognizes but does not invoke on behalf of the novel.

The first point to note is that the assumption that the future will resemble the past allows Hume to apply historical knowledge prognostically. He claims that the knowledge of how causes and effects have operated in history allows us “to control and regulate future events” by warranting predictions about the probable consequences of our present actions

(EHU 7.29). What about the consequences of hypothetical events? Hume is ostensibly averse to this type of prediction. He warns us, early in the Treatise, against “hypothetical arguments, or reasonings upon a supposition” (THN 1.3.4.2). But the temptations of counterfactual history are hard to resist, and Hume often succumbs. His reflections on the balance of trade are a good example:

Suppose four-fifths of all the money in Great Britain to be annihilated in one night, and the nation reduced to the same condition, with regard to specie, as in the reigns of the Harrys and Edwards, what would be the consequence? Must not the price of all labour and commodities sink in proportion, and every thing be sold as cheap as they were in those ages? (“Of the Balance of Trade,” E 311)

This is as clear an example of “reasoning upon a supposition” as one might wish. Still, the developments Hume predicts are supposed to reveal something real about the dynamics of national economies. Here, in short, is one of Hume’s favorite heuristic tools: the thought experiment — a tool he employs not only to clarify theses on political economy,21 but also to

20 Hume, David, The History of England, ed. William B. Todd (Liberty Classics, 1983), Vol. I, 4.

21 See Margareth Schabas’s “Hume’s Monetary Thought Experiments,” Studies in History and Philosophy of

50 settle difficult questions in epistemology and psychology.

For instance, to demonstrate that even our elementary knowledge of the world originates in experience, Hume invites us to imagine Adam in Paradise, in full possession of his rational powers, and to admit that the inexperienced Adam “could not have inferred from the fluidity, and transparency of water, that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire, that it would consume him” (EHU 4.6). This scenario, again, is only partly made up. While the initial conditions are hypothetical, what we are invited to consider is what would really follow had they been real. Accordingly, we must imagine the situation unfolding “realistically,” that is, in compliance with our knowledge of how human perception (or national economies) have really functioned in our experience. If this condition is met, then the thought experiment may reveal, through studied circumscription, something about the world of experience that is not easily discernible in the world of experience.

Hume offers us many other hypothetical scenarios — “a man … supported in the air

… softly convey’d along by some invisible power” (THN 1.2.5.6); a man “well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue” (THN 1.1.1.10); “a total darkness over the whole earth for eight days” (EHU 10.36) — always in the interest of substantiating empirical theses. If spelled out, the proposition expressing that thesis would be different than the unabridged version of “Caesar was kill’d in the senate-house.” It would take the subjunctive form “Had x been the case, then p.” While x is an imaginary state of affairs implying no claim about the real world, the proposition as a whole has truth value.

By Hume’s criteria, the indicative conditional “If nature is uniform, then Caesar was killed in the senate-house” has the same epistemic status as the subjunctive conditional “Had we been Adam in Paradise, we would have been unable to infer that water would suffocate us.”

Science 39 (2010): 161–169.

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Both are empirical propositions with genuine cognitive value. For Hume, then, subjunctive conditionals are not just punctual truths about an imagined world. They articulate principles that apply to the world of experience, principles whose truth does not depend on whether the conditional clause describes a real state of affairs or not.

Counterfactual conditionals, in other words, provide a clear case of how claims about the real world can be made through what Hume himself calls an “idle fiction” (THN

3.2.2.16). Some modern defenses of literary cognitivism claim that literature has precisely this ability. Mitchell Green, for instance, proposes that “the difference between counterfactual reasoning and fictional literature is one of degree rather than of kind,” suggesting that literary fiction can yield knowledge by means of thought experiments or

“suppositional reasoning.”22 This idea receives full-length treatment in Peter Swirski’s Of

Literature and Knowledge, a work whose main premise is that “philosophical and scientific counterfactuals, that is, propositions that map consequences of events that by definition did not occur, generate knowledge as part of their field-specific hunts for knowledge ... [A] significant chunk of narrative fiction generates knowledge in a similar manner.”23 The same view, minus the technical terminology, was espoused by eighteenth-century novelists who offered to inspect human nature or questions of ethics and prudence by unfolding the probable developments of an initial state of affairs. As John Bender suggests, with the eighteenth century in mind, “fictions, be they hypotheses or novels, yield a provisional reality, an ‘as if,’ that possesses an explanatory power lacking in ordinary experience.”24

Whatever the limits of this version of literary cognitivism, it describes a possibility

22 Green, “How and What We Can Learn from Fiction,” p. 357.

23 Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge. Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution and Game Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 6.

24 John Bender, “Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis,” Representations 61, Special Issue (Winter 1998), 9.

52 that Hume was fully willing to acknowledge. In his discussion of justice in the Treatise, he points out that “if we may believe the poets, the distinction of mine and thine was banish’d

[in the Golden Age], and carry’d with them the very notions of property and obligation, justice and injustice” (THN 3.2.2.16). Poems about the golden age demonstrate that “if every man had a tender regard for another, or if nature supply’d abundantly all our wants and desires ... that jealousy of interest, which justice imposes, cou’d no longer have place” (ibid.).

Here is a subjunctive conditional leading to an empirical conclusion: that justice only exists where generosity is limited and resources are scarce — a central feature of Hume’s theory of justice. He therefore concludes that the myth of the Golden Age, while an “idle fiction,”

deserves our attention, because nothing can more evidently shew the origin of those virtues, which are the subjects of our present enquiry ... [H]owever philosophers may have been bewilder’d in those speculations, poets have been guided more infallibly, by a certain taste or common instinct, which in most kinds of reasoning goes farther than any of that art and philosophy, with which we have been yet acquainted. (THN 3.2.2.16)

This recognition goes to show that Hume’s epistemology is not really incompatible with literary cognitivism. By his own admission, the counterfactual scenarios of fiction are just as able to yield empirical knowledge as the factual scenarios of history. As in the cases of

British currency and Adam in Paradise, as long as the fictional world observe the acknowledged laws of nature, its events may lend support to nontrivial theses about the reader’s reality.

This seems in keeping with Bender’s contention that Hume’s epistemology implies a theory of the novel.25 Other scholars have proposed similar views. Michael Prince, for instance, argues that in Hume’s view popular philosophical forms such as the essay and the philosophical dialogue “appeal to modes of cognitive processing that are no less

25 See Chapter 1.

53 philosophical for being bound up with systems of representation.”26 By the same token,

Carrie Shanafelt claims that Hume “found in fictional narratives the possibility of something like knowledge.”27 It is true that Hume approved of philosophical genres that borrow “all helps from poetry and eloquence” (EHU 1.1). But while fictional illustrations and thought experiments play an important role in his work, he rarely acknowledges that poems or novels are cognitively valuable in themselves. This discrepancy between theoretical and practical acknowledgement needs to be explained. It has deep sources, as I will now argue, in Hume’s aesthetics and epistemology.

The aesthetic factor helps account for Hume’s attitude towards poetry. His sense that poetry is a source of pleasure rather than knowledge comes from a normative conception of the function of genres. In Hume’s famous formula, “[t]he object of eloquence is to persuade, of history to instruct, of poetry to please by means of the passions and the imagination” (“Of the Standard of Taste,” E 240). The idea that different genres have different “objects” and should be judged on how successfully they attain them has anticognivist implications, as in Hume’s aesthetics the demands of instruction and pleasure often pull in opposite directions. History alone, in Hume’s gallery of genres, is able to accommodate the two demands at the same time. “If one person sits down to read a book as a romance, and another as a true history,” he points out in the Treatise, “they plainly receive the same ideas, and in the same order”; but the reader who takes the narrative to be true

has a more lively conception of all the incidents. He enters deeper into the concerns of the persons: represents to himself their actions, and characters, and friendships, and enmities: He even goes so far as to form a notion of their features, and air, and person. While the former, who gives no credit to the testimony of the author, has a

26 Prince, “A Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy and Literature,” in John Richetti ed. The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 411.

27 Carrie Shanafelt makes this point in her doctoral dissertation “Common Sense: The Rise of Narrative in the Age of Self-Evidence” (CUNY, 2011), p. 117.

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more faint and languid conception of all these particulars; and except on account of the style and ingenuity of the composition, can receive little entertainment from it. (THN 1.3.7.8)

What allows history to please without “all that seeming vehemence of thought and sentiment, which attends the fictions of poetry” (THN 1.3.10.10), is thus the intensity of the reader’s belief. In an illuminating treatment of Hume’s psychology of reading, Marina

Frasca-Spada distinguishes between two types of “vivacity” that often feature somewhat unanalyzed in Hume’s usage of that term. She calls them “belief/vivacity” (the intensity of the act of the mind when its ideas are objects of belief) and “fun/vivacity” (the vividness of the mental content itself).28 While history commands both, poets and romance writers need to compensate for the reader’s lack of belief/vivacity by intensifying fun/vivacity through what Hume calls “the style and ingenuity of the composition” (THN 1.3.7.8). This involves a delicate balance. Poetical fictions must resemble truth, but must also be vivacious in ways that plain truth seldom is. “It is the business of poetry,” Hume claims, “to bring every affection near to us by lively imagery and representation, and make it look like truth and reality” (EPM 5.30). But in order to be vivacious, poetry “can never submit to exact truth,” as that would result in “a work which, by universal experience, has been found the most insipid and disagreeable” (“Of the Standard of Taste,” E 231). What poets offer is accordingly “a poetical system of things, which tho’ it be believ’d neither by themselves nor readers, is commonly esteem’d a sufficient foundation for any fiction” (THN 1.3.10.6).

It is not, however, a sufficient foundation for philosophical conclusions, as the demands of pleasure require a sacrifice of truth. If popular philosophers are justified in resorting to poetry and eloquence, this is because by doing so they will “please the imagination, and engage the affections” (EHU 1.1). Hume himself quotes abundantly from

28 Frasca-Spada, “Quixotic Confusions,” p. 174.

55 poets including Virgil, Shakespeare, and Homer when refashioning the third book of the

Treatise as his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. But the example of the Golden

Age now reappears as yielding a truism: the principles of justice are “so natural and obvious, that they have not escaped even the poets, in their descriptions of the felicity, attending the golden age” (EPM 3.1.14). Poets find themselves downgraded to agreeable heralds of the obvious, as though poetical fictions, when taken by themselves, were either cognitively void or cognitively trivial. In order to fulfill their true call — to “please the imagination” — poets must renounce their aspirations as conveyors of knowledge.

3. The cognitive value of the novel

If we turn back to the novel, we find that it presents a special case for Hume. The aesthetic factor is not as much of an obstacle as it is with poetry. The problem with the novel is not that it deviates from truth in order to compensate for the reader’s lack of belief. Instead, we have seen that what worries Hume is precisely the ability of novels to elicit belief. Unlike most forms of imaginative literature, the novel achieved vivacity not through its “style and ingenuity,” but by approximating the effect of history. That fictions can be as credible as fact is compatible with Hume’s associationist psychology, which grants that “[i]f any of [the] incidents [in a literary work] be an object of belief, it bestows a force and vivacity on the others, which are related to it” (THN 1.3.10.7). This borrowed vivacity, as Frasca-Spada notes, then works as a “functional equivalent of belief” (178). The phenomenal reception of

Pamela and Clarissa showed that readers could be as invested in the fate of realistic fictional characters as in that of historical figures. By reproducing in laborious detail the minutiae of real life and setting their stories in the concrete world of their readers, Richardson and other realist novelists elicited the type of reader response which Hume associated with works of history.

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From Hume’s perspective, this affected the value of novels both as aesthetic objects and as vehicles for knowledge. In their failure to follow neoclassical norms, novels ranked low among the products of the imagination. That Hume was less than enthusiastic about them is suggested not only by the passages already quoted, but also by his silence on several major novelists and by his contemptuous dismissal of others. As I pointed out, Hume’s writings contain no references to either Richardson or Fielding, and he maintained the same silence over his prominent compatriots Tobias Smollett and Henry Mackenzie. Those he did write about tended to fare poorly in his hands. Witness his remark that if all books “worse than [the novels of] Bussi Rabutin, or Crébillon” were to be removed from the Advocates’

Library in Edinburgh, “I shall engage that a couple of porters will do the office” (L i 212).

This stands in sharp contrast with Hume’s frequent recognition of the aesthetic value of poetry.

The problem, from Hume’s perspective, is that novels ignored that good literature should involve the right type of subject matter treated in the right ways. As far as subject matter is concerned, he had a neoclassical predilection for the high theme. “A tragedy,” he alerts, “that should represent the adventures of sailors, or porters, or even of private gentlemen, would presently disgust us” (“Of the Protestant Succession,” E 504). Likewise,

“the pleasantries of a waterman, the observations of a peasant, the ribaldry of a porter or hackney coachman, all of these are natural, and disagreeable,” while the “chit-chat of the tea-table, copied faithfully and at full length” would make an “insipid comedy” (“Of

Simplicity and Refinement in Writing,” E 191). As for adequate treatment, Hume’s motto was “unity amidst diversity” (EHU 3.8), a traditional neoclassical tenet he justified on psychological grounds. On his account, the smooth transition of the imagination from subject to subject facilitates the flow of the passions, while anything that causes the imagination to jolt and lose momentum tends to deflate the passions (EHU 3.12-18).

57

Symptomatically, at a time when Sterne was acquiring a reputation in Europe as high as his own, Hume noted that Tristram Shandy was “the best Book, that has been writ by any

Englishman these thirty Years,” adding, anti-climactically: “bad as it is” (L ii 269). If we are to trust Boswell, what displeased Hume in Sterne was that “[w]ith all its drollery there is a sameness of extravagance which tires us. We have just a succession of Surprise, surprise, surprise.”29 This accords with Hume’s principle that “the mind, in perusing a work overstocked with wit, is fatigued and disgusted with the constant endeavour to shine and surprize” (“Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing,” E 193).30

Thus, the novel’s concentration on detail, its focus on the daily life of the middle or lower classes, its subplots and episodes, its digressions, its ranks of secondary characters, and everything that brought it closer to the randomness of real life constituted artistic flaws by Hume’s standards. One might wonder, then, whether these aesthetic shortcomings would not be compensated by cognitive gains. Here, however, epistemological considerations kick in. As we have seen, Hume found that novels fail not only to please like poetry; they also fail to instruct like history. They occupy a space between poetry and history, close enough to the formlessness of real life to compromise our aesthetic experience, but not close enough to qualify as a source of knowledge. While novelists did not feel bound by neoclassical rules, they were nonetheless writing for a popular readership that favored other types of mimetic license; novels please through “false representations of mankind” that exaggerate the causal influence of love over that of “avarice, ambition, vanity, and a thousand other passions” (“Of the Study of History,” E 564). Such exaggerations, in turn, compromise their value as

29 Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, Mount Vernon, N.Y., W.E. Rudge, 1928-1934, Vol. 1, p. 127. Reproduced in Early Responses to Hume’s Life and Reputation. Ed. James Fieser (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003), Vol. II, p. 141.

30 Critics who isolate Hume’s remark about Tristram Shandy from his other statements often read that remark as a form of praise. I argue that Hume was seriously critical of the novel in my “Hume’s Opinion of Tristram Shandy,” The Shandean, 25 (Winter 2014), 89-98.

58 counterfactual exercises, since the simplification of the psychological causes driving human behavior flaunts the laws of nature that a valid thought experiment should observe. As a result, the hypothetical scenarios of the novel fail to yield principles that are transferrable to the real world.

For Hume, readers who derive their knowledge of human nature from novels are as deluded as those who try to understand the causality of events through accounts of miracles. “When we peruse the first histories of all nations,” Hume tells us,

we are apt to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole frame of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operations in a different manner, from what it does at present. Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience ... It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages. (EHU 10.20)

A carefully cultivated suspicion is the proper remedy. When seeking to expand our knowledge of human nature, we should “glean up our experiments ... from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures” (THN, “Introduction”).

Failing personal experience, we can consult the experience of others, but we should proceed with caution, proportioning our belief in their testimony to the weight of the evidence in its favor (EHU 10.4). Like Hume’s “judicious reader” of miracles, a judicious reader of novels would find that their events “are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience” — and thus do not reflect the complexity of real life.

It is unclear whether these reservations should apply to the full possibilities of the genre or only to those novels Hume happened to have read and disliked. As far as entertainment value is concerned, Hume did have good things to say about some novels,

59 generally from continental Europe. “The absurd naivety of Sancho Pancho,” he thought, “is represented in such inimitable colours by Cervantes, that it entertains as much as the picture of the most magnanimous hero or softest lover”; he also praised the “entertaining books” of the Abbé Prévost, and the novels of Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, which he thought were written with “great Elegance and Decency” (E 192; L i 302; L i 427). In the peculiar case of La Nouvelle Héloïse, his approval may have been philosophical as well. But it may also be that Hume valued that novel because of its frequent suspension of the novelistic mode. The epistolary structure of La Nouvelle Héloïse gives Rousseau occasion for long dissertative sections that can be read as philosophical essays. The novel allows philosophy to borrow the aids of poetry, fulfilling to perfection Hume’s program for connecting the

“learned” and the “conversible” worlds (E 533). But we cannot know for sure. It is possible that Hume’s anticognitivism was less than categorical. At least in theory his reliance on thought experiments suggests that a cognitively valuable novel may be construed on his epistemological principles.

Or maybe not. It is worth noting that there is an important difference between a thought experiment, which isolates one specific aspect of experience, and the broad representations of life novels seek to provide. While confident that certain principles in human nature were general enough to warrant systematization, Hume was also wary of the unpredictability of the multifarious forces governing individual and collective existence.

The less general principles of human nature, he insists, “are commonly so delicate and refined, that the smallest incident in the health, education, or fortune of a particular person, is sufficient to divert their course and retard their operation; nor it is possible to reduce them to any general maxims or observations” (“Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and

Sciences” E 112). This sets limits to the ability of narratives to demonstrate the general tendencies of particular actions and decisions, since the “influence [of such principles] at

60 one time will never assure us concerning their influence at another, even though all the general circumstances should be the same in both cases” (ibid.). The implication of this passage is that even a genuine biography describing an individual life in excruciating detail has limited evidential value as a source of empirical knowledge; it is only the broader repository of history, “by shewing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations,” that allows us “to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature” (EHU 8.7).

These difficulties, we might add, are no longer a function of the problem of induction.

Induction is fully operative in this context, and the problem is instead that the variables at play in real life are too numerous to be controlled by human prognosis — way too numerous to warrant counterfactual reasoning.

4. Hume’s anticognitivism

The actual extent of Hume’s anticognitivism is thus unclear. But its sources are identifiable, and an important thing to note is that not all of it follows from his empiricism. When it comes to poetry, Hume’s attitude is partly motivated by his normative aesthetics — by the idea that different genres have different goals, that works should be evaluated according to how well they achieve such goals, and that aesthetic success may come at an epistemic cost.

There is, it is true, an empiricist psychology undergirding Hume’s aesthetics. It is his theory of the passions that suggests to him that conventions such as the dramatic unities would be best fit to please. But Hume’s psychology does not fully define his aesthetics, which is also informed by normative factors. As it turns out, the type of writing Hume disdains — such as the works of Ogilby and Bunyan — did please readers. Rather than dismiss such taste as a psychological impossibility, Hume acknowledges its existence but writes it off as aberrant

(“Of the Standard of Taste,” E 231). It is therefore Hume’s residual neoclassicism, rather than brute facts about the psychology of reading, that requires successful poetry to avoid a

61 strict adherence to truth. When it comes to the novel, however, Hume’s anticognitivism has much more to do with his empiricist convictions. From the point of view of empiricism, socio-ethical reality is too intricate to be reliably replicated by fictions; the underlying principles of human nature, when they admit of systematic articulation at all, can only be gleaned through direct experience or reports thereof. The preference for history which

Hume shared with Locke and other empiricists presumes that to broaden the experience of readers in true empirical fashion would involve portraying the world as it actually is or has actually been, elsewhere and at other times.

If the credo of an empiricist age is that knowledge of the world starts with the knowledge of particulars, then what Hume’s example shows is that genres that have traditionally spoken in the language of universals may have become philosophically bankrupt, and that even the realist novel is bound to be smaller than life. This, of course, is the empiricist view. Things looked rather different for those novelists who affirmed the cognitive value of explicit fictions by invoking the authority of experience. Fielding, as the next chapter will show, is a prime example.

62

CHAPTER 3

Empiricism and Fielding’s Theory of Fiction1

Henry Fielding may not seem the obvious writer to turn to for an empiricist defense of fictions. Studies of his place in the history of the novel have usually contrasted him with his more realist predecessors, highlighting in the process his relative detachment from the world of sense perception. Ian Watt, for example, contends that Defoe and Richardson go farther than Fielding in providing “an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals,” while Catherine Gallagher argues that Fielding helps inaugurate the modern category of fiction by having his characters refer not to particular persons (as Defoe’s did) but to generalizations.2 Judging by these very prominent statements, Defoe and Richardson present reality from the bottom up, while Fielding assesses it from the top down; and while their pictures of life are copied directly from the original, his are refracted through the categorizing prisms of neoclassicism. These assumptions, in turn, have sometimes suggested that Fielding drew his knowledge of life not from the surrounding reality of eighteenth-century England, but from the higher planes of myth, epic, and Platonic archetypes. Henry Knight Miller, aware of Fielding’s status as a misfit in the early days of novelistic realism, resituated him in a tradition of romance whose epistemological

1 A version of this chapter was published as “Empiricism and Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction,” Eighteenth- Century Fiction, 27, 2 (Winter 2014-15), 201-228.

2 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 27; Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, Vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), especially 342-4.

63 allegiances were anti-empirical. Tom Jones, in Miller’s reading, is “the demonstration and celebration of a universal, generic body of truths that are assumed à priori, rather than the induction of a personal and individual truth that is ‘emergent’ from a world of undifferentiated particulars.”3

There is a certain intuitive appeal to Miller’s reading, as the universalizing tendencies of neoclassicism — which Fielding subscribed to — seem more compatible with the realm of ideas than with the fleeting mirages of experience.4 But we should be wary of inferring an epistemology from Fielding’s aesthetics. His ambiguous position between ancients and moderns is partly a function of his simultaneous acceptance of traditional aesthetic values and modern philosophical ones. To see him as an idealist or rationalist is to overlook the famous apostrophe to “Experience” in Tom Jones: “From thee only can the manners of Mankind be known; to which the recluse Pedant, however great his Parts or extensive his Learning may be, hath ever been a Stranger.”5 It is to overlook, in other words,

Fielding’s insistence that his novels were vehicles for moral instruction, and that the knowledge they made available originated in empirical reality. The guiding premise of this chapter is that empiricism not only inflected Fielding’s ethics, but substantially informed his

3 Henry Knight Miller, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and the Romance Tradition (British Columbia: University of Victoria, 1976), 73. The long tradition of romance Miller has in mind is characterized by “long narrative fiction before the eighteenth-century, over its whole range,” extending all the way back to ancient epics (13). Sheridan Baker, who also sees Fielding as deeply invested in romance, notes that the “trueness and durability” of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones comes less from their “realistic glimpses of eighteenth-century life” than from “the even more essential realism that sees the comic impossibility of the ideal and romantic glories of life yet affirms their existence and their value.” Baker, “Henry Fielding’s Comic Romances,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Vol. XLV, 1960, 419.

4 I should note that I find Baker’s and Miller’s revaluation of romance elements in Fielding’s novels highly valuable. One should only refrain from conflating aesthetic and philosophical considerations. Two good discussions of Fielding’s indebtedness to romance that avoid translating his formal commitments into an espousal of philosophical idealism are James L. Lynch, Henry Fielding and the Heliodoran Novel. Romance, Epic, and Fielding’s New Province of Writing (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986); and Hubert McDermott’s Novel and Romance: The Odyssey to Tom Jones (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1989), especially chap. 5.

5 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), Book XIII, chapter i, 687. References are to this edition.

64 conception of the novel — maybe as substantially as it did Defoe’s or Richardson’s, except that in Fielding’s case the influence operated less by means of shared procedures than through theoretical pressure.

Fielding’s theory of fiction, as will be seen, was shaped by the attempt to solve a theoretical problem — that of justifying the pedagogic ambitions of neoclassicism at a time when the Aristotelian-Platonic argument had lost traction. My departure point is Michael

McKeon’s thesis that what distinguishes Fielding from his more realistic peers is less a regress in literary time than a recuperation of tradition qualified by the terms of modernity.

McKeon recognizes that Fielding’s reliance on romance conventions does not invalidate “the crucial degree to which he is in accord with the empiricist perspective.”6 That said, parlaying this insight into an empiricist reading of Fielding is not the goal for McKeon, who focuses instead on how Fielding invokes empiricism as a standard of truth against romance.

And this leaves open the question of what the standard requires of Fielding himself once it is in place, and of how Fielding responds to it — if at all.

These are questions that have remained mostly unexplored in subsequent criticism.7

John Bender’s work is an important exception, since he reads Tom Jones as part of the experimental cultural of the Enlightenment.8 But even Bender has little to say on how

Fielding justifies his empirical ambitions. It should be clear by now that the philosophers whose goals Fielding shared were far from convinced that experience can indeed speak

6 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 119 and 404.

7 Even a critic like Joseph Bartolomeo, who accepts McKeon’s interpretation and focuses on the commonalities between Richardson and Fielding, prefers to concentrate on Fielding’s “preference for generality and externality, a definition of human nature in the aggregate, and a portrayal of the species rather than the individual.” Bartolomeo, A New Species of Criticism. Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1994), 67-8, 72.

8 John Bender, “Novel Knowledge. Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin & William Warner (Chicago and London, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010), 290. A related argument is made by William Donoghue in Enlightenment Fiction in England, France, and America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

65 through narrative fiction. Fielding’s challenge was to show that it can, and thus to enlist in support of the novel an epistemology nominally unreceptive to the methods of literary representation. I argue in this chapter that the notion of “true history” in Joseph Andrews and the concept of probability in Tom Jones can be understood as Fielding’s attempt to develop an empiricist defense of literary cognitivism. Through these two principles Fielding seeks to demonstrate the coextensiveness between the world of his novels and that of sense experience, and thus show that even highly explicit fictions can communicate knowledge in the empirical way.

1. Moral epistemology in Fielding’s novels

As a professed heir of the Augustans, Fielding believed that man was indeed the proper study of mankind, and his writings are suffused with considerations on topics such as the innateness of evil, the power of education to mold character, and the tug-of-war between human nature and social imperatives. As George Sherburn once pointed out, “it would be a mistake to take Fielding very seriously as a systematic thinker; but only the casual reader can fail to see that his thinking does shape his stories.”9 Even the less carefully crafted of

Fielding’s novels have an earnest intellectual agenda, giving narrative expression to views that also animate his dissertative writings.

Particularly relevant among the latter is Fielding’s Essay on the Knowledge of the

Characters of Men, a treatise in moral epistemology published in 1743 but written at an

9 George Sherburn, “Fielding’s Social Outlook,” Philological Quarterly, Vol. XXXV (January 1969) No. 1, 1. Book- length accounts of Fielding’s ethics are Martin Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959); Morris Golden, Fielding’s Moral Psychology (University of Massachusetts Press, 1966); and Bernard Harrison, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (London: Sussex University Press, 1975). See also Michael Irwin, Henry Fielding. The Tentative Realist (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), as well as Ronald Paulson’s various discussions of the subject.

66 earlier point.10 The Essay’s central premise is that there is between men an “unacquired, original distinction” that determines “that very early and strong Inclination to Good or Evil, which distinguishes different Dispositions in Children ... Savages [and] Persons [with] the same Education.”11 This original distinction is ineradicable, but the “crafty and designing

Part of Mankind” soon learns to conceal it under a veil of hypocrisy. The Essay, accordingly, seeks to help the “more open, honest, and considering Part of Mankind” to see through the masquerade, by means of three inferential rules (155-6). The first involves the art of physiognomy, whose central premise is that people’s characters are spelled out in their faces. Fielding accepts this premise in theory, but fears that the language of facial features may be too tricky to decipher in practice. “The passions of men,” he thinks, “do commonly imprint sufficient marks on the countenance; and it is owing chiefly to want of skill in the observer that physiognomy is of so little use and credit in the world” (284). He therefore complements the first rule with two additional ones: that we deduce people’s characters from the visible tendencies of their actions towards ourselves (rule number two) and of their actions towards others (rule number three), while avoiding the common mistake of taking “their Words against their Actions” (163). The common denominator of the second and third rules is that observation trumps testimony; regularities in behavior are better clues to a man’s character than their reputation or self-description. Taken together, all three rules presume that one’s moral essence is inscrutable and can only be known through inferences from its observable manifestations. Over time the repeated application of this method leads inductively to Fielding’s initial assumption that human nature is innately heterogeneous — a principle Fielding derives neither from intuition nor revelation, but by

10 Henry Knight Miller suggests a date of composition somewhere between 1739 and 1742. See his Essays on Fielding’s Miscellanies. A Commentary on Volume One (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 190.

11 Henry Fielding, “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” in Henry Knight Miller, ed., Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq. (1743; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 1:154. References are to this edition.

67 considering “that immense Variety of Characters, so apparent in Men even of the same

Climate, Religion, and Education” (153). This, as Fielding probably knew, was a principle expounded by his favorite philosopher, John Locke.12

Fielding’s moral epistemology is thus thoroughly empirical. The Essay distills his worldly wisdom into a guidebook for the detection of character, whose goals and methods then carry over into the novels of the 1740s. In both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones Fielding continues his inquiry into the connections between appearances and reality. Physiognomy remains an important clue to character, as in Fielding’s overwrought descriptions of Mrs.

Tow-wouse in Joseph Andrews13 and Captain Blifil in Tom Jones (I, xi, 65-6), and in his recommendations that the reader check out specific figures in Hogarth’s paintings to get a sense of what Square or Bridget Allworthy look like (III, vi, 138; I, xi, 66). As in the Essay, however, facial features are easy to misread: young Blifil has “one of those grinning Sneers with which the Devil marks his best Beloved” (XVII, ii, 878), but no one notices it; while

Parson Adams, one of the best of men, is said to have “the most villainous Countenance” (II, x,

142). Still like the Essay, the novels emphasize the disjunction between professions and behavior as clues to character. Joseph Andrews is, among other things, an extended denunciation of hypocrisy, where Fielding dramatizes the susceptibility of the good-natured to be duped by dissemblers. Adams, “who never saw farther into People than they desired to let him” (II, x, 144), is the epitome of the man who chronically misjudges the characters of

12 That there are innate dispositions (as opposed to innate ideas) is integral to Locke’s empiricism. While Locke believes that most men follow good or evil courses because of education, he admits that “God has stamp'd certain Characters upon Mens Minds, which, like their Shapes, may perhaps be a little mended; but can hardly be totally alter’d, and transform’d into the contrary.” John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Yolton and Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), §66, 122. Locke also notes that “amongst men of equal education there is great inequality of parts. And the woods of America, as well as the schools of Athens, produce men of several abilities in the same kind.” Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Thomas Fowler (1706; New York: Lenox Hill, 1882. rprt. 1971), 5.

13 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (1742; Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), Book I, chapter xiv, 61-2. References are to this edition.

68 others by drawing his knowledge not from experience, but from bookish learning and a naive trust in empty words.14 The main action of Tom Jones, in turn, can be read as a variation on the following theme from the Essay: “A Hypocrite, in Society, lives in the same

Apprehension with a Thief who lies concealed in the Midst of the Family he is to rob ... And thus, as nothing hates more violently than Fear, many an innocent Person, who suspects no

Evil intended him, is detested by him who intends it” (170). In these and other ways, Joseph

Andrews and Tom Jones transplant onto fictional narratives the topics and methods of the

Essay.

An important difference, of course, is that the novels substitute examples for precepts. While the Essay teaches the reader to draw connections between signs and dispositions in real life, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones display the connections in suppositional scenarios, in hopes that the reader will then recognize similar patterns in their material surroundings. And this implies that fictional narratives may somehow stand in for the world — that by showing characters in action they offer the reader a viable replacement for first-hand observation. Hence Fielding’s offer to “present the amiable

Pictures to those who have not had the Happiness of knowing the Originals” (I, i, 19). As I have been arguing, however, the empiricists denied that fiction can facilitate forms of virtual witnessing. In Locke’s view, for example, the knowledge of men has “to be had chiefly from experience, and, next to that, from a judicious reading of history.”15 Narratives truly grounded in experience, Locke implies, must be factual, not fictional. The superiority of factual narratives was recognized not only by later generations of empiricists, but also by those novelists who co-opted the label “history” as an epistemic validator for their works.

Fielding was one of them, but his decision to present his novels as belles lettres

14 As Adams claims, “Knowledge of Men is only to be learnt from Books, Plato and Seneca for that” (II, xvi, 176).

15 Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study, for a Gentleman,” in The Works of John Locke, ed. J. A. St. John (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), vol. II, 503. Emphasis added.

69 prevented him from simply stamping the label “history” on fictions disguised as facts. As applied to Fielding’s novels, “history” still functions as a label of cognitive value, but applying the label required Fielding to redefine its meaning and find space within it for certain types of prose fiction — without, however, divesting the genre of its original empirical credentials. This conceptual redefinition of history is a central achievement of

Fielding’s first novel.

2. Joseph Andrews and “true history”

Joseph Andrews contains two sections (I, i and III, i) where Fielding situates his new province of writing in the domain of historiography. His central move is to dismiss traditional historians as unreliable “Romance-Writers” and suggest in turn that Don Quixote

(and by implication Joseph Andrews) is a “history of the world in general ... from the time it was first polished to this day” (III, i, 185, 187). By and large critics of the novel have taken

Fielding’s claim to historicity less literally than the epic theory outlined in the preface. The main reason to avoid taking Fielding’s professions at face value is that he himself pokes fun at certain varieties of pseudo-history. His initial characterization of Joseph Andrews as an

“authentic History” (I, i, 19-20) is overtly parodic, since the “histories” he professes to emulate include everything from popular chapbooks to Richardson’s Pamela. As McKeon convincingly argues, in such passages — to which we may add Joseph’s mock genealogy, the narrator’s pretense to have conducted interviews with his characters, and the occasional interpolation of spurious documents — Fielding is mimicking in self-subversive ways the usual conventions of naive empiricism. Nevertheless, parody does not tell the whole story.

In contrast with Fielding’s opening remarks, the introductory essay to Book III is mostly earnest in tone, and Fielding’s attacks on historians of England such as Bulstrode

Whitelocke and the Earl of Clarendon indicate that he is targeting more than those strands

70 of prose fiction that paraded as history. By choosing Whitelocke and Clarendon as elements of contrast that set to advantage his own achievement, Fielding is looking for the common denominators underlying factual history and fictional prose, so as to establish a single critical scale on which the two strands are commensurable.

The more programmatic aspects of Joseph Andrews’s engagement with contemporary historiography have attracted considerable critical attention, gaining what seems to me its most compelling discussion in a recent article by Noelle Gallagher.16 Noting that Joseph Andrews is a response not only to Richardson’s Pamela, but also to Colley

Cibber’s autobiography, Gallagher argues that Fielding is concerned with a cultural crisis that cuts across the divide between literary and historical modes of representation. For

Fielding, “both history and epic were destabilized — and, to some degree, endangered — by the movement toward a more detailed or immediate style of representation,” as a result of which “the timeless lessons of classical history were being drowned out by the narcissistic musings of men such as Cibber” (638). Fielding’s narrator, still according to Gallagher, seeks to realign mimetic narrative with classical values in the fields of history and literature simultaneously, through a genre that straddles the divide between the two domains.17 And this is “biography,” a generic category whose boundaries were flexible enough to encircle both Plutarch and Cervantes.

That said, Gallagher notes, “the novel’s overall practice” contradicts the narrator’s

16 Gallagher, “Historiography, the Novel, and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500- 1900, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer 2012), 631-650. Other important discussions of the relationship between Fielding’s novels and eighteenth-century historiography are Leo Braudy’s pioneering Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction. History and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), and Homer Brown, “Tom Jones: The ‘Bastard’ of History,” Boundary II, 7 (1979), 201-33.

17 Gallagher’s reading thus stands in sharp contrast with Leo Braudy’s, for whom Fielding provides “a corrective to the biases and faulty generalizations about human nature that are secreted within the interstices of any public history bent consciously or unconsciously on proving a particular thesis” (92). The problem with Braudy’s claim, as I see it, is that Fielding criticizes public history not because it offers generalizations about human nature, but because the historical individuals who supposedly instantiate such general truths are ultimately unknowable.

71 theory (642). In spite of his neoclassical principles, “Fielding’s narrator ultimately attributes his broad knowledge of mankind to his own specific sensory observations rather than to an abstract knowledge of moral philosophy” (643). I certainly agree that there is a mismatch here between neoclassical and empirical principles; but while Gallagher sees it as a sign of conflict between theory and practice, I see it instead as an indication of the scope of the theory.18 What history does for Fielding, as I will proceed to argue, is precisely to mediate between the generalizing impulse of neoclassicism and empiricism’s orientation towards particulars, and thus connect Fielding’s universalist claim to be describing “not an individual, but a species” with his empirical claim to “have writ little more than I have seen”

(III, i, 189).

Let me start by stressing something that has tended to escape critical attention: the carefully circumscribed role assigned to Aristotle in Fielding’s theoretical chapters. Fielding seeks to vindicate Joseph Andrews on both aesthetic and epistemic grounds, but invokes

Aristotle for the first purpose only. He appeals to the Poetics in the “Preface” to claim, first, that “the Epic, as well as the Drama, is divided into Tragedy and Comedy,” and that just “as

Poetry ... may be Tragic or Comic ... it may be likewise either in Verse or Prose” (1). Once the novel’s status as a “comic Epic-Poem in prose” has been established, an argument for its epistemic value would not be far to seek. Aristotle himself offers one in his famous claim that “poetry is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history; poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (1451b).19 Fielding, however, makes no use of this principle, for reasons that have to do with his moral epistemology. I argued in Chapter 1

18 This was also recognized by the German scholar Wolfgang Deppe, who claimed that Fielding’s formal project consisted in “die Gestaltung der empirischen Faktizität bei gleichtzeitiger Wahrung des Universalitätsanspruchs der Dichtung.” See Wolfgang G. Deppe, History versus Romance. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte und zum Verständnis der Literaturtheorie Henry Fieldings (Munich: Verlag Aschendorff, 1965), 59.

19 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2d edn. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 95. Parenthetical references in Bekker numbers.

72 that empiricism inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetry and history, assigning philosophical priority to the latter precisely for its focus on particulars. Fielding’s usage reflects this change. While the aesthetic manifesto of the “Preface” describes Joseph Andrews as type of epic, the epistemic vindication in Book III refashions it as a “true history” (III, i,

191). Fielding remains invested in communicating universal lessons, but while he professes to describe “not Men, but Manners; not an Individual, but a Species” (III, i, 189), what gives his descriptions epistemic value is their empirical groundedness. As Fielding insists, everything in Joseph Andrews “is copied from the Book of Nature, and scarce a Character or

Action produced which I have not taken from my own Observations and Experience”

(“Preface,” 10). The timeless lessons of neoclassicism, Fielding implies, must be tied all the way down to the firm soil of empirical reality, and “true history” provides the link.

It goes without saying that history has been re-conceptualized in this process. It no longer means what Aristotle would have meant by it, and it is a far cry from what any empiricist would have understood by the term. What warrants Fielding’s usage, however, is that Fielding shares an empiricist understanding of history’s philosophical function.

Philosophers like Locke and Hume were as interested as Fielding in erecting general principles on the groundwork of particular instances, and what made history so appealing to them was its ability to mediate between the two levels. The main function of history, as

Hume describes it, is “to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by shewing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials, from which we may form our observations, and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour.”20 Hume’s view of the function of history is

20 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8.7, 150. References are to this edition. Locke similarly recommends that his readers complement personal experience “by what they shall find in history to confirm or reverse these imperfect observations; which may be established into rules fit to be relied on, when they are justified by a sufficient and wary induction of particulars.” Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, 37.

73 remarkably close to Fielding’s understanding of his goals as a novelist.21 Both have in mind a narrative form capable of expanding the reader’s observations beyond the confines of their own time and place. But they disagree about the methodology most suitable for the task. The type of narrative Hume has in mind, and which he would pursue in his own History of England, endeavors to reconstitute the specific materiality of the past and broaden the observed samples from which generalizations can then be drawn: “These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science” (EHU 8.7, 150). By contrast, Fielding’s argument in Joseph Andrews suggests that the same goal can be better attained if one skips the historian’s laborious catalogue of data and presents instead the generalizations that the particulars would have yielded.

The generalizations in question are mostly socio-ethical. The opening claim of Book

III is that recent historiography has failed to live up to its promise. Those authors “who intitle their Books, the History of England, the history of France, of Spain, etc” only get right what matters least; they are accurate as far as geographic specificity is concerned, but “as to the Actions and Characters of Men, their Writings are not quite so authentic ... some representing the same Man as a Rogue, while others give him a great and honest Character”

(III, i, 185-6). Read in connection with the Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men, this passage suggests that the role of the historian, for Fielding, is not to record change over time, but to provide an accurate assessment of the moral landscape through reliable portrayals of “the Actions and Characters of Men.” Those who seek to do so by describing actual historical figures inevitably fail, not only because of biases or blanks in the records,

21 Fielding never mentions Hume directly in his writings, and the only available evidence that he may have read Hume is the presence in his library of the Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Martin Battestin is exemplarily cautious when arguing for Hume’s influence on Fielding’s Amelia, presenting his claim as “a hypothesis only” which “cannot be finally proved.” While Fielding probably had some knowledge of Hume’s work, I have preferred to speak of shared concerns without ascribing them to direct influence. See Martin Battestin, “The Problem of Amelia: Hume, Barrow, and the Conversion of Captain Booth,” ELH 41 (1974), 613-48.

74 but also as a result of a peculiar consequence of Fielding’s moral epistemology. We have seen that for Fielding character must be inferred from actions. But he also suggests, in

Joseph Andrews and elsewhere, that actions only have moral valence in light of the dispositions and motivations they externalize. One must therefore infer character from actions while assessing actions through character.22 And this is a vicious circle which,

Fielding believes, can only be broken by means of prolonged exposure. The third rule of the

Essay recommends that the student of character trace their subject “into his private Family and nearest Intimacies” and “see whether he hath acted the Part of a good Son, Brother,

Husband, Father, Friend, Master, Servant, etc.” (175). This is to say that reliable moral adjudication, in Fielding’s view, requires a degree of acquaintance unattainable in the case of the dead. In default of empirical evidence, the historian of the past falls victim to naivety, political bias or personal prejudice, “representing the same Man as a Rogue, while others give him a great and honest Character,” while the reader “believes as he Pleases, and indeed the more judicious and suspicious considers the whole as no other than a Romance, in which the Writer hath indulged a happy and fertile Invention” (III, i, 186).

In order to fulfill the higher function of history, the Fieldingesque biographer shifts his focus: “The Facts we deliver may be relied on, tho’ we often mistake the Age and Country wherein they happened” (III, i, 186). Age and country, or the specificities of time and place, are certainly essential for the original research, but they are secondary for the final report.

What matters, as far as the report is concerned, is whether the “facts” related are true of human nature in general. This is what gives Joseph Andrews a degree of truth that factual history allegedly lacks. While the novel’s raw material comes from Fielding’s experience,

22 Fielding, in other words, is a virtue ethicist. See Hume’s very congenial remark: “By means of this guide [experience], we mount up to the knowledge of men’s inclinations and motives, from their actions, expressions, and even gestures; and again, descend to the interpretation of their actions from our knowledge of their motives and inclinations” (EHU, 8.9, 151).

75 what ends up on the page is not an organized enumeration of the data, but fictional iterations of the general principles derivable from them. By presenting the copies and archiving the originals, Fielding suspends judgment on actual historical agents, avoiding the mistakes he denounces in Whitelocke or Clarendon.

What “true history” does, then, is not to retell the past more accurately, but not to retell it at all. Instead, it posits characters and actions on a counterfactual stage and then shows, through the assistance of an omniscient narrator, what type of moral disposition lies behind what type of behavior. In the process, it reveals how the same action may have different moral connotations depending on the motivations from which it stems. As many critics have noted, Fielding juxtaposes the false charity of his lawyer, who recommends saving Joseph for fear of legal prosecution, with the genuine charity of the young postilion, who clothes Joseph for no other reason than that he has a good heart (I, xii); similarly, Mrs

Tow-wouse’s concern for Joseph, motivated by the belief that he is a gentleman, is contrasted with Adams’s, who looks after Joseph out of pure fellow feeling (I, xiii).23 That appearances can nonetheless be misleading is dramatized in the way the characters routinely misjudge each other, Parson Trulliber’s parishioners taking his austerity for a sign of inner sanctity (II, xv, 169) and Lawyer Scout assuming that Adams only supports Joseph’s marriage for fear of losing his fee (IV, iii, 285). Examples could be multiplied; what is common to all of them is that the reader, unlike the characters, benefits from the narrator’s bird’s-eye view and can spot the moral essences hidden behind the appearances. The ability to correlate behavior to internal states, in turn, will hopefully remain of avail back in the real world, where the reader, suddenly deprived of narratorial assistance, is reduced to the perspective of a character, with its unprivileged view from the ground.

23 See, in particular, Ronald Paulson’s discussion of the “touchstone structure” in Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 121-26.

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3. Probability in Tom Jones

In Joseph Andrews, in short, Fielding tries to reconcile empiricism and literary pedagogy through a reformulation of the concept of history; he claims affiliation with a generic category with respectable empirical credentials, redefines it along functional lines, and then asserts that a fictional biography can perform the function in question better than the

“romances” of historians, without being for that matter less empirical. In Tom Jones Fielding dispenses with the term “biography” and tends to criticize historians on the grounds of tediousness rather than unreliability; but his own claim to historicity remains essentially the same. What distinguishes his new province of writing is that while traditional historians

“relate public Transactions,” he deals “in private Character” (VIII, i, 402); and “as we have good Authority for all our Characters, no less indeed than the vast authentic Doomsday-

Book of Nature ... our Labours have sufficient Title to the name of History” (IX, i, 489).

The History of Tom Jones, in short, is still capitalizing on the rhetoric of the previous novel. But now Fielding is also concerned with an issue he mostly passed over in Joseph

Andrews: verification. The theory of history in Joseph Andrews plants a defense of literary cognitivism on an empiricist foundation, asserting that principles derived from the hypothetical scenarios of a novel may also hold true in real life, as long as the scenarios in question constitute extrapolations from experience; but Fielding offers no way to ascertain whether they do. As Fielding realized, it is far from obvious that prose fiction can indeed live up to the empirical status it borrows from history. Hume, we have seen, feared that novels and romances simply catered to an “appetite for falsehood,” treating readers to “false representations of mankind” that distort the ways human nature and society actually function.24 Fielding was very aware of the possible discontinuities between prose fiction

24 Hume, Essays. Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianopolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 564.

77 and real life, but he also found that they are avoidable. He predicts in Tom Jones that given the popularity of the genre “a Swarm of foolish Novels and Romances will be produced” and readers will need help to “distinguish what is true and genuine in this historic Kind of

Writing, from what is false and counterfeit” (IX, i, 487). Misrepresentations of life, for

Fielding, are thus the product of authorial ineptitude rather than a necessary feature of literary mimesis. What is in order is some means of verifying the correspondence between the world of a novel and the real world.

Fielding admits that when it comes to authenticating their accounts, public historians start off at an advantage; they can verify their claims with “public Records [and] the concurrent Testimony of many Authors”; by contrast, private historians “have no public

Notoriety, no concurrent Testimony, no Records to support and corroborate what we deliver” (VIII, i, 402). All they can do to authenticate their narratives is demonstrate their probability. At first sight there is nothing particularly empiricist about this claim.

Probability had a long history in the domains of rhetoric and aesthetics, entering the vocabulary of Tom Jones mainly via Aristotle’s Poetics. That said, Fielding’s usage reflects the additional role probability had come to play in early modern epistemology, where it was associated with non-intuitive and non-demonstrative modes of cognition grounded on the perception of regularities in nature.25 As I will now argue, the association of probability with empiricist psychology made it a potential measure of a narrative’s empirical status.

Fielding opens his section on probability with the routine gesture of prescribing

25 For how probability traversed boundaries between epistemology, rhetoric, and literary criticism in the period, see Douglas Lane Patey’s Probability and Literary Form. Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Patey explains how the use of “probability” as a translation for the neoclassical principle of vraisemblance “imported into criticism new standards of accuracy and conceptual apparatus ... previously associated with probability’s uses in other disciplines” (83).

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“Bounds” to what was generally called “the Marvellous.” 26 His concern is that “while some

[critics] are, with M. Dacier, ready to allow, that the same Thing which is impossible may yet be probable, others have so little Historic or Poetic Faith, that they believe nothing to be either possible or probable, the like of which hath not occurred to their own Observation”

(VIII, i, 396). To some extent the distinction between these two types of critic — the one willing to believe, the other lacking in “Historic or Poetic faith” — is also a distinction between the Aristotelian and the empiricist stances on the proper limits of mimesis. What

Fielding has in mind with his allusion to the French classicist André Dacier is Aristotle’s dictum that in poetical compositions “a believable impossibility is preferable to an unbelievable possibility” (Poetics, 1461b). Fielding seconds the veto on unbelievable possibilities (events that while possible seem improbable), and agrees that “we must keep ... within the Rules of Probability” (VIII, i, 400). After all, by “falling into Fiction [and] deserting

Probability,” a historian “forsakes his Character and commences a writer of Romance” (VIII, i, 402). But allowing writers to narrate impossible events on the grounds that they seem probable strikes Fielding as excessively liberal. He insists that the private historian should also remain “within the Bounds of Possibility.” Thus, Aristotle leaves room for events such as divine interventions, which seem probable within proper generic conventions but remain ultimately impossible; whereas Fielding, worried about the skeptical reader, proscribes all such events and promises that in Tom Jones “nothing will be found which hath never yet been seen in human Nature” (III, v, 136). As a result, everything that is probable in Tom

Jones has to be empirically possible as well.

It is unclear whether Fielding thought that this theory was still Aristotelian. From our perspective, there is an important sense in which it might seem to deviate from

26 For a compelling discussion of how Fielding balances the competing demands of probability and wonder see Robert V. Wess, “The Probable and the Marvelous in ‘Tom Jones.’” Modern Philology, Vol. 68, No. 1 (August 1970), 32-45.

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Aristotle. Modern commentators on the Poetics often disagree on why Aristotle requires that events in poetry be “in accordance with probability or necessity” (1451a), but they tend to agree that the answer depends on whether Aristotle means probability in the objective sense (as a measure of the actual likelihood of an event) or in the subjective sense (as a measure of whether the event seems likely to the audience).27 If Aristotle means the objective sense, then the function of probability is to underwrite tragedy’s cognitive value; if he means the subjective sense, then probability is required for tragedy’s affective appeal.

Regardless of what is truly the case with Aristotle, we find no equivalent disconnect between subjective probability and cognitive purpose in Tom Jones. Probability, for Fielding, is a function of reader response (and therefore a subjective judgment), but given its integral overlap with possibility it also serves as a mark of epistemic value. In fact, as I will proceed to show, it is precisely the subjective character of probability that makes it a viable verification device for Fielding’s purposes.

We have seen that what leads Fielding to set limits to the marvelous is his concern with skeptics — with those critics who “believe nothing to be either possible or probable, the like of which hath not occurred to their own Observation” (VIII, i, 396). Fielding often disputes their judgments, but at least in principle they are reasoning in sound empirical fashion. Locke had suggested that the proper ground for probabilistic judgments is the

“conformity of anything with our own Knowledge, Observation, or Experience [and with]

27 For example, Stephen Halliwell argues for the objective sense, claiming that Aristotle is “directed more towards the objective presentation than the subjective reception of the general propositions which the poet’s dramatisation of human action embodies.” In turn, Halliwell adds, objective probability is crucial because for Aristotle “the experience of poetry is inescapably cognitive.” Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Trowbridge, UK: Duckworth, 1986), 103, 105. Neil O’Sullivan, by contrast, argues that only a subjective interpretation of probability can make sense of passages such as Aristotle’s acceptance of believable impossibilities, and that taken together these passages “indicate Aristotle’s lack of concern with truth in poetry, and his interest in the emotional effect on the audience.” Neil O’Sullivan, “Aristotle on Dramatic Probability,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 91, No. 1 (October-November 1995), 52.

80 the Testimony of others, vouching their Observation and Experience.”28 Given his canons of probability, Locke could speak approvingly of the King of Siam, who refused to believe a

Dutch ambassador’s asseverations that “Water in his Country, would sometimes, in cold weather, be so hard that Men walked upon it” (ECHU 4.15.5, 657). Locke’s anecdote reappears to similar effect in Hume’s discussion of miracles. When faced with any report of events, Hume notes, “a wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence,” assessing the probability of the report on the basis of its conformance to their past experience (EHU 10.4,

170). By this rule, “the Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost, reasoned justly ... Though they were not contrary to his experience, they were not conformable to it” (EHU 10.10, 172)

Now, of course ice is real: the King of Siam was simply wrong. And this, for Fielding, was the problem with skeptical critics, whose observations of life were often too limited to make them proper judges of the probable. He points out how a certain “Lady of Quality” in a play (and he is thinking of Lady Charlotte in his own The Modern Husband), while declared unnatural “by the unanimous Voice of a very large Assembly of Clerks and Apprentices,” had

“the previous Suffrages of many Ladies of the first Rank” (VIII, i, 407). Clearly enough, it is the ladies’ vote that counts. But this is not to deny that judgments of probability are subjective responses conditioned by habitual experience. It only means that some subjective judgments are better grounded than others, and that skepticism is warranted as long as it is accompanied by experience of the relevant kind. More importantly, in this account the reader’s assent becomes a function of their exposure to the world. Locke acknowledges that, if placed in the King of Siam’s position, given his own different experiences, he would be “disposed by the nature of the thing itself to assent to it” (IV, xv,

28 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 4.15.4, 656.

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5). This disposition to believe is crucial. Hume, going a step beyond Locke, insists that once the relevant type of experience is given, “belief ... arises immediately, without any new operation of the reason or imagination” (T 1.3.8.10).29 Judgments of probability, by the terms of empiricist psychology, are thus subjective responses inflected by a repository of past experiences. This gives them evidentiary weight. That a reported event strikes the reader as probable is a sign that experience has previously inscribed similar tales in their mind.

While never explicitly articulated, this principle underlies Fielding’s practice in Tom

Jones, sometimes coming to the surface in the form of appeals to the reader’s sense of normalcy. Take, for instance, Mrs. Honour’s declaration that “no-body can say that I am base born, my grandfather was a Clergyman” (IV, xiv, 205). At this point Fielding adds the following footnote: “This is the second Person of low Condition whom we have recorded in this History, to have sprung from the Clergy. It is to be hoped such Instances will, in future

Ages, when some Provision is made for the Families of the inferior Clergy, appear stranger than they can be thought at present.” That Honour is already the second of her kind to be

“recorded” is here presented as a worrisome symptom of the actual poverty of the clergy — as though frequency in the novel corresponded to frequency in the real world. Of course it doesn’t have to. Fielding knows that he is making up the records and could invent any number of Honours. That said, he seeks to validate the correlation between novel and world by contrasting the reactions of two readers from different realities. For a reader from a happier future, cases such as Honour’s would “appear stranger than they can be thought at

29 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1.3.8.10, 71-72. There is an apparent contradiction between Hume’s description of belief as involuntary and his advice that we conform our belief to the evidence (since the latter assumes that belief is under our control). As David Owen has shown, however, the contradiction disappears once we distinguish between the roles of unreflective and reflective causal reasoning in Hume’s philosophy. See Owen, “Philosophy and the Good Life: Hume’s Defence of Probable Reasoning,” Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 3 (Summer 1996), 486-503.

82 present”; by contrast, Fielding implies that the contemporary reader, whose sense of normalcy has been informed by the spiritual crisis of the mid-eighteenth century, will have found the fact unremarkable — which, if true, would confirm the observable frequency of

Honour’s situation beyond the boundaries of the novel. Subjective probability, because it is inflected by experience, provides thus a litmus test for the correspondence between literary representation and empirical reality, even as Fielding is alerting his readers to features of that reality they may have become inured to.

Fielding is often careful to translate the episodes of Tom Jones into general formulas which in themselves constitute inferences from experience. Bridget Allworthy’s infatuation with Dr. Blifil, for instance, instantiates the following ironic maxim: “As Sympathies of all

Kinds are apt to beget Love, so Experience teaches us that none have a more direct

Tendency this Way than those of a religious Kind between Persons of different Sexes” (I, x,

62). He asks, rhetorically, whether Dr. Blifil’s schemes to marry Bridget to his brother follows from the principle — “which experience seems to make probable” — that we have

“a Satisfaction in aggrandizing our Families, even though we have not the least Love or

Respect for them” (I, x, 64). At the same time, he invites the reader to attest to the probability of both his principles and his scenes: “Examine your Heart, my good Reader, and resolve whether you do believe these Matters with me. If you do, you may proceed to their

Exemplification in the following Pages” (VI, i, 271). The sufficiently qualified reader, we must presume, will resolve and proceed. As for those who withhold assent, Fielding recommends that they broaden their experience appropriately:

We would have these Gentlemen know we can see what is odd in Characters as well as themselves, but it is our Business to relate facts as they are; which, when we have done, it is the part of the learned and sagacious Reader to consult that original Book of Nature, whence every Passage in our Work is transcribed, though we quote not always the particular Page for its Authority. (VII, xii, 377)

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Fittingly, Fielding determines that all historians of his ilk have to be sufficiently familiar with “the original book of nature” to copy faithfully from it (IX, i, 490), casting shame on the writer who “takes his Lines not from Nature, but from Books” and whose characters “are only the faint Copy of a Copy, and can have neither the Justness nor Spirit of an Original” (IX, i, 493). Provided the historian copies from nature and respects the rules of possibility and probability, “he hath discharged his Part; and is then intitled to some Faith from his Reader, who is indeed guilty of critical Infidelity if he disbelieves him” (VIII, i, 406-7).

For Fielding’s purposes, the main advantage of subjective probability as a criterion of truth is that it brings public and private history onto the same epistemic level, since events can be probable or improbable regardless of whether they are factual or counterfactual. While it is true that public historians can marshal documental evidence for their facts, Fielding still recommends that they steer clear of the incredible, noting that improbable facts, even when well attested, “may nevertheless be sacrificed to Oblivion in

Complacence to the Scepticism of a Reader” (VIII, i, 401). Both historical and fictional narratives are thus required to conform to the past experience of a qualified reader, succeeding only to the extent that they seem probable. If they do, then this counts as a verification of their empirical status.

4. The limits of Fielding’s theory

The idea that fictional narratives can be instructive extrapolations from life persists in

Fielding’s last novel. The “exordium” to Amelia spells it out quite explicitly: “As histories of this kind ... may properly be called models of HUMAN LIFE, so, by observing minutely the several incidents which tend to the catastrophe or completion of the whole, and the minute causes whence those incidents are produced, we shall best be instructed in this most useful

84 of all arts, which I call the ART OF LIFE.”30 What Amelia offers to reveal through the isomorphism between model and original is that our predicaments and successes are brought about not by fortune, but by the concatenation of minute factors often invisible in real life. Critics have rightly noted that Amelia fails to make good on this promise, since its resolution depends more on sudden contrivance than on the progressive convergence of remote little causes.31 That said, despite the mismatch between theory and practice, and despite the substantial differences between Amelia and the novels of the 1740s, Fielding’s defense of prose fiction as an empirically grounded type of history remains nominally in place at this point.

The radical change comes only with The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, where

Fielding attacks the literary models of Joseph Andrews: “In reality, the Odyssy, the

Telemachus, and all of that kind, are to the voyage-writing I here intend, what romance is to true history, the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter.”32 For Fielding the memorialist, the label “true history” should apply only to factual history: “I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages” (549). This new conception of history resembles the old one only in the sense that it is intriguingly presentist: while it is the job of antiquarians to “she[w] you how things were,” the historian

“shews you how things are, and leaves to others to discover when they began to be so”

(573). As in the novels, history in the Journal is an enquiry into the current state of earthly things; but the new emphasis on fact, together with Fielding’s dismissal of “mere work[s] of

30 Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin. (1751; Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), Book I, chap. i, 17.

31 See, for instance, John Coolidge’s “Fielding and the Conservation of Character,” Modern Philology, Vol. 57, No. 4 (May 1960), 258, and Jesse Molesworth’s Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 178-180.

32 Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Shamela, and Occasional Writings, ed. Martin C. Battestin. (1755; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2008), 548. References are to this edition.

85 invention” (553), cast serious doubt on any empirical defense of literature.

This theoretical shift takes place after the negative reception of Amelia exacted from

Fielding the promise to “trouble the World no more with any Children of mine by the same

Muse”; in addition, it accompanies what seems to have been a project for writing a history of Portugal.33 Fielding’s reorientation, in short, reflects what he anticipated as a permanent transition from the methods of the novelist to those of the factual historian. In this sense, it may have been dictated by rhetorical convenience rather than a real change of mind. It is telling, for instance, that The Covent Garden Journal, published close to the end of Fielding’s career, still carries on the old satire on history and journalism.34 But this raises the question of whether Fielding was ever committed to his theory of novelistic truth to begin with. He was remarkably willing to espouse conflicting views simultaneously. Jonathan Wild and A

Journey from this World to the Next, written around the time of Joseph Andrews, evince different attitudes towards empirical historiography.35 And in 1746 Fielding interrupted the composition of Tom Jones to work on The Female Husband, a mostly forged biography whose claims to historical authenticity bring it closer to Defoe than to anything usually associated with Fielding.

The easiest way to account for these fluctuations is by remembering Wayne Booth’s warning that we should distinguish between “[Fielding’s] own values and the values

33 See The Covent Garden Journal No. 8, 28 January 1752, and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Appendix C.3, Letter 8.

34 See, for instance, numbers 12 and 17, as well as the column on “Modern History” accompanying each issue (reproduced in appendix 2 of Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register- Office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1988), 452-474.

35 In the reflections on the Journey that feature in the Preface to the Miscellanies, Fielding is less overtly worried about the falsehood of fiction: “I have, in the Relation which I have put into the Mouth of Julian, whom they call the Apostate, done many Violences to History, and mixed Truth and Falshood with much Freedom” (4). Similarly, the “design” of Jonathan Wild “is not the enter the Lists with that excellent Historian, who from authentic Papers and Records etc. hath already given so satisfactory an Account of the Life and Actions of this Great Man” (9). See Henry Fielding, Miscellanies, Vol. 1.

86 supported by his second self.”36 In other words, the theory is the narrator’s, not Fielding’s.

Booth’s advice is certainly worth heeding, and one should refrain from taking the novels’ theoretical chapters as adequate expressions of Fielding’s views on the matters at hand, even at the time of writing. Nonetheless, it might be a mistake to attribute the theory to a narrator whose views the novelist implicitly disowns. For the most part, the impression these sections produce is that of an author striving to convince, even if his pen is driven partly by conviction and partly by rhetorical expediency. In fact, much that seems disingenuous in the narrator’s theory is actually compatible with Fielding’s views on human nature. To take the most obvious case, Fielding certainly knows that the figures he claims to have copied from life owe more than a little to stock characters in Restoration drama. And yet such characters are interestingly true to Fielding’s model of human psychology. As noted already, Fielding espouses a form of biological determinism according to which every individual is born with a charitable or selfish disposition, which is then inflected by habits and education and by a ruling passion that colors that individual’s every action. 37 Human beings, for Fielding, were products of the interaction between historical contingency and a limited number of innate traits that remained identifiable in spite of variations across time and place. From this perspective, fictional characters can be types and still remain true to life in all the ways that are relevant for the purposes of moral philosophy. While bad playwrights copied from plays, “Vanbrugh and Congreve copied nature” (Tom Jones, XIV, i,

742). Fielding believed that he did as well.

36 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 83. As Bartolomeo notes, following Booth: “By effacing himself and investing responsibility in a playful and often ironic narrator, Fielding, in effect, licensed inconsistency.” Bartolomeo, A New Species of Criticism, 70.

37 See Morris Golden, Fielding’s Moral Psychology, especially 38-9. There are nonetheless frequent inconsistencies between Fielding’s various statements on nature and nurture, as shown in Henry Knight Miller’s Essays on Fielding’s Miscellanies, 215-20. Building on Miller’s account, C.R. Kropf has argued that the early Fielding sees character as formed solely by education, but then moves slowly towards a deterministic theory which is already in place in Joseph Andrews and finds full expression in Tom Jones. Kropf, “Educational Theory and Human Nature in Fielding’s Works,” PMLA, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jan. 1974), 113-120.

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But in the end, it is hard to ignore that what led Fielding to prose fiction was less a prior conviction of its cognitive value than his personal vicissitudes. That his defense of his novels was to some extent a rationalization may help account for the shortcomings of his theory. There is much that Fielding leaves unexplained. His moral epistemology, for one, seems to present serious obstacles for his pedagogic program. The dispositions of man,

Fielding insists, can be known through a mixture of observation and introspection.

Researchers into human nature “will seldom be able to draw any Inferences which can lead them to the Springs or Causes of those Actions; they must therefore receive all their

Information from within.”38 The epistemological implications of this principle are clear to

Fielding, who turns them against the Hobbesian egotist: “The truth-finder, having raked out that jakes, his own mind, and being there capable of tracing no ray of divinity, nor anything virtuous or good, or lovely, or loving, very fairly, honestly, and logically concludes that no such things exist in the whole creation” (VI, i, 269). The egotist paints others after his own selfish image, and Fielding makes clear that introspection distorts judgment on the altruistic end of the scale as well. Adams “never had any Intention to deceive, so he never suspected such a Design in others” (I, iii, 23). But if we can only read the moral world by projecting onto others the dispositions we discover within ourselves, then it would seem that no one

— neither the egotist nor the altruist — can truly command the view from above that

Fielding’s novels profess to import from experience. What Fielding’s epistemology seems to imply, instead, is that if moral knowledge depends on sense perception, then the characters of men are unknowable, not only for the historian painting the characters of the dead, but also for the novelist aiming for an objective portrayal of the moral landscape.

A related problem is whether such a vantage point, had it been available to the

38 The Champion, Tuesday, 11 December 1739, 56. In Contributions to The Champion, and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

88 writer, would be useful for the reader. Fielding often seems skeptical about the ability of language to communicate what experience has not previously furnished: “To treat of the

Effects of Love” to those who never felt it “must be as absurd as to discourse on Colours to a man born Blind” (VI, i, 271). If genuine moral insight hinges on introspective experience, then prudence may lie beyond the reach of virtue, unless virtue becomes tainted by the recognition of evil in itself. But this route to enlightenment is obstructed by Fielding’s principle of the conservation of character, according to which “for a Man to act in direct

Contradiction to the dictates of his Nature is, if not impossible, as improbable and as miraculous as any Thing which can well be conceived” (TJ, VIII, i, 405). Like Fielding’s typology, the principle of conservation of character reflects on the level of form Fielding’s theory of ineradicable traits, setting bounds to what his characters (and implicitly his readers) can apprehend. As John Coolidge recognizes in his classic essay on the subject,

“Amelia’s innocence is preserved by another’s experience; goodness is guarded by a knowledge of evil not its own.”39 Many are the characters in the novels who are saved by the narrator’s timely interventions rather than because they have learned to see through appearances, either in practice or from books. Fielding could affirm that Homer is “him who, of all others, saw farthest into human Nature” (TJ, IV, xiii, 202); but Parson Adams, who discourses so knowledgeably on the Iliad, remains blissfully impervious to its insights.

Can novels really communicate knowledge if Fielding is right in his moral epistemology? One wishes Fielding had pursued this question further. But his version of literary cognitivism is remarkable for what it does cover. It is an impressive effort to address what was after all a new problem. Fielding was writing at a time when appeals to universal truths discernible through reason alone were losing traction. By the terms of the new epistemology, literature’s cognitive value would depend on its structural continuity

39 “Fielding and the Conservation of Character,” 257.

89 with the world of experience. Demonstrating such a continuity was a challenge which most fictionists before Fielding eschewed by denying the fictionality of their works. By contrast,

Fielding set out to write explicit fictions while renouncing neither the authority of experience nor the pedagogic mission of literature. He sought to demonstrate that fiction can show its face in an empiricist age and still claim to be a vehicle for socio-ethical knowledge. And this is a quest in which he would have many successors.

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CHAPTER 4 Varieties of Propositionalism: Lennox, Austen, Godwin

A central feature of Fielding’s theory is that it prioritizes knowledge of the propositional type. The lessons he expects readers to derive from Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones are in many ways the cautionary statements of the Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of

Men: “A sour, morose, ill-natured, censorious Sanctity, never is, nor can be sincere”; or, “A

Man whom we once knew to be a Villain remains a Villain still”; or, “[Slanderers] are generally impartial in their Abuse.”1 Fielding often spells out those propositions for us; but he also expects them to emerge as by implication from his carefully contrived episodes. In thinking of novels as vehicles for explicit and implicit propositions, Fielding was travelling on well-trodden ground. Defenders of poetry ancient and modern had thought of imaginative literature as providing precept through example; so did Fielding’s precursors in the lineage of the novel; and to this day literary cognitivists regard poetry and prose fiction as valuable thanks at least in part to their propositional content. Cognitivists in the analytic tradition have coined a convenient name for this view: propositionalism. The term was defined most recently by Jukka Mikkonen in his very thorough The Cognitive Value of

Philosophical Fiction. Propositionalism, Mikkonen explains, is “a view which states, roughly put, that literary works communicate non-trivial propositional knowledge. In the propositional theory, literary works are seen to make or imply truth-claims or provide

1 Henry Fielding, “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” in Henry Knight Miller, ed., Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq. (1743; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 1:168, 176, 167.

91 hypotheses about reality, human nature, and the like.”2 The label is new, but the view it designates has a respectable ancestry, as Biblical parables and Aesop’s fables best illustrate.

There is something distinctive about Fielding’s propositionalism, however: he expects his novels not only to yield propositions, but also to count as empirical evidence in their favor. The fables of Aesop are again a good example of how a fictional story may be able to illustrate a thesis without counting as evidence for it. Some modern cognitivists (and many anticognitivists as well) believe that this is the case across all of literature. Hilary

Putnam, for example, claims that “no matter how profound the psychological insights of a novelist may seem to be, they cannot be called knowledge if they have not been tested.”3 The novel itself does not perform the testing. What it offers, for Putnam, are hypotheses to be tried out in real life, which may become empirical knowledge should they prove true. It is also possible to say that literature works to authenticate its assertions, but not by supplying empirical evidence. Sir Philip Sidney is a canonical example of this view, and we also find its defenders among modern cognitivists. Noël Carroll, for instance, accepts that literature does not by itself lead to empirical discoveries, but then argues that it can perform analytical thought experiments; the experiments, in turn, “can shift our conceptual map in such a way that the results bring to the surface propositional knowledge about our concepts and their relationships.”4 By contrast with these views, the theory of fiction emerging in association with the eighteenth-century novel put forward a more ambitious claim: that novels, as faithful representations of life, have evidentiary value. They provide grounds for the same type of inductive inference that readers otherwise draw from direct observation. The novel’s realism, on this view, validates the propositions it yields in sound empirical fashion.

2 Jukka Mikkonen, The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12. The term was originally coined by Noël Carroll in A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Chapter 5.

3 Hilary Putnam, “Literature, Science, and Reflection,” New Literary History, 7, 3 (1976), 488.

4 Noël Carroll, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60, 1 (2002), 7.

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In this chapter I look at how these premises were examined, endorsed or contested in the British quixotic tradition — that is, in those novels whose protagonists misunderstand life because of their addiction to misleading books. Joseph Andrews is itself an example, but the tradition had a long shelf life in Britain, as a mere survey of titles indicates: The Female Quixote (1752), The Spiritual Quixote (1773), The Philosophical

Quixote (1782), The Amicable Quixote (1788), The Infernal Quixote (1801), The Romantic

Quixote (1813). And I pass over without mention the vast array of works inspired by Don

Quixote without carrying the adjective in their titles. What makes this tradition relevant for my purposes is that the quixotic scheme, by its own nature, sets idealism against empiricism, providing the grounds at once for an empiricist critique and an aesthetic defense of the imagination.5 In this chapter I build on this insight and explore how three novels in the tradition grappled with the empiricist challenge by testing the potential of propositionalism. The novels are Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Jane Austen’s

Northanger Abbey, and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. Each of them begins with a critique of a misleading type of prose fiction and then sets itself up as a preferable alternative — preferable because of its greater empirical authenticity. Likewise, in each case propositions seem to be the horizon where fiction and experience meet to provide instruction. But all three novelists find it difficult to keep these elements together without friction. As a group, Lennox, Austen, and Godwin do as much to continue Fielding’s enquiry as to illustrate how refractory empiricism can be to a propositional defense of fiction.

1. The Female Quixote

Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote features one of the most sustained discussions of

5 I am indebted here to Ronald Paulson’s argument in Don Quixote in England. The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), esp. xii.

93 narrative and truth in all of eighteenth-century fiction. In the penultimate chapter we find

Arabella, the quixotic heroine whose knowledge of life comes from French heroic romances, defending her favorite books from the skepticism of an Anglican priest, the anonymous

Doctor ——. Both score local points in the debate, but as the chapter draws to a close

Arabella eventually throws in the towel, convinced by the Doctor that romances “soften the

Heart to Love, and harden it to Murder.”6 In spite of this rather extreme charge, however, the chapter does not yield a wholesale condemnation of fiction. The Doctor himself grants that “truth is not always injured by Fiction,” citing as evidence Samuel Richardson’s novels and Samuel Johnson’s eulogy of them.

Readers of The Female Quixote have taken the Doctor’s stance to indicate two things.

First, that Lennox is prescribing novels as suitable replacements for romances. Mary

Patricia Martin, for example, finds that “though Arabella must give up her romances, it is not real life that she must learn to love, but novels,” while Duncan Isles speculates that in her original plans for the novel, Lennox intended to cure Arabella by having her read Clarissa.7

The second point stressed by critics is that the theory underlying the debate is derivative of

Johnson’s. While the thesis that Johnson literally wrote the chapter lost ground in recent years,8 even critics who assign the authorship to Lennox still regard the chapter’s doctrine as essentially Johnsonian. As Patricia Meyer Spacks notes, Johnson’ s influence on Lennox was such that “it hardly matters whether Johnson actually wrote the crucial chapter ... If not literally, at least metaphorically, Dr. Johnson articulates the view of the world that persuades Arabella to abandon her dream of creating meaning and interest beyond the

6 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, rprt. 2008), 380. Further references will be to this edition.

7 Mary Patricia Martin, “‘High and Noble Adventures’: Reading the Novel in The Female Quixote,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 31, 1 (1997), 45.

8 The last major contribution to this debate, reviewing the main issues and offering a strong case for Lennox’s authorship, is O.M. Brack, Jr., and Susan Carlile’s “Samuel Johnson’s Contributions to Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote,” The Yale University Library Gazette, 77, 3/4 (2003), 166-173.

94 domestic sphere.”9 For Martin, Spacks, and several other critics, it is Johnson’s outlook on life and letters that governs and eventually settles the debate.

I intend to show that this account is true but only partly so. It is true in the sense that the theory finally endorsed by the novel’s penultimate chapter is indeed the one articulated by Johnson in Rambler 4. But it falls short in that the debate between Arabella and the Doctor mostly focuses on issues that transcend Johnson’s concerns. As will be seen, the question the chapter revolves around is whether romance, and by extension prose fiction as a whole, has sufficient empirical status to warrant inductive inferences — in other words, whether empiricism can be made to support a propositionalist defense of novels.

Lennox’s answer for this question is ambivalent. She gives strong reasons for thinking that fiction provides no empirical support for its implicit propositions, but her goals in The

Female Quixote seem to require otherwise. The grounds for an affirmative answer, however, are never articulated, as Johnson’s defense of the novel, which has different theoretical goals, steals the limelight towards the end and leaves the question unsolved.

We may well begin by reviewing Johnson’s argument. Its outlines are well known.

On the one hand, Johnson finds that fictions that are too distanced from real life have no effect on the reader’s conduct. On the other hand, he believes that representations that are too close to life are redundant: “If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account; or why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind.”10 Johnson prefers a via media, a representational regimen that sticks to the probable but imbues its materials with a moral clarity not to be found in real life. Only thus can readers learn to detect vice without the temptation to become vicious.

9 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 15.

10 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecth B. Strauss. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), vol. III, 22.

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“The purpose of these writings,” says Johnson, “is ... to initiate the youth by mock encounters in the art of necessary defense, and to increase prudence without impairing virtue” (23). Lifelikeness matters, but it should not be carried too far. As long as the novelist avoid the mixed characters and moral laxity of a Fielding or Smollett, “these familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions” (22).

It is clear that for Johnson novels are more didactic than romances because they come closer, albeit not too close, to the reader’s reality. But what is it that renders them more useful than “professed morality”? As the statement above makes clear, it is not their ability to yield “axioms” or ethical propositions. Instead, novels succeed because they avoid preaching. Targeted at those whose minds are “not fixed by principles, and therefore easily follow[] the current of fancy” (21), novels achieve their pedagogic ends by regulating that

“current.” In bestowing reward and punishment where they are due, they impress on readers “that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness; and that vice is the natural consequence of narrow thoughts, that it begins in mistake, and ends in ignominy” (24-5). Once established, the associations between virtue and greatness or vice and ignominy affect the reader’s conduct as through reflex. “The power of example,” Johnson believes, “is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will” (22). To direct such responses towards the moral improvement of society, a certain unfaithfulness to experience is in order. As Johnson notes, maybe with Roderick Random and Tom Jones in mind, it is not enough that “the train of events [in a novel] is agreeable to observation and experience, for that observation which is called knowledge of the world, will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good” (22). A little worldly knowledge is a

96 dangerous thing. Like other defenders of poetic justice, Johnson is less interested in communicating empirical knowledge than in conditioning readers to be virtuous and prudent. Deep down he felt that novels did provide insight into the ways of the world — hence his dislike of low-life realism — but he was not invested, as Fielding was, in articulating the grounds for such an aptitude.

If we turn now to The Female Quixote, we find that the penultimate chapter closes by endorsing the key principles of this doctrine. Like Johnson, the Doctor finds that “books ought to supply an Antidote to Example” (380), so as to counterbalance the corrupting influence of worldly models. As an example that fiction can perform this function, he observes that “an admirable Writer of our own Time [i.e. Richardson], has found the Way to convey the most solid Instructions, the noblest Sentiments, and the most exalted Piety, in the pleasing Dress of a Novel” (377), and then quotes Johnson’s remark that Richardson

“has taught the Passions to move at the Command of Virtue’” (377).11 By praising

Richardson through Johnson’s voice, the Doctor is emphasizing not only the lessons of

Clarissa, but also its power to make readers unreflectively prefer virtue. It is not for nothing that critics see Johnson’s theory and authority as the cause of Arabella’s cure. It would seem to follow that Arabella gives up on romances because they are not novels; they fail to perform what Johnson regards as the function of prose fiction — to provide antidotes to example and align the passions with the cause of virtue.

But the chapter’s attack on romance is more complicated than that. As it happens, the Doctor makes two attempts to deploy Johnson’s criteria against romance, and while the second attempt succeeds the first backfires. Early in the debate, he dismisses romances on the grounds that they lead not to virtue but to corruption; they are “senseless Fictions; which at once vitiate the Mind, and pervert the Understanding.” Arabella immediately takes

11 Johnson makes this remark in his prefatory note to The Rambler 97, which was contributed by Richardson.

97 issue with the implication: “These Books, Sir, thus corrupt, thus absurd, thus dangerous alike to the Intellect and Morals, I have read; and that I hope without Injury to my Judgment, or my Virtue” (374). Lennox allows Arabella to win this exchange. The Doctor “found himself entangled” and decided to reconsider his approach. The terms of the ensuing debate are dictated by Arabella herself, who requests the Doctor to demonstrate, “First, that these

Histories you condemn are Fictions. Next, That they are absurd. And Lastly, That they are

Criminal” (374). The rest of the conversation follows this agenda, with a disproportionate amount of it focusing on the first item — whether romances are fictional.

This should give us pause. For the Doctor, as for Johnson, books do not need to be factual in order to be instructive. They only need to “supply antidotes to example.” By this standard, fictionality not only is not a problem, but is in fact an advantage, as it allows books to offer better role models than experience. If Richardson succeeds, it is because his novels provide readers with patterns of virtue that are hard to encounter in the real world. Why, then, would the Doctor comply with Arabella’s request and begin the evaluation of romance by discussing its truth status?

The reason, as I will proceed to argue, is that the frame of reference at this point is not Johnsonian. In fact, for most of their debate Arabella and the Doctor are evaluating romance on a different scale, one where factual truth matters. The principles of The

Rambler, to begin with, cannot be transposed without modification into the context of The

Female Quixote. One of Johnson’s basic postulates is that romances are “so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader [is] in very little danger of making any applications to himself” (Rambler 4, 21). But in Lennox’s novel the Doctor finds himself dealing with a striking counter-example to this principle. Arabella insists that her romances are credible and allows them to shape her every move. What brings the Doctor to her presence is just the last episode in a long series of exploits: she risked her life by jumping into the Thames,

98 thus hoping to elude a group of horsemen she romanced into ravishers (363). The Doctor’s main task is to discredit the evidence of romances, but he is initially “at a loss for some leading Principle, by which he might introduce his Reasonings, and begin his Confutation”

(368). He decides to try the waters by calling into question the reasons for her desperate flight.

Arabella insists that her fears were warranted. She had seen the horsemen, and

“there was sufficient Appearance of intended Injury ... It rests upon you to shew, That in giving Way to my Fears, even supposing them groundless, I departed from the Character of a reasonable Person” (371). Here the Doctor finds the principle he was looking for, and it is an empirical one:

We can judge of the Future only by the Past, and have therefore only Reason to fear or suspect, when we see the same Causes in Motion which have formerly produc’d Mischief, or the same Measures taken as have before been preparatory to a Crime.

Thus, when the Sailor in certain Latitudes sees the Clouds rise, Experience bids him expect a Storm. When any Monarch levies Armies, his Neighbours prepare to repel an Invasion.

This Power of Prognostication, may, by Reading and Conversation, be extended beyond our own Knowledge: And the great Use of Books, is that of participating without Labour or Hazard in the Experience of others.

But upon this Principle how can you find any Reason for your late Fright[?] (372).

This is meant as a rhetorical question, as the Doctor is sure that Arabella can find no reason satisfying his principle. Not because the method for prognostication he has in mind — which is induction from the empirical evidence — demands direct experience of ravishers.

He grants, after all, that books provide access to the experience of others, and thus carry evidentiary weight on their own. But he also knows that not all books are analogous to

99 experience. While at this point in the conversation Arabella has not yet appealed to the evidence of romances, the Doctor was forewarned by Glanville about “the Disorders

Romances had occasion’d in her Imagination” (367), and is invoking the empirical test just so that romance may fail it. Somewhat unexpectedly for him, Arabella not only accepts the test, but finds that romance passes it with flying colors.

Arabella, as one would think, has no question that reading is an alternative source of experience; our direct observation, she concurs, gives us only limited knowledge of the world, and “the rest can only be known from the Report of others” (373). As a case in point, she mentions “Descriptive Geography,” which informs readers of the existence of “Lakes, and Caverns, and Desarts” lying beyond the reach of their own senses or memory; but then, in the same breath, she goes on to name a string of romance heroines whose ordeals provided the grounds for her fears. By treating romances and descriptive geography as equal supplements to direct experience, Arabella comes very close to the defense of fiction envisioned by John Cleland, who describes novels as “pilot’s charts, or maps of those parts of the world, which every one may chance to travel through.”12 Very close, but not quite. In the end, Arabella believes that her inferences from romances are warranted not because she trusts that fiction can be empirical, but because she thinks romances are not fiction.

The reader has known this all along. Since the novel’s opening chapters, Lennox has made sure that the world of romance resembles the world of Arabella’s experience. She grows up under the care of a reclusive father in an “Epitome of Arcadia,” a remote castle surrounded by woods designed to look wild; and she inherited from her deceased mother a collection of romances that became her favorite readings. As a result, “her Ideas, from the

Manner of her Life, and the Objects around her, had taken a romantic Turn; and, supposing

Romances were real Pictures of Life, from them she drew all her Notions and Expectations”

12 See Chapter 1.

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(7). Because they match the circumscribed world of her childhood, romances strike Arabella as factual; heroism becomes “her Habit of thinking, a Principle imbib’d from Education”

(329).13 This habit is continually strengthened through confirmation bias, as Arabella sees events and people through the lens of romance and finds that they live up to the role.14 As

Glanville points out, Arabella has “such a strange Facility in reconciling every Incident to her own fantastick Ideas, that every new Object added Strength to the fatal Deception she laboured under” (340). What the Doctor did not realize is that the principle he proposes to set Arabella right merely describes the procedure she has been following all her life.15 She decides on matters of propriety and prudence by drawing inferences from the compound evidence of her senses and readings (see, for example, 13, 18, 35, 122, 280). Arabella explicitly appeals to the Doctor’s principle earlier in the novel, when retorting to a rebuke by Sir Charles: “Do not the same Things happen now, that did formerly? And is any thing more common, then [sic] Ladies being carried, by their Ravishers, into Countries far distant from their own?” (261). This retort prefigures her attitude in the passages examined above, where she faces the Doctor’s empiricist challenge with unabated confidence.

By concurring on the empiricist principle, Arabella and the Doctor are agreeing to judge romance on terms that are orthogonal to those of the Rambler. For their immediate purposes, what matters is not whether romances provide an antidote for the reader’s

13 There is little reason to think, as some critics have argued, that Arabella is mad. Scott Paul Gordon lists eleven passages in the text where Arabella is described as mad, but in every case but one those are misdiagnoses offered by uninformed characters (Sir Charles, Edward, Tinsel, Charlotte). The one exception is the scene where Arabella falls victim to a prank and Glanville momentarily considers that she may have lost her wits (352); but he soon changes his mind. See Gordon’s “The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 38, 3 (1998), 499-516.

14 In The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism, and Political Economy in Eighteenth Century Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), Wendy Motooka describes this type of circularity as a problem not only for Arabella, but for empiricism itself.

15 This has been broadly recognized by critics. See, in particular, Judity Dorn, “Reading Women Reading History: The Philosophy of Periodical Form in Charlotte Lennox’s The Lady’s Museum,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 18, 3 (1992), 11; and Ruth Mack, “Quixotic Ethnography: Charlotte Lennox and the Dilemma of Cultural Observation,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 38, 2/3 (2005), 197.

101 experience, but whether they are able to mediate the reader’s access to the experience of others; not whether they discipline the passions, but whether they help readers make warranted inferences about the future. In short, what is at stake for most of the debate is romance’s ability to fulfill not what Johnson saw as the function of the novel, but what the empiricists regarded as the function of history. Do romances, like history, provide grounds for inferences about the future? The Doctor implies that they do not. Arabella believes that they do, but only because she takes romance to literally be history. This is why the truth status of romance becomes such a crucial point of contention. Arabella herself grants that if romances are fictional, then the game is over:

Prove, therefore, that the Books which I have hitherto read as Copies of Life, and Models of Conduct, are empty Fictions, and from this Hour I deliver them to Moths and Mould; and from this Time consider their Authors as Wretches who cheated me of those Hours I ought to have dedicated to Application and Improvement, and betrayed me to a Waste of those Years in which I might have laid up Knowledge for my future Life. (377)

The rules are clear: from Arabella’s perspective, fictions cannot be “copies of life” or

“models of conduct,” and cannot add to the reader’s store of knowledge.

At first the Doctor is unwilling to accept such a radical separation between imagination and knowledge, and cites Richardson’s novels and Aesop’s fables as examples that fiction too can carry its lessons. Arabella, however, is unimpressed. She says nothing about Richardson, but finds that in citing Aesop the Doctor is changing the parameters: “The

Fables of Æsop ... are among those of which the Absurdity discovers itself, and the Truth is comprised in the Application; but what can be said of those Tales which are told with the solemn Air of historical Truth, and if false convey no Instruction?” (377). The contrast between Aesop’s fables and “tales” that aspire to “historical Truth” is also one between two varieties of propositionalism. Both Aesop and romance convey instruction by issuing

102 statements about the world, the first by spelling out a moral and the latter by yielding inferences that can be parsed propositionally; but Arabella allows only the first model to be compatible with fiction. The difference between Aesop and romance has to do with whether the truth of the moral depends on that of the fable. In the case of Aesop it does not. His lessons are prior to and independent of the events contrived to embody them, and can be true even if the events are imaginary. In romances, at least as Arabella reads them, the events come first, and the lessons must be inferred from them as from a body of empirical evidence. The inferences, therefore, cannot be valid unless the events are real.

Arabella implicitly denies that an empirical narrative can be reconciled with Aesop’s model. She denies, in other words, that a romance writer can make up events to embody a predefined lesson (as fables do) while nonetheless keeping those events anchored in the world of sense experience (as history does). Hence her question: What can be said in defense of fictions that aim to teach in the manner of history? By channeling this question through Arabella, Lennox is evincing interest in an issue that troubled Fielding much more than Johnson, an issue that casts doubt not only on romances, but on the very book she is writing. Arabella’s reasons for thinking that fictions “convey no Instruction” are also the ones prompting philosophical skepticism about the novel. Adam Smith finds that “the facts

[in a narrative] must be real, otherwise they will not assist us in our future conduct, by pointing out the means to avoid or produce any event.”16 By the same token, Arabella asks:

“[W]hat Pleasure or Advantage can arise from Facts that never happened? What Examples can be afforded by the Patience of those who never suffered, or the Chastity of those who were never solicited?” (376). If one of the aspirations of The Female Quixote is to help readers regulate their future conduct, then we should expect Lennox to offer answers for these questions.

16 See Chapter 1.

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Indeed she does, but only by shifting the standards away from empiricism. As the debate between the Doctor and Arabella further unfolds, the gap between empiricism and fiction is broadened rather than bridged. Instead of disputing Arabella’s belief that fictions cannot instruct, the Doctor decides to play by her rules and focus on proving that romances are fictional: “[I]f to evince their Falshood be sufficient to procure their Banishment from your Ladyship’s Closet, their Day of Grace is near an end” (378). He proceeds to deploy empirical arguments against romance until Arabella grants defeat. The testimony provided by romances, to begin with, is empirically unfounded, as it contradicts historical evidence and philosophical principles. Romance — and here the Doctor closely echoes Hume —

“disfigures the whole Appearance of the World, and represents every Thing in a Form different from that which Experience has shewn” (378). When Arabella prevaricates, the

Doctor appeals to the principle she herself holds to be final: “[Y]our Ladyship must suffer me to decide, in some Measure authoritatively, whether Life is truly described in those

Books ... You have yet had little Opportunity of knowing the Ways of Mankind, which cannot be learned but from Experience ... I have lived long in a public Character, and have thought it my Duty to study those whom I have undertaken to admonish or instruct” (379). At this point Arabella gives up. The Doctor’s vaster knowledge of the world wins her trust, and he finally accomplishes the first of the three tasks on the agenda: he convinces her that romances are fictional.

At this crucial juncture, however, Arabella goes back on her word. Instead of banishing romances from her closet, she makes a final attempt to vindicate the genre, by changing her standards. If romances “do not describe real Life,” she argues, they “give us an

Idea of a better Race of Beings than now inhabit the World” (380). With this final move,

Arabella is transferring the conversation from the context of empiricism to that of the

Rambler. She is now accepting a suggestion she had originally had no use for: that truth is

104 not always injured by fiction, and that fictions that improve on the world of experience may offer examples that are worth heeding. The Doctor, as we know, has always been sympathetic towards this theory. Unfortunately for Arabella, however, he objects that romance fails on these grounds as well. For the second time he impugns romances for their moral effects: “The immediate Tendency of these Books which your Ladyship must allow me to mention with some Severity, is to give new Fire to the Passions of Revenge and Love”

(380). Whereas a novel like Clarissa had “taught the Passions to move at the Command of

Virtue,” romances “teach Women to exact Vengeance, and Men to execute it; teach Women to expect not only Worship, but the dreadful Worship of human Sacrifices” (380). This time the charge hits home, as Arabella recognizes that this is precisely the effect romances had had on her. She recoils in horror, and is cured.

Arabella and the Doctor come out of their tortuous debate having reached an agreement on two broad issues. On the one hand, they agree that romance fails both by empiricist and by Johnsonian standards; it does not constitute a reliable account of the experience of others, neither does it provide antidotes to real-life example. They also agree that fiction can nonetheless meet the second of these standards; for the Doctor, as for

Johnson, Richardson’s novels do precisely that. But because the debate shifts gears once

Arabella grants that romances are fictional, we never learn whether the novel can meet the first standard. When the Doctor suggests that experience can be complemented by reading, he does not mention novels; he speaks instead of “books” in general: “The great Use of

Books, is that of participating without Labour or Hazard in the Experience of others” (372).

This famous passage, which John Bender reads as an empiricist defense of the novel, is less decisive than we might wish.17 I am inclined to think that Bender is right, and that the notion of virtual experience put forward by the Doctor is meant as a vindication of The

17 See Chapter 1.

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Female Quixote; but Lennox never comes full circle on that. By voicing the empiricist challenge through Arabella, she shows that the Doctor’s model of virtual witnessing may not apply to fiction; but because the conversation shifts away from empiricism, we never learn whether it does or, if yes, on what grounds.

Does that matter for Lennox? One might argue that it does not, and that Johnson’s theory provides a sufficient justification for her didactic goals. Johnson, as we have seen, does not conceive of instruction as the transmission of empirical knowledge; instead, he believes novels should instruct by making virtue appealing and vice repelling, which may be better accomplished through representations of life that do not aim at empirical authenticity. If Lennox’s program is Johnsonian, then she simply does not need to meet the empirical challenge. But one might also claim that The Female Quixote goes beyond the promotion of ethical ideals envisioned by Johnson. As I began by noting, the quixotic framework involves the juxtaposition between an ideal and an actual world, the one dreamed of by the protagonist and the one she initially disdains but eventually comes to accept. Within the novel, both worlds are equally fictional: the reality that shows romance to be an illusion is not the real Bath and London, but Bath and London as re-imagined by

Lennox. How Johnsonian is that world?

As Deborah Ross has compellingly argued, it is only partly so. Like other female novelists of the midcentury, Lennox felt simultaneously drawn by conflicting imperatives; while seeking to “provide models of virtue,” such writers also wanted their novels “to be modern and realistic, concerned with the daily lives of characters much like their readers.”18

As a result, Lennox’s explicit message, which affirms patriarchal norms of female behavior, coexists in her novels with a more descriptive interest in the actual state of English society.

18 Deborah Ross, “Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 27, 3 (1987), 457.

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Arabella’s conversion, followed by her happy marriage, works to inculcate virtue in the

Johnsonian manner; but the distance between the world she abandons and the domestic world she is now entering highlights the cost of that virtue. It reveals, in the words of Jane

Spencer, that “any woman whose life is eventful enough to be the subject of romance has compromised feminine virtue. The ideals offered to Arabella are silence, anonymity, and the end of the story — or rather, no story at all.”19 Critics have generally agreed that Arabella’s love of romance tells a real story about female desire, the desire to escape the unfulfilling lives reserved for proper English women.20 The impossibility to reconcile “adventures” with female propriety is illustrated through the other female characters in the novel, in special the fallen Miss Groves and the hyper-virtuous Countess.

If these critics are right (and I think they are), then the empiricist challenge is not inconsequential for Lennox. To the extent that she is laying bare the domestic consequences of patriarchal norms, she is operating within the framework of empiricism; rather than inculcating ideals, she is performing the type of social analysis championed by empiricist historiography and ethnography.21 In order for her analysis to carry weight, however, it matters whether her depictions of society are accurate. To paraphrase Arabella’s question: can we really draw conclusions from the lives of Miss Groves and the Countess, characters who never existed and whose ordeals were never real? Lennox’s answer, judging from her practice, is probably yes. But Arabella and the Doctor do a better job of articulating than of removing the theoretical difficulties lying in the way of that answer. The Johnsonian theory they settle for can do much in its own way, but it is does not manage — nor does it aspire —

19 Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist. From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 190.

20 For an extended discussion, see Spacks, Desire and Truth. The same point has been emphasized by Dorn (“Reading Women,” 9-16) and Sharon Smith Palo, “The Good Effects of a Whimsical Study: Romance and Women’s Learning in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 18, 2 (2005-6), 203- 228.

21 For a discussion of The Female Quixote as a study in ethnography, see Ruth Mack, “Quixotic Ethnography.”

107 to harmonize empiricism with a propositional defense of novels.

2. Northanger Abbey

The formal and theoretical issues raised by The Female Quixote reappear virtually intact half a century later in Jane Austen’s first completed novel. Northanger Abbey, posthumously published in 1817 but composed in 1798-9 with substantial revisions in 1803, replicates

Lennox’s basic Quixotic framework. Like Arabella, Catherine Morland is an inexperienced young woman who sets out on a course of collision with the world. With an “ignorant and uninformed” mind, and having derived “nothing like usual knowledge” from her books,

Catherine is a chronic misreader of the social scenes she witnesses in Bath and at

Northanger Abbey.22 She sees the selfish behavior of false friends through the lens of her own selfless disposition, and shoehorns her host at the Abbey into the role of a Gothic villain. Again like Arabella, she is rescued from the ways of delusion through the seasoned intervention of a divine, a younger one this time: Henry Tilney, the man she is eventually to marry. Finally, just as Arabella’s eccentricities allow Lennox to contrast French romances and English novels, Catherine’s educational journey sets the sensations of Gothic fiction against Austen’s down-to-earth realism.

Similarities apart, Austen is more forthright than Lennox in affirming the value of realism. She is confident that plain English life is worthy of literary treatment and that narratives built on that premise have greater epistemic power than its idealist counterparts.

Having overcome her imaginary fears at Northanger Abbey, Catherine learns that her host, the forbidding General Tilney, wants her gone for some undisclosed reason. During her last night at the abbey, spent in anguish over the prospect of losing Henry, she moves from the

22 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 10. Further references will be to this edition.

108 horrors of the gothic novel to the more palpable fears of social estrangement and shattered hopes:

That room, in which her disturbed imagination had tormented her on her first arrival, was again the scene of agitated spirits and unquiet slumbers. Yet how different now the source of her inquietude from what it had been then — how mournfully superior in reality and substance! Her anxiety had foundation in fact, her fears in probability. (234)

In moving from imaginary alarms to concerns grounded in fact and probability, Catherine is also transitioning between genres. She is exiting a parody of Radcliffean fiction to enter the world of Frances Burney or Maria Edgeworth. And Austen is clear about the relative merits of each approach. “Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works,” Catherine realizes that “it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for” (205). By contrast, Burney’s Cecilia or Edgeworth’s Belinda, as Austen states in her famous defense of fiction, convey to the world “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour” (31). In comparing the two literary models as vehicles for the knowledge of human nature, Austen is positing a connection between cognitive value and empirical realism.

Peter Knox-Shaw makes essentially the same point when he notes that Austen’s “concern with exactitude and with probability, even her demur over Radcliffe’s historicist melodrama, are all facets of a thoroughgoing empiricism.”23 If literature is to speak reliably about human nature, Austen implies, it should do so through an uncompromising conformity to “fact” and “probability,” functions of a narrative’s resemblance to observable life.24

23 Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 114.

24 These standards are confirmed by the narrator’s constant ventriloquism of romance conventions, which sets off Catherine’s lifelikeness by flagging her failure as a romance heroine. They are likewise confirmed by Austen’s rather unfair (or perhaps ironic) attack on The Spectator, which she accuses of consisting too often “in the

109

In short, Northanger Abbey is more explicitly committed than The Female Quixote to an empiricist model of instruction. Like Lennox, however, Austen goes only so far in developing a theoretical basis for the model. Eleanor Tilney’s suggestion that history is at once fictional and factual might seem a promising starting point, but for Eleanor the fictional elements in history do not serve a cognitive purpose. They function instead as embellishment: “If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made — and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or

Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, of Alfred the Great” (110).25

Eleanor, acting on her version of Hume’s position, finds that history should aspire both to please and to instruct, and while pleasure may be served by invention, instruction requires attested facts: “In the principal facts [historians] have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on ... as anything that does not actually pass under one’s own observation” (110). History, if appropriately supported by documentary proof, allows readers to see through the eyes of others. Like Lennox’s Doctor,

Eleanor is proposing that reading may be a form of virtual witnessing. Modern critics have taken this to be the basis of Austen’s pedagogic program. John K. Mathison, for example, finds that Northanger Abbey and the later novels seek to allow readers to “witness the education of a young girl” and benefit from the same insights that lead her to maturity.26

Likewise, Eric Rothstein suggests that Catherine and the reader are learning in tandem from the same set of events: “She, with her free and unconstrained will, is trying to ‘read’ events, using inferences from her experience (including that of novels); we are doing the same statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living” (31).

25 While Austen was famously suspicious of the claims of traditional historians, she was also indebted, as Knox- Shaw has shown, to the Anglo-Scottish tradition of liberal historians represented by Hume and Robertson. In this sense, Eleanor’s position may be expressive of her own.

26 John K. Mathison, "Northanger Abbey and Jane Austen's Conception of the Value of Fiction," ELH Vol. 24, No. 2 (1957), 150.

110 thing, except that the events we are ‘reading’ are those within a novel.”27 However, while

Eleanor gestures towards the possibility of virtual witnessing from within the fabric of

Northanger Abbey, she associates it with evidentiary standards that the novel she inhabits is unlikely to meet. Unlike the historian, the novelist does not draw her materials from

“former histories and records.” If this is the case, then what is it that makes Catherine’s world more empirically authentic (and hence more cognitively valuable) than the romance world it supersedes?

Sparing in metacommentary even in the most rhetorical of her novels, Austen does not provide a direct answer to this question; but a sophisticated answer was inferred from her practice by one of her first unconditional admirers — the Reverend Richard Whately, who reviewed the four-volume edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion for The

Quarterly Review in 1821. In his review, Whately agrees that there is a direct link between cognitive value and empirical authenticity, but denies that the latter is the province of historians alone. In order to count as “models of real life,” Whately thinks, narratives do not need to be factual; instead, they have to be “natural” and “probable” — they must observe the laws of nature and steer clear of events that have “the balance of chances against them”

(227).28 Crucially, Whately then adds that such criteria are more likely to be met by fictional than factual narratives. History, after all, “details what has actually happened, of which many parts may chance to be exceptions to the general rules of probability”; novels, by contrast, as long as they are “quite perfect in respect of the probability of their story,” are more similar to events in general than the actual events of history; they display “a comprehensive view of human nature, and furnish[] general rules of practical wisdom”

27 Eric Rothstein, “The Lessons of Northanger Abbey,” University of Toronto Quarterly 44 (1974), 22.

28 Richard Whately, “Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.” The Quarterly Review, January, 1821. Reproduced in Famous Reviews, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1914), p. 224. Further references will be to this edition.

111

(224).

Whately’s position is avowedly Aristotelian. In claiming that history fails to supply generalizable principles, he may seem to be echoing Sidney’s defense of poetry as well.29

Unlike Sidney, however, Whately associates the universal lessons of the novel with a theory of knowledge that is empirical rather than Platonic:

[Novels] being a kind of fictitious biography, bear the same relation to the real, that epic and tragic poetry, according to Aristotle, bear to history: they present us ... with the general instead of the particular, — the probable, instead of the true; and, by leaving out those accidental irregularities, and exceptions to general rules, which constitute the many improbabilities of real [i.e. factual] narrative, present us with a clear and abstracted view of the general rules themselves; and thus concentrate, as it were, into a small compass, the net result of wide experience. (229)

What Austen’s novels represent, according to this insightful statement, is not the world with all its “accidental irregularities,” but the “net result” of experience — those general truths which, like Locke’s general ideas, are “abstracted” from the unsorted input of the senses, lending experience clearer conceptual contours. Whately grants that a lot can go wrong with the process of abstraction. In fact, while his theory bears a strong resemblance to Fielding’s, he finds that Tom Jones fails to respect the rules of probability (227-8), and that Austen was almost alone in standing by them. By “giving a perfectly correct picture of common life,” her fiction “guides the judgment, and supplies a kind of artificial experience” (224) that seems equivalent to the one Eleanor finds in books of history.

Whately is essentially outlining an empirical basis for propositionalism, by claiming that the general principles philosophers abstract from life and spell out in dissertations and moral essays can also be expounded through literary representation. Translating them

29 In fact, Jocelyn Harris argues, in Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) that Austen’s position is essentially the same as Sidney’s. But she omits Sidney’s fundamental conviction that poetry should not copy the world as it is, a principle that runs counter to Austen’s view.

112 without distortion into fictional settings is surely difficult, as Hume had feared, but Whately insists that it can be done and is worth doing. A novel that respects the bounds of naturalness and probability will be more analogous to the general course of things than the miscellaneous compendiums of history, and hence more useful as a source of empirical precedents.

Whether this is how Austen herself would have defended her novels we cannot know for sure. It would be neither implausible nor anachronistic to suppose so, but my purpose in this section is not to make that argument. I intend to show, instead, that the formal procedures Whately rightly attributes to Austen are not as compatible with propositionalism as he claims, and that Austen addresses their incongruence on a reflective level in Northanger Abbey. This divergence in outlooks between Whately and Austen has to do with an additional feature of the methods they both approve. Lifelikeness, for Whately as for Austen, depends not only on empiricist mimesis; it also requires a degree of rhetorical subtlety. Novels, as Whately puts it, should provide “that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life” (232). But since real life flows without authorial commentary, the novelist can only approximate its effect by keeping moralizing to a minimum. Whately accordingly finds that a crucial factor in Austen’s success is her refusal to pontificate. While Maria Edgeworth tends to “press every circumstance of her story, principal or subordinate, into the service of a principle to be inculcated, or information to be given” (230), Austen’s lessons “are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story” (232).

It is hard to think of Austen’s narrators as being this inconspicuous, least of all in

Northanger Abbey; but we can certainly grant that she is less sententious than most of her predecessors. The greater thoroughness of her realism allows her to convey through implication what they would have crystallized into maxims. In her hands, form can do the

113 talking. As Marilyn Butler puts it in her seminal Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, “a representation of man in a setting which resembled the natural world would be seen as making certain statements about man’s nature and about his social role.”30 In Northanger

Abbey, in particular, “the arrangement of the two pairs of brothers and sisters, the Tilneys and the Thorpes, virtually forces the reader into a series of ethical comparisons between them on the author’s terms” (178). The technique Butler here attributes to Austen involves what Patrick Fessenbecker has recently called “content formalism,” the critical premise that novelists imply and endorse propositions through formal features that include the repetition of moral dilemmas, the way characters and narrators reflect on those dilemmas, and the implications of plot developments for their reflections.31 Whately is displaying a similar sense of form’s function when he claims that Austen’s lessons “spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story.” But if he is right to commend Austen’s indirectness, the same cannot be said of his attendant claim that it is easy to get her thrust. Confident that subtlety comes at no cost for clarity, Whately finds that Austen’s moral lessons are “clearly and impressively conveyed,” even if the reader “is left to collect them (though without any difficulty) for himself” (232).

That Whately thinks so is partly due to ideological reasons, to his view of Austen as a pious Anglican moralist in whose works he discovered his own truths. Today we are more likely to think, like Butler, that Austen’s novels are “notional” rather than naturalistic. They are carefully designed to promote a set of values whose exact nature has proved elusive — witness the unending critical disagreement over Austen’s political leanings, her views on gender, her attitude towards religion, and other aspects of her outlook. Much of this elusiveness is due to the rhetorical light-handedness of her methods. The set of procedures

30 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3.

31 Patrick Fessenbecker, “In Defense of Paraphrase,” New Literary History, 44, 1 (Winter 2013), 134.

114 that allow Austen to code her views into convincing simulacra of real life also make the views difficult to decode.

My central claim in this section is that Austen was aware of this problem, and as a result felt less confident about the connection between empiricist mimesis and general lessons than Whately did. This is true even of Northanger Abbey, which critics have often described as the least elusive of Austen’s completed novels. John Wiltshire, for instance, claims that moral issues become difficult to adjudicate in Sense and Sensibility and the later novels, but that in Northanger Abbey Austen is atypically transparent.32 While there is some truth to this, there are nonetheless limits to Austen’s transparency even in Northanger

Abbey. To see what those limits are we should turn to some relevant moments in the novel. I will consider two examples of how Austen uses form to convey claims and what her procedure entails for the nature of those claims.

The first example comes at the close of Book I, when Catherine learns that her brother James is engaged to her friend Isabella Thorpe, and that she herself has an admirer in Isabella’s unpleasant brother John. Catherine is worried that by rejecting the brother she may harm her friendship with the sister, but Isabella assuages her fears as follows:

I do not think anything would justify me in wishing you to sacrifice all your happiness merely to oblige my brother, because he is my brother, and who perhaps after all, you know, might be just as happy without you, for people seldom know what they would be at, young men especially, they are so amazingly changeable and inconstant. What I say is, why should a brother’s happiness be dearer to me than a friend’s? (149)

For all Isabella’s meanderings, there is nothing explicitly absurd in her line of thinking. If treated in the abstract, the idea that friendship should not be affected by the romantic frustrations of one’s kin is a plausible candidate for an authorial statement. And yet we can

32 John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 27.

115 tell, on the basis of contextual clues, that we are not meant to trust this speech. The reader has already witnessed Isabella’s flirtations with Captain Tilney, and has reasons to suspect that she has been experiencing a change of heart towards James. When read in the light of previous events, or re-read in awareness of what happens later, Isabella’s speech reveals itself to be a masterpiece of double-dealing. It is natural for young people to change their minds, she notes, and why desert a friend just to appease a brother? By showing magnanimity towards Catherine’s rejection of John, Isabella is setting the stage for her own rejection of James, while placing on Catherine the obligation to be equally magnanimous should things come to such a pass.

This should be clear enough, and is in keeping with Wiltshire’s claim that attentive re-reading should reveal the hidden clues scattered by Austen in this particular novel. But there is more to this scene. In particular, what exactly are we rejecting when we decide to distrust Isabella? It is not the principle she invokes, but her motivations for invoking it.

While her speech offers the principle to our consideration, the contextual clues imply a statement not about principles, but about character. What Austen is triggering us to recognize, without quite saying it, is that this ostensibly selfless woman is a manipulative opportunist (and we’d better watch out for her counterparts in real life). But then the question of principle has been left unsolved: should the claims of friendship remain intact in the face of family grievances? All that Isabella’s speech allows us to conclude is that her particular use of this principle is unscrupulous. Whether Austen endorses the principle itself is not clear at this point. Neither Catherine nor Isabella is in a position to speak authoritatively on the question without a violation of probability (that is, without transcending the limited perspective the novel has carefully defined for them), whereas the narrator herself lives up to Whately’s praise by refraining from drawing conclusions.

Instead, she moves on with the story by bringing Captain Tilney into the scene, and with

116 him a change of topic. The point of conduct reemerges later in the novel, but the results are again unclear. When Catherine teases Henry for being partial to his brother the Captain,

Henry responds not by defending himself, but by exalting Catherine’s moral superiority:

“Your mind is warped by an innate principle of general integrity, and therefore not accessible to the cool reasonings of family partiality, or a desire of revenge” (225-6). If we take Austen to be on Henry’s side here — and we well might, since his description of

Catherine’s general attitude seems accurate — then we would conclude that Isabella herself, while wrong in her motivations, was right in principle. But we must also consider that

Henry’s praise was offered in jest, suggesting that Catherine’s integrity, while admirable, may be excessive. The narrator, once again, provides no decisive clues as to who is right.

The two dialogues thus raise the same moral issue, but Austen allows it to remain unsolved even for the attentive re-reader.

We find the same lack of closure if we now turn to one of the main questions proposed by Northanger Abbey: whether keeping one’s word constitutes an inviolable duty.

Henry suggests that under the proper circumstances it is permissible to retract a promise:

“To be always firm must be to be often obstinate. When properly to relax is the trial of judgment” (135). As usual with Henry, it is not clear whether he is being serious, since he is offering this principle as a mock apology for Isabella’s fickleness. But while the immediate context of Henry’s statement does not clarify Austen’s stance towards it, the topic of promise keeping appears at other moments in the narrative, and is at the heart of two of the novel’s most important episodes.

The first is Catherine’s deliberative crisis in Book 1. At the opening of Chapter 13,

Catherine agrees to join the Tilneys for a walk the next day; five minutes later, the Thorpes and her brother James ask her to retract her promise and join them on a trip to Clifton instead. Catherine resolutely refuses, and in response her brother turns Henry’s principle

117 against her: “‘I did not think you had been so obstinate, Catherine,’ said James; ‘you were not used to be so hard to persuade’” (100). Catherine, however, does not feel that she has a choice in the matter: “‘[I]ndeed I cannot go. If I am wrong, I am doing what I believe to be right’” (100). Neither side is willing to give in, and the impasse only comes to an end when

John Thorpe tries to force Catherine’s decision by conveying her excuses to Eleanor Tilney on a false pretence. Catherine is livid: “‘If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I never will be tricked into it’” (101). She leaves the room, and for all practical purposes the debate is over.

But Catherine keeps replaying the scene in her mind, bothered by a certain insinuation made by Isabella: that deep down she was simply indulging her desire to see

Henry. She is sure that this was not the case: “She had not been withstanding them on selfish principles alone, she had not consulted merely her own gratification ... no, she had attended to what was due to others, and to her own character in their opinion” (102). The ultimate factor in her decision had been her sense of duty, which weighs more than inclination or pleasure. This, at least, is Catherine’s perspective immediately after the fact.

After excusing herself to Eleanor, she starts second-guessing her decision:

[N]ow that she had been triumphant throughout, had carried her point, and was secure of her walk, she began (as the flutter of her spirits subsided) to doubt whether she had been perfectly right. A sacrifice was always noble; and if she had given way to their entreaties, she should have been spared the distressing idea of a friend displeased, a brother angry, and a scheme of great happiness to both destroyed, perhaps through her means. (104)

At this point utilitarian considerations begin to conflict with Catherine’s sense of duty.

Should adherence to an abstract rule prevail over the happiness of others? Or was Henry right to say that the trial of judgment is knowing when to relax? Later developments suggest that Catherine made the right decision: the Thorpes are not worth a noble sacrifice, whereas

118 her growing intimacy with the Tilneys proves immensely valuable in the long run. But

Catherine is trying to reason beyond her particular situation, and to determine whether her decision was right regardless of the individuals involved and regardless of her personal advantage. She cannot know for sure, and in order to “ascertain by the opinion of an unprejudiced person what her own conduct had really been,” she decides to consult her chaperons in Bath, the simpleminded Allens (104). She could scarcely have made a worse choice. Confined, as Isabella and Catherine, to the shortsightedness that Austen’s realism has made their lot, the Allens misunderstand the question, and respond by harping on the impropriety of traveling around in an open carriage with a young man. If there ever was an opportunity for the narrator to step up and enforce a principle, this was it. But instead of clearing up the waters, Austen allows this comedy of errors to bring the chapter to a close.

Thus, Henry and Catherine illustrate two conflicting stances on whether promises are inviolable, but it is not clear whether the novel endorses either of them. He may be joking, she is unsure, the Allens do not help, and the narrator allows the issue to subside. As in the case of Isabella’s speech, however, the topic resurfaces towards the end of the novel, but again inconclusively. After Catherine is sent home from Northanger Abbey, Henry finds himself in a similar dilemma, but at much higher stakes. He has to choose whether to please his father or be true to the pledge he has tacitly made Catherine. If relaxing is the trial of judgment, Henry decides that this is not the right time and sticks firmly to his promise,

“sustained in his purpose by a conviction of its justice” (257). In spite of the General’s anger and disappointment, Henry “felt himself bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss

Morland, and believing that heart to be his own which he had been directed to gain, no unworthy retraction of a tacit consent, no reversing decree of unjustifiable anger, could shake his fidelity, or influence the resolutions it prompted” (257). In spite of his own advice,

Henry will keep his word no matter what. And the novel’s happy ending indicates that he

119 too made the right decision in his particular case.

But would that decision apply as a general principle — should vows between young people be kept in spite of parental dissatisfaction? Austen suspects that certain readers will blame her for suggesting as much. She closes the novel with a dig at ungracious reviewers:

“I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience” (261). Put this way the two alternatives seem to be red herrings, but they are not equally absurd. That

Austen is not recommending parental tyranny should be clear enough, but she does approve of Henry’s particular act of disobedience — of his decision to prioritize his word to

Catherine over his father’s wishes. Nonetheless, Austen’s gesture of defiance implies that construing Henry’s case into a general rule for the young would be a mistake. A likely mistake, however, and one she anticipates and even rejoices in.

This decision, more than anything else in Northanger Abbey, reveals that Austen’s avoidance of theoretical closure is often deliberate. She uses Catherine’s crisis to illuminate her character, while knowing that the moral question triggering the crisis will remain unanswered on a general level. The same applies to her treatment of Isabella, and in fact to most ethical dilemmas in the novel. There are at least two reasons for this, one having to do with the nature of Austen’s ethics and another with her formal commitments. On the ethical front, critics have long argued that Austen is skeptical of generalized moral rules. To take a notable example, Sarah Emsley argues in Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues that Austen was an Aristotelian in matters of ethics; virtue, as depicted in her novels, consists “in a moderation between extremes (the Aristotelian mean), in a constant process of judging carefully, measuring the claims of honesty against those of propriety, consulting principles but adapting them to the case at hand” (25). Austen’s careful attention to the uniqueness of particular situations lends credence to this view, as does her irreverent dismissal of certain

120 truths universally acknowledged. But if Austen’s position is that moral dilemmas should be judged on a case by case basis, then it makes sense that Northanger Abbey yields no general rule on the keeping of promises. It would have been inconsistent for Austen to provide one.33

But this is not all. Henry’s position, after all, is characterized by the same resistance to general rules Emsley ascribes to Austen. By recommending that one judge when to be firm and when to relax, Henry is suggesting that particular situations call for circumspect acts of judgment that may not conform to a priori imperatives. As we have seen, however, even this principle is left to fend for itself in the broader movement of ideas in Northanger

Abbey. Austen’s authorial endorsement never comes for Henry, but the issue here is no longer ethical; instead, I believe that Austen refrains from taking a stance out of a concern for form. She is recognizing, as Whately did not, that lifelikeness may require a sacrifice of propositional clarity. The general principles one abstracts from life are indeed clear at the moment of abstraction, but become enmeshed in contingency again when fed back into naturalistic settings; to preserve their clarity would be to write like Edgeworth or Fielding, whom Whately finds respectively too intrusive and too improbable. From Austen’s standpoint, the novel that truly succeeds at offering “that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life” will speak an ambiguous language.

This is not to say that Northanger Abbey does not imply or assert propositions. As noted already, Austen’s vignettes carry recognizable statements about particular characters and specific decisions. It is also undeniable that the narrator of this particular novel gives us a great many pieces of her mind, not the least of which is her spirited defense of the novel.

The problem, for the type of propositionalism defended by Whately, is whether Austen is indeed providing readers with “general lessons” in the realm of socio-ethics. Austen’s

33 I am thankful to Patrick Fessenbecker for alerting me to this possibility.

121 ethical and formal commitments suggest that her local verdicts should remain local, tightly bound by the novel’s covers. The right decision for Catherine or Henry might be the wrong one in the reader’s circumstances. This mismatch is a problem with a long afterlife in the history of propositionalism. Jerome Stolnitz, for instance, argues that the problem with propositionalism is that narratives do not clarify the scope of application for the propositions they float. They carry statements about “Miss Bennet and Mr Darcy, or Ajax and Creon,” but they do not explain whether such statements “refer to all or most or a few of the flesh-and-blood beings they designate.”34 The issue of scope is a real one for Austen. She is providing her readers with a faithful representation of life in the Midland counties of

England, but the quandaries she recounts are too particularized to yield the general lessons extolled by Whately. What readers find in Northanger Abbey, instead, are opportunities to exercise their judgment against the grain of unique scenarios. The payoff, for the compliant reader, is a shaper moral discernment rather than an ampler repertoire of truths.

The problem with Fielding, Whately thinks, is that he did not take empiricism far enough; his episodes were too artificial for his lessons to carry conviction. What Austen realized, in turn, is that novels can get only so close to life before the lessons begin to fall out of focus. It is true that she never took empiricist mimesis to its logical extreme, not even in the later novels. The ultimate empiricist novel — the novel that truly replicates the effects of sensory experience — would present readers with a world analogous to the one that confronts their senses: a world consisting in an amalgam of particular facts succeeding each other in no clear pattern, carrying no values or meaning other than the ones superadded by the beholder or reader. Clearly, Austen’s novels are not like this. Her characters fall more neatly into the roles of heroes and villains than real people ever do, and her worlds are ordered from above by a presiding intelligence. Nonetheless, she took her commitment to

34 Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 32, 3 (1992), 194.

122 empiricism far enough for the moral thrust of her novels to lose sharpness. Rather than a pedagogic goal, her staging of moral issues comes to serve a formal function, as part of the novel’s apparatus to represent character. Austen’s didactic agenda consequently recedes from view. It is not for nothing that her twentieth-century admirers have often seen her as an aestheticist writing novels for art’s sake.

3. Caleb Williams

The quixotic model takes a dark turn with William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, the

Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). Its two protagonists suffer profoundly from mistakes they owe to their devotion to romances. Ferdinando Falkland is a country squire who

“imbibed the love of chivalry and romance” from “the heroic poets of Italy,” and who lived his life in the conviction that “things will never be as they ought, till honour, and not law, be the dictator of mankind.”35 Caleb Williams, Falkland’s young and overly curious secretary, had likewise “an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance,” and a corresponding desire to find romance in his employer’s nebulous life story.36 What Caleb learns after much prying is that Falkland had a criminal past. Years ago he had killed a neighboring squire called Barnabas Tyrrel, an envious and cruel man who made the mistake of humiliating Falkland in public. The killing took place not in the open, as Falkland’s code of honor would have had it, but under the cover of night. Falkland was tried and found innocent, but still labored under the weight of his dishonor. Now, faced with his secretary’s inquisitiveness, he finally owns his guilt, but as a price for his confession he makes Caleb the object of his hatred and persecution.

35 William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley (Ontario, CA: Broadview, 200), 67, 259. Further references will be to this edition.

36 C.R. Kropf makes this argument in “Caleb Williams and the Attack on Romance,” Studies in the Novel, 8, 1 (1976), 81-87.

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Falkland obtains Caleb’s arrest by pressing false charges against him, and for the rest of the novel Caleb is plunged into an underworld his youthful readings left him unprepared for: the real world of the British prison system, of outlawry, of urban indigence, of those social pariahs who live under the pressure of invisible but omnipresent political forces. In the course of his ordeals he finds himself under the unrelenting surveillance of

Falkland’s agents. Critics have long noted that Caleb Williams should not be taken as a straightforward fictionalization of Godwin’s philosophical masterpiece, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793); the two works nonetheless offer a remarkably similar picture of political oppression, as Frances Ferguson and Pamela Clemit have shown in different ways.37 Consider, for instance, the passage in Political Justice where Godwin notes that in many countries

justice is frequently a matter of expensive purchase, and the man with the longest purse is proverbially victorious. A consciousness of these facts must be expected to render the rich little cautious of offence in his dealings with the poor, and to inspire him with a temper overbearing, dictatorial, and tyrannical. Nor does this indirect oppression satisfy his despotism. The rich are in all such countries directly or indirectly the legislators of the state; and of consequence are perpetually reducing oppression into a system.38

This passage contains in a nutshell the theme of Caleb Williams, whose wealthy and reputable anti-hero sways both the law and public opinion against the humble man who dared affront him. While Godwin’s optimism about the power of sincerity and truth-telling is noticeably absent from the novel, the institutional forces Falkland deploys against Caleb are the same ones anatomized in Political Justice.

37 Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 100-1. Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel. The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

38 I quote from the third edition (1789), which expands a passage from chapter I.ii into a full chapter. William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, ed. K. Codell Carter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 24-5.

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What makes Caleb unique for a member of his class is that he comes to see his political subjection for what it is. At the novel’s opening, Caleb is as naive as Arabella or

Catherine, or Parson Adams for that matter: “Though I was not a stranger to books, I had no practical acquaintance with men” (CW, 61). This begins to change through his scrutiny of

Falkland’s character: “The constant state of vigilance and suspicion in which my mind was retained ... seemed to have all the effect that might have been expected from years of observation and experience” (199). The sufferings that follow wear out the last vestiges of

Caleb’s naivety:

Since my escape from prison I had acquired some knowledge of the world; I had learned by bitter experience, by how many links society had a hold upon me, and how closely the snares of despotism beset me. I no longer beheld the world, as my youthful fancy had once induced me to do, as a scene in which to hide or to appear, and to exhibit the freaks of a wanton vivacity. I saw my whole species as ready, in one mode or other, to be made the instruments of the tyrant. (378)

Caleb becomes aware of the subtle yet pervasive influence of political and social inequality on his slightest actions. He realizes that Falkland “exhibited, upon a contracted scale ... what monarchs are, who reckon among the instruments of their power prisons of state” (CW,

261). This, from Godwin’s perspective, is no mean realization. It is the main lesson he was seeking to convey in Political Justice, and, if we take his word for it, in Caleb Williams as well.

In the “Preface” to the novel Godwin makes the following statement of purpose: “It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach” (55). Caleb Williams is

Godwin’s vehicle to popularize this truth. It offers “a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man” (55), so that readers may learn by proxy what Caleb learns from his painful experiences. Godwin is

125 unfazed by the fact that Caleb Williams is just as fictional as the romances Caleb read in vain.

“If the author shall have taught a valuable lesson ... he will have reason to congratulate himself upon the vehicle he has chosen” (55).

That Godwin believed in the instructive power of fictions is of course no secret. He made that belief explicit on a number of occasions, and studies of Caleb Williams usually treat its pedagogic agenda as one of its essential features. But critics have also tended to look away from Godwin’s avowed intention to use the novel to demonstrate a thesis. For example, in what remains one of the best studies of Godwin’s theory of fiction, David

McCracken points out that Godwin deliberately avoided the type of philosophical talk to be found in the novels of Thomas Holcroft and Robert Bage. For McCracken, Godwin “knew that in his novels he had to affect men as they are, complete with passions, prejudices, and lack of philosophical understanding,” and accordingly sought to instruct not by means of precepts, but through “incident and feeling.”39 Similarly, Pamela Clemit describes Godwin as seeking “a mode of instructive literature which avoids the imposition of a direct moral, and invites the reader to play an active role in determining meaning” (76), while Evan Radcliffe claims that the differences between Political Justice and Caleb Williams are reflected on their modes of instruction, which he regards as respectively propositional and nonpropositional.40 There are, of course, very good reasons to be wary of a propositional reading of the novel. As these critics implicitly acknowledge, the idea that Caleb Williams is basically the vehicle for a political thesis is hard to square with a well-known principle of

Godwin’s literary theory — the principle that the “moral” of a work is irrelevant for its pedagogic value. While recognizing the force of this concern, I nonetheless intend to show

39 David MacCracken, “Godwin’s Literary Theory: The Alliance between Fiction and Political Philosophy,” Philological Quarterly, 49, 1 (1970), 132.

40 Evan Radcliffe, “Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist: Political Justice, Caleb Williams, and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative, Modern Philology, 97, 4 (2000), 546, 551.

126 that the pedagogic program of Caleb Williams is propositional after all; that Godwin recognized that it called for a response to the empiricist challenge; and that the response he offered illustrates the persisting difficulty of laying propositionalism on an empirical basis.

We should begin by examining the problem posed by Godwin’s literary theory. In an essay entitled “Of Choice in Reading,” published as part of The Enquirer in 1797, Godwin proposes a distinction between the moral and the tendency of a book. By “moral” Godwin means “that ethical sentence to the illustration of which the work may most aptly be applied,” whereas the “tendency” consists in “the actual effect [a book] is calculated to produce upon the reader.”41 The word “calculated” is infelicitous here, since what Godwin means by tendency are effects produced on readers regardless of the author’s calculations:

“It is by no means impossible, that the books most pernicious in their effects that ever were produced, were written with intentions uncommonly elevated and pure” (140). Having defined his terms, Godwin goes on to note that “the moral of a work is a point of very subordinate consideration, and ... the only thing worthy of much attention is the tendency”

(139). If this is the case, then the preface to Caleb Williams, which presents the novel as the vehicle for a moral, starts indeed to seem suspicious.

This impression only deepens when we look more closely at how Godwin speaks of his two categories. The distinction between morals and tendencies is subtler than it seems, and I think it has been mischaracterized even by some of Godwin’s best readers. Patricia

Meyer Spacks, for example, finds that Godwin uses the terms to distinguish between authorial and readerly interpretations of the same work, the moral being stable and corresponding to the author’s intention, while the tendency is variable and depends on the reader’s impressions.42 It can be shown that Godwin is making a different point, however.

41 William Godwin, Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1993), 139. Further references will be to this edition.

42 See Desire and Truth, 4-5. Clemit provides a similar gloss in The Godwinian Novel (76-7).

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He is distinguishing not between authorial and readerly perspectives, but between what a work of literature means and what it does to its readers. To begin with, morals are not simply expressions of the author’s intention. Godwin finds that authors may be as deceived as readers with regard to the ethical statement a book illustrates. “The true moral and fair inference from a composition has often lain concealed for ages from its most diligent readers,” and “authors themselves are no more infallible in this respect, than the men who read them” (138). He presses this point home by suggesting two possible readerly interpretations for Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy The Fair Penitent, while adding that “it is of no consequence whether the moral contemplated by the author, were different from both of these” (139). Morals, the example shows, are inferences that authors and readers may draw in different ways from the same textual evidence. (This is not a celebration of multiple interpretability, as Godwin finds that most supposed “morals” are exegetical blunders.) By contrast, tendency, which for Spacks refers to the different meanings a book carries for different readers, is only indirectly related to interpretation or meaning. While in a few places Godwin seems to think that books “tend” towards a certain reading, what he most consistently designates by “tendency” is the work’s impact on the reader’s moral and rational constitution. “The principal tendency of a work,” he explains, “may be either intellectual or moral, to increase the powers of the understanding, or to mend the disposition of the heart” (140). Tendency, in short, is the transformation a book brings about in the reader’s heart and mind. By setting tendency above morals, Godwin is proposing that a book’s practical consequences are worth more than the messages that authors and readers discover in it.43

43 This view was not unique to Godwin. A reviewer of Madame Cottin’s Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia notes that “The moral effect of a work ought perhaps to be the same with its moral; but it is not always so; and, under correction, it forms a far more important object of inquiry ... So distinguishable is the tendency of a work from the pithy little adage which may conclude it, that nothing is more conceivable than a most immoral work with a most excellent moral.” From The Edinburgh Review Vol. XI (London: John Murray, 1808), 461.

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Having set tendency above moral, Godwin then adds that of the two types of tendency, the intellectual is more important. What he calls the moral tendency has only minor relevance. Gil Blas and Shakespeare’s plays may seem to have an “immoral” tendency in the way they depict vice, but their apparent immorality is harmless, since books “rarely produce vice and profligacy where virtue existed before” (141).44 By contrast, Godwin notes, the intellectual tendency is “a consideration of much greater importance”; by affecting the understanding, books “raise my ambition, expand my faculties, invigorate my resolutions, and seem to double my existence” (141). This passage is quite in keeping with

Godwin’s late recollection of his goals for Caleb Williams: “I said to myself a thousand times,

‘I will write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before.’”45 But the premium on intellectual tendency makes Godwin’s preface to Caleb Williams even more puzzling. In

Godwin’s account, a book’s power to transform readers is often unrelated to its message or thesis: “A work may be fairly susceptible of no moral inference, or none but a bad one, and yet may have a tendency in a high degree salutary and advantageous” (139-140). This makes the novel’s statement of purpose seem myopic on Godwin’s own terms. In light of this problem, critics like McCracken and Clemit have preferred to read Caleb Williams within a nonpropositional framework, even if at the cost of downplaying the nominal propositionalism of the preface.

As I will proceed to argue, however, Godwin’s emphasis on the novel’s thesis is not really at odds with his declared preference for tendency. Morals, for Godwin, are not always orthogonal to tendencies, and the two are directly connected in the case of Caleb Williams.

44 This is the one moment in the essay where the word “tendency” refers to the contents rather than the effects of a book.

45 From the “Preface” to the “Standard Novels” edition of Fleetwood, published in 1832 by R. Bentley. Reproduced in Godwin, Caleb Williams, Appendix A, 447.

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To begin with, the “effect” that goes by the name of intellectual tendency must have a cause, and Godwin suggests two ways for a text to be causally related to the reader’s mental growth. The first is via inspiration. Certain authors are able to enlarge minds by “pour[ing] their whole souls into mine, and rais[ing] me as it were to the seventh heaven” (140). In ways that recall the workings of political ideology, Godwin finds that the writings of

Shakespeare or Milton can spread their energy even among those who never heard of them, from the poorest peasant to a Mandarin in China: “Every man who is changed from what he was by the perusal of [Shakespeare or Milton], communicates a portion of the inspiration all around him. It passes from man to man, till it influences the whole mass” (141). This is the voice of the romantic Godwin, who would revisit this theme later in life in his Essay on

Sepulchres (1809), a proposal for erecting memorials over the unmarked tombs of notables, and thus promote a spirit of emulation among the living.46 But the more unsentimental

Godwin of the early 1790s proposes an alternative cause for the reader’s enlightenment: not inspiration, but the communication of knowledge. A guiding premise of Political Justice is that the improvement of society can only follow from the improvement of reason, which

“depends for its clearness and strength upon the cultivation of knowledge” (PJ 15).

The knowledge in question is of many types — natural, ethical, political — but it has two common denominators: it originates in the senses and is conveyed through propositions. In spite of his reputation as a rationalist, Godwin is a staunch empiricist in matters of epistemology.47 He endorses Locke’s attack on innate ideas and takes his theories of perception and knowledge straight out of Hartley, Berkeley, and Hume:

46 Godwin notes in the “Essay” that “good deeds and good feelings are contagious,” and by spreading from person to person “the agitation at length reaches to the remotest parts, and the most distant extremity.” “Essay on Sepulchres,” in William Godwin, Essays, ed. Mark Philip (London: William Pickering, 1993), 24.

47 What earned Godwin his reputation as a rationalist is not his epistemology, but his early theory of moral motivation, according to which “the great stream of our voluntary actions essential depends, not upon the direct and immediate impulses of sense, but upon the decisions of the understanding” (PJ, 28).

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All our knowledge, all our ideas, everything we possess as intelligent beings, comes from impression. All the minds that exist, set out from absolute ignorance. They received first one impression, and then a second. As the impressions became more numerous, and were stored by the help of memory, and combined by the faculty of association, so the experience increased, and with the experience the knowledge. (PJ 59-60).

This is the conception of knowledge that governs both Political Justice and Godwin’s later writings. It reappears in its most articulate form in his unpublished “Essay of Scepticism,” a defense of mitigated skeptics along the lines of Hume’s first Enquiry. In it Godwin appeals to

Berkeley’s theory of vision and to Hume’s account of custom and causation to assert that regularly conjoined perceptions are the source and test of all probable knowledge. “From experience of the past [the skeptic] forms judgments as to the future: from experience of what he has seen, he forms judgments as to what he has not seen.”48 The cultivation of knowledge advocated by Godwin follows this empirical model. It requires that inductive inferences be drawn from observation and experience and made portable in propositional form.

But this is not all. While knowledge must eventually be couched in propositions, propositions alone are not able to disseminate it. Godwin believes that in order to genuinely know something, we should not accept it on someone else’s word, but must autonomously realize its truth. This applies both to demonstrative and to empirical knowledge. Being told

“‘that Euclid asserts the three angles of a plane triangle to be equal to two right angles’” is not the same as knowing it, since “the knowledge of truth lies in the perceived agreement or disagreement of the terms of a proposition ... So long as they are incommensurate to my understanding ... I may strictly be said to know nothing” (92). Likewise, matters of fact can

48 “Essay of Scepticism,” in Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1993), 303-4.

131 only be known in light of adequate evidence; truth, when “unaccompanied by the evidence which proves it to be such, or when that evidence is partially and imperfectly stated,” loses its power to impact the understanding (59). The public cultivation of knowledge is therefore a difficult task, but an achievable one nevertheless: “We do not always know how to communicate all the evidence we are capable of communicating, in a single conversation, and much less in a single instant. But, if the communicator be sufficiently master of his subject, and if the truth be altogether on his side, he must ultimately succeed in his undertaking” (56). The reforming program of Political Justice is predicated on this conviction.

Here then is one reason why Godwin is so suspicious of morals: they too often consist in unsubstantiated assertions. In many cases what passes for a moral has no grounding in the work that ostensibly illustrates it. As a case in point, “examine [Aesop’s] fable impartially, and you will find that the lesson set down at the foot of it, is one of the last inferences that would have occurred to you” (“Of Choice,” 137). Because of received prejudices, however, authors and readers routinely buy morals that are at odds with the actual implications of the text: “Books have been handed down from generation to generation, as the true teachers of piety and the love of God, that represent him as so merciless and tyrannical a despot, that, if they were considered otherwise than through the medium of prejudice, they could inspire nothing but hatred” (138). It may also happen that moral lessons run counter not to the textual but to the empirical evidence. This problem is particularly frequent in philosophical writing. To believe “the apothegms of philosophers, and the maxims of scientifical and elevated morality” is to live “in imaginary scenes,” overlooking “the perverseness of the human heart, and the springs that regulate the conduct of mankind” (142). Caleb’s beloved romances fail on these grounds. As he admits,

“though I was not totally unacquainted with [the world and its passions] as they appear in

132 books, this proved of little service to me when I came to witness them myself” (CW, 179). To sum it up, when the moral contradicts the textual evidence, it is a moral in name but not in fact;49 when it contradicts the empirical evidence, it is a genuine but misguided moral. In neither case does the moral facilitate the cultivation of knowledge, which renders it irrelevant for tendencies.

It should be noted, on the other hand, that Godwin’s indictment leaves room for the possibility that morals may be instructive, as long as two conditions are satisfied. First, the narrative must genuinely support the statement or set of statements it implicitly or explicitly illustrates; and, second, the evidence from the narrative must be in accordance with the evidence from experience. As long as these criteria are met, the moral of a story will be more than a vacuous refrain; it will become “knowable” in Godwin’s sense of that word. And to the extent that it genuinely conveys knowledge, it becomes relevant for the book’s intellectual tendency.

These, I think, are the assumptions underlying Godwin’s preface to Caleb Williams.

In relation to the first of the two criteria I named above, Godwin presents Caleb’s narrative as a direct illustration of his thesis — of the principle, that is, that “the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society.” The novel seeks to determine, by means of a thought experiment, what would happen if the “existing constitution of society ... were faithfully developed in its practical effects” (CW, 55). The phrasing implies that the persecution and abuses faced by Caleb are products not of Godwin’s invention, but of actual political forces. Unlike the apothegms of philosophers, Caleb’s story “is no refined and abstract speculation; it is a study and delineation of things passing in the moral world”

49 Such works may contain a genuine moral that goes unnoticed, as Godwin found to be the case with Paradise Lost. For Godwin, the real lesson of Paradise Lost is not that God’s ways to man are justifiable; it is, instead, that God, as the absolute sovereign, is also a tyrant. See Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philip (London: William Pickering, 1993), 146. Clemit provides a helpful discussion of this passage; given her interpretation of Godwin’s terms, however, she takes Godwin to be speaking of tendency rather than morals (The Godwinian Novel, 77).

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(55). Here then is the premise that evidence from the novel is equivalent to evidence from the real world, which suggests that Caleb Williams meets the second criterion as well.

Godwin expects that the novel will bring home to its readers the type of realization that experience brings home to Caleb, and consequently foster their intellectual emancipation.

As Godwin explains in a letter to The British Critic, the whole point of the novel is “to expose the evils which arise out of the present system of civilized society; and, having exposed them, to lead the enquiring reader to examine whether they are, or are not ... irremediable; in a word, to disengage the minds of men from prepossession, and launch them upon the sea of moral and political enquiry” (CW, 451). Caleb’s narrative, in short, is a pool of evidence for a proposition which, once realized as knowledge, helps expand the reader’s mental horizons. The novel’s moral is thus essential for its tendency.

If the argument above seems convincing, then there is no real incompatibility between the propositionalism of the preface and Godwin’s preference for tendencies over morals. But framed this way, his pedagogic model runs into an issue of a different order.

From the empiricist perspective that Godwin shares, it is far from obvious that Caleb’s fictional life can indeed meet the second criterion. To suggest that evidence from a novel can stand in for evidence from experience is to run directly into the empiricist challenge.

The critic who reviewed Caleb Williams for The British Critic put the objection well. He wondered “whether Mr. Godwin has even taken a common and superficial view of the state of society in this country, instead of having surveyed it with the precision, and sagacity of a

Philosopher.”50 The problem, for this reviewer, is not only that Godwin had a deficient knowledge of the law, but that the story only takes the course it does because the novelist is pulling the strings; the normal operations of society would never have produced the same

50 The anonymous review was published in The British Critic 5 in April of 1795, and is reproduced in Godwin, Caleb Williams, Appendix F, 556-9.

134 results.51 One would need an argument showing that Caleb Williams, for all its obedience to

Godwin’s will, nonetheless qualifies as a reliable surrogate for experience.

Godwin was acutely aware of this problem, and addressed it on a theoretical level in his “Essay of History and Romance.” Written for a second volume of The Enquirer and left unpublished until 1987, the essay is a penetrating defense of the empirical status of fictions.

Its central strategy is to set prose fiction against history and then propose that the former is better able than the latter to fulfill the function of “true history.” This, of course, is very much Fielding’s theory. Everett Zimmerman has already noticed the germaneness of

Godwin’s approach to the theoretical chapters of Joseph Andrews, but the parallels are even more striking than Zimmerman suggests.52 Like Fielding, Godwin finds that historians are only reliable when it comes to “facts, dates, and places,” but fail with regard to the characters of men, which are the genuine subject of history.53 Again like Fielding, he singles out historians of the Rebellion like Whitelock and Clarendon for their untrustworthiness, while extending his criticism to the sociological history of “Hume and the whig historians”

(300). The problem with “general history,” Godwin thinks, is that it paints life in too broad strokes to attend to nuances of character. “Individual history,” by contrast, holds greater promise, but even here the factual historian is beset with difficulties. Godwin echoes

Fielding’s advice that the student of character should follow their subject into their homes and private life (294), but notes that such intimacy is impossible in the case of even the

51 The reviewer objects, for instance, that the men who carried the blame for Falkland’s murder look too guilty to be innocent. He wonders “whether it is possible that such circumstances should appear without actual guilt. Mr. Godwin’s imagination has not been able to account for them, and the narrative in this instance may be considered as exceeding all the bounds of probability” (557).

52 Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction. History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996 ), 22-25.

53 “Of history and Romance,” in Godwin, Educational and Literary Writings, 297. Godwin anticipates this claim in his “Account of the Seminary” (Educational and Literary Writings, 18), where he argues that the “true application of history ... is to study men and manners” (17). “The mere external actions of men are not worth the studying ... No: it is the hearts of men we should study. It is to their actions, as expressive of disposition and character, we should attend” (18).

135 most well known historical figures. “The materials are abundant for the history of

Alexander, Caesar, Cicero and Queen Elizabeth. Yet how widely do the best informed persons differ respecting them? Perhaps by all their character is misrepresented” (300).

The issue is that character, for Godwin, is inscrutable: “The conjectures of the historian must be built upon a knowledge of the characters of his personages. But we never know any man’s character. My most intimate and sagacious friend continually misapprehends my motives. He is in most cases a little worse judge of them than myself and I am perpetually mistaken” (300). Even the most rigorous biographer, working on the minutest of canvases, is unable to survey those subjective recesses history is supposed to unveil, and must accordingly resort to invention. This opens the door for Godwin’s defense of “romance,” a term he applies indiscriminately to romances and novels: “The writer of romance stands in this respect upon higher ground. He must be permitted ... to understand the character which is the creature of his own fancy” (300).

This is not to say that romance is “fanciful” though. As in Joseph Andrews, we learn that just as the historian “is a romance writer,” “the writer of romance is to be considered as the writer of real history” (301). Godwin grants that most novels fail to live up to their potential, but insists that this is not a consequence of the turn to fiction. On the one hand, he reiterates that history itself is deeply fictional, and that “the reader will be miserably deluded if, while he reads history, he suffers himself to imagine that he is reading facts”

(299-300). On the other hand, he proposes that fiction can be founded in fact, and be as true to the data of experience as the more reliable strokes of the historian. This is where his theory most closely resembles Fielding’s:

The difference between romance and what ordinarily bears the denomination of history, is this. The historian is confined to individual incident and individual man, and must hang upon that his invention or conjecture as he can. The writer of romance collects his materials from all sources, experience, report, and the records

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of human affairs; then generalises them; and finally selects, from their elements and the various combinations they afford, those instances which he is best qualified to pourtray, and which he judges most calculated to impress the heart and improve the faculties of his reader. (299)

In consonance with Godwin’s broader theory, this passage sets much store by the moral and intellectual tendencies of romance — by its ability, that is, “to impress the heart and improve the faculties of [its] reader” (299). And it associates those tendencies with the genre’s affordance of empirical knowledge. Romances render visible, for the benefit of their readers, those patterns in human affairs which the writer only discovers through painstaking observation, research, and reflection. Godwin follows the same logic invoked by

Fielding and later by Whately: the romance writer derives general principles from the empirical data through induction, and then feeds them back into the particularized scenarios of romance or the novel. As long as the transfer precludes distortion, the narrative that results will retain the empirical status of the original data.

There is good reason to think that Godwin thought of Caleb Williams in light of this theory. In response to the reviewer who accused him of doing armchair philosophy, he responded by affirming his faithfulness to experience: “I ask any man, in the least degree informed as to the history of squires and their tenants in Great Britain, whether he can read this episode [the one in which Tyrrell torments the Hawkinses] and not recognise its counterpart in what he has himself heard and seen?”54 What matters, for Godwin, is less the historicity than the representativeness of the individual episode, the fact “that oppressions of a similar nature, and of equal magnitude, are known to be perpetually practised with impunity” (451). Similarly, Godwin authenticates Caleb’s sufferings in prison by footnoting the relevant passages with references to the Newgate Calendar and to John Howard’s The

54 For Godwin’s response, see Caleb Williams, Appendix A, 450-3.

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State of the Prisons (1777). Emily Anderson finds that Godwin’s footnotes have the effect of foregrounding the narrative’s fictionality; maybe they do, but Godwin’s goal is to show that the fiction thus foregrounded is representative of an actual state of affairs.55 When Caleb returns to jail after his escape, he himself stresses the representativeness of his ordeals:

“Why should I repeat the loathsome tale of all that was endured by me, and is endured by every man who is unhappy enough to fall under the government of these consecrated ministers of national jurisprudence?” (378). Taken together, Godwin’s defense of fictions and passages like the ones above suggest that Caleb Williams is envisioned to function as a repository of evidence with the same epistemic status as direct experience.

There is one sense in which the novel may seem out of tune with the theory. The type of biographical writing Godwin defends in “Of History and Romance” is the exemplar history Hume was endeavoring to move beyond. Godwin finds that the dealings of ordinary people, while a useful source of precedents, provide no pointers to a better future. In order to go beyond the prediction of déjà vus and “pronounce what it is of which social man is capable,” history ought to treat “of the development of great genius, or the exhibition of bold and masculine virtues”; it must accordingly focus on those characters who are “epitomes of the world, of its best and most exalted features, purified from their grossness” (293, 295).

Only by doing so can individual history “add, to the knowledge of the past, a sagacity that can penetrate into the depths of futurity” (293). None of the characters in Caleb Williams, not even the formidable Falkland, seem to live up to such high standards. Less than a depiction of role models, Caleb Williams is a denunciation of a system. It seeks to affect the reader’s conduct less by inspiring emulation than by disclosing the sad state of contemporary Britain. But this too has its value. Unfortunately modern history has to be

55 Anderson, Emily, “‘I Will Unfold a Tale—!’: Narrative, Epistemology, and Caleb Williams,” in Eighteenth Century Fiction, 22, 1 (2009), 111.

138 read, Godwin claims, “because all that we wish must be connected with all that we are, and because it is incumbent upon us to explore the means by which the latter may be made, as it were, to slide into the former” (295). It is no coincidence that the main title of Caleb

Williams was originally Things as They Are, an emblem of its empirical ambition.

One last challenge remains for Godwin. The goal of Caleb Williams is to form a vision for the future by demonstrating a thesis about the present. Backing its propositional status is an empiricist theory of fiction, according to which narratives and characters are instantiations of principles derived inductively from experience and reliable sources. But the thought experiment at the heart of Caleb Williams calls for more than a daguerreotype; it requires a picture of life that is dynamic rather than static. And the temporal axis intrinsic to narrative, as Evan Radcliffe has already pointed out in relation to Godwin, poses serious hurdles for the propositional model of instruction.56 Not only because characters and actions evolving through time are hard to reduce to formulas (as Radcliffe argues), but also because the unfolding of the novel’s plot involves too many variables. Determining, on a counterfactual stage, what would happen “if [the existing constitution of society] were faithfully developed in its practical effects” (CW 55) requires forecasting skills that may exceed the powers of the human mind.

Hume, we saw, insists that the causes of human action “are commonly so delicate and refined, that the smallest incident in the health, education, or fortune of a particular person, is sufficient to divert their course and retard their operation.”57 Godwin grants the point in Political Justice, where he notes that “a single grain of sand more or less in the structure of the earth, would have produced an infinite variation in its history. If this be true in inanimate nature, it is much more so in morals” (PJ 2.5). But such an admission, as

56 Radcliffe, “Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist.”

57 David Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Essays. Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianopolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 112.

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Hume’s misgivings illustrate, means that the imagination should not be trusted to forecast too much. Godwin, with remarkable intellectual integrity, grants the point. Having outlined his vigorous defense of fiction, he ends “Of History and Romance” with an unexpected and sober qualification:

To write romance is a task too great for the powers of man, and under which he must be expected to totter. No man can hold the rod so even, but that it will tremble and vary from its course. To sketch a few bold outlines of character is no desperate undertaking; but to tell precisely how such a person would act in a given situation, requires a sagacity scarcely less than divine. We never conceive a situation, or those minute shades in a character that would modify its conduct. Naturalists tell us that a single grain of sand more or less on the surface of the earth, would have altered its motion, and, in the process of ages, have diversified its events. We have no reason to suppose in this respect, that what is true in matter, it false in morals. (301)

In this regard, the factual historian is at an advantage, since “the events are taken out of his hands and determined by the system of the universe” (301). The novelist, by contrast, is hampered by the limitations of the human mind. Godwin’s final attitude is one of resignation: “The sciences and the arts of man are alike imperfect, and almost infantine”

(301). This may seem hard to reconcile with Godwin’s optimism about Caleb Williams, but

Godwin experienced self-doubt in relation to the novel as well. Decades later he would contrast his original intention in writing it with his actual achievement: “What had I done?

Written a book to amuse boys and girls in their vacant hours, a story to be hastily gobbled up by them, swallowed in a pusillanimous and unanimated mood, without chewing and digestion” (CW 450). Recollected in tranquility, the novel now strikes Godwin as a “mighty trifle” with a doubtful moral and an ineffectual tendency.

“Of History and Romance” is an appropriate closing point for my survey of eighteenth-century varieties of propositionalism. It articulates with remarkable forcefulness the positions defended less systematically by Fielding and Hume, and

140 concludes by declaring the impossibility of choosing one over the other. By the end of the century, no defense of propositionalism had been able to lay it unproblematically on an empiricist foundation. This, of course, remains true of our own time, as the example of

Stolnitz illustrates. In response to such difficulties, modern cognitivists have often preferred to defend the cognitive value of novels without appealing to their propositional content.

Like the propositionalism they reject, the nonpropositional alternative they espouse had precursors in the eighteenth century. In my next chapter I turn to what is probably the most notable of all of them.

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CHAPTER 5 Laurence Sterne and the Experience of Reading Fiction

The extent of Fielding’s influence on Sterne remains a matter of debate. Prominent

Sterneans including John Traugott and Melvyn New have preferred to keep the term “novel” away from discussions of Tristram Shandy, to avoid suggesting a genealogy where Sterne saw none.1 More recently, Tom Keymer and Robert Folkenflik resituated Sterne within the discourse on the novel, without denying his affiliation with the secular and religious traditions stressed by Traugott and New.2 Keymer argues that Sterne was “alert and responsive to problems that Richardson and Fielding were themselves intelligently exploring,” and thus “indebted to both the Rabelaisian-Cervantic tradition and to the modern novel” (25). I find myself in agreement with Keymer here, and shall be using the word “novel” in what follows. But even the more hesitant reader would grant that, influence or no influence, there is considerable common ground between Fielding and Sterne. Both are highly self-conscious comic artists who season their descriptions of plain English life with irreverent displays of learning. They also share a view of human nature as consisting in

1 See John Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), and Melvyn New, Tristram Shandy: A Book for Free Spirits (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994).

2 Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2002), and Robert Folkenflik, “Tristram Shandy and eighteenth-century narrative,” The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). Other accounts of Sterne’s indebtedness to previous novelists include Wayne C. Booth’s groundbreaking “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy,” PMLA Vol. 67, No. 2 (March 1952), 163- 185, and Walter L. Reed’s An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

142 an inscrutable set of innate features lying underneath the veil of appearances, and use their novels to inspect those depths. In a passage reminiscent of Fielding’s moral epistemology,

Tristram laments that we lack “the fixure of Momus’s glass” to scrutinize the interior of one another’s breasts. He offers to depict the character of his Uncle Toby (as well as the other

Shandys, including himself) by focusing instead on its external manifestations — those behavioral proclivities Sterne has famously dubbed a “hobby horse.”3 When seen from this angle, Sterne’s project seems strikingly similar to that of the Fieldingesque historian.

Or take the question of whether fiction is equipped to engage in forms of empirical enquiry. Here too Sterne seems to be on Fielding’s side. His infusion of realism into the shell of learned satire and his explicit references to Locke and to the theory of moral sentiments led generations of critics to characterize Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey as incursions into the psychology and the ethics of empiricism. As Ernest Tuveson puts it,

Sterne’s fiction constitutes “an extended imaginative embodiment” of the philosophical project initiated by Bacon and Locke.4 This is further evidence that Sterne may have espoused a form of propositionalism similar to Fielding’s.

And yet, for all this resemblance, the universe of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental

Journey differs in substantial ways from that of Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones. We find no equivalent of Fielding’s narrator in the course of the Tristram’s tortuous narrative or

Yorick’s sentimental excursions. We are guided instead by a couple of eccentric valetudinarians, both of whom are too enmeshed in the earthly fray of their worlds to command a detached view from above. In addition, the worlds they inhabit are more

3 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. Vols. 1 & 2, The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978, 1984), Book I, Chapter xxiii, p. 82. Further citations will be to this edition and will be registered parenthetically in the text.

4 Ernest Tuveson, “Locke and Sterne,” in Reason and Imagination. Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600-1800. Ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 258.

143 ambivalent than Fielding’s; the ethical outlines are less clear-cut, the poetical justice simply absent. Such differences in execution reflect differences in how each author conceived of the nature and purposes of fiction, and in this chapter I hope to show that Sterne’s formal distinctiveness also placed him in a unique position within the cognitivist debate. I hope to show, more specifically, that Sterne developed an alternative solution for the problem of aligning literary pedagogy with the epistemology of empiricism, a solution that owes little to the propositionalist approach.

My procedure will be somewhat different than in the two previous chapters, where I focused almost exclusively on the versions of cognitivism most relevant for each novelist. In the present case I will be considering, in addition to what I claim to be Sterne’s version of cognitivism, two competing alternatives that seem to follow as corollaries from central strands of twentieth-century criticism on Sterne. I accordingly examine not one, but three versions of literary cognitivism, and then ask whether Sterne acknowledged and endorsed them, and on what grounds. Two of them are propositional, and lie implicit in readings of

Tristram Shandy that characterize it either as an experiment in associationist psychology or as a philosophical enquiry into topics dear to empiricism. The third is nonpropositional, and features both implicitly and explicitly in A Sentimental Journey and Sterne’s Sermons. My conclusion, to put it briefly, is that neither version of propositionalism loomed large in

Sterne’s horizon. He treats their premises as raw material for comedy, but there is little indication that he was invested in defending them. By contrast, Sterne openly defends the nonpropositional theory. In doing so, he avoids some of the main problems faced by propositionalists, while running into difficulties of a quite distinct nature.

I discuss each of the three hypotheses in separate sections, beginning with Tristram

Shandy. For reasons that will become clear, I pass over the sentimental aspects of Tristram

Shandy in sections one and two, reserving them for discussion in my third section, where I

144 finally take up A Sentimental Journey.

1. Tristram Shandy as a psychological experiment

Sterne’s affiliation with the Scriblerians and with what D.W. Jefferson has memorably described as the “tradition of learned wit” should by itself suggest that the universe of

Tristram Shandy is not hermetic.5 By its very nature, satire looks beyond itself to an external reality — its business is that of pointing fingers — and it is easy to establish parallels between Swift’s and Sterne’s attacks on contemporary intellectual and religious abuses. For all its layers of metacommentary, Tristram Shandy also speaks of the world beyond its covers. In addition, Sterne takes on board a number of philosophical topics from within the arena of empiricism, as best illustrated by Walter Shandy’s disquisitions on time and the human mind. But if propositionalism and empiricism clearly share space in Tristram

Shandy, the methods of satire do not require them to cooperate. The discursive apparatus of

Pantagruel or The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus delivers its message regardless of whether the narrative content supports it. Because opinions flow as efficiently from fictional personas as from an authorial voice, the broad rhetorical tradition described by Jefferson posed no problem for the empiricists; witness their reliance on the dialogue form, which develops claims within fictional frameworks without entailing cognitive claims on behalf of the fiction.6 The challenge faced by writers like Fielding and Austen was different: they sought to create fictions that are more than caricatures of reality or scaffolds for a lecture — fictions that replicate the world with minimal distortion, so that readers can observe the replica to understand the original. As it happens, twentieth-century readers of Sterne have developed precisely this type of claim on behalf of Tristram Shandy. According to this

5 D.W Jefferson, “Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit,” Essays in Criticism 1, No. 3 (1951), 225-248.

6 See, however, n. 57 to Chapter 1.

145 reading, Sterne’s guiding purpose in the novel is to lay open to our observation the operations of a hypothetical human mind running on the principles of empiricism.

Interpretations of Tristram Shandy as a contribution to empiricist psychology exist in different versions, but its original backbone was Lockean associationism. The basic features of Locke’s theory — that ideas succeed one another in our minds on the basis of habitual association — are thematized quite explicitly in a number of episodes in Tristram

Shandy, especially towards the beginning.7 What twentieth-century criticism did was to expand the role of association beyond such explicit appearances, and treat it as an underlying logic that ties the whole narrative together. Peter Anstey offers one of the most recent articulations of this classical thesis: “[W]hat we find in Tristram Shandy is a happy, though slightly unstable, juxtaposition of Lockean themes ... with the ubiquitous presence of the association of ideas deployed for comic effect.”8 The omnipresence of associationism, on this view, is demonstrated by its clear effects on the behavior of characters and narrator alike. Peter Briggs puts it well: “Both Tristram’s style of telling his story and the modes of thought of his various characters stand as comic realizations of Locke’s worst fears, embodiments of cognitive eccentricity and arbitrariness. Tristram cannot reconstruct his memories in a sequential way, and he is borne along by the stream of his own associations.”9 The point here is that the meanderings of Tristram’s narrative style, which we might otherwise take as random or capricious, are in fact calculated to illustrate a

7 The most explicit reference is this: “from an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,—but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head,—& vice versâ” (I.4.7). Tristram parodies Locke’s physiological explanation in I.1.2 and refers directly to Locke’s Essay as a “history-book ... of what passes in a man’s own mind” in II.2.98.

8 Peter R. Anstey, “The Experimental History of the Understanding from Locke to Sterne,” Eighteenth-Century Thought, 4 (2009), 164.

9 Peter M. Briggs, “Locke’s ‘Essay’ and the Tentativeness of ‘Tristram Shandy,’” Studies in Philology, Vol. 82, N. 4 (Autumn, 1985), 507. Briggs’s excellent account of Sterne’s relationship to Locke is a lot more complex than these remarks may seem to suggest, as it goes well beyond the issue of associationism.

146 certain form of cognitive deviance. As I will shortly note, many critics have found that

Locke’s associationism lacks the conceptual wherewithal to render such an interpretation plausible, favoring later associationists like Hartley and Hume as more likely sources for

Sterne.10 I will have more to say about this view later, but for now let me just note that in spite of their disagreement concerning sources, critics from both camps concur in taking the novel’s digressive structure to be a product of psychological triggers beyond Tristram’s control.

What makes the associationist interpretation relevant for a discussion of literary cognitivism is that it attributes to Sterne not only a philosophical purpose, but also a heuristic strategy involving the use of fiction as evidence in favor or against an empirical hypothesis. If Tristram’s digressions are indeed produced by associationist principles, then

Tristram Shandy may be said to function as a counterfactual experiment in psychology. The goal of Sterne’s experiment would be to weigh the merits of associationism, by first imagining what a mind running on the principles of association would look like and then displaying the resulting stream of thoughts for everyone to see. The novel, on this view, should be treated as an artifact, the tangible product of a hypothetical mind. The plausibility of associationism would then depend on whether or not we, as readers, recognize in our own mental life the patterns brought into relief by the narrative before us. Either we realize that our thoughts happen to divagate as much as Tristram’s (and thus acknowledge the role of associationism in governing our minds) or we find that a mind running on associationist principles would be fundamentally alien to our own experience (in which case the novel would be subjecting an empirical hypothesis to a reductio ad absurdum). In either case

Tristram Shandy would constitute a genuine contribution to empirical psychology. As

10 For a brief reconsideration of Locke’s influence, see W.G. Day, “Tristram Shandy: Locke May Not Be the Key,” in Valerie Grosvernor Myer (ed.), Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries (London: Vision, 1984), 75-83.

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Anstey summarizes it, “Locke produced an essay on the understanding, Hume a treatise and an enquiry and Sterne a novel, and yet there is a very real sense in which all three of them were engaged in the same enterprise” (169).

Here, then, is a propositional version of literary cognitivism we might consider attributing to Sterne. It is propositional in that it implies that Tristram Shandy carries an implicit philosophical thesis; and it is “literary” in that it treats the novel’s imaginative elements as an integral component of the experiment. Tantalizing as it is, however, the possibility that Sterne entertained this form of propositionalism is extremely hard to substantiate. Its underlying principles are unlikely to find explicit expression, let alone a defense, in the pages of Tristram Shandy. After all, on the associationist interpretation

Tristram is not privy to the heuristic function of his narrative. Rather than a guide, he is a subject on display, and his narrative speaks to Sterne’s purported experiment less through statement than through the unconscious processes it instantiates. In the absence of direct corroboration by either Sterne or Tristram, the hypothesis must rest entirely on the merits of the associationist reading, from which propositionalism would follow as a corollary. If

Sterne was indeed relying on associationism as a syntax of digression, and if his purpose in doing so was to test the theory’s plausibility, then this must mean that he trusted fiction to weigh in on the matter. How strong, then, is the associationist reading?

The central premise of Anstey’s interpretation — that Tristram’s digressions are cases of Lockean association — went through a number of iterations in the last century, and is already fully fledged in James Work’s critical edition of Tristram Shandy (1940), where

Work claims that the novel, “even in its seemingly wildest digressions, is based upon the theory of ‘the sagacious Locke’ that certain ideas come to be associated in a man’s mind”

(xlix). By itself, such longevity certainly suggests that there is something to recommend this view. Some of Tristram’s reflections about his methods suggest as much. Consider, for

148 instance, his explanation for why he postponed telling the story of Le Fever: “Ask my pen,–– it governs me,––I govern not it” (VI, vi, 500). This is quite in keeping with Tristram’s famous principle of composition: “I begin with writing the first sentence–––and trusting to Almighty

God for the second” (VIII, ii, 656). Alan McKillop alerted us against taking such remarks at face value (with good reason, since Tristram also writes at the whim of situational and physiological contingencies), but Sterne did happen to tell a correspondent “that my pen governs me—not me my pen.”11 It is therefore quite possible that at least parts of the novel occurred to him in the heat of the moment. If we decide to trust these statements, then the method they collectively outline has a certain resemblance to associationism. What defines

Tristram’s itinerary is not a well charted roadmap, but the next idea on the page, which triggers the next, which triggers the next. This is precisely what Tristram seems to have in mind when he compares his progress to that of a muleteer driving on his mule: “If he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly” (I.14.41). This analogy occurs in Book I, and Tristram presciently predicts that this will be the fate of his entire oeuvre.

In spite of its apparent plausibility, however, the assumption that Tristram’s digressions are triggered by Lockean associations faces difficulties that may well be insuperable. It came under severe attack around the 1950s, and its more recent iterations are by no means immune to all the objections then raised.12 The main problem, as I see it, is

11 As examples of the other factors guiding Tristram’s writing, see IX, xiii, 763 and 764; and IX, xxiv, 779. For McKillop, see The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956), 185. For Sterne’s remark, see Letters, I, 394.

12 See, for instance, Arthur Cash’s retort in ““The Lockean Psychology of Tristram Shandy,” ELH, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1955). Finding that Sterne was more interested in Locke’s notion of the “train of ideas” than in his theory of association, Cash contends that transitions along associationist lines, while certainly present in Tristram

149 that Lockean associationism is profoundly unlike Tristram’s ad hoc improvisations. The crucial difference between the two processes is the factor triggering the mind’s next turn.

The ramblings of Tristram’s muleteer are triggered by the novelty of his sense impressions, while for Locke novel impressions carry no associations, and thus lead to no associationist transitions. Lockean associations are a function of precedents, of “Intellectual Habits” ingrained in the mind. Locke offers this among many illuminating examples: “A Friend of mine knew one perfectly cured of Madness by a very harsh and offensive Operation ...

[W]hatever Gratitude and Reason suggested to him, he could never bear the sight of the

Operator: That Image brought back with it the Idea of that Agony which he suffer’d from his

Hands” (ECHU 2.33.14, 399). The image of the surgeon would have been inconsequential without the painful precedent, and it is their established association in the man’s mind that promotes the transition from image to the idea of agony. The implication for our reading of

Tristram Shandy is clear: Tristram’s narrative is built on Lockean associationism only if its segments can be shown to succeed each other via unnatural connections established by habit in Tristram’s mind.

Very few transitions in Tristram Shandy have the potential to meet this criterion. A few digressions may be Lockean, but the vast majority follow a different logic. We can only take the whole narrative to be associationist if we detach that term from Locke’s usage and look for a more capacious conception of association. In this spirit, John Traugott concedes that “digressions (and there is nothing else in the book) must be brought on by some association of ideas — doubtless they are, since to connect ideas is to associate them, — but it is not Locke’s ‘association of ideas.’”13 I agree, but it is nonetheless possible to rule out

Shandy, are at most a minor narrative device. “Locke’s association principle,” Cash argues, “is not a principle by which ideas are synthesized; it cannot, therefore, lead to new ideas or new relationships among ideas” (127).

13 John Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), 45.

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Locke and yet insist that associationism informs Tristram Shandy in a less deflationary sense than Traugott allows. All one needs is to look for empiricist psychologies more capable of accounting for Tristram’s vagaries. Critics receptive to this possibility have accordingly turned to the fuller theories of association developed by Hume and Hartley, proposing readings that have the same cognitivist implications as the Lockean alternative, without facing the same objections.

While well-meaning, however, these readings may also be overzealous. The growing rejection of Lockean associationism in the 1950s left a vacuum that later critics felt urged to fill, but it is not clear that it had to filled. Here is why. Associationism was first suggested as a key to Tristram Shandy by Sterne’s biographer Wilbur Cross in 1904.14 Cross was relying on a statement dubiously attributed to Sterne by a nineteenth-century French source.15

“Anyone ... acquainted with Locke,” Cross translates, “might discover the philosopher’s directing hand ‘in all [of Sterne’s] pages, in all his lines, in all his expressions.’”16 Trusting the hint, Cross conjectured that “there is in Tristram Shandy a design of which the author was aware” and that its guiding thread was Locke’s association of ideas.17 Cross does not pursue this hypothesis any further, but his passing suggestion and the third-hand anecdote

14 Cross makes this point in The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne (New York, 1904), Vol. II, xxvi: “Locke’s doctrine of associated ideas certainly impressed Sterne greatly; and upon it he organized his whole work, lending to madness a kind of method.”

15 The source is Dominique-Joseph Garat’s M moires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard (Paris: A. Belin, 1820), vol. 2, 149. According to Garat, Sterne once told the young Jean Baptist Suard (a member of d’Holbach’s circle) that his originality was partly due to “l’étude de Locke, qu’il avait faite au sortir de l’enfance, et qu’il refit toute sa vie; à cette philosophie que ceux qui savent la reconnaître où elle est, et où elle dirige tout secrètement, retrouvent et sentent dans toutes les pages, dans toutes les lignes, dans le choix de toutes les expressions.” Carlo Ginzburg characterizes Garat’s rather hyperbolic account as “dubious,” “peripheral” and “unreliable, being so indirect.” Ginzburg, "A Search for Origins: Rereading Tristram Shandy," No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia, 2000), 49. I think Ginzburg is right to do so.

16 I quote from Cross’s The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, 3r ed. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1929, reissued 1967), 301. The same passage appears, without citation, in Cross’s “Laurence Sterne in the Twentieth Century,” The Yale Review, XV (1925), 106.

17 Wilbur Cross, “Laurence Sterne in the Twentieth Century,” The Yale Review, XV (1925), 106. Cross makes the same point in Complete Works, Vol. II, xxvi.

151 endorsing it made their way into a number of seminal works that would cast a long shadow over Sterne scholarship.18 Together, these works established the assumptions that the whole of Tristram Shandy is organized around Locke’s philosophy, and that if associationism proved a bad fit, then other Lockean principles would have to do.19 These assumptions were sufficiently entrenched by the 1950s for a critic to describe them as “one of the unexamined dogmas in literary history.”20

In time, even those readers who denied Locke’s hold on the novel still retained the belief that a single organizing principle secretly informed its every page. Chinmoy Banerjee, for example, rejects the standard Lockean readings, claiming that Tristram’s mind “follows neither the aberrant pattern of Locke’s association nor his normal pattern of rational connection.”21 But instead of taking this as a sign that the old assumptions were mistaken — that no philosophical device unifies the novel after all — Banerjee insists that there is an order to Tristram’s mind. Only it is “an order indicated by traditional associationist psychology lately developed by Hume” (696). While dismissing Locke, Banerjee still feels the need to explain Tristram’s digressions on the principles of association. But what the genealogy above reveals is that the associationist reading was never a well established hypothesis that one ought to save should Locke fail the role. Instead, it was an attempt to clarify the nature of Locke’s presumed omnipresence in the book. One would therefore expect that critics who rejected Locke’s omnipresence would also discard the associationist

18 They include Kenneth MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), especially pp. 131-5; James Aiken Work, “Introduction” to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1940), xlix; and D.W. Jefferson, “Tradition of Learned Wit,” 244.

19 Cash accordingly favored the “train of ideas,” while Tuveson turned to Locke’s call for an epistemic reform and Traugott focused on Locke’s philosophy of language.

20 D.R. Elloway, “Locke’s Ideas in Tristram Shandy,” Essays in Criticism, 6 (1956), 329.

21 Chinmoy Banerjee, “Tristram Shandy and the Association of Ideas,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter 1974), 696.

152 readings attendant on it. This is not what happened, and Humean and Hartleian readings eventually took over the field.

Of course, the fact that the associationist view took root without sufficient warrant does not mean that it is invalid. The new readings deserve to be judged on their own merits, and Banerjee certainly succeeds at demonstrating the conformity of Tristram’s thought patterns to Hume’s associationism. As he points out, “there is, usually, under the almost incomprehensible randomness of Tristram’s narrative a logic of associations operating according to the principles of resemblance, contiguity, and causality,” which are central features of Hume’s associationism with no equivalent in Locke (699). The correlations identified by Banerjee are certainly real. But they do little to show that Sterne was indeed drawing on Hume’s psychology. For Hume, the three principles of resemblance, contiguity, and causality constitute the three “natural relations” between ideas, and they exhaust “the associating qualit[ies], by which one idea naturally introduces another.”22 Any two ideas in succession, whether in real or in fictional minds, are almost inevitably connected by one of these three principles.23 It would be hard to find a narrative that does not instantiate them, and Tristram Shandy is quite unexceptional in this regard.

Now, Banerjee’s position is not simply that Tristram’s thoughts can be described in

Hume’s lexicon, but that Tristram Shandy “seems to illustrate and use Hume’s notions on association in many ways” (699; my emphasis). Such a claim cannot be established on the basis of correlations alone.24 But revisionists like Banerjee unfortunately lack a crucial

22 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford, 2000, 1.1.4.1

23 I say “almost” because Hume also leaves room for the imagination to join ideas that have no natural relation to each other. Such ideas will still stand in what Hume calls a “philosophical relation” to each other, but philosophical relations are analytical tools, not psychological processes. See THN, 1.1.4.1 and 1.1.5.1.

24 The same applies to Jonathan Lamb’s claim that “there are few situations in Sterne’s two novels that don’t develop a reciprocal play of sensations and ideas corresponding either to Hartley’s scheme of vibrations or Hume’s of gravitational pull.” Such conformity, while real, would be present in any narrative. It does not suffice

153 advantage enjoyed by their Lockean opponents. Whereas Sterne cites, paraphrases, and parodies Locke on a number of occasions, there is little indication that he was familiar with later theories of association, and still less that he used them. Jonathan Lamb, who reads both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through the lens of Hartleian associationism, very candidly concedes that “[t]here is no direct evidence in the form of quotation, theft, or verbal echo to connect Sterne with Hartley ... So there is nothing but inference to go on.”25 In the end, the correlations between Tristram’s way of thinking and the categories of associationism may simply reflect the fact that Sterne was representing the same set of human behaviors that the empiricists were analyzing and labeling.

Most of Tristram’s digressions can be shown to be more than mere illustrations of empiricist psychology. Some are comic products of chance, such as the “long digression I was accidentally led into ... when my aunt Dinah and the coachman came a-across us, and led us a vagary some millions of miles into the very heart of the planetary system” (80).

Others are displays of rhetorical freedom following upon the tradition of wit, such as

Tristram’s frequent shifts into dissertative mode or his occasional resumption of narrative threads that were lying abandoned. While one could certainly file these transitions under the categories of resemblance, contiguity or causality, they lack the most interesting feature of associationism: they are not involuntary mental glides triggered by past conditioning. For most of the novel, Tristram is very much in control of his chaos. He capitalizes on his early promise that there is wisdom in his methods, forcing readers to humor him in the faint hopes that his detours will eventually lead them home. The following exchange between

Walter and Toby nicely illustrates the variety of Tristram’s methods:

to show that “the subtlest redoublings of Shandean wit and wordplay are owing to [Hartley and Hume’s basic propositions].” Jonathan Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 65.

25 Jonathan Lamb, “Language and Hartleian Associationism in A Sentimental Journey,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), 299, n. 9.

154

Every thing in this world, continued my father (filling a fresh pipe)---every thing in this world, my dear brother Toby, has two handles;--Not always, quoth my uncle Toby.---At least, replied my father, every one has two hands,---which comes to the same thing.----Now, if a man was to sit down coolly, and consider within himself the make, the shape, the construction, come-at-ability, and convenience of all the parts which constitute the whole of that animal, called Woman, and compare them analogically—I never understood rightly the meaning of that word,---quoth my uncle Toby.–—ANALOGY, replied my father, is the certain relation and agreement, which different—Here a devil of a rap at the door snapped my father's definition (like his tobacco-pipe) in two. (II.7.118)

This dialogue, like Tristram’s account of his life and opinions, is shot through with interruptions and parenthetical remarks that stretch it to inordinate proportions, for the greater good of comedy. The devices at play are many, but none of them is necessarily associationist. Walter’s verbosity pays homage to Rabelais, and his false starts to A Tale of a

Tub; Toby’s question derails the lecture for the sake of a trifle, highlighting his naivety and

Walter’s will-to-rant; the rap at the door cuts Walter short not by evoking some association of ideas, but by theatrically startling him.

There are just as many devices behind the broader movement of Tristram Shandy, which is marked by the same delight in dilatoriness characteristic of the passage above.

Consider the most celebrated digression in the whole novel, Toby’s interrupted line in I.21:

“I think...” — and there he stops. The rest of the sentence, says Tristram, is of such consequence that further acquaintance with Toby’s character is in order before we can properly appreciate it. He accordingly leads us on for forty pages, inflating our expectations by postponement and then deflating them all of a sudden when Toby proceeds: “I think ... it would not be amiss, brother, if we rung the bell” (II.6.114). The effect would be lost without the long dance of digressions within digressions, and the same may be said of the novel’s very final joke: “L--d! said my mother, what is all this story about?——A COCK and a BULL,

155 said Yorick——And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard” (IX.33.809). Yorick’s line is doing double duty here. It refers to the story of Walter’s bull, but also brings to a cynical close nine volumes of studied tergiversation.

This brief overview does not capture the full variety of digressive devices in

Tristram’s toolbox, but it goes to show that Tristram’s methods have origins and functions that transcend the scope of a psychological experiment. Readings of Tristram Shandy predicated on Locke’s associationism smooth over this plurality, while readings based on later forms of associationism still rest on scant evidence. It would be rash to conclude that

Hume or Hartley did not influence Sterne, but the associationist hypothesis needs to be placed on firmer grounds to warrant further conclusions about Sterne’s theory of fiction.

The idea that the novel can contribute to empiricist psychology by running a model of the mind may not have occurred to Sterne; if it did, he did not flesh it out into an argument about the philosophical possibilities of prose fiction, nor did he consider the objections such a position might invite.26

2. Tristram Shandy as a philosophical enquiry

We can move now to a second version of propositionalism, one implicit in philosophical readings of Tristram Shandy that focus on the novel’s themes rather than on Tristram’s thought patterns. As already noted, critics who shifted their lenses away from Locke’s theory of association proposed a variety of interpretations connecting the novel to other strands in empiricism, both in Locke and elsewhere. Most famously, John Traugott argued

26 Hume offers a possible objection when he notes that one cannot replicate the operations of the mind for the purposes of experimentation: “When I am at a loss to know the effects of one body upon another in any situation, I need only put them in that situation, and observe what results from it. But should I endeavour to clear up after the same manner any doubt in moral philosophy, by placing myself in the same case with that which I consider, ’tis evident this reflection and premeditation would so disturb the operation of my natural principles, as must render it impossible to form any just conclusion from the phaenomenon” (THN “Introduction,” 10).

156 that Sterne is developing a “philosophical rhetoric” to question Locke’s views on communication. The opinions of Tristram Shandy, for Traugott, “bespeak a philosophy,” and through them “Sterne, the rhetorician, has written in truth a treatise on communication.”27

A number of critics followed Traugott down this road, while others took to different tracks, examining among other things Sterne’s engagement with post-Lockean notions of madness or with the long debate on skepticism.28 For the most part, I find that these readings stand on much firmer ground than the associationist interpretation. Which of them comes closest to capturing Sterne’s own understanding of his methods and goals is one of the hardest questions for modern readers of Tristram Shandy, but fortunately it is not a question we need to engage with here. My purpose in this section is to discuss two working assumptions shared by most philosophical readings of the novel, assumptions that carry important implications for Sterne’s attitude towards literary cognitivism. Philosophical interpretations of the novel along the lines proposed by Traugott, Bernard Harrison, Michael DePorte, or

Christina Lupton rely implicitly or explicitly on two presuppositions: first, that we can attribute to Sterne not only many of Tristram’s explicit statements, but also statements that are implicit in the verbal and visual features of the novel; and, second, that the statements in question derive at least some of their force from the novel’s fictional elements, which highlight philosophically relevant aspects of reality. These two assumptions form the

27 Sterne’s position, for Traugott, is that communication does not simply depend, as Locke had assumed, on the relationship between words and ideas, but also on a “context of human situations.” Tristram Shandy’s World, xv, 150.

28 For readings that share thematic interests with Traugott’s, see Wolfgang Iser, Tristram Shandy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Bernard Harrison, “The Defence of Wit: Sterne, Locke, and the Particular,” in Inconvenient Fictions. Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 71-97. Michael DePorte reads the novel in the context of the eighteenth-century discourse on madness in Nightmares and Hobbyhorses. Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino: The Huntington Library), 1974. Readings that set Sterne in the context of skepticism include J.T. Parnell, “Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998), 14- 158; Fred Parker, Scepticism and Literature. An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (Oxford: OUP, 2003); and Christina Lupton, “Tristram Shandy, David Hume, and Epistemological Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1 (April 2003), 98-115.

157 backbone of a version of propositionalism rather similar to Fielding’s. They imply that a work of fiction can yield claims about an extra-textual world and support them via analogy with the empirical realm. One should then ask whether Tristram Shandy gives warrant to these two assumptions, and, supposing that it does, whether Sterne assessed them on a reflective level as the basis of a cognitivist program.

In response to the first question, I find that Tristram Shandy gives ample justification for these two assumptions. But there are also good reasons to think otherwise, and I should like to address them briefly. As I noted above, Sterne’s rhetoric in Tristram Shandy lacks the tutorial quality of Fielding’s. The voice we hear when Tristram shifts gears from showing to telling (and he is almost always telling) is not that of a wise narrator clarifying theses on literature or socioethics. Instead, it is the voice of a fully developed persona whose overlap with its creator is notoriously difficult to establish, whose coherence over time is just as uncertain, and whose portrayal of other characters is anything but impartial. One may wonder, then, whether it is safe to attribute to Sterne any of the implicit and explicit propositions floating around in the narrative. In this spirit, Richard Lanham preferred to view Tristram Shandy as “one of those seminal books about nothing in particular, a rhetorical gesture for fame. The reader’s central role in the novel is to buy it.”29 And then there is a second problem, having to do with the relationship between the world of the novel and that of the reader. Martin Battestin notes that Tristram Shandy is “the objectification in art of the new subjectivism implicit in An Essay concerning Human

Understanding,”30 a subjectivism which implies that everyone’s reality is unique to themselves. A novel built on such a premise, Battestin warns, is less an illuminating representation of the vast world we all inhabit than a portrayal of the narrator’s solipsistic

29 Richard A. Lanham, Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 127.

30 Martin Battestin, “Sterne: The Poetics of Sensibility.” In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), p. 63.

158 island. Tristram’s life “is no allegory because there is no longer any common system of belief, no ‘higher’ reality beyond itself, to which it can relate” (62). If this is true, then the fictional elements of Tristram Shandy are projections of the narrator’s unique subjectivity rather than depictions of an empirical world available to collective scrutiny.

These are serious but not insurmountable problems. Lanham’s reticence to regard

Tristram Shandy as cryptography for Sterne’s views is well advised; but there is no need to conclude that philosophy and Tristram Shandy are non-overlapping magisteria.31 Few critics would dispute that we can often tell where Sterne stands in relation to the views thematized in the novel, particularly when they have parallels in his sermons and personal correspondence. (As examples, I believe we can say quite confidently that Sterne endorses the novel’s negative portrayal of Roman Catholicism, Tristram’s defense of wit, and — most obviously — Yorick’s views on the abuses of conscience.) Neither is there any question that

Sterne speaks to us as much through implication as by direct assertion; inference, after all, is the task that irony imposes on its readers.32 Battestin, on the other hand, is probably exaggerating the solipsistic implications of Locke’s Essay.33 The central figures at Shandy

Hall — so much more realistic than the usual fare of the satirist — are studies in character that shed light on the life we all lead, even if it is only by stressing the importance of mutual tolerance and of fortitude when the worst has come. In reading between Tristram’s lines on the lookout for Sterne’s views, or in considering how the novel supports those views via empiricist mimesis, we may be doing no more than what Sterne wanted us to.

As the foregoing chapters have shown, however, these principles were easy to

31 The most radical statement of this view is made by Duke Maskell in “Locke and Sterne, or Can Philosophy Influence Literature?”, Essays in Criticism 23 (1973), 22-40.

32 Melvyn New criticizes the view that Sterne’s position is undecidable in “Sterne and the Narrative of Determinateness,” in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998).

33 The fear of Lockean solipsism is lucidly dispelled by D.R. Elloway in “Locke’s Ideas in Tristram Shandy,” Essays in Criticism, 6 (1956), 329.

159 follow in practice, but hard to defend in theory. One could not take for granted that novels are equipped to make empirical claims, or that their fictional apparatus carries evidentiary weight in favor of those claims. We must move then to the second question and ask whether

Tristram Shandy examines these principles on a reflective level. The short answer is that it does. Implicit assertion and empiricist mimesis are topics on which Tristram fortunately has a lot to say, and we can finally listen to him.

“I write to instruct” (98): this is a recurrent pledge with Tristram Shandy, gentleman. He often presents himself as a promoter of knowledge, describing other philosophers as “my fellow-labourers and associates in this great harvest of our learning, now ripening before our eyes” (72). It is true, as Judith Hawley alerts, that “Tristram’s confidence in the ripeness of learning is clearly misplaced, and his classification of knowledge is at best eccentric.”34 The speculative branches of knowledge Tristram celebrates feature in the novel mostly as grist for Sterne’s satirical mill. But Tristram is not always this naive. His snide remarks at his father’s “little sceptical notions” (60) show that he is often in on the joke, and can tell real knowledge from mere drivel. It is possible, with due caution, to take Tristram’s assertion that he is “writing this book for the edification of the world” (51) as expressing a similar commitment on Sterne’s part.35 The problem, however, is that Tristram has a wavering attitude towards his role as a teacher, and every now and then casts ridicule both on his pedagogic agenda and on the reader who decides to take him at his word.

As is well known, Tristram makes a point of scolding readers who get his fable but

34 Judith Hawley, “Tristram Shandy, wit, and Enlightenment knowledge,” The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 34-5.

35 Other remarks along the same lines include: “I sat down to write my life for the amusement of the world, and my opinions for its instruction” (III.28.253); and “I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good-humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good—/—And all your heads too,—provided you understand it” (VI.17.525).

160 miss his moral; but he also imposes on them interpretive duties in whose impossibility he rejoices. One such duty involves the first of the two principles under consideration — the inference of authorial claims from the novel’s text and visual features. Inferring propositions, Tristram insists, is the task of all careful interpreters, and he accordingly reproaches a female reader who neglects her call: “How could you, Madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter? I told you in it, That my mother was not a papist.–––Papist! You told me no such thing, Sir. Madam, I beg leave to repeat it over again, That I told you as plain, at least, as words, by direct inference, could tell you such a thing” (I.20.64). Tristram enjoins the lady to re-read the chapter and draw the inference, but he knows that she will fail. (The male reader who stands silently by has also failed, and Tristram knows that too.)

Tristram’s joke runs precisely on foiling the reader’s conjectures, and at the close of Book I he can no longer hold back his triumph: “I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has never yet been able to guess at any thing” (I.25.89). He spurs us to go beyond the plain words on the page, but just so that he can watch us flounder.

While the episode above is basically a trap for the reader, Tristram nonetheless construes it as a serious reflection on contemporary reading practices. He schooled the female reader, we learn,

to rebuke a vicious taste, which has crept into thousands besides herself,—of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them—The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along. (I, xx, 65)

As examples of works of “deep erudition and knowledge” deserving of careful exegesis,

Tristram names the same type of popular chapbook Fielding had already satirized (65). The reader who decides to “draw curious conclusions” from “the history of Parismus and

Parismenus, or ... the Seven Champions of England” is likely to gain as much erudition and

161 knowledge as Walter does by poring over the volumes of Skawkenbergius. In short, while

Tristram’s admonition to “Madam” resembles a cognitivist manifesto, the context frames it instead as a red herring.

This, of course, does not mean that we should ignore Tristram’s advice and read

Tristram Shandy “straight forwards.” My point, instead, is that the practice of propositional inference features in the novel mostly as a comic motif, associated not with careful reading, but with overinterpretation. Tristram seduces us into its dangers by presenting his whole narrative as brimming with recondite knowledge, accessible only to the initiate. This is nowhere more visible than in his announcement of the marbled page: “Without much reading, by which your reverence knows I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one” (III.26.268). One can certainly interpret the black and the marbled pages in ways that are consonant with the work they emblematize; but Tristram is also trading on their ostensible inexhaustibleness.

Once we turn the marbled leaf we find Walter practicing the very same type of “mystical” reading Tristram is luring us into, and the result is all pain and no gain.36 Walter is laboring over Erasmus, “studying every word and every syllable of it thro’ and thro’ in its most strict and literal interpretation,” in the conviction that “learned men ... don’t write dialogues upon long noses for nothing” (III.37.271). As the book refuses to yield its secrets, Walter decides to sink deeper: “I’ll study the mystick and the allegorick sense” (ibid). He tackles Erasmus as

Swift’s Peter tackled the Bible: by taking out his penknife and trying “experiments upon the

36 Tristram generally uses the word “mystical” in a derogatory way. When Phutatorius concludes that Yorick threw a chestnut into his breeches out of dislike for one of his treatises, Tristram describes such interpretation as the “mystical meaning in Yorick’s prank” (384). Such an interpretation, Tristram goes on to note, “was as groundless as the dreams of philosophy” (385).

162 sentence, to see if he could not scratch some better sense into it” (III.37.272).

The attempt to construe the words on the page into unstated messages confronts us here at its most literal, and all we can do is sit back and laugh with Tristram. But a few pages later we find ourselves suddenly transferred into Walter’s shoes. Slawkenbergius’s “Tale” is very much a series of dialogues upon long noses, which Tristram swears were not written for nothing. “Philosophy,” he grants, “is not built upon tales”; but Slawkenbergius’s stories are more than just that. “[T]hey are to be looked upon by the learned as a detail of so many independent facts, all of them turning round somehow or other upon the main hinges of his subject, and added to his work as so many illustrations upon the doctrines of noses”

(III.42.286). Walter bites the bait, but we know better than to reach for our penknives. The secret meaning of the doctrine of noses is easy to infer, despite Tristram’s disclaimer that by a nose he means just a nose.

In describing fictional narratives as a “detail” of facts that support a doctrine, the introduction to Slawkenbergius’ Tale connects the mockery of inferential practices to the second assumption informing philosophical readings of Tristram Shandy: the assumption that the imaginary world of a novel can lend support to its propositional content. By the model of virtual witnessing, this would mean that the events and characters in the narrative can stand in for the reality they represent. This principle is extensively thematized in

Tristram Shandy, especially in the “Preface” that sits halfway through Book III. Tristram professes to “hate set dissertations” and to prefer images to words. It is silly, he claims, “to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your reader’s conception.” After all, “if you had looked about, you might have seen something standing, or hanging up, which would have cleared the point at once” (III.Preface.235). What Tristram is about to do is draw our attention to the furniture in his room, and then ask us to step closer and take a look, “for the sake of an

163 experiment.” His goal is to show that wit and judgment are “indubitably both made and fitted to go together,” like the two knobs at the back of his chair. And he demonstrates his thesis by taking off one of the knobs, and then asking: “[D]id you ever see in the whole course of your lives such a ridiculous business as this has made of it? ... [D]o,—pray, get off your seats, only to take a view of it” (III.Preface.236). Here is an empirical experiment if ever there was one, except that Tristram pretends to ignore that his chair is beyond the reach of our senses. Once more, the joke is on us if we get up to take a look.

A more extensive example of the same ploy occurs earlier in the “Preface.”

Tristram’s thesis this time is that wit and judgment come in limited amounts into the world,

“the height of our wit and the depth of our judgment [being] exactly proportioned to the length and breadth or our necessities” (231-2). As evidence of this, he takes his readers on an imaginary trip from Lapland to Tartary, at the end of which he concludes: “Now throughout this long tour which I have led you, you observe the good people are better off by far, than in the polar countries which we have just left:––for if you hold your hand over your eyes, and look very attentively, you may perceive some small glimmerings (as it were) of wit, with a comfortable provision of good plain houshold judgment” (III.Preface.231). The reader’s job is to keep their eyes open and collect evidence, so that “by these observations” and by means of “dialectick induction” they may come to endorse Tristram’s hypothesis.37

The imaginary trip through northern Eurasia is thus supposed to count as real fieldwork, as a quest for empirical data that will confirm, through induction, a proposition about our intellectual faculties. Nothing is proven, of course. By pointing to human specimens that the reader cannot see while treating them as empirical evidence, Sterne may be aping a common eighteenth-century practice — that of settling debates in moral and political

37 Tristram takes the term “dialectick induction” from Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. The Florida Notes glosses it as meaning induction by complete enumeration (246).

164 philosophy by citing evidence from China to Peru, culled from unreliable travel narratives.

More broadly, however, he is mocking the notion, so essential to virtual witnessing, that exposure to the worlds of fiction is a proper replacement for the direct observation of life.

Rather than equating these two ontological realms, Tristram’s argument highlights the impassable gulf between them.

The passages just examined constitute Tristram’s most sustained reflections on propositional inference and empiricist mimesis. It is significant that Sterne treats these principles as mere occasions for a jeu d’esprit, without bothering to justify them or the type of cognitivism they potentially underwrite. It is well to remember that Sterne endorses

Tristram’s defense of wit, for all its avowed absurdity. (We know that he endorses it because he defends wit on similar grounds in one of his sermons.38) But Sterne’s authorial stance is hard to infer from the text itself, nor is it clear how the imaginary elements of the

“Preface” or of Tristram Shandy as a whole bear on his position, or on any of the other philosophical theses that populate the novel. If the Shandy family is supposed to illuminate truths about English provincial life or the limitations of the human intellect, it is not clear why their imaginary dealings should carry more weight than Tristram’s pointless tour of

Eurasia. This is not to say that Sterne denies that narratives can imply philosophical propositions or substantiate them through empiricist mimesis; it simply means that he did not feel urged to defend these principles.

Such theoretical insouciance would be in keeping with Sterne’s overall attitude. As an account of literary knowledge, propositionalism holds the most appeal for those writers who use literature to deliver a pointed doctrine. Sterne is among the most cerebral of novelists, but persuasion was never his priority. As he once told Garrick with regard to certain sententious French tragedies, “I cannot bear preaching—I fancy I got a surfeit of it in

38 For Sterne’s own defense of wit, see Sermon 18, “The Levite and the Concubine.” Sermons, 175.

165 my younger days” (I, 244). Or, as the Florida editors felicitously put it, “Shandeism might well be defined ... as the ability to dance away from disputatious encounters” (Letters, I,

246). Sterne danced away with aplomb. A major difference between him and Fielding is that it is always easier to tell on what side of the fence Fielding stands. Sterne, like Austen, is at home with ambiguity, and often leaves his personal views deliberately unstressed. Like

Tristram, he was too aware of the fallibility of human judgment to be dogmatic:

[S]o often has my judgment deceived me in my life, that I always suspect it, right or wrong,—at least I am seldom hot upon cold subjects. For all this, I reverence truth as much as any body ... But I hate disputes,—and therefore (bating religious points, or such as touch society) I would almost subscribe to any thing which does not choak me in the first passage, rather than be drawn into one. (V.11.439)

Tristram Shandy has all the marks of such complaisance. Sterne can be firm on topics such as the abuses of the Inquisition and the simple truths of Christianity, but for the most part he shows remarkable willingness to let others be, and, within proper limits, to make light of his own values. His attitude towards inference and empiricist mimesis is just one case in point.

Donald D. Wehrs pointedly notes that Sterne’s novels, unlike Richardson’s or

Fielding’s, are not planned to lead inductively to a set of predefined messages. Sterne works instead “by offering multiple inductive possibilities, proliferating connotations, and thus dramatizing the reader’s role (perhaps guilty, lazy, presumptuous) in manufacturing a form of coherence” (135). This seems right to me, even if Sterne sometimes objects to the forms of coherence that readers manufactured. He complains, for instance, that people interpreted

Tristram Shandy in ways “which suits their passions, their ignorance or sensibility. There is so little true feeling in the herd of the world, that I wish I could have got an act of parliament, when the books first appear’d, ‘that none but wise men should look into them’”

(Letters II, 646). Is Sterne implying that all readings are equal but some readings are more

166 equal than others? Maybe. We get a revealing glimpse of his take on this matter in A Political

Romance (1759), an allegory of a church squabble in Yorkshire in which he had been involved. The members of a Political Club are struggling to decipher the “romance” of the title, each of them proposing an interpretive key that reflects their particular turn of mind. A whitesmith eventually declares that “the Right Key, if it could but be found, would be worth the whole Bunch put together.”39 The right key is eventually proposed by one of the members, but none of the others can tell, precisely because the “Romance” is equally compatible with all keys. This may be the case with Tristram Shandy as well. Tristram teases his readers with this enticing suggestion: “Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest,––and has wit in it, and instruction too,––if we can but find it out” (479). If there is indeed a master message to be found among the threads of Tristram Shandy, in the form of a philosophical reading that supplants all others, Sterne was happy to leave it untagged.

Seldom hot upon cold subjects, he felt no pressure to defend his own propositions, let alone the principles of propositionalism.

3. A Sentimental Journey as virtual experience

To move into A Sentimental Journey is to enter a different universe, in which precepts remain hard to find, but where one senses a much stronger didactic purpose. It is a sense that begins in Tristram Shandy, but which depends on an aspect of the novel I have left untouched in the foregoing sections. I am of course speaking of sentimentality. The pedagogic power of the feelings was already apparent to Sterne in the earlier novel. It comes to the fore in the scene where Uncle Toby shows a fly the way out: “Go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?----This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee

39 Laurence Sterne, “A Political Romance.” The Miscellaneous Writings and Sterne’s Subscribers, an Identification List. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. Vol. 9, ed. Melvyn New and W.B. Gerard (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2014), 116.

167 and me” (131). Toby’s kindness leads Tristram to the following reflections:

I was but ten years old when this happened ... The lesson of universal good-will then taught and imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been worn out of my mind: And tho’ I would not depreciate what the study of the Literæ humaniores, at the university, have done for me in that respect, or discredit the other helps of an expensive education bestowed upon me, both at home and abroad since;—yet I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression. (131)

To see a war veteran refraining from killing a fly — and to see it from the recesses of impressionable age — is a formative experience for Tristram. But the learning process has nothing to do with inductive inference. Toby’s actions are not data from which Tristram draws conclusions; they “teach” and “imprint” their lesson in some other way. Maybe,

Tristram conjectures, “the action itself was more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation”; or maybe it was less the action than something about Toby’s expression, some “secret magick” by which “a tone of voice and harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might find a passage to my heart” (131). However it was, the lesson hit home, and it did so in a visceral sense. Tristram admits that the “study of the Literæ humaniores” and his “education ... both at home and abroad” would have been unable to produce the same effect as that one

“accidental impression.” Precepts alone would have fallen flat. One thing is clear: whatever transitioned from Toby to Tristram was not knowledge of the propositional type.

The notion of an unmediated, unreflective moral apprehension is of course integral to sentimental ethics. It informs not only Toby’s address to the fly, but most of Sterne’s incursions into the pathetic, whether in Tristram Shandy or A Sentimental Journey. Critics have long thought that Sterne’s turn to feeling was also a turn away from words and from the verbal problems that worried Locke. But another goal of sentimentalism was to have on

168 readers the effect Toby has on Tristram, and thus extend the bounds of sympathy across the boundary between fiction and real life. The two intellectual traditions most often associated with Sterne’s ethics — midcentury moral philosophy and the benevolist strain of Anglican theology — had long affirmed our ability to sympathetically engage with the joys and woes of imaginary characters. The potential of this view for literary cognitivism is evident. If sympathetic engagement can also be enlightening — if, like Tristram’s communion with

Toby, it carries the force of a lesson — then the reader of sentimental fiction may share in the visceral realizations that traffic between the characters.

This conception of literary pedagogy is qualitatively different from the forms of propositionalism I have considered, but it is nonetheless built on an empiricist foundation.

It was envisioned by no less than Adam Smith himself. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, Smith shared the standard empiricist view that narratives must be factual if they are to provide instruction, as long as “instruction” is taken to denote the transmission of propositional knowledge. But he also conceived of instruction in a different, non-propositional sense, as the development of one’s moral awareness through exercises of the sympathetic imagination. There are limits to what such exercises can achieve, but Smith finds them useful as an antidote to “stoic apathy ... and the metaphysical sophisms by which it is supported.”40 As he points out, “the poets and romance writers, who best paint the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all other private and domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire, Richardson, Marivaux, and Riccoboni, are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus” (242). While Smith places greater trust in the methods of history, he is nonetheless willing to welcome into empiricism a conception of instruction that dispenses with verifiable empirical statements.

And he explicitly acknowledges that this route to knowledge is compatible with literary

40 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1969), 241.

169 representation.

That Sterne gives thematic expression to a moral theory very much like Smith’s is widely accepted by critics. What I want to investigate is whether he recognized and pursued its cognitivist potential. The story of Toby and the fly certainly seems to suggest that he did.

But it is not clear whether Sterne expects the reader to learn the lesson that Tristram claims to have learned. This is the crux of the issue, and as I move now to A Sentimental Journey I want to keep that in view. My discussion will accordingly center on the following set of questions: Does the journey into France and Italy constitute a source of knowledge for

Yorick? If yes, then is the reader supposed to partake in Yorick’s realizations? And does

Sterne have anything to say about how the learning process works, both for Yorick and for the reader? I will be offering positive answers to each question, but the picture, as will be seen, is admittedly complicated.

To the extent that it is about anything, A Sentimental Journey is about the experience of traveling; and traveling may be instructive or otherwise, depending on how one approaches it. Yorick sees little value in the project of running the world on the lookout for new observations. Thinking of the Grand Tour, he concedes that “the poor Traveller, sailing and posting through the politer kingdoms of the globe in pursuit of knowledge and improvements” may indeed find both; “but whether useful knowledge and real improvement, is all a lottery” (249). Travelers of this stripe — whom Yorick dubs

“inquisitive” — are likely to fail in their quest for knowledge, and feature in the novel invariably as objects of derision. Sterne shares Yorick’s view, and elaborates on it in Sermon

20, “The Prodigal Son.” Acknowledging that nature has planted in mankind an urge to travel

“for the purposes of carrying forwards the mind to fresh enquiry and knowledge,” Sterne imagines a youth who sets out on his travels accompanied by a tutor well versed in Greek,

Latin, natural philosophy, and mathematics. He then objects that if the tutor “is a mere man

170 of reading, the unhappy youth will have the tutor to carry,—and not the tutor to carry him.”41 As in Fielding, lack of real-world experience is fatal on the road. But Sterne goes on to imagine, alternatively, that the youth “shall be escorted by one who knows the world, not merely from books—but from his own experience” (193). This tutor, for all his credentials, turns out to be no better than the man of reading: “[I]f he is such as my eyes have seen! some broken Swiss valet de chambre,—some general undertaker, who will perform the journey in so many months ‘IF GOD PERMIT,’—much knowledge will not accrue” (193).

Rather than a worldly-wiser Parson Adams, Sterne’s man of experience is just a well travelled scoundrel, a reminder that, as Johnson puts it, “that observation which is called knowledge of the world, will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good” (The Rambler 4). The Grand Tour and its analogues provide exposure to the world, but little improvement in knowledge or morals.

That said, Sterne also conceives of a different way of traveling. Instead of attending to the outwardly variety of the world, the traveler may focus instead on his or her inwardly responses to new places and people. As Sterne explains in “The Prodigal Son,” traveling also tends, “by shewing us new objects, or old ones in new lights, to reform our judgments—by tasting perpetually the varieties of nature, to know what is good—by observing the address and arts of men, to conceive what is sincere,—and by seeing the difference of so many various humours and manners,—to look into ourselves and form our own” (192). In each case the traveler’s attention transitions from without to within, from the new objects and customs to the impact these have on their judgment, their notions of the good, their conception of sincerity, and their psychological constitution. Traveling becomes a means for self-examination.

41 Laurence Sterne, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. Vol. 4, The Sermons, ed. Melvyn New. Vol. 5, Notes to the Sermons, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 192, 193.

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This of course is the goal of the sentimental traveler, who sets greater store by introspection than observation. Sentimental travelers yearn to feel, but their attention to feeling is also a means of knowing. Yorick, typical of his class, characterizes his own journey as “one of the greatest efforts I had ever made for knowledge” (91). His travels, as he tells the anglophile Count de B***, are “a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE, and those affections which rise out of her, which make us love each other—and the world, better than we do” (111). What allows Yorick to succeed where travelers inquisitive and splenetic fail is his ability to feel. “I pity the man,” he solemnly avows, “who can travel from Dan to

Beersheba, and cry, ’Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers” (37). In saying so, Yorick is not only belaboring the point that traveling brings no profit to disengaged minds. He is also hinting at an additional principle of Sterne’s project in the Journey: the notion that affective experiences can be called forth even in virtual solitude, when external stimuli are minimal: “I declare, said I, clapping my hands cheerily together, that were I in a desert, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections” (ibid).

Here lies the potential not only for Yorick to achieve his epiphanies, but also for the reader to share in them. To show how this works, I will consider a moment in the novel where Yorick makes good on his word, proving that he can indeed evoke affections in solitude. In the section headed “The Captive,” we learn that the Parisian police has been asking for a passport Yorick never thought of applying for. England, he forgot, is at war with

France, and both sides are keeping a close eye on foreigners. At first Yorick is unconcerned about the whole affair. But an encounter with a caged starling at his hotel — a bird that keeps repeating “I can’t get out” (95) — impresses on him the prospect of incarceration.

Finding himself alone in his room, with the Bastille lying out of sight, Yorick decides to probe the depths of that prison and get a foretaste of the loss of freedom. He first calls to

172 mind “the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery” (97). But finding it impossible to sympathize at once with so many sufferers, he dispels their image and starts again: “I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture.” The picture is a harrowing one:

I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of the heart it was which arises from hope deferr’d. Upon looking nearer I saw him pale and feverish ... I heard his chains upon his legs, as he turn’d his body to lay his little stick upon the bundle—He gave a deep sigh—I saw the iron enter into his soul—I burst into tears—I could not sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had draw. (98)

Yorick’s response evinces the reflex mechanism described by Smith: “When we see a stroke aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or arm” (TMS 48). Yet there is no real leg in chains forcing its palpable presence on Yorick. It is his imagination alone that binds the prisoner and inflicts him pain, but it proceeds with such vividness that Yorick recoils as if the scene was real. His reaction, moreover, is accompanied not only by tears, but by a new realization: freedom is precious to him. Not long before this episode, Yorick was making little of the Bastille, trusting that “a tower is but another word for a house you can’t get out of” (94). The grief of his imaginary prisoner shakes him out of his complacency.

One source for this episode is an appeal Sterne received from Ignatius Sancho around the time he was planning the Journey. Sancho, the former slave whose Letters would become a source of inspiration for British abolitionists, wrote to Sterne urging him to sensitize readers to the horrors of slavery.42 “That subject,” he wrote, “handled in your

42 Sterne declared his intention in a letter of July 23, 1766; Sancho’s letter is dated July 21 of the same year (Letters II, 502, 697).

173 striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many—but if only of one—Gracious

God!—what a feast to a benevolent heart! ... Grief (you pathetically observe) is eloquent;— figure to yourself their attitudes;—hear their supplicating addresses!” (Letters, II, 697).

Sancho is seeking to awaken in Sterne a sense of compassion for his brethren, so that

Sterne, in turn, through his literary skills, may impress the same feeling on readers with no direct exposure to those evils. ‘The Captive” treats slavery too briefly to be a satisfactory response to this plea, but it nonetheless thematizes the process of awakening, implicitly endorsing Sancho’s intuition. Yorick, one should remember, is pondering a picture of suffering that is no more real for him than it is for the reader. What leads him there is the starling’s mechanical complaint: “I can’t get out.” Those words pursue Yorick first into his room, and then into his imaginary Bastille. The bird is real for him in a way it isn’t for the reader, but once Yorick crosses the doorway into his room the ontological distinction between him and the reader is cancelled. He is (as the reader may well be) just sitting at his table, with words ringing in his mind. The prisoner in the Bastille now lies equidistant from both, and all they have to figure him forth is the stimulus of certain words — the starling’s “I can’t get out” or the rich verbal fabric of A Sentimental Journey. Words can always be just words, but for the willing imagination they can function as springboards for sympathetic communion. The reader — and this was Sancho’s hope — should be just as able as Yorick to look through the prisoner’s grated door, take his picture, and learn the lesson.

Now, did Sterne really expect that level of imaginative engagement from his readers? Is it even possible to read that way? Well, at least for Yorick it is: “Taking up Much

Ado about Nothing, I transported myself instantly from the chair I sat in to Messina in Sicily, and got so busy with Don Pedro and Benedick and Beatrice, that I thought not of Versailles, the Count, or the Passport” (ASJ 114). While granting that these are “illusions,” Yorick insists that to travel imaginatively to Shakespeare’s Messina or Virgil’s elysian fields “is not walking

174 in a vain shadow — nor does man disquiet himself in vain, by it” (114, 115). Sterne, like

Yorick, had no doubt that readers can and often do commune with the universes they read about. As he told Dr. Eustace, “a true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call’d forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within, so entirely correspond with those excited, ’tis like reading himself and not the book” (Letters II,

645-6). To read A Sentimental Journey in true sentimental fashion would be to approach it as Yorick does Shakespeare, reading ourselves in Paris as he reads himself in Messina. This may resemble Tristram’s anthropological survey of Eurasia, but the premises involved are not the same. Tristram’s tour is plainly absurd, as it offers to replace experience in the sense of direct sensory observation; he takes us sightseeing where there are no sights to see.

Yorick’s tour, by contrast, directs our attention to emotional states that we can access, as they arise inwardly from our sympathetic engagement with imaginary others.

The reader of A Sentimental Journey, as long as he or she is a “true feeler,” should not only feel what Yorick feels, but also learn what he learns. “Lessons of wisdom,” Sterne insists, “have never such power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through the ground-work of a story which engages the passions” (Sermons 186).43 This, of course, is the reformist program of sentimental literature. Sterne’s goal in the Journey, as he explained to Anne James, “was to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do” (Letters II, 639). This may sound a little bit too virtuous, and one must grant that the whole idea reeks of wishful thinking. Sterne, after all, did not ignore the self-centered tendency of the human passions. Could he be serious about a pedagogic project so heavily dependent on the feelings?

43 In fact, Sterne sees the ability for imaginative engagement not only as conducive to philanthropy, but as evidence of a philanthropic disposition: “I think there needs no stronger argument to prove how universally and deeply the seeds of this virtue of compassion are planted in the heart of man, than in the pleasure we take in such representations of it” (Sermons 28-9).

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Critics of A Sentimental Journey have long warned that Sterne was paying lip service to sentimentalism, telling readers what they wanted to hear while secretly laughing at their altruistic pretensions.44 “If A Sentimental Journey is indeed a novel with a lesson,” Tom

Keymer writes, “the lesson may be an unsettling one: that we bear the misfortunes of others with excellent tranquillity.”45 According to these skeptical readings, Yorick was Sterne’s target, not his model for the reader. There are, of course, many passages in the Journey that cast no flattering light on the protagonist, whose virtuous inclinations often die in the bud and who uses his sentimental skills to manipulate others.46 But much of the evidence supporting unsentimental readings of the Journey has to do with attitudes that Sterne shared with Yorick. The bawdiness and last-minute jokes that undercut many of Yorick’s ecstatic moments, and which have been read as disclaimers of sentimentalism, are quite in character with Sterne’s unwillingness to dissociate spirit from flesh and with his aversion to mawkishness, which he staved off with timely injections of comedy.47 Yorick is indeed a satirical target at times, but he is also more than that, providing Sterne with opportunities for irreverent self-scrutiny and an occasional outlet for his personal views.48 Moreover, as

44 Seeing the Journey as a hoax on readers, Rufus Putney notes that “in those letters where [Sterne] boasted of his feelings, he was Yoricking now as he had Shandyed before. Far from wantoning with his emotions, Sterne made fun of the man who did” — the “man” in question being both Yorick and the consenting reader. Rufus Putney, “The Evolution of A Sentimental Journey,” Philological Quarterly (Jan. 1940), 368, 369. See also Ernest Nevin Dilworth, The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne (New York: King's Crown Press, 1948).

45 Thomas Keymer, “A Sentimental Journey and the failure of feeling,” The Cambridge Companion on Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 69.

46 As examples, Yorick tries to emotionally blackmail Monsieur Dessein into selling him a desobligéant for a pittance (18) and spends much of his time in Versailles crafting “plans of dirty address” to ingratiate himself with the nobility (101).

47 For Sterne’s refusal to categorically dissociate mind and body, see John A. Dussinger, “Yorick and the ‘Eternal Fountain of our Feelings,” Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Christopher Fox (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 259-276; and Martin Battestin, “Sterne among the Philosophes: Body and Soul in A Sentimental Journey,” ECF 7, 1 (2013).

48 A full defense of Sterne’s earnestness would require more space than I have here. It would have to address, for instance, Arthur Cash’s argument that Sterne’s ethics were based not on sentiment, but on the rationalism of the Cambridge Platonists. Here I will limit myself to recommend Tim Parnell’s retort, according to which Sterne’s Anglicanism assigned an equally important moral role to the passions. See Arthur Cash, Sterne’s Comedy of Moral

176 will be seen, Sterne’s sentimentalism was by no means oblivious to the darker side of the passions. In fact, he found that the tendency of the feelings to promote self-centeredness is what gives literature its didactic importance.

In two of his sermons — “The Abuses of Conscience” and “Of Self-Knowledge” —

Sterne discusses how our passions cloud our judgment, leading us to tolerate in ourselves what we are quick to condemn in others. He singles out self-love as the main culprit: “We are deceived in judging of ourselves, just as we are in judging of other things, when our passions and inclinations are called in as counsellors” (Sermons.4.32). It is very difficult to

“disengage our judgments” from the “strange bias” induced by self-love. And this is why fiction is so valuable for Sterne. According to him, fiction can momentarily distract the reader from their natural self-centeredness, allowing the sympathetic imagination to do its work while self-love is looking away. This, Sterne explains, is why teachers from the earliest times resorted to “parables, fables, and such sort of indirect applications”: “[T]ho’ they could not conquer the principle of self-love, yet often laid it asleep, or at least over-reached it for a few moments, till a just judgment could be procured” (4.33). As an example of how this process works, Sterne retells the biblical story of Nathan and David (2 Samuel 12). After sleeping with Uriah’s wife, David dispatched Uriah to die in battle. In response, the prophet

Nathan, hoping to awaken David to the gravity of his acts, “comes to him with a fictitious complaint of a cruel act of injustice” (4.34). The story concocted by Nathan mirrors David’s dealing with Uriah, while avoiding the route of direct reproach. David listens to the story with interest, pitying the man who represents Uriah; his indignation is such that he passes a death sentence against the villain who is his fictional counterpart. Sterne finds David’s sentence “highly unequitable,” but praises David’s condemnation of the crime as “truly

Sentiments: The Ethical Dimension of the Journey (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966); and Tim Parnell, “A Story Painted to the Heart? Tristram Shandy and Sentimentalism Reconsidered,” The Shandean 9 (November 1997), 122-135.

177 sincere and well meant” (35). “The story,” Sterne concludes, “though it spoke only of the injustice and oppressive act of another man—yet it pointed to what [David] had lately done himself, with all the circumstances of its aggravation—and withal the whole was so tenderly addressed to the heart and passions, as to kindle at once the utmost horror and indignation”

(35). By disguising David’s actions as a fictional narrative, Nathan manages to obtain a fair hearing for his plea; whereas David, momentarily distracted from considerations of self, comes to see his own deeds as they would appear to another, and accordingly repents.

Fictions, Sterne concludes, facilitate self-examination by provisionally suspending the prejudices and interests that attend on our self-love. It expands our empathetic abilities by allowing us to contemplate our own actions through disinterested eyes — or, to invoke

Adam Smith’s famous figure, through the eyes of an “impartial spectator.” Smith’s position is remarkably close to Sterne’s. When discussing the principles of self-approbation and self- disapprobation, Smith explains that “we can never form any judgment concerning [our sentiments and motives] unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us”; we must “examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it” (TMS 203-

204). This principle of spectatorship is at work not only in Nathan’s strategy, but in A

Sentimental Journey as well. James Chandler recently proposed that the segments of Sterne’s novel constitute “sentimental cases” that enact Smith’s spectatorial model.49 As Chandler nicely puts it, “the very conceit of the sentimental journey is premised on Smith’s elaboration of the notion that sentiment necessarily involves a certain kind of mobility — the capacity to put oneself in the place of another — a mobility made possible by the sympathetic imagination itself” (173-4). Yorick’s sentimental cases — his encounters with

49 James Chandler, An Archeology of Sympathy. The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 160.

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Maria de Moulines, Father Lorenzo, and so many others — are exercises in sympathetic engagement, leading Yorick to an impartial appreciation of his own actions and to a greater respect for the individual worth of other people.

Exactly why we need fiction for this type of realization is a mystery for Sterne. “Is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be wrought upon? or, Is the heart so in love with deceit, that where a true report will not reach it, we must cheat it with a fable, in order to come at truth?” (Sermons 5.186). Whatever the answer, Sterne did his part in cheating us with fables, and I have tried to show that he did so in earnest. Whether or not he approves of Yorick at every turn (and it is safe to say that he doesn’t), he openly acknowledges the pedagogic power of sentimental fiction and offers an appreciative account of its underlying mechanisms. His theory, as I reconstructed it, is quite plausible.

The sights and sounds, the smells and skins that greet Yorick in France are valuable less as fodder for inductive inferences than as triggers for exercises in sympathetic engagement. If the same exercises can be facilitated by words on the page, then the reader of the novel can dispense with the material triggers available to Yorick, and replace actual traveling with the act of reading. This, in turn, would level off the ground between the character who inhabits the novel and the person who reads it. The reader can partake vicariously in Yorick’s experiences, communing with him and, through him, with France and the world. To the extent that these shared experiences reveal what it might be like to be someone else — a prisoner in the Bastille, a monk we have wronged, a traveler mourning for his dead ass, a dwarf in the opera, a young woman driven to madness by a broken heart — they force us to revaluate our attitudes towards these others, to reform our self-judgment, and to expand the perimeter of our sympathies.

But is this the same thing as acquiring knowledge? If yes, then what is it that one has come to know? It is difficult to define the cognitive payoff of this model without resorting to

179 vague tags such as “lessons of wisdom” or “lessons of philanthropy.” Tristram recognizes that whatever it is that he learned from Uncle Toby defies precise statement. Similarly,

Yorick’s insights are seldom translated into maxims. The reason for this is that propositional statement cannot capture the type of awareness Sterne is seeking to promote.

To be told that the loss of freedom or sanity is a terrible thing replaces neither the experience of loss nor that of communing with its victims. Conveying loss through bare statement would be like describing colors to the blind. What Sterne is seeking to make available through literature is the type of foundational experience that fascinated the empiricists — that phenomenal awareness unattainable in the absence of the appropriate impressions, which we now designate by the name of qualia. If we asked Yorick to paraphrase the lessons he learned on the Continent, his answer would have to be: Read my

Journey, and travel with me.

It has become difficult, if not impossible, to read A Sentimental Journey this way. We are far too distant from Sterne’s time and ethos for his episodes to strike us with their original freshness. It may even be that the Journey failed at its didactic mission even in its own day. But the version of literary cognitivism it embodies, and which I have claimed

Sterne endorses, does not depend on how successfully any particular novel brings it to fruition. The theory can stand on its own. One of its most appealing features is that it avoids the vexing issue of reference. Propositionalism needs to show that a description of a fictional world picks out relevant features of the real world, and a major difficulty for its proponents is to explain how imaginary events can have real referents. Sterne’s model eschews this problem by shifting the function of literature from that of describing the world to that of triggering sensations, which are real and potentially illuminating in their own right. It suggests that fiction can complement experience not simply by describing worlds unseen, but by allowing readers to apprehend the familiar world from a different

180 phenomenal angle. Reading a novel becomes itself a form of experience — experience that authors synthesize into writing and readers replicate as they read.

Susanne Langer coined the term “virtual experience” to describe this mechanism, and the concept was adopted by the philosopher Dorothy Walsh in her defense of literary cognitivism. Walsh argues that literature offers virtual experiences that “stand still” to be realized through the act of reading.50 Realization, in turn, conduces to forms of awareness that are genuine instances of knowledge, but it is knowledge that defies paraphrase:

When someone says, with reference to some kind of human experience, “I know what it’s like. I’ve lived through it. I’ve experienced it,” we commonly accept that he does know, even when he cannot convey this knowledge. Knowing beyond saying is acceptable in such a case, not because saying is impossible, but because the only kind of saying that would be relevant is a saying that requires some degree of literary talent. (104)

Literature, on Walsh’s view, has the ability to “say” the unstatable, not because a novel contains more words than a simple statement, but because its words function as a form of notation. They help the reader play out in their minds the experiences that lie static on the page, and it is these experiences, rather than the inert words, that yield knowledge. A similar argument was defended more recently by Martha Nussbaum, who views the

“narrative imagination” as a source of civic-mindedness. Like Smith’s sympathy,

Nussbaum’s narrative imagination allows readers of literature “to see the lives of the different with more than a casual tourist’s interest—with involvement and sympathetic understanding, with anger at our society’s refusals of visibility.”51 These views are strikingly similar to Sterne’s, and Nussbaum’s reliance on Adam Smith’s moral theory suggests that the resemblance is more than a coincidence. The form of cognitivism Sterne envisioned

50 Dorothy Walsh, Literature and Knowledge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 90-91.

51 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 88.

181 prefigures these modern defenses of fiction both in spirit and in its theoretical underpinnings, and it shares with them an interest in nonpropositional forms of knowledge.

What literature promotes, for Sterne, Walsh, and Nussbaum alike, is a type of knowledge that other discourses cannot mobilize so easily, and which may be labeled “experiential” or

“phenomenal” knowledge.

When it comes to the empiricist challenge, the strength of this position is also its vulnerability. On the good side, phenomenal knowledge, because it is grounded in subjective experiences, is also empirical knowledge, and the novel that manages to impart it can claim fidelity to the norms of empiricism. On the flip side, since phenomenal knowledge precludes articulation through words alone, the novel’s cognitive content cannot be paraphrased to convince a skeptic; it can only be accessed through the experience of reading, or, failing that, through its observable effects on the behavior of readers. This is a test anticognitivists have repeatedly asked literature to pass and found it to fail. Critics of

Nussbaum’s brand of humanism objected that if great books really taught us to be civic- minded, then we should find evidence of that in the behavior of humanities professors, and yet we don’t.52 The very same objection was raised in the eighteenth-century by the detractors of feeling, who accused sentimentalism of falling short of its proclaimed goals.

Henry Mackenzie, once an exponent of the mode, complained that sentimentalism promotes

“a separation of conscience from feeling”; its disciples “are contented with talking of virtues which they never practise” and “pay in words what they owe in actions.”53 Interestingly,

52 Responding to Anthony Kronman’s defense of the humanities in Education’s End, Stanley Fish remarked that “It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.” Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?” The New York Times, January 6, 2008. The connection between readerly empathy and altruistic behavior was less wittily but more systematically dismantled by Suzanne Keen in Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

53 The Lounger, 20, June 18, 1785. Reproduced in Novel and Romance 1700-1800. A Documentary Record. Ed. Ioan Williams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 330.

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Sterne himself was willing to grant this point. When reading a tragedy, he lamented, “we realize nothing:–––we sigh–––we wipe away the tear,––and there ends the story of misery, and the moral with it” (Sermons 22.207). We can do better than this in theory, but Sterne acknowledges that this is what we do in practice. Even Yorick’s experiment with the Bastille is deeply self-centered. It leads him to get a passport and avoid the fate of his imaginary prisoner. Meanwhile the starling, the only real prisoner in the whole scene, remains in its cage to the very end of the journey, when Yorick returns to England and sells it to an unnamed lord.

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Conclusion

I

For all its appeal to the feelings, sentimentalism also aimed at teaching wisdom. But wisdom, then as now, is a slippery thing. If the lessons one derives from the sentimental novel cannot be pointed to others — if they find expression in neither words nor deeds — then skeptics have a good reason to remain skeptical. Critics of sentimentalism, including radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft and reformers like Hannah More and William Wilberforce, accused the mode of turning readers away from the world; even a sympathetic critic like

Anna Letitia Barbauld found that reading sentimental novels had only the undesirable effects of real-life interactions: “Young people, by a course of this kind of reading, often acquire something of that apathy and indifference which the experience of real life would have given them, without its advantages.”1 It would seem, then, that the turn to phenomenal knowledge avoids the problems of propositionalism only to run into new troubles. And yet it is here, in the very weakness of sentimentalism, that a completely different solution for the empiricist challenge can be glimpsed for the first time. Those skeptics who remained enthralled by Sterne’s depiction of Maria or Le Fever — and they were legion — had to acknowledge that they did not always read for instruction. As Barbauld confessed later in life, “When I take up a novel, my end and object is entertainment; and as I suspect that to be the case with most readers, I hesitate not to say that entertainment is their legitimate end

1 Anna Letitia Barbauld, “An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations,” in Selected Poetry & Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Craft (Ontario, CA: Broadview, 2002), 206.

184 and object.”2 While all agreed in public that novels had better impart wisdom, many knew in private that immersive reading had a value all its own.

Michael McKeon has taken this to be the defining moment in the novel’s aesthetic emancipation. Just as defenders of the Restoration stage had praised the ability of drama to purge the passions, “thoughtful readers of the novel of sensibility suspected that this might be the function of art with respect to the virtues as well.”3 This, for McKeon, is how the epistemological issues that presided over the novel’s origins were finally laid to rest. As I noted in my introduction, McKeon finds that extreme skepticism was an impossible position for the writer of fictions. Skeptics like Fielding rejected both the idealism of romance and the tricks the naive empiricists used to authenticate their narratives; in doing so, they were empiricists against themselves, blaming the fictions of others while refusing to disguise their own fictions as fact. The way out of this impasse, McKeon proposes, involved a two- step process. At first novelists rediscovered, via Aristotle, “a more generalized and universalized ‘truth of things’” that predated the norms of empiricism — the truth of

Christian parables and of traditional narrative forms, which had always been compatible with fiction (119). By the doctrines of realism that emerged, novels were still accountable to the empirical world, but only on the level of form. Once novelists discovered their independence from empirical truth, they were ready to take the second step and defend their craft on aesthetic grounds alone. McKeon sees this as the signal achievement of the novel of sensibility: “With the triumph of ‘aesthetic truth’ over naive empiricism, literary fictions are able to have value without laying claim to being ‘real,’ and the end of literature has become not teaching goodness but being ‘good’ in itself” (Origins, 126).

The developments McKeon describes provide a resolution for the longstanding

2 Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” in Selected Poetry & Prose, 407.

3 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002 [1987]), 125.

185 conflict between empiricism and the novel, bringing his account of the novel’s epistemological origins to a meaningful close. I should now consider the implications of the preceding chapters for that larger narrative. To begin with, I am in full agreement with two features of McKeon’s argument: that the perceived incompatibility between empiricism and fiction informed the new doctrines of realism; and that the problem of fictional truth was eventually solved (or rather avoided) through a turn to aesthetics. I want to qualify these two claims, however. I will have more to say about the second one in a moment. With regard to the first, it should be clear by now that the early formulations of realism did not take the breach between empiricism and fiction to be unbridgeable. What followed the obsolescence of the claim to historicity was not a simple revival of the old truth of poetry; it was a phase of experimentation in which novelists and critics attempted to demonstrate the novel’s conformity to the epistemology of the day. Narratives, they claimed, can be imaginative and yet empirical, and convey knowledge in precisely the same way as experience or factual reports. We have seen that the arguments they built on these premises took two main forms. Defenders of propositionalism suggested that novels could complement experience as repositories of empirical evidence, warranting inductive inferences about the real world.

The sentimental tradition, by contrast, suggested that sympathetic reading is itself an experience with a cognitive payoff. Neither argument involved the intuition of universal truths; they were based instead on empiricist models of knowledge acquisition — on the process of virtual witnessing implicit in experimental philosophy and empiricist history, or on the workings of the sympathetic imagination as described by Adam Smith and his successors. In thinking of the novel in this way, authors were agreeing that the rules that apply to natural and moral philosophy should equally apply to literature; if the novel follows those rules, then it qualifies as a vehicle for the diffusion of empirical knowledge.

John Bender made precisely this point when he proposed that the early novel

186 claimed a place in the experimental program of the Enlightenment. I obviously concur, but I have also argued that the place was not easily granted. From an eighteenth-century perspective, it was far from obvious that empiricism and the novel were indeed viable partners. The empiricists thought otherwise, and defenders of the novel ran into theoretical difficulties that often proved intractable, which invited renewed attempts at a solution. In fact, the issue persisted long after the crucial decade of the 1740s. After the turn of the century we still find novelists like Burney claiming that a novel, as “a picture of supposed, but natural and probable human existence,” can afford “the lessons of experience, without its tears”;4 and we still encounter the objection that experience cannot be shoehorned into novels in the name of a lesson. In the long run, the difficulty of updating the terms of the old defense of poetry for empiricist times eventually led to the slide into aesthetics described by

McKeon. The advantage of the aesthetic view is that it locates the value of the novel in its relation not to the world, but to itself, which robs the empiricist challenge of its sting. But the solution via aesthetics took longer to gain acceptance than McKeon suggests. For Sterne,

Mackenzie, Wollstonecraft, More, Wilberforce, and even Barbauld, the claim that sentimental novels were read for pleasure rather than instruction was less an aesthetic manifesto than an accusation. At that point, the novel professing no moral purpose could justify itself as a harmless trifle, but not as a work of art.5 That prose fiction could have an intrinsic claim to dignity was a concession that the eighteenth century was not ready to make.

The sentimental novel suffered from its lack of cultural capital. Its turn to subjectivity was no doubt promising, as it prefigured the emergence of what M.H. Abrams

4 Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties. Ed. Margaret Drabble (London: Pandora, 1988), xx.

5 Typical in this regard is the anonymous author of Eugenius (1785), who warns his readers that they should expect nothing like “Hume’s, Robertson’s, or Gibbon’s amusing histories”; but “if you read merely for amusement ... you will here find a light, harmless evening’s repast.” Eugenius: or, Anecdotes of the Golden Vale: An Embellished Narrative of Real Facts (London: J. Dodsley, 1785), ii-iv.

187 has called the expressive theory of art.6 But even the theory’s champions were reluctant to award prose fiction a place on the podium of high forms. Thomas De Quincey, while by no means averse to novels, wryly observed that “only the grander passions of poetry ... can last,” while “all novels, whatever, the best equally with the worst, have faded almost within the generation that produced them.”7 Likewise, Coleridge, himself an avid novel reader, found that novels fill the mind “with a mawkish and morbid sensibility, which is directly hostile to the cultivation, invigoration, and enlargement of the nobler powers of the understanding.”8 The empiricist most open to the expressive powers of poetry — John

Stuart Mill — was equally uncharitable towards the novel: “The minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in poetry,” while “the most idle and frivolous persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative.”9 Not everyone agreed, for sure, but the dissenting voices took time to grow in number. The point is that the aesthetic emancipation of the novel required not only a break with didacticism, but also an elevation in the genre’s cultural standing. By the 1830s, when Mill first wrote down his thoughts on poetry, the novel still labored under the stigma of its lowly origins; the most plausible way to defend it was still the route of the utile et dulce.10

Aesthetic defenses eventually became viable, but long after the heyday of sentimentalism, and as a product of different developments. In time, the aversion to explicit lessons and the recognition that lifelikeness entails ambiguity suggested to writers and

6 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 22.

7 De Quincey, North British Review, IX (1848), 193-4. Quoted in Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England: 1850-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 4.

8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856), 3.

9 John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 344-5.

10 See John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel. The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 (New York: King’s Crown, 1943), 87-100; and Stang, Theory of the Novel, 64-88.

188 readers that novels should lay a different claim to value. As I argued in my discussion of

Northanger Abbey, the conflict between empiricist mimesis and moral clarity forced a choice on novelists; and as more and more of them pursued the former, the idea that realism could be an autonomous goal for the novel gained adherents. Tracing how this happened would require a separate study, one able to do justice to the thorny complexity of nineteenth- century reflections on fiction. But a review of some relevant developments may illustrate the persisting relevance for novel theory of the story I am now bringing to a close. In this spirit, I will look at some revealing turns in the periodical press.

The trade-off between empiricist mimesis and moral clarity was recognized by an anonymous defender of Sir Walter Scott, writing in The Monthly Review in 1820:

The world of reality is such a jumble of cross pursuits, such a mingled chaos of resolves and purposes, of schemes frustrated and designs thwarted by one set of accidents and consummated by another, that, although such circumstances constitute the fund from which [the novelist] has to extract his humour, select his events, and derive his characters, it is obvious that many of these pass off without the elucidation of one religious or moral truth. If this be the case in the original, it must be the same in the copy.11

This reviewer grants that the jumble of a novel, like the jumble of life, may still yield its lessons, but insists that teaching lessons should not be the purpose of the genre. To plan a novel around a thesis would be to compromise the integrity of its representation of life.

Moreover, the review adds, any planned lessons would be pointless. Truths in religion or morality are either evident, in which case no lessons are needed, or contentious, in which case the novel would make no difference: “If the proposition, which the work is intended to elucidate, happen to be disputable, it will remain unelucidated; if plain and self-evident, it would be rejected by the reader as an affront to his acquirements and his understanding”

11 Review of A Letter to the Author of Waverley, in The Monthly Review, vol. 93 (London: J. Porter, 1820), 171.

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(171). If novels are to be worthy of attention, our critic submits, they must be so not as sources of knowledge, but as “sportive delineations of human nature and human occurrences” (170). The sentiment proved congenial. As the reviewer of Catherine Gore’s

Women as They Are declares, “Many writers, in order to avoid the stigma of having indited

[sic] a mere novel, have stuffed the pages of an ordinary love-tale with grave and weighty disquisitions ... We do not scruple to confess that we prefer the mere novel.”12

This is not a full rejection of didacticism, since both reviewers still believe that a lifelike narrative will always convey unplanned lessons, and be more valuable for doing so.

We can nonetheless detect in these statements, and in others like them, the beginnings of a reversal in the roles of realism and instruction. While in the eighteenth century the novel’s empiricist procedures were a means to a moral end, now that end is starting to recede into the background. “We are too didactic,” claimed a critic in Fraser’s in 1851; “thinking too much of the moral, and too little of the story through which it is enforced, we suffer the end to overwhelm the means.”13 Novelists that enforce a doctrine, according to a writer from

The North British Review, “seem to us to pass out of their proper province ... By aiming at two incompatible objects, the author does not succeed in attaining either.”14 The “true object of the novel,” this critic contends, is “to ‘hold the mirror up to life;’ to present varieties of character, serious, humorous, wise, and foolish; acting, speaking, and unfolding themselves in the world; to show their destinies, as influenced by one another and by circumstances, in accordance with the natural course of events, as presented to us by experience” (113). The problem with moral lessons is not that they are inadmissible, but that they may compromise a realism which is now reconceived as the novelist’s proper end.

12 Review of Women as They Are; of, the Manners of the Day, in The Edinburgh Review, vol. 51 (Edinburgh: Longman, 1830), 444.

13 Quoted in Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 69.

14 Review of “Religious Novels.” In The North British Review, American Edition, Vol. XXI (XX on the cover) (New York: Leonard Scott & Co., 1856), 114, 115.

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Novels with a didactic agenda are “in danger of merging their purpose of dramatic representation in the advocacy of a theory” (113).

The question, then, is whether the “dramatic representation” can remain valuable in the absence of an ulterior purpose. Mill had conceded that the function of fiction is to “give a true picture of life,” but he also found that only weak minds would care for the picture.15 But the times had changed. By the 1850s, with the triumph of the Victorian novel, the opposite view could finally stand on firmer ground. Writing in 1857, a contributor to The Saturday

Review acknowledged the existence of “literary purists” who set “the verisimilitude of the characters and the plot” above the novel’s “moral purpose.”16 The reviewer objects that putting things this way amounts to “treating a didactic novel as if it were a literary performance” (736), which is precisely what the “purists” in question were doing. Appealing to “the principle of art pour l’art,” another writer for the same weekly had claimed that “a work of imagination [and the novel in particular] ought to be considered, not as a child’s plaything, but as a great and serious undertaking, to be executed according to the rules of its own art, and not to be mutilated for the sake of pointing any moral which may strike the fancy of the writer.”17 A lengthy and spirited defense of this claim was offered by one

“Monkshood,” author of the “Mingle-Mangle” section of Bentley’s Miscellany.18 Monkshood provides an encyclopedic survey of recent pronouncements on the novel in support of the following points: that the novelist should subordinate purpose to narrative (137), that since novels are pictures of life, to wax didactic would be to “transport fiction out of the region of

15 According to Mill, “The truth of poetry is to pain the human soul truly; the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life.” “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 346.

16 “Religious Novels in Germany.” Originally published in The Saturday Review, and collected in E. Littell’s Living Age (Boston: Littell, Son and Company, 1857), Second Series, Volume XIX, 736.

17 “Light Literature in France,” in The Saturday Review, Vol. IV (London: The Office, 1857), 220.

18 “Of Novels, Historical and Didactic,” in Bentley’s Miscellany, Vol. 46 (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), 42-51 and 135-147.

191 belles lettres” (143), and that “in so far as art is regulated by essential and eternal rules, it is its own justification” (146). Most crucially, Monkshood enlists the aid of Romantic thinkers on behalf of the novel, extending to prose fiction De Quincey’s organicist view of poetry:

“The moral of an epos or a drama should be immanent, not transient ... it should be vitally distributed through the whole organization of the tree, not gathered or secreted into a sort of red berry” (142). Knowledge is now internalized as an animating principle that defies extraction. Like the Iliad and Niagara, a novel needs no portable moral in order to justify its being (139).19

These tendencies culminated in the “era of discussion” triggered by Walter Besant’s lecture and essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884), which affirmed that the “sole end, aim, and purpose [of modern fiction] is to portray humanity and human character,” and that “Fiction is an Art in every way worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting,

Sculpture, Music, and Poetry.”20 In response to Besant, Henry James provided in his own

“Art of Fiction” (1884) one of the most influential statements on the autonomy of form: “The air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel ... If it be not there [other merits] are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life.”21 At this point the priority of form over message has gained a respectable footing, making good on McKeon’s characterization of realism: “Those novelistic categories we now understand as formal and intrinsic — character consistency, unity of design, internal probability — were first elaborated in the express service of an extrinsic moral end to which they now appear

19 The relevant essays by De Quincey are “Letters to a Young Man whose Education Has Been Neglected” (1823), “Milton versus Southey and Landor” (1847), and “The Poetry of Pope” (1848). Monkshood’s figure of the berry is a direct quotation from the second of these essays.

20 Walter Besant and Henry James, The Art of Fiction (Boston: The Algonquin Press, 1884), 4.

21 The Art of Fiction, 66.

192 irrelevant.”22 This applies much more accurately to the late nineteenth century than to the tentative efforts of the 1770s.

This brief and admittedly linear survey simplifies what was in fact a much more twisted process, in which notions of realism were highly contested and the moral purpose of fiction remained essential for many practitioners and critics. It nonetheless illustrates the emergence of a view that would have been foreign to eighteenth-century sensibilities: that the cognitive content of a novel, rather than an end superintending all of its other aspects, is instead a by-product of realism, now reconceived as an end in itself. It should also be apparent that the turn to aesthetics was partly due to the difficulty of fusing the dulce and the utile by means of empiricist mimesis. The reason why novels should refrain from didacticism, according to one of the reviewers already cited, is that “the novelist, who starts with a theory, seems to us almost invariably to give an impersonation of abstractions, not of life.”23 Godwin and Whately would have agreed, but the inductive argument they used to justify the abstractions leaves this reviewer unimpressed: “A writer, who attempts to form a tale of life to illustrate some general principles, is apt to forget that his principle is abstracted from many individual cases of living beings, each acted on by manifold other influences, so that in any one case the action of the principle he means to illustrate may be scarcely perceptible on the whole tenor of the life” (115). This is a familiar concern. The reviewer is articulating in more general terms Hume’s complaint that novels focus on a narrow set of human motivations while effacing others, and as a result mischaracterize the causes determining social behavior and historical change. As contributions to moral and political philosophy, novels are therefore suspect. But any mismatch between fiction and

22 Michael McKeon, “Prose Fiction: Great Britain,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 262.

23 Review of “Religious Novels.” In The North British Review, American Edition, Vol. XXI (XX on the cover) (New York: Leonard Scott & Co., 1856), 114, 115.

193 life ceases to be a problem when the function of realism is reimagined as aesthetic. No empiricist would deny that realism gives fiction a stronger hold on the reader’s mind. In fact, the view that prose fiction should be seen as a source not of knowledge, but of aesthetic experience, would be congenial to Hume. It has the effect of bringing the novel under the division of intellectual labor he had always proposed as natural to empiricism: “The object of eloquence is to persuade, of history to instruct, of poetry to please by means of the passions and the imagination.”24

II

In my opening remarks I characterized this study as a revisionist account of the eighteenth- century novel in its relation to empiricism. The nature of the revision should by now be clear. The tradition I am building upon, but also diverging from, has recognized the impact on prose fiction of the shift towards particularity in early-modern epistemology. As the new regimen gained prominence, old notions of narrative truth came under pressure; in turn, fictionists responded by developing new representational procedures, denying their dependence on the imagination, and falsely professing a literal fidelity to experience. This was the readiest way of defending literary pedagogy at a time when the imagination had fallen into discredit. But things changed around the midcentury, and this is where I part ways with the extant accounts. What changed, for McKeon, is that the doctrines of realism that emerged after the 1740s liberated fiction from the jurisdiction of empiricism; a more recent view suggests that fiction, however explicit, came to be recognized by both novelists and philosophers as integral to the program of empiricism. I have claimed, by contrast, that empiricism was much more resistant to the novel than the second position implies, but that novelists, pace McKeon, nonetheless attempted to overcome such resistance. Their efforts,

24 David Hume, Essays. Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Classics, 1985), 240.

194 as should now be apparent, informed the theory and the practice of prose fiction in very substantial ways: by thinking of fictional narratives as coextensive with or as sources of experience, novelists necessarily made formal choices — between idealized and mixed characters, remote and familiar settings, the marvelous and the probable, an external and an internal approach to characterization, explicit or implicit instruction — all of which had a bearing on their creative practice. Empiricism, therefore, was more than the dead source of a formal legacy for the novel after the 1740s; it remained a living influence, retaining its hold on both the theory and the practice of prose fiction long after the heyday of pseudo- factual narratives.

I shall now briefly consider what this means for our picture of the period. Basically, I want to propose a view of the rise of the British novel as part of a foundational moment in intellectual history, of a cultural shift whose reverberations we are still experiencing. As I emphasized time and again, the defenses of the novel developed by Fielding, Lennox, and their successors did not heal the breach between the imagination and the rising epistemology. What they did was to help inaugurate a line of theoretical enquiry for which there had been no equivalent need before, and which has survived ever since in spite of occasional lulls. The intuitive model of literary truth that flourished in the Renaissance, while never universally accepted, had the virtue of theoretical consistency. After narratives were expected to conform to experience rather than to reason, imaginative writers with a pedagogic agenda found themselves with no adequate replacement for the old view.

Because novelists said yes to the change, they ran into unprecedented theoretical problems, which were only put to rest by a redefinition of the novel’s goals. But since empiricism retained its prestige as the epistemology of modern science, those problems are prone to resurface whenever the aesthetic value of literature happens to seem insufficient for its justification. The modern debate over literary cognitivism is a case in point.

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The most thorough statement on literary cognitivism from within the analytic tradition —Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s Truth, Fiction, and Literature (1994)

— endorses the aesthetic view, offering an implicit defense of the humanities by decoupling literary appreciation from issues of truth or knowledge. Lamarque and Olsen reject what they call the “Theory of Novelistic Truth” by alleging that while novels certainly carry explicit and implicit propositions, such propositions serve not to assert truths, but to organize events and characters into meaningful patterns.25 As evidence of this, they point out that literary critics pay little to no attention to questions of truth: “Debate about the truth or falsity or the propositions implied by a literary work is absent from literary criticism since it does not enter into the appreciation of the work as a literary work” (334; emphasis in the original). This would have been a startling observation for the contemporaries of Samuel Johnson, but Lamarque and Olsen are basing their views on a very different conception of what literature is and what makes it valuable. “Literature,” they claim, “does not need to be justified as a source of moral precepts or an adjunct to philosophy or the social sciences. It is its own justification, providing its own rewards” (viii).

What they do not acknowledge is that this conception of literature, rather than atemporal and self-evident, is a relatively recent one. It has forefathers in the great Romantics and in

Kantian aesthetics, and, as far as it pertains to the British novel, in Henry James and Oscar

Wilde. And it has a notable predecessor in twentieth-century critical history. The principle that literature has its autonomous sphere and that propositions are formal rather than pedagogic devices would ring a bell for any readers of The Well Wrought Urn. Like

Lamarque and Olsen, Cleanth Brooks had insisted that poems ought to be taken “out of competition with scientific, historical, and philosophical propositions,” and warned against

25 Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994), 295, 331.

196 treating “certain remarks we make about the poem — statements about what it says or about what truth it gives or about what formulations it illustrates — for the essential core of the poem itself.”26 In both cases, propositionalism (or “the heresy of paraphrase”) is denounced as a category mistake: literature is simply not in the business of making claims.

These parallels are not unmotivated, since New Criticism and modern analytic aesthetics share a philosophical cornerstone in Monroe Beardsley’s Aesthetics (1958), one of the most thorough manifestos for the autonomy of art. As is well known, Beardsley proposes that the value of the arts, literature included, resides in their ability to provide not knowledge, but aesthetic experience. In relation to the novel in particular, he proposes that the theses a narrative may seem to put forth are unasserted, and as a result their cognitive content should not play a role in estimations of literary value.27 Beardsley did not deny, however, that the theses in question may turn out to be true; nothing prevents the empirically-inclined reader from testing them out in real life and gaining knowledge should they prove valid (429-436). This was a fruitful suggestion for those thinkers in the analytic tradition who hesitated to quarantine literature away from the sciences. In attempting a conciliation between the two domains, however, modern cognitivists ran once more into objections originally raised by Bacon four centuries ago. Frank Farrell, himself a cognitivist, ventriloquizes the objections as follows:

Talk about the weighing of evidence and the testing of beliefs is misapplied to works of literature. Scientific practice may hope to achieve knowledge of the world because its beliefs are tested through experiments that give the world a chance to have its say regarding whether or not a belief is true. But the reader’s beliefs are exposed to, and transformed by, a set of experiences arranged by the imagination of

26 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 190.

27 See, in particular, the chapter entitled “Literature and Knowledge.” Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics. Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1958; 2dn. ed. 1981), 400-453.

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the author, such that there is no guarantee at all that the world itself is serving as the tribunal that measures and judges the believer’s capacities to achieve truth.28

Here again is the view that advancers of learning should place their trust in the nature of things rather than on the mind’s fragile tendrils. Farrell’s response — that novels provide an engineered space where the reader’s mental faculties can be strengthened for better performance in the real world — bears superficial resemblance to Austen’s. But other cognitivists have tackled the objections in ways that are more closely analogous to the eighteenth-century debate, defending the empirical genesis of literary fictions, clarifying the referential relation between fictional universals and actual particulars, and attributing to novels the counterfactual virtues of a thought experiment. Because of their heavy reliance on the philosophy of language, the modern solutions are often distant from anything the eighteenth century could have envisioned; but there is still considerable common ground between them and the inaugural theories of the novel we have covered. Like Fielding, John

Hospers argues that the novel that respects the rules of probability is a reliable source of knowledge about human nature; the novelist, by eliminating the irrelevant details and interruptions that historians must record, “can be true to other things like human character, and bring out the tendency and significance of human actions, which would be impossible if he slavishly followed history.”29 Like Whately, Graham Martin argues that the characters and events in literature constitute collages of traits that are abstracted from factual referents, so that while the combinations are imaginary the components originate in sense experience.”30 Like Godwin, Mitchell Green argues that novels are able to unfold the

28 Frank B. Farrell, “‘The Way Light at the Edge of a Beach in Autumn is Learned”; Literature as Learning,” in A Sense of the World. Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, ed. John Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2007), 247.

29 John Hospers, “Literature and Human Nature,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17, No. 1 (1958), 45- 57, esp. 55.

30 Graham D. Martin, “A New Look at Fictional Reference,” Philosophy, 57, 220 (1982), 223-236.

198 consequences of a set of initial conditions, as long as they faithfully reproduce the operations of human psychology, the laws of nature, and the workings of social and political institutions.31 The similarities are even more salient among nonpropositionalists. As already noted, Sterne’s didacticism shares both its essential features and its philosophical assumptions with the defenses of literature proposed by Dorothy Walsh and Martha

Nussbaum.

Behind these technical similarities lies a common sense of urgency. Noël Carroll points out, quite forcefully, that “propositionalism is a way of defending the value of art, especially literature, in the face of the fear that science has greater authority and greater claims to the academic and/or cultural pie. The propositionalist responds to the lustre of science by asserting that literature and other art forms are just like the sciences, since they too have interesting and informative propositions to advance.”32 Such concerns would have seemed out of place in the contexts in which Sidney or James were writing. But they stem from cultural pressures with recognizable analogues in the eighteenth century, when the ascension of empiricism to philosophical prominence threatened to relegate imaginative literature to the lowly sphere of leisure. To judge the value of literature through the terms of the empirical sciences is to revive a critical perspective that Renaissance Platonists had had no use for, and that nineteenth-century aestheticism had moved beyond — a perspective that first took shape in the body of theoretical reflection that emerged around the eighteenth-century novel.

I have focused on analytic aesthetics rather than (as might be expected) modern literary studies because the problems faced by the eighteenth-century novel seem a lot less pressing for literary scholars than for analytic philosophers. Few students of literature

31 Mitchell Green, “How and What We Can Learn from Fiction,” A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, ed. Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), esp. 356-361.

32 Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1998), 298, n. 12.

199 today would think that novels must pay homage to empiricism in order to be cognitively valuable; in fact, “cognitive value” would not even seem the right term to designate what it is that makes novels worth reading, teaching, and writing about. There is nonetheless a looser sense in which modern literary studies may be said to be revisiting the terms of the eighteenth-century crisis. The recent emergence of new formalisms in the United States has been greeted with apprehension by those who find in them a retreat into ivory towers. In her critique of surface reading, Crystal Bartolovich noted that such a practice replicates the indifference of New Criticism to its political moment, at a time when the humanities “should be asserting the importance of humanistic enquiry to the most pressing problems facing our planet.”33 Interpretive methods that stress the intrinsic interest of literary works, for

Bartolovich, are complicit with the institutional pressure for the humanities to scale back, lending force to the view that the humanities are a luxury that universities and funding agencies may not be able to afford. For those sharing Bartolovich’s concern, what is needed is a different argument, one that demonstrates the extrinsic value of the humanities in general and of literature in particular. One must claim “a place for the humanities in public life,” as Peter Brooks recently put it, by “arguing that fictions are not distractions from reality but a central means to an understanding of where and how we live in reality.”34 Such an argument would seem unobjectionable to anyone practicing the types of reading that

Bartolovich or Brooks endorse. But when seeking to publicly assert the value of their discipline, literary scholars find themselves confronting scales of value that are foreign to literature and that often militate against it.35 They need to defend humanistic study to constituencies that prize utility and knowledge, but whose sense of those metrics comes

33 Crystal Bartolovich, “Humanities of Scale: Marxism, Surface Reading — and Milton,” PMLA 122, 2 (2007), 116.

34 Peter Brooks, “Introduction” to The Humanities and Public Life, ed. Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 14.

35 A good discussion of this issue was recently provided by Judith Butler in “Ordinary, Incredulous,” in Brooks and Jewett, The Humanities and Public Life, 15-37.

200 from the spheres of business and the hard sciences. In this sense, the institutionalized study of literature is under the pressure of extraneous standards that the less regulated practices of the eighteenth century were already encountering. The novel then was already literature under siege, standing against values that were coming to seem less and less its own, and which have lost no strength since the epistemological and social transformations of the seventeenth century.

Isaiah Berlin has characterized the fractures of the late Enlightenment as a “divorce” between the sciences and the humanities. In Berlin’s account, the “total claim of the new scientific method to dominate the entire field of human knowledge” eventually elicited a reaction, one that affirmed the existence of autonomous domains of knowledge grounded in the informed use of the imagination.36 It is within this larger narrative that I want to situate the rise of the British novel. Eighteenth-century novelists were among the first to experience the pressure of the new epistemic dispensation; but instead of seeking autonomy, they sought a conciliation. Living and writing at the dawn of the schism, they sought to prevent it by subjecting fiction to the rule of fact. That they ultimately failed is just a sign of how mutually refractory the two systems of value seemed then and have seemed since.

36 Isaiah Berlin, “The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,” in Against the Current (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 [2003), 104. See also Berlin’s “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in Against the Current, 1-32.

201

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Biographical Note

Roger Maioli dos Santos was born in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1975. Prior to entering academia he worked for ten years (1990-1999) as a refrigeration mechanic and then salesman, and another nine years (2000-2008) as an English-Portuguese translator. He holds a B.A. in Journalism from University Anhembi-Morumbi and an M.A. in English

Literary Studies from the University of São Paulo. He joined Johns Hopkins University in

2008 for a PhD program in English. He translated around sixty books into Portuguese, including Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (Ateliê Editorial, 2011). His publications include:

• “Empiricism and Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 27, 2,

Winter 2014-15. (Nominated for the Clifford Prize 2016)

• “David Hume, Literary Cognitivism, and the Truth of the Novel,” SEL Studies in English

Literature 1500-1900, 54, 3, Summer 2014.

• “Hume’s opinion of Tristram Shandy,” The Shandean, Vol. 25, 2014.

• Review of Sarah Tindal Kareem, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder, at Digital Defoe (forthcoming)

• Review of Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric, for Eighteenth Century

Novel 10 (forthcoming).

• “English Metamorphoses of Don Quixote.” Crop (a University of São Paulo journal), 11,

2006. Original in Portuguese.

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