Copyright

by Kirsten Anne Hall 2021

The Dissertation Committee for Kirsten Anne Hall certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Between Christ and Achilles: Christian Humanism in Crisis and a New Heroic Ideal in English Fiction, 1713-1813

Committee:

Janine Barchas, Co-Supervisor

Elizabeth Hedrick, Co-Supervisor

Lance Bertelsen

Ashley Marshall

Martha Bowden

Between Christ and Achilles: Christian Humanism in Crisis and a New

Heroic Ideal in English Fiction, 1713-1813

by

Kirsten Anne Hall

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2021

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful, first, to Janine Barchas and Beth Hedrick for their encouragement and intellectual energy as my co-supervisors. At every stage, they championed my progress and challenged me to deepen and clarify my claims. I am also thankful for the mentorship of

Lance Bertelsen as well as the support of my committee members outside of the University of Texas at Austin: Ashley Marshall and Martha Bowden. I would also like to express my gratitude to colleagues who offered to read parts of this project at different stages of the writing process: to James Bryant Reeves at Texas State University for his feedback on my

Cato article, to Erik Dempsey at the University of Texas at Austin for helping me think through the intellectual background of my project and pointing me to Diogenes Laertius, and to Jocelyn Harris at the University of Otago for reading my Notes & Queries manuscript.

Much of this project took shape during the Collegium Institute’s Genealogies of Modernity summer seminars at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve been grateful for the opportunities to collaborate with other scholars outside my discipline and for the friendships I formed there, especially with Terence and Jessica Sweeney, Donato Loia, and Owen Joyce-Coughlan.

In my ongoing involvement with the GenMod Project, it’s been an immense privilege to work with a team, under the leadership of Ryan McDermott at the University of Pittsburgh, who is dedicated to the public-facing humanities. I know this dissertation has been greatly enriched by the chance to explore my ideas in podcasts and short articles for GenMod’s online journal. Fellowships awarded by the Department of English gave me necessary time to research, write, and revise the dissertation. It’s an honor to have been named a Decherd

iv Fellow and to have had the opportunity to meet with Maureen and Robert Decherd to discuss my research. Lexi Pérez Allison, Sierra Senzaki, Kristin Foringer, and Kaitlyn Farrell have been the best writing group I could ask for. Without our writing sessions at Quack’s and our daily virtual meetings after the pandemic hit, I might still be languishing in the slough of writerly despond. To my community here in Austin do I also owe the success of this project. The fellowship I discovered at the Austin Institute and especially the friendship of Kevin and DeAnn Stuart, Marianna Orlandi, and Sneha Tharayil has heartened me during my time in graduate school. A special thanks also goes to my friends Bowden Herlin, Micah

Heinz, and Zachary Larson not only for cheering me on, but also for their editorial assistance during the final stages of writing and revising. Finally, I wish to thank my parents,

Robert and Maureen Hall, both for their unflagging support and for their enthusiastic reading of my dissertation in its entirety.

v Abstract

Between Christ and Achilles: Christian Humanism in Crisis and a New

Heroic Ideal in English Fiction, 1713-1813

Kirsten Anne Hall, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2021

Supervisors: Janine Barchas and Elizabeth Hedrick

This dissertation is about the disintegration of Renaissance Christian humanism in the Enlightenment and the literary efforts to reunite those fragments. The tension between the classical philosophical tradition and Christian theology is an old problem, one that up until the

Renaissance had found compromise in Christian humanism. Under the changing historical conditions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, it resurfaced as a new problem that old solutions could no longer manage. In England, the so-called “latitudinarians,” English theologians of the Restoration whose ideas were to mark the mainstream of Anglican thought well into the 1800s, were among the last torchbearers of Christian humanism and yet largely responsible for its decline. The latitudinarian emphasis on ethics over doctrine, in the wake of the civil strife of the seventeenth century, rendered the ethically-based systems of ancient writers newly tempting, opening the gates to the rising tide of freethinkers, atheists, and deists who in their efforts to free morality from the shackles of religion, turned to classical moral philosophy not as a complement to but as a replacement for

Christian moral teachings.

vi This conflict was memorably articulated by Richard Steele at the start of the century when he asked in The Christian Hero, “Why is it that the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imaginations?” While Steele’s concern that his contemporaries had become too enthralled with the ancient world at the expense of Christianity is echoed throughout the period, what makes Steele’s essay especially noteworthy is the way he carves out a place for literature’s crucial role in this philosophical and religious crisis. Hs rallying cry for “Elegant Pens” to take up the cause of Christianity and win back not just the minds, but the hearts of its readers by offering attractive and powerful Christian “heroes” is one, I argue, that prompts the response of early novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and, later, Jane Austen.

vii Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... ix

Chapter One: Introduction to Steele’s Crisis of Christian Humanism...... 1

Richard Steele’s The Christian Hero ...... 3

Christian Humanism in Crisis ...... 15

The Christian Hero in the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel ...... 39

Chapter Two: The Splendid Vices of Addison’s Cato...... 52

Splendid Vices, Varnished Sins ...... 62

Cato’s “Gentler Doom” ...... 73

The Eye of Cato ...... 83

Chapter Three: Morality A-la-Mode in Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison ...... 89

From Virtu to Virtue ...... 102

Richardson and Homer Divide the Crown...... 138

Chapter Four: Metallurgical Satire in Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield ...... 149

Chapter Five: The Austen Synthesis ...... 183

Bibliography ...... 199

viii List of Figures

Figure 3.1: Bartolozzi Fan ...... 110

Figure 3.2: Fürstenberg Porcelain Teapot...... 110

Figure 3.3: Wedgwood Medallion ...... 113

Figure 3.4: Wedgwood Plaque ...... 113

Figure 3.5: Silk Waistcoat ...... 114

Figure 3.6: Benotti and Fanelli Cabinet ...... 118

Figure 3.7: Stowe Obelisk ...... 119

Figure 3.8: The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa ...... 125

Figure 3.9: Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord LeDespencer ...... 126

Figure 3.10: The Beauties of Stow ...... 128

Figure 3.11: The Choice of Hercules between Virtue and Pleasure ...... 145

Figure 4.1: The Sleepy Congregation ...... 174

Figure 4.2: A Sleepy Congregation ...... 174

Figure 4.3: Vicar and Moses ...... 176

Figure 4.4: The Vicar Preaching to the Prisoners, from “The Vicar of Wakefield”...... 178

ix

Chapter One: Introduction to Steele’s Crisis of Christian Heroism

“Mr. Spectator…I need not tell you that preaching is quite another thing than it was in the earlier times of Christianity and that in this degenerate corrupt age…people will not be chastised but charmed into their duty, & I take it our Parson has got the Spell…”1

“O foolish Christians, who hath bewitched you…Having begun in Christianity, are ye to be made perfect by Heathenism?”2

In a small, leather-bound volume archived at the Harry Ransom Center is the beginning of an essay addressed to “Mr. Spectator.”3 The author, likely Robert Harper, a conveyancer of Lincoln’s Inn who wrote Spectator 480, jotted down his fragmentary thoughts about the decline of Christianity, noting that “in this degenerate corrupt age” clergymen must be especially charismatic if they hope to win the attention of their apathetic congregations. This early eighteenth-century draft is notable for its language of enchantment: a parson with the power to cast a “spell” and “charm” congregants into their Christian duties. Around half a century later during the French Revolution, William Jones (1726-

1800), a high-churchman controversialist who wrote against Unitarians and Methodists and defended the church’s authority against irreligion and anarchy, likewise spoke of “bewitched” believers.4

Christians, according to Jones, were not under the spell of a beguiling preacher, but “Heathen” deities such as Jupiter and Juno, Minerva and Phoebus.5

1 Transcript from the Sir Richard Steele Ms. Book [spine label] with armorial bookplate of Rev. S Harper, uncatalogued, Container 7.1-2, George Atherton Aitken Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 2 William Jones, Reflexions on the Growth of Heathenism among Modern Christians (London: 1776), 17. 3 According to the archival notes that accompany the Ms. Book: written below this particular entry, there are attendant notes written in red ink, “badly faded” that read, “I am inclined to think that this is but part of a letter intended for the Spectator, but never set for publication. As it has not date I can give [no] account of it at present but shall keep [it in] my remembrance. Probably [it was written] before (illegible) owing letter, dated Aug. 9 17 (illegible) Spectator vol. 7 no. 480 (illegible).” 4 G.M. Ditchfield, “Jones, William [known as William Jones of Nayland] (1726–1800), Church of England clergyman and religious controversialist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004, Online. 5 Jones, Reflexions, 14-16.

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These two texts, one an unfinished manuscript for the Spectator and the other the published

“Reflexions” of a country clergyman, reflect the growing concern among eighteenth-century Christian writers that their age’s “taste” for “the glorious realities of Christian revelation” had been “wholly vitiated” by the bewitching attractions of “the religion and morality of classical writers.”6 Together, these two pieces roughly bookend this dissertation, which takes as its inquiry the problem of the affective appeal of the classics in a century which was torn between its commitment to Christian duties and its lingering love of the ancients.

This tension between the classical philosophical tradition and Christian theology is an old problem, one that up through the Renaissance had found compromise in Christian humanism. Under the changing historical conditions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, it resurfaced as a new problem that old solutions could no longer manage. In England, the so-called

“latitudinarians,” English theologians of the Restoration whose ideas were to mark the mainstream of

Anglican thought well into the 1800s, were among the last torchbearers of Christian humanism and yet largely responsible for its decline. The latitudinarian emphasis on ethics over doctrine, in the wake of the civil strife of the seventeenth century, rendered the ethically-based systems of ancient writers newly tempting, opening the gates to the rising tide of freethinkers, atheists, and deists who in their efforts to free morality from the shackles of religion, turned to classical moral philosophy not as a complement to but as a replacement for Christian moral teachings.

As Jones and Harper recognized, this was not simply a philosophical and theological problem.

Importantly, it was a literary and imaginative problem as well. Thus, this is not just a dissertation about the disintegration of Renaissance Christian humanism in the Enlightenment, but about the efforts of early novelists to reunite those fragments by offering attractive Christian “heroes” who could reenchant those who had begun to feel that their Christian duties had become “insipid and

6 Jones, Reflexions, 22.

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insignificant.”7 While my scope is primarily literary, this problem was only fictional insofar as it was also real, and so this project necessarily blurs the boundaries between page and life, drawing evidence from novels, plays, and poems as well as specific places, people, objects, and events. The story of the eighteenth century’s crisis of Christian heroism brings us first to the misadventures of the young

Richard Steele after he decided to drop out of Oxford to pursue a life of military valor before descending into a life as a London wit. In subsequent chapters, it leads us to witness the suicide of

Joseph Addison’s cousin, to survey the ruins of Herculaneum, and to visit a somniferous congregation at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Richard Steele’s The Christian Hero

In 1692, the young Richard Steele was ready for adventure. Leaving Oxford without taking a degree, he set off to fight in King William’s war against France.8 He enlisted in the gentlemanly Second

Troop of Life Guards, commanded by the Duke of Ormonde, and in 1695 he joined the Coldstream regiment, which was assigned guard duty in London.9 That same year he published his first work The

Procession, dedicating it to the Coldstream’s commanding captain, Lord Cutts.10 By 1697, Steele was promoted as ensign in Cutts’ own company and became his private secretary. Dreams of heroism gave way to hedonism as the newly minted Captain Steele enjoyed the allurements of London society: he drank heavily, fathered an illegitimate child, sparred in a pamphlet war with coffeehouse wits, lost everything but his commission in an alchemy venture, and fought a duel in Hyde Park in 1700, nearly killing his opponent.11

7 Jones, Reflexions, 22. 8 As Steele’s biographer Calhoun Winton points out, we know little about Steele’s reasons for leaving Oxford without taking a degree beyond his own statement published about twenty-five years later. See Calhoun Winton, Captain Steele (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), 39. 9 Winton, Captain Steele, 44-46. 10 Ibid., 45. 11 Ibid., 49-55.

3

During the long nights he was “upon Duty” as a guard at the Tower, Steele’s “Mind was perfectly Disengag’d and at Leisure…to run over the Busie Dream of the Day.”12 He had begun to reflect that his was “a way of life exposed to much Irregularity” and became “convinced of many things, of which he often repented.”13 The fruit of his reflections was the composition of a moralizing tract called The Christian Hero, which Rae Blanchard estimates he had started writing as early as 1699.14

This “little book,” as he later said of it in Mr. Steele’s Apology for Himself and His Writings (1714), was

“writ, for his own private Use…with a design principally to fix upon his own Mind a strong Impression of Virtue and Religion, in opposition to a stronger Propensity towards unwarrantable Pleasures.”15

Unfortunately, his private resolutions were not enough, and in 1701 Steele decided—perhaps spurred by the infamy he had acquired through his recent duel—to publish it: “This secret Admonition was too weak; he therefore Printed the Book with his Name, in hopes that a standing Testimony against himself, and the Eyes of the World (that is to say, of his Acquaintance) upon him in a new Light, might curb his Desires, and make him ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was

Virtuous, and living so quite contrary a Life.”16 The Christian Hero, however, was only implicitly a confession of his own sin, for it diagnosed in more universal terms what he saw not simply as a personal problem, but as a systemic one.

The Christian Hero expresses Steele’s conviction that chief among the “unwarrantable pleasures” responsible for leading men astray was their preference for ancient Roman rather than

Christian heroic ideals. It troubled him how common it had become that “when we say a thing was

12 Richard Steele, The Christian Hero, ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford University Press, 1932), 3. 13 Richard Steele, Mr. Steele’s Apology for Himself and His Writings, in Tracts and Pamphlets by Richard Steele, ed. Rae Blanchard (London: Octagon Books, 1967), 338. 14 On the dating of The Christian Hero to 1699, see Richard Steele, The Correspondence of Richard Steele, ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 436-437. 15 Steele, Mr. Steele’s Apology, 338-39. 16 Ibid., 399. Interestingly, Jacob Tonson—who was the uncle of the unfortunate Elizabeth Tonson, the mother of Steele’s illegitimate child—was the one who brought The Christian Hero to the press.

4

done like an old Roman, we have a generous and sublime Idea, that warms and kindles in us, together with a certain Self-disdain, and desire of Imitation; when, on the other side, to say, ‘Twas like a

Primitive Christian, chills Ambition, and seldom rises to more than the cold Approbation of a Duty that perhaps a Man wishes he were not oblig’d to.”17 In short, Steele was kept up at night by the following question: “Why is it that the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imaginations?”18

Steele defies what “Machiavil says, that Religion throws our Minds below noble and hazardous

Pursuits” and that “its Followers are Slaves and Cowards” and sets out to prove what he says in the subtitle of the tract: “No principles but those of Religion Sufficient to make a Great Man.”19

According to Steele, a “Great man” is someone who can successfully endure suffering and misfortune. In the chapters that follow, Steele considers “two or three of the most eminent Heathen” and compares them with a number of Christian figures to see whether morality or religion “are better appointed for the hard and weary March of human Life.”20 First, he examines the events surrounding the fall of the Roman Republic: while ancient statesman like Cato, Caesar, and Brutus all displayed admirable qualities, ultimately their deaths show more cowardice than genuine fortitude. Cato took his own life, Brutus was easily corrupted by Cassius, and Caesar became a tyrant. He contrasts the heroic failures of these Roman statesmen with Christ and St. Paul in the second and third chapters.

In the last section of the essay, he praises King William as an exemplary model of modern Christian heroism. Figures such as King William and St. Paul, he argues, demonstrate that it is the tenets of

Christianity that fortify us in the crucible of life’s greatest trials, while the philosophies of the ancients have crumbled under pressure. By modelling ourselves after the ancient heathen heroes, we “lost our

Way by following a false Fire, which well consider’d is but a delusive Vapour of the Earth, when we

17 Steele, The Christian Hero, 14-15. 18 Ibid., 15. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 16.

5

might enjoy the leading constant Light of Heav’n.”21 In other words, it is the Christian not the

Heathen, Christ rather than Achilles, who is truly heroic and offers, to borrow Samuel Johnson’s phrase, “the best choice of life.”

If the vogue for Steele’s The Christian Hero is any indication, Steele was not the only one who was “very clearly deeply concerned that Christian virtues [were] being passed over in his age by those who have a predilection for pagan example.”22 The “reading public,” as Calhoun Winton tells it,

“seized upon the book.”23 In Steele’s own lifetime, nine editions of The Christian Hero were published.24

Steele zealously promoted it during his years writing for the Tatler and Spectator, meticulously editing and enlarging it for the second and third editions.25 The fifth edition was added to the first collection of the Tatler into volumes in 1711, and Steele occasionally recycled portions of it in the Spectator and his other periodicals.26 In Spectator 37, Addison includes The Christian Hero among the books in Lady

Leonora’s library that she had collected because “she had heard them praised.”27 Steele’s own future wife, then Mary Scurlock, referred to The Christian Hero as a positive recommendation of his character when she wrote to her mother of their engagement in 1707.28 It continued as a bestseller through the rest of the century, with at least one new edition published every decade but one.29 By 1820, it had run

21 Ibid., 15. 22 Malcolm Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” The Review of English Studies 17, no. 1 (1966): 151. 23 Winton, Captain Steele, 57. 24 See Rae Blanchard, “The Christian Hero by Richard Steele: A Bibliography,” Library, Fourth Series 10, no. 1 (1930): 61-72. Compare this to the Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was first published in 1690 and went through 10 editions by 1730. 25 Blanchard, Introduction to The Christian Hero, xii. 26 Ibid. See Spectator 356 and 516; Guardian 20 and 79; Englishman (first series) 48. 27 All citations of the Spectator refer to The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). 28 Mary Scurlock’s letter to her mother dated 16 August 1707: “he has a Competency in worldly goods to make easie, wth a mind so richly adorn’d as to Exceed an Equivalent to ye greatest Estate in ye World in my opinion…& for his understanding & Morals I refer yu to his Christian hero wch I remember yu seem’d to approve, by this I believe yu know his name.” See Steele, Correspondence, 193. 29 Blanchard, “A Bibliography,” 61.

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to twenty-two editions, including Irish and American editions, and had been translated into French and German.30

As with most bestsellers, The Christian Hero had admirers and adversaries. Some readers were quick to accuse Steele of moral hypocrisy. In Mr. Steele’s Apology for Himself and His Writings (1714),

Steele recalls the animosity he received for writing The Christian Hero:

This had no other good Effect, but that from being thought no undelightful Companion, he

was soon reckoned a disagreeable Fellow. One or two of his Acquaintance thought fit to

misuse him, and try their Valour upon him; and every Body he knew measured the least Levity

in his Words and Actions, with the Character of a Christian Heroe. Thus he found himself

slighted, instead of being encouraged, for his Declarations as to Religion.31

Delarivier Manley, who had partnered with him in his alchemy scheme and with whom he had a falling out over finances, wrote of him in The New Atalantis (1709): “He affected to be extreme religious, at the same time when he had two different creatures lying-in of base children by him.”32 Even Boswell and Johnson discussed what they deemed to be Steele’s failure to reform: “I mentioned Sir Richard

Steele having published his Christian Hero, with the avowed purpose of obliging himself to lead a religious life; yet, this his conduct was by no means strictly suitable. Johnson. ‘Steele, I believe, practiced the lighter vices.’”33 The Christian Hero did much to draw attention to Steele’s moral failings, helping to secure Steele’s reputation in the nineteenth century as the “boozing, impetuous, debt- burdened” counterpart to the “sober, cautious, prudent, law-abiding” Addison.34 Except for one

30 Ibid., 62. 31 Steele, Mr. Steele’s Apology, 338-39. 32 Winton, Captain Steele, 56. 33 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), 2:428-9. 34 Louis T. Milic, “The Reputation of Richard Steele: What Happened?” Eighteenth Century Life 1 (1975): 81-87.

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commentator who referred to it as the writing of a “theologian in liquor” and another historian who mistakenly called it a poem, the Victorians all but forgot about The Christian Hero.35

On its initial publication, Steele was criticized for his work’s stylistic faults, in addition to preaching what he did not practice.36 An anonymous early critic said: ‘Tis a Chaos, ‘tis a confusion of

Thoughts, rude and undigested…and I suppose by the roughness of the Stile, he writ it there on the

Butt-end of a Musquet.”37 Steele may not have been the greatest stylist or the most rigorous philosopher, but what he lacked in artistry he more than made up for in the urgency of his message.

Though Steele presented The Christian Hero as a philosophical tract, it was not merely theoretical, but as Henry Morley (1822-1894), the Spectator’s Victorian editor, observed, “plain truth out of Steele’s heart.” Written initially as an exercise in self-persuasion against the temptations of pleasurable London living, Steele rejects Cato, Brutus, and Caesar in The Christian Hero not because he doesn’t find them appealing, but because he, perhaps more than most, felt strongly the seductive pull of their virtue.38

“As it was at first attempted to disengage my own Mind from deceiving Appearances” Steele wrote in the preface, “so it can be publish’d for no other end, but to set others a thinking with the same

Inclination.”39 The popularity of his essay suggests that others were indeed also set “a thinking” on this issue. Steele was neither the first nor last to worry that classical morality was more appealing than

Christian duty or to champion an ideal of “Christian heroism” as an alternative to classical models of

35 See Blanchard, Introduction to The Christian Hero, xi. 36 Ibid. 37 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: The Critical Heritage, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (London: Routledge, 1995), 112-113. 38 It seems that well after he finally published The Christian Hero, he continued to turn to it as a personal manual of piety: “To his wife Lady Steele, (“Prue”) he wrote in 1717, “I have Yours with your advice against Temptation &c all I can answer is that I have learn’d a Language and written a booke, to keep me out of Vanities.” Rae Blanchard notes that the book is The Christian Hero and the language is Latin. See Steele, Correspondence, 343. 39 Steele, The Christian Hero, 10.

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heroism. A diverse array of writers from across the century threw their hats into the ring, penning sermons and essays that addressed the same crisis that Steele articulated.

With Steele, many writers found their age’s love for the ancients deeply troubling. The

Reverend Arthur O’Leary (1729-1802) lamented those who “prefer Socrates and Cato to the clergy of the Christian religion.”40 Joseph Edwards (b. 1706/7, d. ?) expressed similar dismay in one of his sermons preached at Oxford and published about two decades later: “Yet I know not how, but so it is, that we have been extremely apt and prone to pass too favourable Opinions…both of the Practices and of the Opinions of the Heathens, and to think better of them than they deserve, and take them to be what they are not.”41 George Keith Skene (1752-1823), a Scottish minister, agreed, noting that this classical bias causes people to disregard Biblical figures: “Had not Moses been a prophet, had he been a heathen, this speech of his had long since been celebrated and universally admired. Had the divine Socrates, the god-like Plato or Cato, the first of Roman patriots, thus expressed himself; or had this speech been put in the mouth of one of the heroes of antiquity how highly would it have been extolled!”42 It makes sense, then, that others perceived that this admiration for classical figures threatened the future of Christianity. Soame Jenyns (1704-1787)—the writer whose Free Inquiry into the

Nature and Origin of Evil (1756) Samuel Johnson so severely rebuked—wrote in A view of the internal evidence of the Christian religion (1776):

Nothing, I believe, has so much contributed to corrupt the true spirit of the Christian

institution, as that partiality which we contract for the manners of Pagan antiquity; from

whence we learn to adopt every moral idea which is repugnant to it; to applaud false virtues,

which that disavows; to be guided by laws of honour, which that abhors; to imitate characters

40 Arthur O’Leary, Miscellaneous tracts (London: 1781), 19. 41 Joseph Edwards, The duty of forgiveness of enemies stated and proved; And of the Excellency, Usefulness, and Truth of the Christian Religion (London: 1742-3), x. 42 George Keith Skene, Sermons and discourses, on several occasions (London: 1785), 121.

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which that detests; and to behold heroes, patriots, conquerors, and suicides with admiration,

whose conduct that utterly condemns.43

A few years later, William Jones would make the same point in his Reflexions on the Growth of Heathenism among Modern Christians: “Should any person ask me how Christianity is to be banished out of

Christendom…I should make no scruple to answer, that it will certainly be brought to pass by this growing affection to Heathenism.”44 It was only a matter of time, these writers feared, before classical

“heathenism” replaced Christianity.

The century also abounds in religious and philosophical texts that promote an ideal of

Christian heroism that surpasses that of the ancients. William Martin Trinder preached, “Christianity is the pure fountain of honour and generosity. Human philosophy, whether in the guise of Greece or

Rome, hides its diminished head before it. To do good, hoping for nothing again, is a noble, a sublime principle, that far excels any ostentatious heroism, that soars far beyond the reach of Roman virtue.”45

In another sermon he warned his readers not to let “feeble witticisms of deceptious and blind philosophy” obscure their judgment and instead to “look up to those Christian heroes with admiration” and “emulate their lustre.”46 Isaac Watts (1674-1748) also stated that “A Christian must regulate his whole Conduct by the Law of his God” and that the ancient “Heathens” are “not set up for our Guides or Patterns.”47 Edward Hitchin (1726-1774), in his funeral sermon for Martha Tate in

1757, like Steele, asserted, “the grandest marks of their heroism are but base and unsubmissive cowardice” compared with “the glory of true religion,’ where men govern their minds and passions through “sacred obedience to Jesus Christ.”48 In Letters on Infidelity (1786), Bishop George Horne (1730

43 Soame Jenyns, A view of the internal evidence of the Christian religion (London: 1776), 79-80. 44 Jones, Reflexions, 35-36. 45 William Martin Trinder, Practical Sermons (London: 1786), 187-188. 46 Ibid., 126-127. 47 Isaac Watts, A Defense Against the Temptation to Self-murther (London: 1726), 24. 48 Edward Hitchin, A sermon occasioned by the death of Mrs. Martha Tate (London: 1758), 12.

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1792) responded to David Hume’s essay on suicide where Hume had claimed that suicides like “Cato and Brutus, Arria and Portia acted heroically.” Horne rebutted: “Christianity inculcates a far nobler heroism.”49 Steele was not the only one who tried to reassure his readers that Christianity, not the classics, held the key to greatness.

While others don’t address the question of heroism as explicitly, there is a whole body of literature that, like Steele’s The Christian Hero, pits classical morality against Christian morality, often arguing that though some of the ancients displayed “Excellent Morals,” yet “none of ‘em practic’d it to such Perfection, as the glorious Pattern” of Christ or the other Christian saints and martyrs.50

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) preaching on the “Advantages of Christianity to the World” in Sermon

26 takes up St. Paul’s famous words in Romans 1:22—“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools”—which are traditionally “thought to allude to the vanity of the Greeks and Romans.”51 Sterne asks, “Whether Christianity has done the world any service?—and, How far the morals of it have been made better since this system has been embraced.”52 With Steele, he agrees that Christianity has improved morals—if not always in practice than at least in theory—and concludes with an echo of

Steele’s words about ancient precept as a misleading “false Fire” that “all their specious wisdom was but a more glittering kind of ignorance.”53 Likewise, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) composed a sermon on 1 Corinthians 3:19—“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God”—in which, because there are those “who highly exalt the wisdom of those Gentile sages” his design will be to “endeavor to shew that their preference of heathen wisdom and virtue, before that of the Christian, is very unjust

49 George Horne, Letters on Infidelity (London: 1786), 135. 50 George Johnston, Christianity older than the creation (London: 1733), 45. 51 Laurence Sterne, The Sermons of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 247. 52 Ibid., 249. 53 Steele, The Christian Hero, 15.

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and grounded upon ignorance and mistake.”54 Between Swift and Sterne, the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of a popular homiletic topos, “the Advantages of Christianity,” which preached the superiority of Christianity over the classical world.

Far less of a celebrity than Swift and Sterne, Roger Kedington (1712-1760), a rector in Suffolk and author of a critical dissertation on Homer’s Iliad, published a sermon in 1753 “On the folly of heathenism and insufficiency of reason in religious enquiries: and the consequent necessity, truth, and excellency of the Christian religion” in which he argues for the “necessity and Advantage of

Revelation,” the “Insufficiency of Reason” and “the Ignorance and Corruption of the Heathen World; and the great Improvements of Men of Learning have since by the Light of the Gospel been enabled to make in the Investigation of Moral Truths and their Motives.”55 Many agreed that “no other System of Morality can be paralell’d to” Christianity because of the many “corruptions” that disqualified ancient morality from the serious consideration of modern Christians.56 Writers were more than happy to elaborate on these corruptions and produced long catalogues of heathen vices. For example, a minister from Virginia listed some of the different failings of ancient philosophers in one of his sermons: “Plato allows of a Community of Wives; Cicero and Cato place Revenge amongst the

Virtues; Rapine, War and Blood-shed are allowed by others, when they are done to advance the Glory and extend the Limits of One’s County.”57 Unmasking classical virtues as vices, as Thomas Pender does here, was one common way preachers dampened enthusiasm for ancient philosophy.

54 Jonathan Swift, The Works of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, ed. Thomas Sheridan (London: 1784), 10:154. Swift’s sermons are sometimes overlooked by those who wish to argue against the view of Swift as a true lover of the ancients against the moderns, although one can find evidence of his skepticism about them throughout his oeuvre. See Elizabeth Hedrick, “The Mask of Cicero: Jonathan Swift, Classical Rhetoric and A Modest Proposal,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2020): 1-12. 55 Roger Kedington, On the folly of heathenism and insufficiency of reason in religious enquiries: and the consequent necessity, truth, and exellency of the Christian religion (Cambridge: 1753), 22. 56 Thomas Pender, The divinity of the Scriptures, from reason & external circumstances. A sermon preach’d at Trinity- Church in New-York, the second Sunday after Trinity (New York: 1728), 17. 57 Ibid.

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Both the popularity of Steele’s The Christian Hero and the abundance of similar texts published during the century would seem to confirm that the question of the relationship between classical and

Christian morality was a new and pressing issue in eighteenth-century life. Many writers affirm Steele’s sense that this new problem was of the utmost urgency. Jonathan Swift wrote, “this high opinion of heathen wisdom is not very antient in the world.”58 He explains that it was “not at all countenanced” in the early days of Christianity:

Our Saviour had but a low esteem of it, as appears by his treatment of the Pharisees and

Sadducees, who followed the doctrines of Plato and Epicurus. St. Paul likewise, who was well

versed in all the Grecian literature, seems very much to despise their philosophy, as we find in

his writings, cautioning the Colossians to beware any man spoil them through philosophy and

vain deceit. And, in another place, he advises Timothy to avoid prophane and vain babblings,

and oppositions of science, falsely so called; that is, not to introduce into the Christian doctrine

the janglings of those vain philosophers.59

“Neither,” says Swift, did the early Church Fathers have “any great or good opinion of the heathen philosophy.”60 In short, “this vein of affecting to raise the reputations of those sages so high, is a mode and a vice but of yesterday, assumed chiefly, as I have said, to disparage revealed knowledge, and the consequences of it among us.”61 Jones remarked in his Reflexions that “in the present age the public taste can seldom find any thing but Heathen matter to work upon: from which it is natural to infer that Heathenism is in better repute than formerly.”62 This “taste for Heathen learning,” he says, which

“began to prevail about the times of the Reformation hath been productive of an evil, which hath been growing upon us for two hundred years past, and hath at length given to Heathenism the upper

58 Swift, Works, 10:153. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 10:154. 62 Jones, Reflexions, 3.

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hand in almost every subject.”63 It is an evil because as the love of the ancients grow “it will follow, that the public regard to Christianity, and all that relates to it, is proportionably declined.”64 Whether or not they were right, what is important is that writers like Jones and Swift believed that the ascendancy of classical morality was a new problem, one their age needed to fix.

Malcolm Kelsall has stated of The Christian Hero, “Whatever the exact relation between pagan virtues and Christianity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century,” “Steele’s question is, perhaps, best left unanswered.”65 Kelsall was approaching the issue from a widely held perspective among historians writing in the twentieth century, which was that the eighteenth century was the “Age of Reason” and “Enlightenment.” Developments in the natural sciences and philosophy led to a decline of orthodox religious belief and the rise of deism, atheism, and materialism. According to this narrative, Christianity was swept up in the secularizing spirit of the age with little resistance. The

Church of England complacently settled in to the “bland, polite religion of the latitudinarians,” enjoying what Edward Gibbon called its “fat slumbers.”66 Faith was a matter of form and church attendance a mere social obligation. As Peter Gay remarked in his influential two-volume study, The

Enlightenment: An Interpretation, “Educated Christians never thought for a moment that their classicism might in any way interfere with their religious duties.”67 For Kelsall, then, the question is best left unanswered because it was simply a nonissue. However, in more recent years, eighteenth-century scholars from a variety of disciplines, especially literature and church history, have challenged this dominant narrative of the eighteenth century as a secular age in which, as Martha Bowden observed, the “Church of England has been conventionally portrayed as an institution on the verge of

63 Ibid., 4-5. 64 Ibid., 3. 65 Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” 151. 66 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 55; Edward Gibbon, Miscellaneous works of Edward Gibbon, Esquire (London: 1796), 1:131. 67 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 39.

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expiration.”68 On the contrary, as these scholars have shown, the Church was anything but lukewarm to the changes taking place around it, and it was especially invested in the newly important problem concerning the relationship between pagan and Christian virtues.

Christian Humanism in Crisis

What, then, was “the exact relation between pagan virtues and Christianity” in 1701? Was it, in fact, as modern a problem as Steele, Swift, and others seemed to think? Indeed, the ambivalence toward the classics that marks Steele’s essay is as old as Christianity itself. As Swift noted in Sermon

XI, Christ “had but a low esteem” of “heathen wisdom” and St. Paul seemed “very much to despise their philosophy.”69 In Colossians 2:8, St. Paul exhorts, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after

Christ.” Even in the early days of Christianity, the classics were perceived as a threat and temptation.

The problem was just as vexed among the writings of the Church Fathers who were divided about what do with the legacy of the classical world. Did ancient philosophy have any wisdom to offer the new religion? Had the ancient Greek and Roman sages anticipated the truth of Christian revelation? Or, were there fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the two traditions?

Tertullian (c. 160-c. 220), an early Christian writer from Carthage, blamed pagan philosophy for the growth of heresy in the early church by asking, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”70 On

68 Martha F. Bowden, Yorick’s Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne (Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 2007), 24. For other studies that revise the narrative of the Church of England “as an institution on the verge of expiration” during the long eighteenth century, see Irene Collins, Jane Austen and the Clergy (London: Bloomsbury, 1994); John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646-1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Peter Virgin, The Church in an Age of Negligence: Ecclesiastical Structure and the Problems of Church Reform 1700-1840 (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1989). 69 Swift, Works, 10:153. 70 Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics, trans. Peter Holmes, Vol. 3 of Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), Chapter 7.

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the other hand, Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-200) held that “Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way from him who is perfected in Christ.”71 “I call him truly learned,” Clement urged, “who brings everything to bear on the truth, so that from geometry, music, grammar, and philosophy itself, culling what is useful, he guards the faith against assault…And he who brings everything to bear on a right life, procuring examples from the Greeks and barbarians, this man is an experienced searcher after truth!”72 Justin Martyr (100-165), known for identifying the Greek concept of “logos” with the Word of God, agreed with Clement of Alexandria in The First Apology: “there seem to be seeds of truth among all men.”73 He deemed certain of the ancients to be virtuous: “we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks,

Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them.”74 According to Justin Martyr and Clement, classical philosophy’s value came from the fact that it had anticipated Christian truth.

Augustine (354-430) intervened in the debate, summing up his solution with his well-known discussion of “Egyptian Gold” in On Christian Teaching. Just as the Israelites in the book of Exodus obeyed God’s command to take the clothes, idols, ornaments of silver and gold of the Egyptians so as to “make better use of them,” so too must Christians “abandon the company of pagans” while taking with them those ideas “which are more appropriate to the service of the truth.”75 Later in his life, in The Retractions, Augustine confirmed his sense that the ancients had at least partial access to

Christian truth: “For what is now called the Christian religion existed even among the ancients and

71 Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, trans. William Wilson, Vol. 2 of Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), 1.5. 72 Ibid., 1.9. 73 Justin Martyr, The First Apology, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, Vol. 1 of Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), Chapter 44. 74 Ibid., Chapter 46. 75 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 64-65.

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was not lacking from the beginning of the human race until ‘Christ came in the flesh.’”76 In Epistle

70, Jerome (c. 347-420) took Augustine’s Old Testament plunder metaphor one step further, likening the Christian appropriation of ancient philosophy to the Israelite’s practice of taking a captive wife in

Deuteronomy: “Is it surprising that I too, admiring the fairness of her form and the grace of her eloquence, desire to make that secular wisdom which is my captive and my handmaid, a matron of the true Israel?”77 Augustine and Jerome’s violent analogies capture both the intense desire for “secular wisdom” among Christians as well as their emphasis on its subservience to Christian teachings.

Steele’s observation that the idea of an ancient Roman “warms and kindles” our hearts while a “Primitive Christian” “chills Ambition” and inspires nothing more than “the cold Approbation of a

Duty” could be found in texts from the Patristic period through the late Middle Ages.78 In the

Confessions, Augustine declared how “pitiable” it was that as a boy learning to read Latin, he wept over the death of Dido but could not weep over himself who was “dying away from you, O God.”79 Or, in the fourth Canto of the Inferno when Dante enters Limbo—the first circle of Hell for virtuous pagans like Socrates, Plato, Homer, Seneca, Heraclitus, and those others who “did not sin” but are lost because they “lived before Christianity” and “did not adore God as was needful”—a “great sorrow” seizes his heart because he recognizes their “great worth.”80 Similarly, Jerome famously recounted a dream in one of his letters in which he is brought before the Judgment seat of God. He is accused of lying when he says he is a Christian: “You lie. You are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For

76 Augustine, The Retractions, trans. Sister M. Inex Bogan, Vol. 60 of The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 52. 77 Jerome, Letters of St. Jerome, trans. W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley, Vol. 6 of Nicene and Post- Nicene Fathers, Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893), Letter 70. 78 Steele, The Christian Hero, 15. 79 Augustine, Confessions, Book 1-8, trans. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 37. 80 Dante, Inferno, trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 73.

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‘where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’”81 Steele, then, was not alone in giving his youthful heart to the ancients.

Boethius (c. 475–7, d. 526?) is an important bridge figure between the ancient world and the

Middle Ages. He translated all of Aristotle’s logical works into Latin and was heavily influenced by

Greek Neoplatonism. In the Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most influential texts on Christianity’s relationship to philosophy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Boethius appears to have no problem reconciling the classical and Christian traditions.82 In the words of John Brown (1722-1787), a minister who authored A general history of the Christian church, from the birth of our Saviour to the present time (1771),

Boethius was a Christian philosopher who “approved of both the Platonic and Aristotelian systems.”83

Boethius approves so much that, when he’s confined in prison, he does not make explicit reference to Christianity, comforted instead by “Lady Philosophy” and arguments derived from the Greek philosophical tradition. As Henry Chadwick put it, the Consolation “is a work written by a Platonist who is also a Christian.”84 Edward Gibbon praised it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as “A golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully.”85 Boethius—together with Clement,

Justin Martyr, and Augustine—strove to unite Christian and classical philosophy.

The project of translating Aristotle that began with Boethius in the late fifth century, was resumed centuries later in the thirteenth century, when the transmission of Aristotle’s works from the

Islamic world reopened questions about the compatibility of Greek philosophy and Christian

81 Jerome, Letters, Letter 22. 82 For a discussion of the “vexed question” of Boethius’ Christianity, see Scott Goins and Barbara H. Wyman, Introduction to The Consolation of Philosophy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), xv. 83 John Brown, A general history of the Christian church, from the birth of our Saviour to the present time (London: 1771), 146. 84 Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 249. 85 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: 1776-1789), 4:38.

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theology.86 One of the most controversial questions was whether Aristotle should be taught in

Europe’s newly founded universities. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) found himself caught between two extremes, arguing against the Averroists, who interpreted Aristotle in a way that was incompatible with the Catholic faith, as well as with the Franciscans, who dismissed Greek philosophy. For Aquinas, it was impossible that human reason could be incompatible with divine revelation, and so Aristotle was a valuable thinker to engage with. As he wrote in Summa Contra Gentiles, “that truth that the human reason is naturally endowed to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith.”87 Faith and reason, Christian theology and classical philosophy can, if properly understood, form a perfect union.

During the Renaissance, humanists such as Pico, Petrarch and later Erasmus continued, according to Peter Gay, to hold together the “great compromise that had taken the best efforts of

Jerome and Augustine and Aquinas.”88 One key project of the humanists, in their “rediscovery” of classical writers, was to harmonize “classical ethics with the practical Christianity of the Gospels.”89

When Petrarch (1304-1374) discovered Cicero’s letters in the cathedral library of Verona in 1345, he confidently declared in On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others (1367): “I even feel sure that Cicero

86 For studies about the issue of Christian and classical philosophy as it arises in twelfth- and thirteenth- century Europe see Medieval Philosophy and the Classical Tradition: In Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, ed. John Inglis (London: Routledge, 2002); A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 87 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God, trans. A.C. Pegis (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 74. 88 Gay, Modern Paganism, 282. 89 Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry (London: Routledge, 1994), 127. For other definitions of “Christian humanism” as involving the synthesis of classical philosophy with Christian teachings, see also Martin I.J. Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 99; Charles Nauert, “Rethinking “Christian Humanism,” in Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism, ed. Angelo Mazzocco (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 155-180. For a helpful overview of different definitions of “humanism” more generally, see Didier Fassin, “Humanism: A Critical Reappraisal,” Critical Times 2, no. 1 (2019): 29-38.

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himself would have been a Christian if he had been able to see Christ and to comprehend his doctrine.”90 Similarly, Erasmus (1466-1536) wrote in his essay “The Godly Feast:”

Whatever is devout and contributes to good morals should not be called profane. Sacred

Scripture is of course the basic authority in everything; yet I sometimes run across ancient

sayings or pagan writings—even the poets—so purely and reverently and admirably expressed

that I can’t help believing their authors’ hearts were moved by some divine power. And

perhaps the spirit of Christ is more widespread than we understand, and the company of saints

includes many not in our calendar.91

In the work of these Christian humanists, the “sting was drawn” from the ancients, and philosophers such as Cicero and Socrates could be safely subsumed into Christian thinking: “with few exceptions the Humanists remained within the Christian fold; their affection for pagan works did not make them pagans.”92 The classics were not yet a threat.

For this happy marriage of Christian and classical thought in the Renaissance, Gay coined the phrase “pagan Christianity:”

a time when men held, more or less comfortably, beliefs that the Enlightenment would regard

as wholly incompatible, when there was nothing incongruous about the sight of a Christian

Humanist, a Christian Stoic, a Christian Platonist, or even a Christian skeptic. Christian

thought had proved flexible and remarkably absorptive, and Lorenzo de’ Medici could say in

all seriousness that one could not be either a good citizen or a good Christian without being a

90 Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Herman Randall (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956), 115. 91 Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 192. 92 Gay, Modern Paganism, 269.

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good Platonist. The rebellion against the Middle Ages was therefore not a rebellion against

religion.93

However, by the time Steele penned The Christian Hero at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the

Christian Humanist ideal of the Renaissance had begun to break down.94 Peter Gay characterizes the period of Pagan Christianity between 1300-1700 as the prehistory to the Enlightenment.95 Both the

Renaissance and the Enlightenment shared an admiration of antiquity, and especially of ancient Rome.

According to Gay, there is a crucial difference between the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The

Renaissance was “still overwhelmingly religious,” still “in the thrall of the great myth.”96 The “malaise in Christian civilization”—by which he means “a great fear of paganism, and signs that the compromise formulas of the Renaissance were threatening to collapse”—did not begin to emerge until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.97

What caused this disintegration of the Christian humanist ideal? Gay broadly traces the issue in Europe, attributing it to the “volatile world” of the sixteenth century “torn by religious war, economic dislocation, political instability, and philosophical uncertainty.”98 However, the collapse was not quick and “the ancient heritage continued to be handled delicately by pious hands.”99 Reformation theologians were more critical of how their medieval Catholic predecessors had incorporated ancient philosophy into their thought than they were of the ancients themselves. Although Martin Luther

(1483-1546) held the doctrine that scripture alone is the basis of faith (sola scriptura), he did not entirely

93 Ibid., 257. 94 For more on the continuation of the Renaissance humanist project in the eighteenth century, see Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1-9; Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660- 1780. Vol. 1, Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9, 87. 95 For the Renaissance as the prehistory to the Enlightenment as an age of “Pagan Christianity” see Gay, Modern Paganism, 256-321. 96 Ibid., 256. 97 Ibid., 282. 98 Ibid., 280. 99 Ibid., 282.

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banish natural reason or classical philosophy from theology.100 He loved authors such as Livy, Virgil, and Cicero but was highly critical of the Aristotelianism of the medieval Scholastics. He thought

Aristotle’s Ethics was incompatible with the Bible and wrote in his Disputation Against Scholastic

Theology that “the whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light.”101 John Calvin (1509-1564) also admired the classics and his mature works abound in classical quotation. He wrote in the Institutes,

“Read Demosthenes or Cicero, read Plato, Aristotle, or others of that crew: they will, I admit, allure you, delight you, move you, enrapture you in wonderful measure. Then betake yourself to that sacred reading.”102 Here, Calvin admits to the same kind of classical temptation everyone from St. Jerome to

Steele had faced.

In England, the crisis of Christian humanism also occurred in the context of political and religious instability beginning with the English Reformation under Henry VIII and culminating in the

English Civil War and the Commonwealth period. After the Stuarts were restored to the throne and the Church of England was reestablished in 1660, nothing was more appealing than putting decades of unrest in the past and rebuilding a “stable religious and political identity.”103 As religious historians such as Isabel Rivers, Patrick Müller, and John Spurr have shown, the “identity” of the Church of

England had long been in flux.104 Between the 1620s and 1660s, the Church of England’s doctrinal position swung as a pendulum between what Rivers and Müller have characterized broadly as the

“Calvinist” and the “Arminian” positions.105 Briefly, the Calvinist, or orthodox Reformation, account

100 For Luther’s attitude toward classical philosophy see Theodore Arthur Buenger, “The Classics and the Protestant Reformation,” The Classical Weekly 11, no. 5 (1917): 34-37; Charles Partee, Calvin and Classical Philosophy (Lousiville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1977). 101 Martin Luther, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, ed. Harold J. Grimm and Helmut T. Lehmann, Vol. 31 of Luther’s Works (St Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress Press, 1958–86), 12. 102 William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 114. 103 Patrick Müller, Latitudinarianism and Didacticism in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2009), 15. 104 Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, xiii. See also Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 11; Müller, Latitudinarianism, 16-17. 105 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 10-11. See also Müller, Latitudinarianism, 16-17.

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stated that man is thoroughly sinful and cannot be saved by his own efforts to be good but by faith alone. Through a process known as justification, God has predestined an elect few who will be saved and, despite their unrighteousness, he grants them the free gift of his grace to help them persevere in a sanctified state and perform good works. On the other hand, the “Arminian” position—from the sixteenth-century Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius and his followers the “Remonstrants” who critiqued Calvin’s doctrine of predestination—asserted that “man is free to work out his own salvation in co-operation with grace.”106 In this account, Christ died for all, and good works are not the result of faith but an important part of man’s choice and effort to be obedient, to repent of his sins, and to use his God-given reason to know and work toward the good. In the 1620s, the Church of England’s official position was Calvinist. Charles I and Archbishop Laud supported Arminian views in the 1630s.

After Laud was executed, Calvinist views again dominated during the English Civil War and

Cromwell’s regime.107

By the 1650s, the pendulum had begun to swing back toward Arminianism.108 Reacting against the “religious dogmatism virulent during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum,” a small but influential group of Cambridge divines known as the “latitude-men” or “latitudinarians” rose to prominence within the Church, inaugurating what J.G.A Pocock has called the “Arminian Enlightenment.”109 The first “generation” of latitudinarians—known since the nineteenth century as the “Cambridge

Platonists”—were primarily at Cambridge before the Civil War as students and during the

Interregnum as fellows and heads of colleges and included Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83), John

106 Ibid., 11. 107 Ibid., 11-12. 108 Ibid., 12. 109 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 23; P.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1:51. There is no consistent convention about capitalizing “latitudinarian.” Following Rivers, but not Müller, I will not capitalize it.

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Wilkins (1614-72), Henry More (1614-87), John Smith (1616-52) and Ralph Cudworth (1617-88).110

The second “generation” were students at Cambridge and Oxford during the late 1640s and 50s and were “strongly influenced” by the first generation.111 At Cambridge, they included John Tillotson

(1630-94), Simon Patrick (1626-1707), Isaac Barrow (1630-77), and Edward Stillingfleet (1635-99); at

Oxford, Edward Fowler (1632-1714) and Joseph Glanvill (1636-80). The latitudinarians became the most powerful group in the Church during William III’s reign: Burnet was appointed Bishop of

Salisbury, Stillingfleet Bishop of Worcester, Patrick Bishop of Chichester and then Ely, Fowler Bishop of Gloucester, and Tillotson Dean of St. Paul’s before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury.112 By the

1690s, Calvinism was seen as nonconformist and latitudinarianism had become the new Church of

England orthodoxy.113

Though “latitudinarian” has long been a disputed label among historians of eighteenth- century religion, it is a valuable term for describing a group of churchmen united by certain beliefs and attitudes.114 The latitudinarians considered themselves to be orthodox Christians who conformed

110 Rivers takes issue with the label “Cambridge Platonists:” “It is not one that contemporaries used; it draws attention to one particular facet of their interests at the expense of others; it excludes one very important member, Wilkins, who exceptionally was not educated at Cambridge; it also obscures the continuity of interest between the first and second generations.” See Whichcote to Wesley, 28. Müller gives a helpful overview of the debate about the relationship between the “Cambridge Platonists” and the latitudinarians: “The transition from Cambridge Platonism to Latitudinarianism is not easy to spot. The extent to which the two groups are intertwined, and in which points their views differ, is still a matter of contention.” Some say Cambridge Platonists transitioned gradually into Restoration latitudinarianism; some say theirs was a relationship of “filiation;” some that they were “simply two generations of latitude-men.” According to Müller, all agree that the latitudinarians “were influenced by the Cambridge Platonists, the latter being the intellectual teachers of the former.” See Müller, Latitudinarianism, 19. 111 For more on the “networks of relationships” between the first and second generation of latitude-men, see Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 28-31. 112 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 33. 113 Ibid., 12. 114 See W. M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660-1700 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 1-10. The terms “latitude-men” and “latitudinarian” were first used pejoratively in the 1650s and early 1660s. Even John Spurr—who, as Andrew Starkie has noted, “has even argued that there is no evidence for a distinctive latitudinarian group within the Restoration Church of England”— agrees with Müller, Rivers, Pocock, and Griffin that there was a swing away from Calvinist toward Arminian theology and that in the 1650s there were “a growing number of clergymen mainly of the younger generation, who were about the work of rehabilitating the notion of ‘morality’ in religion” and that the Restoration church had

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to the Church of England. They were “theological minimalists” who distinguished between religious essentials and “matters indifferent.”115 This distinction—which can be traced back to Erasmus—was an important aspect of their reaction to the chaos of the Civil War and the Interregnum. As Müller has observed, “At the heart of Latitudinarianism lies a deep-seated desire for political, religious, and social stability.”116 Because a unified and peaceful Church came first to other things like ecclesiastical organization and ceremony or theological minutiae, they were willing to tolerate a certain “liberty of opinion” in religious matters, and many of them supported the Toleration Act of 1689 and thought about “broadening the base of the Church of England” to include dissenters who would consider conforming if the requirements of the 1662 Act of Uniformity were less strict.117 Their irenicism helps explain their success. Not only were the calls for Church peace and unity deeply appealing to many in the wake of the Puritan Revolution, but on a more practical level, their doctrinal latitude made it possible for them to hold on to their Church posts during the Interregnum, conform to the articles of the Church under the 1662 Act of Uniformity, and to advance to important posts after nine bishops and over three hundred members of the clergy refused to take the 1688 Oath of Allegiance to William and Mary and were expelled from their offices.118

If the latitudinarians were indifferent about many things, this leaves the question of what they considered to be the essential core of Christian teaching. Because the latitudinarians were working from the Arminian rather than a Calvinist perspective, they emphasized man’s free will in choosing to act virtuously and perform good works as an essential component of salvation. Above all else, the latitudinarians emphasized Christian morality and were best known for trying “to reduce Christianity

begun “to divorce herself from calvinist soteriology.” See Andrew Starkie, The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716-1721 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). 115 Griffin, Latitudinarianism, 43. 116 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 73. See also Spellman, Latitudinarians, 1. 117 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 32. 118 Ibid., 33.

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to a few plain essentially moral fundamentals, easily apprehended and put into practice by the ordinary rational man.”119 Morality could unite the Church because what was required for the salvation of faithful Christians was not a matter of abstruse theological and metaphysical speculation, but of following the clear and simple moral directives found in Scripture.120

In “Anti-Fanatical Religion,” Glanvill described how their “main Design was, to make Men good, not notional, and knowing; and therefore, though they conceal’d no practical Verities that were proper and seasonable, yet they were sparing in their Speculations, except where they tended to the necessary vindication of the Honour of God, or the directing the Lives of Men.”121 Samuel Clarke

(1675-1729) in his Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, declared that “Moral

Virtue is the Foundation and the Summ, the Essence and the Life of all true Religion.”122 Whichcote wrote, “There are but two things in Religion; Morals and Institutions; Morals may be known, by the reason of the Thing: Morals are owned as soon as spoken; and they are nineteen parts in twenty, of all Religion.”123 Later in the eighteenth century, a “Rational Christian” wrote in The Morality of the New

Testament (1765): “The moral parts of the New Testament are those only which can concern mankind…unintelligible mysteries cannot at all influence our conduct, or tend to promote virtue and happiness, which are the main end of true religion,” and “The religion of Christ, unadulterated, is pure morality.”124 Addison signaled his latitudinarian allegiance when he wrote in Spectator 186: “the Infidel himself must at least allow that no other System of Religion could so effectually contribute to the heightning of Morality.” As Griffin wittily summarizes, the latitudinarians believed “creeds were nothing if they did not become deeds.”125

119 Ibid., 25. See also Müller, Latitudinarianism, 28, 44; Griffin, Latitudinarianism, 150. 120 Griffin, Latitudinarianism, 140. 121 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 44. 122 Ibid., 72. 123 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 76. 124 Rational Christian, The Morality of the New Testament (London: 1765), 5, 38. 125 Griffin, Latitudinarianism, 140.

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In their emphasis on practical Christian morality, the latitudinarians were the direct heirs of

Renaissance humanists.126 The latitudinarians agreed with Erasmus that what was necessary to salvation was clear from the Bible, which contained a “compendium of the entire philosophy of

Christ” derived from “the purest sources of the Evangelists and Apostles.”127 The latitudinarians read the Church Fathers and drew from the scholastic tradition of natural law.128 But most importantly, they—like Petrarch, Erasmus, Augustine, and Jerome—were committed to the humanist project of drawing on classical ethics in the service of Christian theology. Their “habit of reading the Bible alongside and in light of classical ethics” is evidenced in their sermons, which frequently cite classical authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus,

Hierocles.129 “These names,” Rivers observes, “are invoked for a consistent purpose: the authors praised are those who define man as a free, rational, and social being, capable of imitating God.”130

For instance, Stillingfleet said, “It cannot be deny’d, that the Ancient Moralists have given excellent

Rules for the Rectifying our Opinions of the Good and Evil of this World, and for keeping our

Passions in due order.”131 Tillotson wrote in his earliest surviving sermon, “When I read the heathen writers, especially TULLY and SENECA, and take notice, what precepts of morality and laws of kindness are every where in their writings, I am ready to fall in love with them.”132 Importantly, the latitudinarians, as fond as they were of the ancient philosophers, insisted that although there was a great deal of true and useful wisdom in ancient philosophy, it fell short of Christian teachings. In other words, Christianity had set out to complete and perfect the unfinished work of the ancients. They

126 See Griffin, Latitudinarianism, 140; Spellman, Latitudinarians, 13-15; Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 87; Rivers, Renaissance Poetry 125-138. 127 Griffin, Latitudinarianism, 140. 128 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 35. 129 Ibid. See also Spellman, Latitudinarians, 90. 130 Ibid. 131 Edward Stillingfleet, Fifty Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions (London: 1707), 633. 132 Thomas Birch, The Life of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson: Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London: 1753), 465.

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consistently emphasized the shortcomings of ancient philosophy and the comparative superiority of

Christian morality. Stillingfleet, in an echo of Augustine’s “Egyptian Gold,” wrote, “But although they failed as to the main of their Design; yet they made very useful Discoveries for the Benefit of others.”133 Soame Jenyns wrote in A view of the internal evidence of the Christian religion (1776): “from this book, called the New Testament, may be collected a system of ethics, in which every moral precept founded on reason is carried to a higher degree of purity and perfection, than in any other of the ancient philosophers of preceding ages.”134 Like Justin Martyr, Jenyns believed that Christian morality finished what the ancients philosophers had known only imperfectly.

The latitudinarian commitment to the Christian humanist ideal was not enough to keep it from unraveling at the seams. They hoped that by focusing on reason and morality as the essential points of Christian teaching they could find common ground between warring factions and “rule out the possibility of religious disputes about doctrinal issues” or metaphysical speculations about what were ultimately mysteries.135 Surely, they thought, no one would disagree when Glanvill wrote, “Christianity is the height, and perfection of morality.” 136 If anything could be a matter of rational and universal assent among faithful Protestants, this must certainly be it. However, there were plenty who disagreed.

Nonconformists perceived them as “timeservers and heathen moralists,” and High Churchmen saw them as heedless not just to the forms of Christianity, but also its content.137

Most importantly, they were criticized for “levelling” Christianity and lowering it to the status of “mere morality,” so that it was no better or no different than any other philosophical system.138 If

Christianity is primarily about morality, what makes it different from other systems of ethics and better

133 Stillingfleet, Fifty Sermons, 633. 134 Jenyns, A view, 43. 135 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 26. 136 Joseph Glanvill, Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains (London: 1681), 72. 137 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 26. 138 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 23.

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than the moral teachings of the Stoics, Epicureans, or Platonists? What now gives Christianity an advantage over classical paganism if its clergy emphasizes the reasonableness of Christianity while downplaying the place of miracles, mysteries, the role of grace and faith in salvation, and the profound necessity of revealed religion? In the words of the Puritan preacher Antony Tuckney (1599-1670), the latitude-men had reduced Christianity to “a kinde of Moral Divinitie.”139 They were derided variously as, “The Rational Preachers,” “Moral Preachers,” and “meer Moral Men, without the Power of

Godliness.”140 In The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan (1628-1688) calls the village to which Mr. Worldly-

Wiseman attempts to direct Christian “Morality.” “The basic theme of the accusations from the side of doctrinaire Calvinism,” Griffin notes, “was that the Latitudinarians gave too much to reason, not enough to revelation; too much to nature, not enough to grace.”141 Robert Grove (1634-1696), author of A Vindication of the Conforming Clergy (1676) and Bishop of Chichester, blamed them for attempting to “supplant Christian religion with natural theology” and to turn “the Grace of God into a wanton notion of morality.”142 They were also accused of trying “to disparage the Gospel, and make it the very same, excepting in two or three precepts, with mere natural religion.”143 In the hands of the latitudinarians, Christianity had become interchangeable with classical philosophy.

In The Christian Hero, Steele tackles this problem by attempting to reassert the distinction between “religion” and “morality.”144 For Calvinist critics of the latitudinarians, religion and morality were hardly synonymous. Thomas Craner (1715 or 16-1773), for example, stated in 1766, “Men who well know their Bible need not quote heathen authors to clear up divine things.”145 Craner’s response witnesses a new articulation of Tertullian’s question, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

139 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 37. 140 Ibid. 141 Griffin, Latitudinarianism, 9. 142 Ibid., 8. 143 Ibid. 144 Steele, The Christian Hero, 14. 145 Thomas Craner, The Christian Hero’s Work and Crown (London: 1766), 67.

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Christianity could only be harmed by its alliance with classical ethics because if God’s grace and faith in the Word of God through Scripture are sufficient for salvation, a faithful Christian could have little to learn from ancient pagans who had neither faith nor revealed religion.

For this reason, seventeenth-century Calvinists were horrified to think of congregations at the mercy of clergymen preaching this “new sort of levelling Theology, unknown to the wisdom of former ages” by polluting their sermons with classical quotation.146 In A Few Sighs from Hell (1658), Bunyan censured “carnal priests” who “tickle the ears of their hearers with vain Philosophy and deceit, and thereby harden their hearts against the simplicity of the Gospel.”147 Those, he says, “who nuzzle up

[their] people in ignorance with Aristotle, Plato, and the rest of the heathenish philosophers, and preach little, if any thing of Christ rightly.”148 Similarly, George Whitefield (1714-1774) felt that the clergy were supplying their flocks “only with the dry husks of dead morality,” and Thomas Browne

(1605-1682) observed: “truly there are singular Pieces in the Philosophy of Zeno, and Doctrine of the

Stoicks, which I perceive, delivered in a Pulpit, pass for current Divinity.”149 Jonathan Warne included in his book An attempt to promote true love and unity between the Church of England and the dissenters who are

Calvinists, of the Baptist, Independent, and Presbyterian Persuasions (1741), a list of reasons that had been given

“about fifty Years ago by some young Men, who were demanded to shew Cause for Leaving the

Parish-Church” to their parish priest.150 These young nonconformists vividly compared the Church’s

Arminian teachings to a tasteless dish of frothed egg whites:

Because of Non-edification by the preaching of such Ministers, as oft-times, we must sit under

in our Country Parish Churches, from whose Discourses we can find little or no Profit or

146 Jones, Reflexions, 24. 147 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 111. 148 Ibid. 149 George Whitefield, Twelve Sermons on Various Important Subjects (London: 1771), 269; Thomas Browne, Religio medici (London: 1738), 118. 150 Jonathan Warne, An attempt to promote true love and unity between the Church of England and the dissenters who are Calvinists, of the Baptist, Independant perswasions (London: 1741), 62.

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Advantage; it being so sorrily adapted to the spiritual Wants of poor Sinners, that it is more

likely to starve, than to feed ‘em. We have too often met with Frustration on this Account, in

the Parish Churches; we come hungry, and return empty; we come for Bread, and we are put

off with Husks; we come with drooping Souls, opprest with a Sense of Sin, perplex’d with

Doubts and Fears spiritual Straits and Burthens (which Country Curates seldom groan under)

and they give us a Dish of dry Insipids to relieve us, as savoury as the White of an Egg; with

a Passage now and then out of Cato and Plato very little to the Purpose, and as little understood.

Instead of the pure Gospel, we have a very fine Flourish of Arminianism.151

These and the like criticisms were so widespread that the latitudinarians had to defend themselves against the charges that they were preaching “mere morality.” In his final sermon before William and

Mary in 1694, Tillotson vindicated himself: “yet I hope that Jesus Christ is truly preached, whenever his will and laws, and the duties injoined by the Christian religion, are inculcated upon us. But some men are pleased to say, that this is mere morality: I answer, that this is scripture morality, and Christian morality, and who hath anything to say against that?”152

On the contrary, there were plenty of people who had something to say against that. What is striking about the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Calvinist ejection of the classics from Christian theology is that not even Calvin had gone so far. In this, it seems, they applied the doctrine of sola scriptura more strictly than Calvin himself. As extreme as this position may seem, there were good historical reasons for it facing seventeenth and eighteenth-century Christians that the earlier Protestant

Reformers had not encountered. Most significantly, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed the rise of freethinkers—including John Toland (1670-1722), Anthony Collins (1676-1729),

Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)—

151 Ibid., 64. 152 John Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, Lord archbishop of Canterbury (Edinburgh: 1772), 3:21.

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who undermined the authority of the Church by attempting to separate ethics from religion. They challenged the assumption that “Christianity is the height, and perfection of morality,” by asking whether it was possible to find a different moral system independent of Christianity.

According to Isabel Rivers, one of the most pressing ethical and religious questions beginning in the 1690s was whether the foundations of human morality could be located in human nature, in reason or the affections, or in the natural order of the world rather than in the will of God as revealed through scripture. If morality could be separated from religion, that would suggest that virtuous atheism was possible.153 Some freethinkers went so far as to suggest that institutional Christianity was damaging to morality.154 Shaftesbury, for instance, lamented that Christians exercise virtue not for its own sake but for fear of eternal punishment.155 Hume argued that the history of Christianity reveals religion to promote superstition, avarice, fanaticism, ignorance, hypocrisy, and fear.156 “The worst speculative Sceptic ever I knew,” mused Hume in a letter to Gilbert Elliot, “was a much better man than the best superstitious Devotee & Bigot.”157 Freethinkers fully committed to the possibility of virtuous atheism, not simply arguing that it was possible, but blaming religion for actively hindering virtue.

Naturally, this proposition would have enraged orthodox Christians. Whatever differences existed between different Christian denominations, all could at least agree that it was impossible for goodness to exist independently of God. All the same, it was important for the Church to combat this heterodoxy and, in the words of Sterne in his sermon “Advantages of Christianity to the World” firmly to “deny, that therefore religion and morality are independent of each other.”158 As a result, the

153 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780. Vol. 2, Shaftesbury to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 154 Ibid., 50-54. 155 Ibid., 132-141. 156 Ibid., 308-319. 157 Ibid., 238. 158 Sterne, Sermons, 252.

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characterization of the atheist as angry and embittered became commonplace.159 Writers including

Addison, Adam Smith, and even Shaftesbury (who as a deist tried to distance himself from atheists) argued that atheists cannot help but act with a “Spirit of Bitterness, Arrogance, and Malice” since their philosophy leads them to believe in a meaningless, Godless world.160 In Spectator 381, Addison wrote,

If we look into the Characters of this Tribe of Infidels, we generally find they are made up of

Pride, Spleen, and Cavil: It is indeed no wonder, that Men, who are uneasy to themselves,

should be so to the rest of the World; and how is it possible for a Man to be otherwise than

uneasy in himself, who is in danger every Moment of losing his entire Existence, and dropping

into Nothing?

Shaftesbury made a similar point in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm: “I very much question whether any thing, besides ill Humour can be the Cause of Atheism.”161 Adam Smith reflected in The Theory of Moral

Sentiments: “the very suspicion of a fatherless world, must be the most melancholy of all reflections.”162

Atheists, in other words, cannot be virtuous because the world they believe in cannot provide them with the conditions to flourish.

Although Shaftesbury criticized atheists like Hobbes for their ill humor, the same accusation was turned on Shaftesbury himself.163 For example, Ann Berkeley censured him in 1791: “Lord S— was…a superficial writer; he was a vain, angry, party man, who stole fine brilliant sentiments from the

159 For more on eighteenth-century attitudes about atheism, see James Bryant Reeves, Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 160 Spectator 186. See also Spectator 185, 381, 234. 161 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Douglas den Uyl (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 1:15. See also 2:40-41. 162 Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 261. 163 There are disputes in Hobbes scholarship today about whether he was an atheist, but in the eighteenth century Hobbes was widely regarded as one. See Peter Geach, “The Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” Religious Studies 17, no. 4 (1981): 549-558; C.A.J. Cody, “The Socinian Connection: Further Thoughts on the Religion of Hobbes,” Religious Studies 22, no. 2 (1986): 277-80; A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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ancient philosophers, and patched them together with shreds of modern infidelity.”164 Not only were atheists ill tempered, but according to the literature of the day, they were necessarily debauched epicures and amoral libertines, who, according to Addison, “unsettle the Minds of the Ignorant, disturb the publick Peace, subvert Morality, and throw all things into Confusion and Disorder.”165 As

Tillotson succinctly put it, “the true reason why any man is an Atheist is because he is a wicked man.”166

Later in the century, David Hume threw a wrench into these ad hominem attacks against atheism.

Most who knew him, even if they were shocked at his atheist philosophy, recognized that he was a good man.167 Boswell, for example, marveled in his journal, “It was curious to see David such a civil, sensible, comfortable looking man, and to recollect, ‘this is the Great Infidel.’”168 Hume was living proof against the common argument that an atheist could not be virtuous.

Freethinkers and deists argued that all one had to do was look back to the ancient Stoics, the

Epicureans, the Skeptics, and the Academics for proof that it was possible to practice moral philosophy without reference to Christian revelation. Peter Gay and Joseph M. Levine have discussed how scholars starting in the Renaissance developed new philological and historiographical techniques that had allowed them to recover ancient writers and “disentangle” the fragments of ancient philosophers from their “Christian formulations.”169 Gay describes how through the recovery efforts of modern scholarship, Stoicism in particular “regained its distinct identity” apart from Christianity.170

Once Stoicism and other ancient philosophies could stand on their own, it was only a matter of time

164 Ann Berkeley, The contrast; or, an antidote against the pernicious principles disseminated in the letters of the late Earl of Chesterfield (London: 1791), 115. 165 Spectator 186. 166 Tillotson, Works, 1:59. 167 Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 240. 168 James Boswell, Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick Albert Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 201. 169 Gay, Modern Paganism, 296. See also Levine, The Battle of the Books, 1-9. 170 Ibid.

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before they could be set up as rival sources of moral authority.171 The classics were, Ayres writes, the

“core” of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century deist and freethinking thought.172 The anonymous author of The Morality of the New Testament (1765) wrote, “I have heard, with concern, the character of Christ, and that of his apostles, treated with familiarity, and even with contempt, by persons who have called themselves Deists; while they spoke of Plato, Socrates, Epictetus, and others of the antient philosophers, with great reverence.”173 Arthur O’Leary similarly complained of the

“Modern Freethinkers” who extolled the ancient philosophers “with a view to degrade the Christian religion and its ministers.”174 In other words, ancient thinkers were the source of moral authority that freethinkers needed to validate their position.

Freethinkers and deists commonly asserted the equality, and sometimes the superiority, of ancient ethical systems over Christian morality. In Christianity as Old as Creation, for example, Tindal recalled that Arnobius, the Christian apologist had written, “If [Cicero’s] works had been read, as they ought, by the Heathens, there had been no need of Christian writers.”175 While Tindal had only gone so far as to make Christ and Cicero comparable, Anthony Collins boldly claimed the ancients as their intellectual forebears. In A discourse of free-thinking, occasion’d by the rise and growth of a sect call’d free-thinkers,

Collins called Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plutarch, Varro, Cato the Censor, Cicero, Cato of Utica,

Seneca, and Socrates the original freethinkers.176 Later, David Hume described how he had turned to the classics for the formation of his character: “Having read many Books of Morality, such as Cicero,

Seneca & Plutarch, & being smit with their beautiful Representations of Virtue & Philosophy, I

171 See Spellman, Latitudinarians, 147-148. 172 Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 152. 173 Rational Christian, Morality, 12. 174 O’Leary, Miscellaneous tracts, 22. 175 Ayres, Classical Culture, 158. 176 Anthony Collins, A discourse of free-thinking, occasion’d by the rise and growth of a sect call’d free-thinkers (London: 1713), 98-117.

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undertook the Improvement of my Temper & Will, along with my Reason & Understanding. I was continually fortifying myself with Reflections against Death & Poverty, & Shame, & Pain, & all other

Calamities of Life.”177 Here, Hume claims for ancient morality what Steele had claimed for Christianity in The Christian Hero: that the greatest moral system will be the one which fortifies us in the face of suffering and hardship.

These claims are daring because they directly challenge the certainty of Renaissance humanists like Erasmus that the virtuous philosophers would have been Christians had they been born in the modern world. In short, freethinkers and latitudinarians were engaged in a tug of war over ancient authority.178 Did Cicero belong to Christians or to freethinkers? If Socrates were alive, would he side with Toland or Tillotson? On the one hand, freethinkers and deists traced a genealogy of freethinking back to the ancient Greeks and Romans so as to establish a rival philosophical tradition that could replace Christian morality. On the other, the latitudinarians continued to champion the Christian humanist ideal rather than concede the classical moralists to the freethinkers as the Calvinists had done. Like Erasmus before them, they continued to speculate that, given the chance, the ancient sages would have been Christians, as when Eustace Budgell wrote in Spectator 389: “the greatest and most eminent Persons of all Ages” have been against atheism, including “The Platos and Ciceros among the

Ancients.”179 At the same time, because the Platos and Ciceros of the ancient world had been born before Christian revelation, the latitudinarians had to claim that their philosophies had only imperfectly begun what Christianity was later to complete.

As one sermon from 1764 effusively put it, Socrates, Plato, Cicero, and Marcus Antonius were

“Venerable Names! Teachers and Examples of almost Christian Virtue!”180 However, “Almost

177 Ayres, Classical Culture, 59. 178 Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 28-31. 179 See also Spectator 186. 180 James Allan, Moderation explained and recommended (London: 1764), 31.

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Christian Virtue” is neither the most precise or secure way to define how the classical philosophers stood with respect to Christian theology. From the Calvinist perspective, a Christianity founded primarily on moral teachings and relying so heavily on ancient moral philosophy would not be able to hold its own against those same ancient moral philosophical systems. George Horne wrote in his

Letters on Infidelity (1786): “In all cases Christians and Heathens are upon the same footing.”181 Their levelling of Christianity to just one moral philosophy among many led their critics to say that latitudinarian theology had actually aided the spread of deism and atheism.182 Henry Grove (1684-

1738) in A System of Moral Philosophy observed “that one thing which hath occasioned the growth of

Deism, hath been mens advancing Morality so much as they have done.”183 “If heathen quotations fill our sermons, instead of divine revelation,” Edward Hitchin asked, “what other consequence can we expect in this age, but what we see, viz. the increase of Deism, Suicide, and all other gross immoralities?”184 Overall, both Calvinists and High Churchmen believed that the latitude-men were on a slippery slope toward Socinianism, deism, and atheism and warned that their theology of Christian morality buttressed by the wisdom of “Seneca, Cicero, Plato, or any of the heathen philosophers” was

“only Deism refined.”185

Let us return now to the original question of what “the exact relation between pagan virtues and Christianity” was in 1701. The question of how to reconcile classical philosophy and Christian theology has been a perennial problem since the beginning of Christianity. When Steele asked, “Why is it that the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imaginations?” he was only expressing the same feelings St. Jerome had when he dreamed he was a Ciceronian and when Dante’s heart broke over the sight of Homer and Horace in Hell. As conflicted as their love for the ancients was, it was

181 Horne, Letters on Infidelity, 135. 182 See Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 87. 183 Henry Grove, A System of Moral Philosophy (London: 1749), 1:11. 184 Hitchin, A sermon, 12-13. 185 George Whitefield, Sermons on important subjects (London: 1828), 121.

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still possible, more or less, for medieval and Renaissance Christians to harmonize the classical and

Christian traditions. Peter Gay has called this reconciliation “pagan Christianity.” Because “their affection for pagan works did not make them pagans,” it was not unthinkable for Petrarch to suppose that Cicero would have become a Christian if he had been born after Christ.

Yet, by 1701 it was no longer possible to take Petrarch’s assumption for granted. In England, churchmen like the latitudinarians tried to continue the Christian humanist project, but, in spite of their efforts, that ideal was beginning to break down. The latitudinarians attempted to bring coherence and unity to English religious and political life by promoting religious tolerance and emphasizing reasonable morality as the centerpiece of Christian belief. However, this doctrinal levelling, as many of their critics pointed out, actually weakened Christianity’s defenses against a challenge not faced by previous generations: the rising tide of freethinkers, atheists, and deists who in their efforts to free morality from the clutches of religion, turned to classical moral philosophy not as a complement to but as a replacement for Christian ethics. In the hands of the Church’s enemies, classical philosophy was no longer in the service of Christian morality but threatened to usurp it. Because Anglican

Christianity had become, at the hands of the latitudinarians, just one moral philosophy among many, it had few ways to defend itself.

Eighteenth-century English Christians identified two means of defense. The first was to relinquish the classical inheritance altogether—deists and freethinkers could have Plato and Aristotle.

Orthodox Calvinists and dissenters, who disavowed the latitudinarian primacy of morality, adhered to this first position. They did not need classical moral philosophers to guide them to salvation, they said, when all that was necessary for salvation was faith in scriptural revelation and the gift of God’s grace.

The second means of defense, adopted by the latitudinarians, was to rescue the classics from the hands of deists, infidels, and freethinkers and to claim the ancients as their own allies, thereby doing all in their power to salvage the Christian humanist ideal.

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The breakdown of Christian humanism, in short, was the state of affairs that so alarmed Steele and his contemporaries. The Christian Hero had not asked a new question so much as it had identified a new problem with that question. The cultural conditions existing in the early eighteenth century were such that the old compromises and formulae satisfying the tensions between classical philosophy and

Christian theology no longer satisfied. This was the crisis of their age, and it required a new solution.

The Christian Hero in the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel

From the pulpits and the universities, divines, philosophers, and moralists did their best to make the strongest claims for Christianity they could, attempting to show that classical ethics fell short of Christian morality, that Christianity, as the most perfect moral system, alone resulted in true greatness. However, as Steele rightly acknowledged, even the most well-reasoned philosophical arguments were not enough. The problem lay as much, if not more, in converting hearts as in converting minds. It was going to require something more than logic to take the “cold” feelings people had toward Christianity and “warm and kindle” in their hearts the same “desire for Imitation” that the ancients had inspired.186

The enthusiasm for classical culture was everywhere to be seen. In 1780, William Jones lamented that if the “general state of religion and manners may be judged of by the style and taste adopted in the ornamental arts,” then surely England was a “pagan” nation.187 Jones was writing at the height of British “neoclassicism,” a term Victorian archaeologists later adopted as a disparaging word for the classical fervor that had taken hold of the visual and decorative arts, music, architecture, fashion, music, and literature and the theater in the eighteenth century.188 The obsession originated

186 Steele, The Christian Hero, 15. 187 Jones, Reflexions, 2. 188 Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1.

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among the aristocracy when young men of fashion embarked on the Grand Tour, which was the finishing touch on an education spent studying Greek, Latin, and the Ciceronian humanities: grammar, rhetoric and eloquence, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.189 On the continent, these elite young men prepared for their illustrious careers as statesmen and gentlemen by cultivating classical gravitas and polite manners as they contemplated the ruins of ancient Rome and visited the courts of Europe.

Many Grand Tourists developed a deep appreciation for antiquities and objets d’art abroad, transporting back collections of antique marbles, gems, vases, and medals to adorn their estates and gardens in England. To name just a few instances of this widespread aristocratic collecting, Thomas

Herbert (1656-1733), 8th earl of Pembroke, amassed the “largest if not best collection of ancient marbles in Europe” at his estate in Wilton.190 Lord Chesterfield’s library contained a valuable antique bust of Cicero, and Sir Robert Walpole curated a magnificent collection of ancient marbles at

Houghton Hall in Norfolk.191

John Northall, who embarked on the Grand Tour in 1752, wrote that collecting sculptures of

“emperors, consuls, generals, orators, philosophers, poets, and other great men, whose fame in history engaged our earliest notice” evoked their presence, creating the illusion that they were “standing as it were in their own persons before us.”192 Inspired by images of these exemplars of heroic virtue,

English aristocrats began in turn to fashion themselves as Roman heroes in portrait sculpture and monuments (a privilege hitherto enjoyed only by royalty).193 They Romanized their estates and gardens as well, resurrecting scenes of heroism and grandeur made famous in the annals of the ancient historians. It became the golden age of Palladian architecture, and hundreds of classically inspired temples dotted the English landscape. Jones complained, “how conspicuous are all the temples of the

189 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 5. 190 Ayres, Classical Culture, 133. 191 Ibid., 138-9. 192 Ibid., 133. 193 Ibid., 63-75.

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Heathen idols in the famous gardens of Stowe.” One of these temples at Stowe was a Temple of

Virtue, which was modelled after the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli and displayed statues of Socrates,

Lycurgus, Homer, and Epaminondas.194 Or in another famous instance, Lord Burlington built a miniature Pantheon in his gardens at his Palladian estate Chiswick House.195

On their return to England, alumni of the Grand Tour and devotees of virtu formed clubs and societies dedicated to cultivating their “Grecian Taste and Roman Spirit.”196 This was, in fact, the motto of one of these clubs of virtuosi, the Society of Dilettanti, who were founded in 1732 and were considered “intensely fashionable.”197 Other earlier societies, which were not strictly devoted to

“philoromanism” but to the arts and collecting and antiquities in general, included the Virtuosi of St.

Luke (founded in 1689) and the Society of Antiquaries (founded in 1707).198 Later, the aristocratic

Society of Roman Knights (founded in 1722) was at the vanguard of Romano-British archaeology. 199

The 1720s and 30s witnessed the rise of archaeological investigation which revealed England’s own

Roman past. Beginning with Caesar’s landings in 55 and 54 BC, Roman Britain lasted almost four hundred years.200 The classics, then, were not just a foreign import accessible only to the aristocracy— they were part of England’s history, in their very backyards, so to speak.

The passion spread beyond elite private collections to the broader public. You did not have to be a wealthy aristocrat with an original antique marble, or even an elite young male, to participate in classical connoisseurship. As Viccy Coltman recounts in Fabricating the Antique, neoclassical material culture was packaged and repackaged, “isolated and dislocated from its original contexts in Italy for

194 Jones, Reflexions, 6. 195 Ayres, Classical Culture, 106. 196 Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), 3. 197 Ayres, Classical Culture, 62. 198 Ibid., 99. 199 Ibid., 92-105. 200 See Ayres, Classical Culture, 84-114.

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the purposes of possession and exhibition by a British audience.”201 In 1772, for instance, Josiah

Wedgwood and Richard Bentley issued a catalogue that introduced novel products on the English pottery market: vases, plaques, cameos, intaglios, rings, and busts inspired by Roman and Greek antiquities that rendered the classical commodities affordable to the genteel classes.202 To design his meticulously copied earthenware, Wedgwood consulted antiquarians and the private collections of the nobility.203

Public buildings were also erected in the classical style, something William Jones found especially worrisome when it came to churches: “The fabulous objects of Grecian mythology have even got possession of our churches; in one of which I have seen a monument with elegant figures as large as life, of the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.”204 Jones seems to have been referring to the funeral monument in Warkton Church, Northamptonshire, which was designed by Louis

François Roubiliac to commemorate Mary Churchill, second Duchess of Montagu, who died in 1751.

The ancients had also taken possession of St. Paul’s Covent Garden, a church which was based on

Palladio’s reconstruction of Vitruvius’ Tuscan temple.205 Such spaces accomplish visually what

Bunyan, Whitefield, and other Calvinists had complained of in the latitudinarian practice of interspersing sermons with scraps of Seneca and Plato.

Secular as well as sacred buildings were redesigned in the classical spirit. Jones also complains specifically of London’s own Pantheon, which was built in 1772 and served as assembly rooms and as a theater: “In our rural ornaments we have temples to all the pagan divinities; and in the city a

Pantheon, wherein there is a general assembly of the sons and daughters of pleasure, under the

201 Coltman, Fabricating the Antique, 15. 202 Hilary Young, Introduction to The Genius of Wedgwood, ed. Hilary Young (London: V&A, 1995), 13. See also Coltman, Fabricating the Antique, 65-96. 203 Young, Wedgwood, 14. 204 Jones, Reflexions, 5. 205 Ayres, Classical Culture, 105.

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auspices of the whole tribe of Heathen daemons.”206 Even Steele himself was guilty of humoring “the sons and daughters of pleasure” with “Heathen” entertainments. From 1712-1722/23, Steele poured time and money into his pet project, which was to be called the “Censorium.”207 It never fully took off, but the idea, according to a letter from George Berkeley in 1713, was that Steele would provide

“noble entertainment for persons of a refined taste. It is chiefly to consist of the finest pieces of eloquence translated from the Greek and Latin authors. They will be accompanied with the best music suited to raise those passions that are proper to the occasion.”208 Steele’s plan for the Censorium shows just how hard it was for him to resist the attraction of classicism, even after denouncing it in The

Christian Hero.

To convince himself and others that true greatness belonged to the “sneaking” Christians rather than the “strutting” Roman hero was, to say the least, an uphill battle in a city that in the wake of the London fires of 1666 was slowly rebuilding itself according to ancient models. What was there to draw the attention of a gentleman like John Northall away from the marble sculptures of Roman heroes on which his gaze was fixed so admiringly? Many would say there was not much. Historically,

Christianity has always had a heroism problem. The ancient Greek word “hero” was used to refer to a man born in the “Heroic Age,” which was one of the five historical ages Hesiod, a Greek poet active around the same time as Homer, delineated in his poem Works and Days (c. 700 BC). Occurring between the Golden Age and the Iron Age, the Heroic Age was an “interlude of virtue and strength, interrupting the sequence of decline just before the coming of the present age.”209 All of Homer’s heroes belonged to the Heroic Age, and they were warriors of divine parentage, who “command wonder because of their strength, their fierceness, their superhuman force, in some cases their

206 Jones, Reflexions, 6. 207 See John Loftis, “Richard Steele’s Censorium,” Huntington Library Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1950): 43-66. 208 Ibid., 50. 209 Michael Clarke, “Manhood and Heroism” in The Cambridge Companion to Homer, ed. Robert Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79.

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heightened wisdom or skill in the arts of speech.”210 Agnori, a Greek word which comes from the adjective that means “having abundant or excessive manhood,” is, as Michael Clarke articulates, the

“key characteristic” of the hero.211 It is this “greater capacity for self-propelled vigour” that enabled the Homeric hero to “wield weapons too large and heavy for modern men to carry” and, singlehandedly to “hurl a boulder that nowadays three men could not lift.”212 Later, the meaning of

“hero” expanded to encompass Aristotle’s noble but flawed heroes of tragedy, the principled and unyielding hero of Sophoclean tragedy, and the philosophical hero as exemplified in Socrates.213

Particularly in comparison to the Homeric definition of the hero—“a man eminent for bravery” as Johnson’s definition of “hero” reads—Christ’s passive suffering on the cross might seem to be the antithesis of ancient heroism.214 Like Achilles, Christ was at once divine and human. Both were heroes by virtue of their sacrificial deaths—Achilles chose a short, but glorious life fighting for the Greeks at Troy, while Christ died to atone for the sins of humanity. However, Achilles was of noble birth, while Christ was merely the son of a Jewish carpenter born in an insignificant town and executed by crucifixion, an inglorious punishment reserved for criminals in the Roman empire. St.

Paul wrote in the First Letter to the Corinthians 1:21-23, “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the

Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” Indeed, Christ’s moral imperatives to forgive your enemies and turn the other cheek would have seemed like foolishness to many who valued the vitality of the Homeric heroes. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

210 Ibid., 80. 211 Ibid. 212 Ibid. 213 For a useful discussion of the Aristotelian hero, see Charlie H. Reeves, “The Aristotelian Concept of the Tragic Hero,” The American Journal of Philology 73, no. 2 (1952): 172-188; for the Sophoclean hero, see Bernard M.W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); for the philosophical hero, see Angie Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 214 All citations of Johnson’s Dictionary refer to Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: 1755).

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wrote of the “Pusillanimous sentiments of the new sect” and in The Christian Hero, Steele mentioned

Machiavelli’s view that “Religion throws our Minds below noble and hazardous Pursuits, then its

Followers are Slaves and Cowards.”215 Steele attempted in his essay to argue that the two great

Christian virtues “Poverty and Meekness,” are not pusillanimous or slavish as we might expect but are in fact “Sublime and Heroick.”216

Steele recognized that if Christianity was to make any strides in the modern English imagination, it had to be made more appealing, to be presented in a way that would attract people of fashion. Throughout his life, he was convinced that people must be converted away from their love for the ancients to loving the truth of the gospels. No longer the young man who wrote The Christian

Hero, Steele wrote in Guardian 21 twelve years later: “I am very confident whoever reads the gospels with an heart as much prepared in favour of them as when he sits down to Virgil or Homer, will find no passage there which is not told with more natural force than any episode in either of those wits, which were the chief of mere mankind.” What was it that would incline modern Englishmen to favor the gospels who before had been devotees of the ancients?

The answer lay in literature and the arts. Fiction could augment and reinforce the message of the New Testament with stories, offering what sermons, pamphlets and tracts could not. Johnson reflected in Rasselas that “Example is always more efficacious than precept,” and Fielding wrote in the opening line of Joseph Andrews, “It is a trite but true Observation, that Examples work more forcibly on the Mind than Precepts.” While expository literature like Steele’s The Christian Hero could only say that a virtue like meekness was heroic, narrative—whether in history, biography, poetry, drama, or prose fiction—could actually show it through the manners and actions of characters. Part of the problem was that modern English writers, according to Steele, were squandering the opportunity they

215 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 1:486. 216 Steele, The Christian Hero, 51.

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had by failing to offer their readers sufficiently compelling portraits of Christian characters who might inspire “a desire of Imitation.” “All our fine Observers,” he scolds, “who have been pleas’d to give us only Heathen Portraitures, to say no worse, have robb’d their Pens of Characters the most truly

Gallant and Heroick that ever appear’d to Mankind.”217

In The Christian Hero, then, Steele identified two problems. The first problem was that martial valor proudly shouts and Christian valor hides quietly in good deeds, or in his words that “the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imaginations.” The second problem, which was at least partially to blame for the first, was that while literature and the arts had a crucial role to play in moving readers to esteem the gospels by offering heroic Christian exemplars, contemporary writers too often wasted this potential, whether that was by imitating ancient authors or attempting to entertain with popular genres like criminal biography, travel narratives, or romances. After all, “The Accomplishments of Art are valuable,” Steele wrote in the Spectator, “but as they are exerted in the Interest of Virtue.”218 Steele’s idea that modern English writers had failed to surpass the literary accomplishments of their ancient predecessors was widely acknowledged in his day. Milton attempted a Christian epic in English and found he had captivated audiences with Satan rather than God, creating what we now term a Miltonic problem for its characteristic failure to make perfection and goodness narratively compelling. Between

1741 and 1743, Pope outlined plans for an original epic that was supposed to be about Brutus, “the mythical grandson of Aeneas and supposed founder of Britain,” but he only ever succeeded at epic in translation and mock epic.219 Joseph M. Levine has pointed out in his study The Battle of the Books that the quarrel of the ancients and moderns as it played out in England at the end of the seventeenth

217 Steele, The Christian Hero, 15. 218 Spectator 172. 219 Henry Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 118.

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century had shown that while the moderns had surpassed the ancients in the natural sciences and philosophy, victory in literature and the arts still went to the ancient Greeks and Romans.220

This second problem, which I term Steele’s crisis of “Christian heroism,” had implications for the broader cultural breakdown of Christian humanism in theology and moral philosophy. William

Jones insisted that it was impossible to appreciate the beauties of ancient poetry and eloquence without it dimming the truth of Christian teachings:

It is much to be lamented, that while we are learning from the scholars of profane antiquity,

the beauties of Imagery, the graces of Diction, the arts of Oratory, and the harmony of Poetry,

we are not better upon our guard against their principles, which steal upon us through the

vehicles of Poetry and Oratory, till our taste is wholly vitiated, and the glorious reality of the

Christian revelation becomes insipid and insignificant. Experience shews how difficult it is to

dwell with delight upon the expressions of Heathen writers, without embracing too many of

their sentiments.221

If the beauties of poetry and eloquence might make readers more receptive to certain “principles” and

“sentiments,” then it would follow that Christian eloquence and poetry could more readily dispose people to accept the moral teachings of Christianity. In other words, people would be more receptive to the teachings of Christianity, less likely to be attracted to classical philosophy as an alternative to

Christian morality, if, to borrow Steele’s language, their hearts had first been disposed to admire Christ and St. Paul over the heroes of Homer and Virgil. Steele, then, recognized that literature had an essential role to play in this larger theological and philosophical debate.

The Christian Hero, by nature of its genre as a philosophical pamphlet rather than as imaginative fiction, then, was not equipped to remedy the crisis it had articulated. Indeed, Steele wrote in a letter

220 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 414. 221 Jones, Reflexions, 21-24.

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to Delarivier Manley that “there is neither Love, Galantry, or Poetry” in The Christian Hero.222 What

Steele’s own essay lacks in “Poetry,” he compensates for in the enthusiasm with which he calls for

“Elegant Pens” to shoulder the cause of converting the imaginations of English readers from a love of classical heroes to a love of Christian exemplars.223

The story of how English writers responded to Steele’s rallying cry for “Elegant Pens” to take up the cause of Christianity against the classics is rich and varied. According to Martin Battestin, “The notion of the Christian hero, thus recommended by both Steele and the homilists, enjoyed an unusual popularity during the first half of the century.”224 One could speak of how The Gentleman’s Magazine announced a poetry context to award prizes to “the 4 best poems intitled The Christian Hero,”225 or how Henry Fielding’s friend George Lillo staged Scanderbeg: The Christian Hero (1735), which Battestin deems “a dismal attempt to dramatize the concept.”226 One could also explore Pope’s successful translation of the Iliad and his failure to write an epic of his own, or look back to Puritan answers to this question of Christian heroism in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and Bunyan’s The

Pilgrim’s Progress. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Elizabeth Carter’s “Ode to Wisdom,” or even Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” speak to the eighteenth-century vogue for Christianizing classical poetic forms. Such a comprehensive study would be impossible to accomplish here. Instead, this dissertation will focus on how Steele’s call prompts the responses of early novelists such as Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and later Austen.

At first glance, the novel might not seem like the most likely genre for a new ideal of Christian heroism to take root and flourish. This is partly because the novel has long been considered a secular

222 Steele, Correspondence, 436. 223 Steele, The Christian Hero, 68. 224 Martin C. Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 28. 225 Ibid., 163. 226 Ibid.

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form, an assumption that eighteenth-century literary scholars working in what is now being called

“post-secular studies” have been hard at work to correct.227 It is also partly because the early realist novel’s focus on the ordinary events of familiar life instead of, as Congreve put it, “constant loves and invincible courages of heroes, heroins [sic], kings and queens, mortals of the first rank” in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century prose romances would seem to be a rejection of heroic values.228 On the contrary, it was Richardson and Fielding’s dissatisfaction with high-flown French romances and the amatory fiction of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley that prompted them to distinguish their fiction from romance by claiming for their work moral respectability.229 Indeed, these novelists made no secret that they intended their heroes as champions of true Christian virtue. In the dedication to Lord Lyttelton, Fielding announced that “the Cause of Religion and Virtue” had been his “sincere Endeavour” in writing Tom Jones.230 The advertisement to Goldsmith’s The Vicar of

Wakefield boasted that his “hero” “unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family,” and Richardson declared in the preface to Sir

Charles Grandison that Sir Charles is “A Man of Religion and Virtue.”231 Thus, in its quest for cultural legitimacy and moral authority, the early English novel offers some of the century’s most concerted efforts to offer its readers exemplary Christian heroes.

227 For what is now being called the “postsecular” response to secularization theories of the novel, see Lori Branch and Mark Knight, “Why the Postsecular Matters: Literary Studies and the Rise of the Novel,” Christianity and Literature 67 (2018): 493-510; Kevin Seidel, “Beyond the Religious and the Secular in the History of the Novel,” New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007): 637-647; Kevin Seidel, Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel: The Bible in English Fiction 1678-1767 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 228 Dieter Schulz, “‘Novel,’ ‘Romance,’ and Popular Fiction in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Philology 70, no. 1 (1973): 78. 229 For discussions about the novel’s rejection of the romance and the novel’s quest for legitimacy and respectability as a genre, see Carol Stewart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); William Beatty Warner, Licensing Entertainment: the Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684- 1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Schulz, “‘Novel,’ ‘Romance,’ and Popular Fiction.” 230 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 7. 231 Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1:4; Oliver Goldsmith, The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 4:14.

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Rather than begin with the solution, the second chapter looks more carefully at the problem, by reading Addison’s immensely popular play Cato (1713) as an example of the kind of cultural production Steele might have had in mind in The Christian Hero when he blamed English writers “who have been pleas’d to give us only Heathen Portraitures.”232 Addison’s magnetic portrayal of Cato’s

“godlike virtue” held sway over English audiences, resulting, in one particularly infamous case, in the suicide of Addison’s own cousin, who left a note reading, “What Cato did and Addison approv’d cannot be wrong.” This prompted a century-long debate about whether Addison’s play glorified the ancient virtues at the expense of Christian virtue or whether Cato was an appropriate proto-Christian figure. I argue that Addison’s play is a carefully orchestrated expression of latitudinarian admiration for ancient virtue that at the same time avoids endorsing his suicide—and yet even his own cousin misjudged the message. Budgell’s suicide and the ambivalent responses to the play’s popularity suggest just how treacherous the latitudinarian celebration of ancient virtue could be.

The third chapter turns to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753) and Fielding’s Tom Jones

(1749) as competing mid-century visions of Christian heroism and the nascent novel’s relationship to classical epic. Richardson wrote Grandison as a response to what he saw as the shortcomings of

Fielding’s hero in Tom Jones. Critics have long noted Richardson’s middle-class hostility to ancient morality and the ancient epic. While I agree it is true that Richardson replaces an epic code of honor with a modern Christian one, the extent to which Richardson accomplishes this by appealing to and appropriating the fashionable classicism of elite men of wit is far less appreciated. In this novel,

Richardson modernizes Augustine’s motif of “Egyptian Gold” by offering a hero who is both a fine gentleman who can visit Herculaneum and praise the fine sayings of Horace with the best of the virtuosi, and a devout Christian. Grandison functions as a heroic exemplar who can entice wits from a life of virtu to one of virtue, who can teach about the beauty of Christian morality through ancient

232 Steele, The Christian Hero, 15.

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marbles. Both Richardson and Fielding see their novels in the lineage of the ancient epic, and like

Milton before them, aim to “soar above the Aonian mount.”

The fourth chapter proposes that no examination of Christian heroism would be complete without considering the eighteenth century’s most memorable, but also perplexing, character type: the quixotic clergyman. Central to all discussions of characters such as Fielding’s Parson Adams and

Goldsmith’s Dr. Primrose is the problem of the laughter these characters provoke. Goldsmith, I argue, appropriates the age’s fashion for Shaftesburian ridicule and anti-clerical humor—as seen in the era’s satirical prints and illustrations for the novels—and turns it to Christian use as latitudinarian divines like Tillotson and Barrow had recommended. In The Vicar of Wakefield, Goldsmith subjects his clerical heroes to the crucible of anti-clerical laughter, from which he emerges triumphant, his virtues no less brilliant for having been ridiculed. Finally, I turn in the closing fifth chapter briefly to look at the state of Steele’s crisis of Christian heroism one hundred years after the premiere of Cato by surveying Jane

Austen’s synthesis of the two emergent traditions of Christian heroism in the novels of her predecessors—the tradition of the gentleman hero and the clerical hero—in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and her other novels.

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Chapter Two: The Splendid Vices of Addison’s Cato

One May morning in 1737, the body of an unknown man was found floating in the Thames near the King’s Stairs at Tower-Wharf. According to London newspapers, his body was weighed down, as the waterman who had pulled him ashore discovered after searching his pockets, with a gold watch and £161 in gold and notes.1 A soggy scrap of paper identified him as Eustace Budgell, most famous as Joseph Addison’s cousin and author of the Spectator essays signed “X.” It was fortunate there was a note since his face was so disfigured—as one satiric broadside graphically put it, “A green and putrid Shade; / His Eyes out from their Sockets stood, / And bloated was his Head”—that his family could only otherwise identify him by his clothes and sword belt.2 An investigation into his death swiftly followed. Life had not been prosperous for Budgell since his days writing for London’s most popular periodical. The newspapers hinted at financial and legal troubles.

Losing a fortune of £20,000 in the South Sea Bubble of 1720 was only the beginning of over a decade of unhappiness, which included a number of lawsuits, two failed attempts to enter Parliament, conviction for libel in 1728, arrest for debt in 1730, all topped off by Budgell’s “increasing persecution mania” and his belief that Sir Robert Walpole was trying to have him murdered.3 And then there was the painfully public business about his friendship with Matthew Tindal, the deist and author of

Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730). When Tindal died in 1733, his nephew Nicholas Tindal accused

Budgell of forging his uncle’s will. The scandal caught fire: Edmund Curll published a copy of the will,

1 For the account of Budgell’s suicide and the discovery of his body, see the DNB’s entry for Budgell and newspaper articles archived in the Burney Newspapers Collection: London Evening Post, May 12-14, 1737; Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, May 14, 1737; Grub Street Journal, May 19, 1737; Old Whig or The Consistent Protestant, May 19, 1737; and Weekly Miscellany, May 20, 1737. 2 The Ghost of Eustace Budgell Esqr. to the Man in Blue, 1742, print with engraving and etching, 28 x 32 cm., The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. See Weekly Miscellany, May 20, 1737. 3 Paul Baines, “Budgell, Eustace (1686–1737), writer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004, Online.

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Budgell defended himself in his periodical The Bee much to the derision of The Grub Street Journal, and

Pope skewered Budgell in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.4

The week before Budgell’s body was discovered, it was reported that he had been acting strangely, talking so “wildly” that his maid took his sword to prevent him from taking his own life.5

The following day, he declared he would “come home no more” and took a coach to the Dorset stairs, where he filled his pockets with stones before boarding a boat for Greenwich.6 When the boat passed under London Bridge, Budgell “perpetrated the melancholy Fact,” flinging himself from the boat where he “sunk instantly, and was not seen to rise again.”7 “Lunacy,” the coroner declared, was responsible for his suicide.8

Budgell “became one of the most notorious suicides of the eighteenth century” in no small part because of one dramatic detail that newspapers did not initially report: he had left a suicide note on his writing desk at home that read, “What Cato did, and Addison approv’d cannot be wrong.”9

There was no doubt that Budgell was referring to his cousin’s popular play Cato (1713), which dramatized the final hours of Cato the Younger’s life as he resists Caesar’s tyranny with heroic stoicism during the final days of Caesar’s Civil War. As the play begins, Cato and his supporters have fled to

Utica and defeat seems imminent as Caesar’s troops close in. In the fifth act of the play, Cato stabs himself, convinced that death is preferable to living in a world ruled by Caesar.

4 Ibid. 5 London Evening Post, May 12-14, 1737. 6 Ibid. 7 Weekly Miscellany, May 20, 1737). 8 London Evening Post, May 12-14, 1737. It was usual when someone died under mysterious circumstances to call a coroner’s jury to decide the cause of death. In the case of suicide, it could either be ruled as felo de se (willful self-murder) or lunacy, non compos mentis. In the case of lunacy, the person was allowed a Christian burial. Most suicides in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were ruled as non compos mentis. See Donna T. Andrew, Aristocratic Vices (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 85-86. 9 Andrew, Aristocratic Vices, 89.

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Budgell was not the only spectator struck by the theatrical representation of “a brave man struggling in the storms of fate,” as the prologue put it.10 After Cato premiered on 14 April 1713— which happened to be Good Friday—it achieved a “near-record” run of twenty performances during the first season.11 Johnson noted that Cato “was acted night after night for a longer time than, I believe, the public had allowed to any drama before.”12 They would have kept going past the end of May if not for the fact that, according to Tickell, “one of the performers became incapable of acting a principal part.”13 On 22 April, John Gay wrote, “Cato affords universal discourse, and is received with universal applause.”14 Londoners from all walks of life applauded it, from Tories to Whigs and lords to “orange wenches” selling copies to passing carriages, with “common hawkers” reciting the prologue and epilogue in the streets.15 By 1776, it had been staged 226 times, by 1800, 242 times.16 Even

Budgell’s own daughter Anne, who was about eleven when he died and grew up to become an actress at Drury Lane, would later perform the role of Cato’s daughter Marcia.17 In short, Cato was, as one sermon said of it in 1784, “the delight of every eye, and the theme of every tongue.”18

Even the clergy couldn’t get enough of Cato. Addison’s play was, many agreed, more edifying than most sermons. George Smalridge, the Dean of Christ Church, wrote to Addison in August 1713 that he had given himself “the pleasure of seeing Cato acted and heartily wish all Discourses from the

Pulpit were as instructive and edifying, as pathetic and affecting, as that which the Audience was then

10 Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), l. 20. Further references to this work appear in the text parenthetically. 11 British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan, ed. George Nettleton and Arthur E. Case (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 473. 12 Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Herman W. Liebert, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958- ), 22:621. 13 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 255. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 255-256. 16 For statistics on performances of Cato, see British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan, 473, and Lincoln B. Faller, The Popularity of Addison’s Cato and Lilo’s The London Merchant (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), 2. 17 General Advertiser, January 22, 1744. 18 William Hunter, A sermon preached on the 29th of July, 1784 (London: 1784), 19.

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entertained with from the Stage.”19 In Guardian 59 (1713), Richard Steele published letters praising

Addison’s production. One fan letter is from William Lizard, the pious son of the fictional Lady Lizard and a student of divinity at All Souls who raves, “How irresistible is virtue in the character of Cato!”20

For the rest of century, the play was near and dear to the clerical heart, fictional and real alike. David

Simpson, an “early pioneer in congregational hymn singing,” set lines from Cato as a hymn.21 In Joseph

Andrews (1742), Parson Adams echoes Smalridge: “I never heard of any plays fit for a Christian to read, but Cato and the Conscious Lovers.”22

At last, here was living proof of what Addison and Steele had made part of their moral crusade in The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian: English dramatists didn’t need to titillate their audiences with the comic lewdness of Wycherley or Etherege’s plays, or the tragic ranting and raving of heroic drama in order to fill London’s playhouses. Positive examples of moral virtue, they thought, could entertain without “vulgar” means (prologue 8). In fact, they argued, the “Accomplishment and

Refining of Human nature” was the very raison d’être of the theater.23 The English stage needed a higher moral tone, one that cleansed the theater of indecent language and immoral actions and instead affirmed English virtues and argued on behalf of “the Religion, the Government, and Publick Worship of its Country.”24 “Britons, attend: be worth like this approved,” Pope wrote in the prologue to Cato,

“And show you have the virtue to be moved” (36-37). And moved the London public was, demonstrating how ready they were to be delighted and instructed if only someone would give them a play worthy of their admiration.

19 Smithers, Addison, 259. 20 The Guardian, ed. Alexander Chalmers (London: 1806), 1:352. 21 Mark Smith, “Simpson, David (1745–1799), Church of England clergyman and author,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004, Online. See David Simpson, A collection of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs: for the use of Christians of every denomination (London: 1776), 221. 22 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 267. 23 Spectator 446. 24 Ibid.

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But Budgell’s suicide tarnished the bright moral luster of Addison’s play, since it cast doubt on Cato’s suitability as a Christian heroic exemplar. Pope’s lines in the prologue—“Who sees him act, but envies every deed? / Who hears him groan, and does not wish to bleed?” (25-26)—ominously prophesied how Cato’s example had emboldened the audience to admire an act forbidden by orthodox

Christianity. Some writers tried to dismiss Budgell’s suicide as an anomaly: only a mad man could possibly interpret Cato’s example as an invitation to self-murder. In 1789, the Revd. David Simpson observed, “Mr. Addison never supposed, that his friend would make so ill a use of the Tragedy, which had cost him so much pains, and had been received with so much applause…Mr. Addison, as a

Christian, never meant to give a sanction to self-murder.”25 At the very least, Addison could not be held accountable if others grossly misinterpreted the moral intentions of his play.

Others said that atheism, not Addison, was to blame. In A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide

(1790), Charles Moore, the rector of Cuxton and vicar of Boughton-Blean, wrote that Budgell “had always thought but lightly of revelation, and after Addison’s death became an avowed free-thinker.”26

Even if one could dismiss Budgell’s particular suicide, he was not the only one. Sermons throughout the eighteenth century allude to rumored “others” who found Cato’s suicide irresistible. Of Cato’s example, Job Orton wrote, “it is well known; Budgell and others made so bad an use,” and Moore said that Budgell’s “insidious remark…has been caught up by many a suicide since the days of Budgell, to justify his own murder.”27

For this reason, Cato found as many detractors as supporters, those who agreed with John

Dennis that “this Play is so far from carrying a Moral, that it carries a pernicious instruction with it.”28

Even those sympathetic to Addison’s good intent wondered “whether this fine Tragedy hath ever

25 David Simpson, Discourses on Several Subjects (London: 1789), 62. 26 Charles Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide (London: 1790), 2:113. 27 Job Orton, A serious dissuasive from frequenting the play-house (London: 1774), 17; Moore, A Full Inquiry, 2:113. 28 John Dennis, Some Remarks Upon Cato, a Tragedy (London: 1713), 10.

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done so much good in the world, as to overbalance this unhappy effect.”29 One anonymous author agreed: “Then was the pernicious example of Cato set up, who hath been followed ever since as a pattern of suicide, because the sin was unfortunately varnished over by the sentiments and diction of that elegant and eminent scholar Mr. Addison.”30

Other critiques were less directly aimed at Addison, indicting any author who set up the historical Cato as a model fit for Christian imitation.31 Well before Addison staged the play, the figure of Cato Uticensis was at the heart of anti-suicide discourse.32 In the eighteenth century, there was widespread concern that England was in the grip of a suicide epidemic, and many of the resulting anti- suicide tracts published in England discussed and condemned Cato.33 For instance, Edward Hitchin wrote in a funeral sermon published in 1758, “If self-murder is dressed up with such elegance of stile, and represented as so grand an instance of a brave heroic mind; and if heathen quotations fill our sermons, instead of divine revelation; what other consequence can we expect in this age, but what we see, viz. the increase of Deism, Suicide, and all other gross immoralities.”34

Chief among the critics of Cato the Younger was Steele, who had published a searing takedown of the historical Cato in The Christian Hero over a decade before Addison’s play premiered. In brief,

Steele argues, Cato’s suicide was the effect of cowardice and pride rather than an act of fortitude. What

29 Simpson, Discourses, 62. 30 The scholar armed against the errors of infidelity, enthusiasm, and disloyalty; or, a collection of tracts on the principles of religion, government, and ecclesiastical polity (London: 1780), 20. 31 See also Watts, Defense, 22; James Foster Sermons on the following subjects (London: 1744), 157; William Shorey, Fourteen discourses preach’d on several occasions (London: 1725), 196-197. 32 For an overview of Christian responses to Cato’s suicide, beginning with Augustine through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment, see Nathaniel Wolloch, “Cato the Younger in the Enlightenment,” Modern Philology 106, no. 1 (2008): 60-82. 33 See Roland Bartel, “Suicide in Eighteenth-Century England: The Myth of a Reputation,” Huntington Library Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1960): 145-158 and Lester G. Crocker, “The Discussion of Suicide in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 1 (1952): 47-72. For examples of early eighteenth-century suicides tracts that criticize Cato, see Richard Willis, The Occasional Paper: Concerning Self-Murder (London: 1698); John Adams, An Essay Concerning Self-Murther (London: 1700); John Prince, Self-Murder Asserted to Be a Very Heinous Crime (London: 1709). 34 Hitchin, A sermon, 13.

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is strange about Steele is that while he was critical of the historical Cato, he was supportive of, and even instrumental in, staging and promoting Addison’s play. Addison had shown Steele a draft of the play as early as 1704. When Addison picked up the draft again in 1713, his friends—Steele included— urged him to bring it to the stage, and Steele soothed Addison’s apprehensions about “the censure of an English audience” by packing the theater with sympathetic spectators.35 Steele also contributed laudatory verses published in the seventh edition of the play and promoted it in Guardian 33: “There is nothing uttered by Cato but what is worthy the best of men; and the sentiments which are given him are not only the most warm for the conduct of this life, but such as we may think not need to be erased, but consist with the happiness of the human soul in the next.”36 This from the man who had just a decade before lamented how too many “Elegant Pens” had celebrated the “shining,” but ultimately misleading, virtues of ancients heroes at the expense of Christian martyrs and saints. In

1701, Steele likely would have considered Cato to be a part of the problem, a perfect example of ancient virtue “pompously array’d in Story.”37

Scholars discussing Cato, specifically its treatment of stoicism, tend to dismiss Steele’s critique of Cato in The Christian Hero, if they mention it at all. Ian Donaldson discusses the connection in passing, Nathaniel Wolloch mentions Addison and Steele’s disagreement, stressing how Steele’s verse encomiums praise Addison rather than the play itself, and Lincoln B. Faller notes how Addison’s depiction of Cato’s suicide relieves “his hero of at least part of Steele’s charge that Cato’s suicide was a blot upon his character.”38 None account for the difficulty of Steele’s endorsement of the play’s

35 Smithers, Addison, 251-252. 36 The Guardian, 1:187. 37 Steele, The Christian Hero, 15. 38 See Ian Donaldson, “Cato in Tears: Stoical Guises of the Man of Feeling,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century II, ed. R.F. Brissenden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 381; Wolloch, “Cato the Younger in the Enlightenment,” 70-71; Faller, The Popularity of Addison’s Cato, 68.

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“sentiments” in The Guardian or his crucial role in the play’s success. Only Malcolm Kelsall acknowledges the problem, but he quickly explains it away as a “complete change of mind.”39

While it is possible that Steele had simply changed his mind about Cato’s virtue, this explanation is unsatisfactory. As Steele’s biographer Calhoun Winton points out, whether about politics, his distrust of Catholicism, or the evils of dueling, Steele rarely changed his mind. It was his dogged loyalty that made him valuable to the Whigs but eventually made his periodical essays feel

“shopworn,” repeating as they did the same topics “for the tenth or the twentieth time.”40 Beyond his loyalty to the Whigs, he was often unflaggingly loyal to his friends.41 For instance, Congreve’s The Way of the World came “under attack” when it premiered during the height of the Collier theatrical controversy.42 Though Steele’s own views about theater reform aligned more closely with Collier,

Steele publicly defended his friend’s play.43 It is therefore possible that his friendship with Addison, combined with his desire for literary fame, commercial success, and his enthusiasm for the play’s politics, outweighed any reservations he may have felt about Addison’s choice to depict Cato as a heroic exemplar. Another reason it seems unlikely Steele simply changed his mind about Cato is that he continued to think well of The Christian Hero, promoting it throughout his life, revising it for a second and third edition, and recycling passages from it in his periodicals.44 If he had a change of heart, there were plenty of opportunities for later editions of the essay to reflect it.

How do we reconcile Budgell’s suicide with Addison’s interest in moral reform, Steele’s apparent change of mind, and the approval of the clergy? Despite attempts by early biographers to dismiss it, Budgell’s suicide—and the other suicides—could not be ignored. For the remainder of the

39 Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” 151. 40 Winton, Captain Steele, 109, 156. 41 Ibid., 41. 42 Ibid., 58. 43 Ibid., 58-59. 44 Blanchard, Introduction to The Christian Hero, xii.

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century biographies analyzed it, moralists warned against it, and even Boswell and Johnson discussed it.45 In reality, Addison’s depiction of Cato’s suicide represented a real problem for eighteenth-century

Christian spectators, and for this reason the legacy of Cato and its success on the eighteenth-century stage demands to be revisited, especially considering how the play’s sustained popularity continues to mystify critics and historians. Approaches that have focused on the play as a moral tragedy rather than as a drama about party politics have led to wildly divergent readings.46 Is Cato a hero or a hypocrite?

Is Addison’s intent to praise or blame?47 Although recent critics such as Terry, Radford, Henderson, and Yellin have been correct to question Addison’s full endorsement of Cato’s virtue on the grounds of Addison’s Christianity, the relation of Addison’s Christianity to Cato’s stoicism remains imprecise and disputed.

By foregrounding the neglected homiletic context for Addison’s play and Cato’s suicide, I hope to reconcile contemporary scholarship’s conflicting interpretations of Cato. In dramatizing Cato’s suicide, “the most important part of the Cato ‘myth,’” Addison was engaging in a current religious and philosophical debate about the Christian status of ancient virtue, for which the figure of Cato and his suicide was frequently a touchstone.48 This was an old problem dating back to Augustine’s theory of the splendida peccata, or the “splendid vices,” that became newly important during the

45 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 2:229. 46 For an influential reading of Cato’s politics, see John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 47 For praise arguments see Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” 149-162; Milton Jeffrey Waldrop, “The Apotheosis of the Hero in Eighteenth Century Tragedy: A Look at Addison’s Cato and Home’s Douglas,” University of Mississippi Studies in English 11-12 (1993-5): 97-105; Bonamy Dobrée, Restoration Tragedy, 1660-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). For blame arguments, which range from the moderate to the emphatic, see J.M. Armistead, “Drama of Renewal: Cato and Moral Empiricism,” PLL 17, no. 3 (1981): 271-283; Richard Terry, “Revolt in Utica: Reading Cato against Cato,” Philological Quarterly 85, no. 1/2 (2006): 121-139; Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin, “‘Those Stubborn Principles:’ From Stoicism to Sociability in Joseph Addison’s ‘Cato,’” The Review of Politics 76, no. 2 (2014): 223-241; Lisa A. Freeman, “What’s Love Got to Do with Addison’s ‘Cato,’” SEL, 1500-1900 39, no. 3 (1999): 463-482; Leslie Radford, “‘Alas I’ve Been Too Hasty!’ And Other Reconsiderations of Addison’s Cato,” Restoration and Eighteenth- Century Theatre Research 10, no. 2 (1995): 32-41. 48 Ibid., 151.

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Enlightenment.49 According to Augustine, without God’s grace and revelation, no act, no matter how good it appeared, was meritorious. Because Cato had been born before Christian revelation, even his most seemingly heroic actions were not truly virtuous. Those who disputed Augustine’s theory argued that the ancients—while they may have been born before Christ—still had access to God’s truth through reason and through natural religion. In an age when deists and freethinkers espousing heresies like Pelagianism and Socinianism were trying to erect a religion of reason unshackled of the more irrational aspects of Christianity—revelation, miracles, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ—it was risky to rely too heavily on man’s natural reason at the expense of supernatural grace.

Addison’s own writings indicate that he adopted this second position, which emphasized the role of natural religion in man’s salvation and was balanced precariously between stringent

Augustinianism on one hand and deism on the other. An important part of this middling stance was that “virtuous pagans” like Cato and Socrates were genuinely worthy of admiration and, in fact, should remind Christians not to squander their spiritual inheritances, since they would have made much better use of the gifts of grace and revelation had they been born in time to hear the Good News. In other words, if Cato could become great without having read a word of Scripture, modern Christians have no excuse for moral mediocrity. In his earliest extant sermon from 1661, Archbishop John Tillotson preached:

When I read the heathen writers, especially TULLY and SENECA, and take notice, what

precepts of morality and laws of kindness are every where in their writings, I am ready to fall

in love with them. How should it make our blood rise in many of our faces, who are Christians,

49 Though the concept is believed to be an Augustinian one—and eighteenth-century writers frequently attributed it to him—Augustine never used the phrase splendida peccata. For a discussion of the origins of the phrase in Bayle and Leibniz and a discussion of to what extent this pseudo-Augustinian phrase actually represents Augustine’s beliefs, see T.H. Irwin, “Splendid Vices? Augustine For and Against Pagan Virtues,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 8, no. 2 (1999): 105-217.

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to hear with what strictness TULLY determines cases of conscience, and how generously he

speaks of equity and justice towards all men?50

If Tillotson was “ready to fall in love” with classical morality at the beginning of the Restoration, by the eighteenth century it certainly had, to borrow from Richardson’s Pamela (1740), crept like a thief, and now looked like love. Although the symptoms of this infatuation were everywhere to be found, nowhere was the blush so crimson as in Addison’s Cato.

In the play, Cato reaches through the dark toward the teachings of orthodox Christianity: based on the use of his reason, he rejects Epicurean materialism and acknowledges the immortality of the soul and the existence of a divinity, whom it is his duty to trust and obey. Cato experiences flashes of divine revelation, and the play dramatizes the theory that God could “infuse faith” into non-

Christians “after an extraordinary manner.”51 Addison’s play, then, endorses Cato’s virtue to the same extent that certain Church of England divines considered a virtuous heathen as an example to all apostate or complacent Christians.

Splendid Vices, Varnished Sins

The idea of the “splendid vices” was a hotly contended issue among archbishops and country curates alike, especially when it came to debates about grace and good works, natural and revealed religion.52 As Thomas Ridgley observed in 1725, “many Volumes have been written on both Sides of the Question.”53 The main question at stake for orthodox Christians was whether the ancients, who were “destitute of the Gospel” and had only nature and reason as their guides, were capable of real

50 Birch, The Life of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, 465. 51 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 110. 52 While the Latin phrase appears in eighteenth-century writings, it was most commonly translated as “splendid sins,” with other variants including “glittering vices,” “shining sins,” “glittering sins,” “varnished sins,” “gilded sins,” and even “painted corruptions” and “glittering Abominations.” 53 Thomas Ridgley, The doctrine of original sin considered, being the substance of two sermons preached at Pinners Hall (London: 1725), 66.

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virtue.54 If they were, that meant one of two things: either God had somehow extended grace to non-

Christians or grace was not strictly necessary for salvation. Unless one wanted to be accused of deism, atheism, or Pelagianism—a heresy positing that man was not tainted by original sin and could choose good or evil without divine assistance—the latter explanation that grace was not necessary to salvation was simply not an option.

Therefore, orthodox Protestants who united in their opposition to freethinking, skepticism, deism, and other forms of heretical thinking could choose, as Ridgley identified, one of two sides, which correspond with what Isabel Rivers has identified as the two ends of the Church of England’s doctrinal spectrum: the Arminian position and the Calvinist position.55 The first group, sympathetic to the Calvinist account, accepted the Augustinian position that because the ancients were born before revelation, had no knowledge of original sin, and died unconverted to the faith, their actions had only the appearance of virtue, making them unworthy models for Christian emulation. The second group was Arminian in character and believed the ancients were capable of real virtue even without Christian faith. But to avoid charges of Pelagianism or atheism, they theorized that it was possible for God to extend grace to non-Christians.

A typical Augustinian sermon often went something like this: “Those moral vertues and

Heroic Acts and Endowments of some of the Pagan Princes and Philosophers, are as St. Austin calls them, but glittering Sins; For they who have not Faith in Christ to turn their Vertue into Grace,

Unbelief turns their Vertue into Sin.”56 Similarly, the Bishop of Derry, St George Ashe—who taught

Jonathan Swift at Trinity and was greatly admired by Addison as hardly having an equal in “Humanity,

54 Ibid. 55 See Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 8-12. 56 James Warner, Salvation and the necessary means of it considered and urg’d: in a discourse upon Titus 3.4 (London: 1712), 6.

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agreeable conversation, and all kinds of Learning”—wittily summarizes the common version of this position, writing that those who think faith alone sufficient to be saved will,

…call you dull Moralist, and say you do not understand the glorious Privileges of the Gospel:

They will assure you, that Morality is a heathenish Perfection, a meer pagan Principle; and that

as the Want of Faith made all the celebrated Virtues of Socrates, Cato, Epictetus, and Marcus

Aurelius, to be only splendid Sins, so the having it will undoubtedly consecrate, or make

innocent all the Actions of their Lives.57

As becomes clear in both of these statements, for a believer in Augustine’s splendida peccata, classical morality is little more than an illusion. Their reasoning is consistent with orthodox Calvinist theology, since, as one writer put it, good works without faith are “empty moralities, raised on no other

Foundation, than the scanty Goodness of the natural Man.”58 No matter how virtuous the ancient heroes may have appeared, without faith in Christ, their actions can be nothing more than sins, the unredeemed actions of unconverted, fallen man.

Many homilists place Cato “at the Head of this false Heroism,” using him as a primary illustration of one whose apparent virtues were actually vices.59 The most common vices attributed to

Cato in sermons of this period are pride and impatience. The ancient stoics were proverbial for their pride, since they believed that happiness lay in their ability to master their own passions. In the second epistle An Essay on Man Pope writes, “With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride” and Edward

57 St. George Ashe, Two sermons, preached at Tunbridge-Wells. By St. George, Lord Bishop of Clogher. Published at the Desire of the Gentlemen who heard them (London: 1714), 30-31. See Hermann J. Real, “Ashe, St George (1658– 1718), Church of Ireland bishop of Derry and scholar,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004, Online. 58 Johann Arndt, Of true Christianity four books. Wherein is contained the whole oeconomy of God towards man; and the whole duty of man towards God (London: 1712-1714), 1:xxvi. 59 Zachary Pearce, A sermon on self-murder (London: 1736), 7.

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Young’s Night the First from Night Thoughts refers to “The Stoic proud.”60 In Dennis’s now commonly cited critique of Addison’s play, he writes, “We are enclin’d to believe, that it was rather a Mixture of

Pride and Ignorance, than any Degree of Heroick Virtue, that induc’d Cato to be his own Destroyer.”61

John Francis speaks of Cato’s “mean Pride, unjustly stiled greatness of Soul,” and in his poem The

Christian, Charles Crawford calls Cato’s death “A voluntary Sacrifice to Pride.”62 In the play, Addison acknowledges this common view when the villainous Sempronius declares, “’Tis pride, rank pride, and haughtiness of soul: / I think the Romans call it stoicism” (1.4.83-84). To be proud was to take credit for your own greatness, rather than understanding that virtue is impossible without God’s grace.

Critics of Cato turned to Plutarch’s account of Cato’s suicide as evidence for the passionate, and therefore unphilosophical, manner of his death.63 Drawing on both Sallust’s famous comparison of Cato and Caesar as well as Plutarch’s Lives, Steele in The Christian Hero (1701) emphasizes the failure of Cato’s stoic self-control as he stabs himself, “tearing open his own Bowels, and rushing out of Life with Fury, Rage, and Indignation.”64 In the end, Cato’s philosophy was “mere Words; for his Opinion of things was in reality Stunn’d by Success, and he dy’d Disappointed of the Imaginary Self-Existence his own Set of Thoughts had promis’d him, by an Action below the Precepts of his Philosophy, and

Constancy of his Life.”65 Edward Stillingfleet similarly attributes Cato’s “Tragical End” to the failure

60 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), II.6; Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), I.563. 61 Dennis, Remarks, 14. 62 John Francis, Sermons Preached on Several Occasions (London: 1773), 84; Charles Crawford, The Christian: A Poem, in Four Books (London: 1781), I.170. 63 For a reading of Plutarch’s handling of Cato’s suicide, see Alexei V. Zadorojnyi, “Cato’s Suicide in Plutarch,” The Classical Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2007): 216-230. 64 Steele, The Christian Hero, 20. For Sallust’s comparison of Cato and Caesar, see Sallust, The War with Catiline, trans. J.C. Rolfe, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 131-133. 65 Ibid., 21.

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of his philosophy. “Cato and Brutus,” he says, “would never have ended their Lives as they did, if they had wholly conquered their Passions.”66

Cato is accused of impatience on similar grounds. For Christians, patience is a trust in providence that allows one to bear hardship. According to the Augustinian theory, Cato’s suicide shows he was not “duly awed by the regards due to the supreme governing mind” nor patient enough to wait for heaven to summon him to a natural death.67 Samuel Scattergood wrote that one would think that Cato’s ‘heroick Spirit” might “patiently have endured Tribulation; but his unhappy End plainly shews that he fainted under it.”68 Soame Jenyns agreed that Cato’s suicide shows an “impatience of controul” leaving him “unqualified for” and “inadmissible into, the Kingdom of Heaven.”69 In short, it was the goal of the Augustinian writers to demonstrate as thoroughly as possible just how

“miserably defective” ancient morality was in comparison with Christian ethics, to unmask the virtues of a hero like Cato as vices rooted in pride rather than in love for God.70

The second group objected to such views as Jenyns’s that heroes like Cato were unqualified for Heaven as harsh, even spiritually presumptuous, complaining how it was a “Hardship that such

Men as Plato, Socrates, Cato, and others should be excluded from Heavenly Blessedness.”71 In his posthumous collection of Twenty-Eight Miscellaneous Sermons (1790), the Scottish Episcopal minister

Andrew Macdonald (1757-1790) resists concluding with any certain knowledge of who is saved and who is not.72 He cites those early Church Fathers who adopted “very liberal sentiments on the subject”

66 Stillingfleet, Fifty Sermons, 633. 67 Foster, Sermons (London: 1744), 157. 68 Samuel Scattergood, Fifty two sermons, upon several occasions (London: 1723), 2:161. 69 Jenyns, A view, 91-92. 70 Robert Moss, Sermons and Discourses on Practical Subjects (London: 1736), 23. See also Benjamin Bennet, The truth, inspiration, and usefulness of the scripture asserted and proved (London: 1730), 172; Edmund Law, Reflections on the life and character of Christ (Cambridge: 1760?), 74-75. 71 Ridgley, The doctrine of original sin, 66. 72 Macdonald was a gifted preacher but with a diminishing congregation, he absconded for London, leaving his wife and child destitute, to seek his fortune as a novelist, dramatist, and poet only to die of consumption

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of ancient pre-Christians who were likely “saved, even without faith.”73 He doesn’t “undertake to defend” these “very liberal sentiments” but notes they are “unquestionably on the safe side. Who shall dare to set bounds to the mercies of the Eternal?”74 But such “liberal sentiments,” as charitable as they were, threatened to undermine the very foundations of Protestant Christianity, in which scripture, faith, and God’s grace—none of which the ancient pre-Christians were known to have had—were all that was required to be saved. To avoid the risk of being called one of those “Modern Freethinkers” who “think the religion of nature a sufficient guide and prefer Socrates and Cato to the clergy of the

Christian religion,” they took a middle road on two different issues: their speculations about the working of God’s grace and their emphasis on “conscience.”75

First, they proposed that the virtues of the ancient world “were not mere natural Virtues, but

[had] Divine Graces in them.”76 They hazarded that God may have extended special grace to those who lived before Christian revelation, even as they did not go so far as to affirm positively that God grants salvation to unbelievers. This was the position of the so-called “latitudinarians,” who were the main group of churchmen during the Restoration responsible for promoting Arminianism in England and who included John Tillotson, Isaac Barrow, and Edward Stillingfleet.77 The latitudinarians held the orthodox position that because of original sin, it is impossible “for men to be virtuous merely through the operation of natural reason.”78 However, they cautiously posited there was still room for the operation of supernatural grace to aid unbelievers in virtue, even without direct knowledge of

Christ’s Atonement, Scripture, and the doctrines of the Trinity and original sin. Nathaniel Culverwell

not much later. See T. W.Bayne and Sarah Couper, “Macdonald, Andrew [pseud. Matthew Bramble] (1757– 1790), poet and playwright,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004, Online. 73 Andrew Macdonald, Twenty-Eight Miscellaneous Sermons (London: 1790), 10. 74 Ibid. 75 O’Leary, Miscellaneous Tracts, 19. 76 George Hall, Practical Sermons (London: 1732), 200-201. 77 For studies on latitudinarian theology, see Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 25-88; Müller, Latitudinarianism; Spellman, Latitudinarians; Griffin, Latitudinarianism. 78 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 110.

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wrote that God may have been inclined “to reveal himself in a special, and extraordinary manner.”79

Lewis Atterbury, chaplain to Queen Anne and George I and brother to the more politically volatile

Francis Atterbury, wrote:

Those Persons who have not heard of a Saviour, and yet live up to the Principles of Natural

Religion, may have such Allowance made them, as we Christians cannot reasonably expect;

and it is very probable that God, out of his wonderful Goodness and Mercy, may apply the

Merits of Christ’s Death and Passion to such Persons who never have had the Means nor

Opportunity to believe on him.80

Note the circumspect rhetoric of these two writers on the topic of pagan salvation. Culverwell’s vague language of “special” and “extraordinary” does not give any idea of how this might happen, and

Atterbury hedges his statement with qualifiers like “very probable” and “may.”

This leads to the second way the latitudinarian position navigated the Scylla and Charybdis of strict Calvinism on the one hand and Pelagianism on the other. As Rivers has described, many of the latitudinarians broke from the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace and adopted the “pre-

Augustinian, Erasmian, and Arminian view that man’s will is free, that God’s grace is given to all, and that man can work with or against it as he chooses.”81 The choice to cooperate with God’s grace is what they meant by “virtue” and what is enabled by “conscience,” an important concept in their writings. Essentially, “conscience” referred to the natural law written in the heart of all men.82

Man’s conscience still requires cooperation with God’s grace. Tillotson writes, “grace and virtue are but two names that signify the same thing. Virtue signifies the absolute nature and goodness of these things: grace denotes the cause and principles by which these virtues are wrought and

79 Nathanael Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (London: 1669), 62. 80 Lewis Atterbury, Sermons on select subjects (London: 1743), 2:75. 81 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 73. 82 Ibid., 74-75.

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produced…namely, by the free gift of God’s HOLY SPIRIT to us.”83 According to latitudinarian logic, were an ancient pagan to cooperate with God’s grace, and were the individual to subordinate the reasonings of his conscience and bring it into harmony with the divine will, his action could be considered a real rather than a false virtue.

However, the latitudinarian stance on pre-Christian grace is slightly more complex than this.

As Tillotson writes:

By the Gift of God’s Holy Spirit, is not only meant the common and transient Operations of

God’s spirit upon the minds of Men, exciting and disposing them to that which is good; (For

thus the Spirit was given to Men in all Ages, from the beginning of the World) but the special

Presence and Residence, the permanent and continued influence and conduct of God’s Holy

Spirit.84

Thus, Tillotson agrees that God’s grace is given to believers and unbelievers alike. But grace operates differently in unbelievers than it does in Christians. Unbelievers have only glimmerings of grace,

“transient” illuminations in the darkness. Christians, on the other hand, receive “permanent and continued influence” so that they may proceed steadily and confidently in their virtue. It is not as easy for the virtuous heathen to distinguish the will of God as it is for the Christian since Christians have the benefit of theological certainty through revelation in Scripture, while the ancients only had what they could know faintly from natural religion.

It is for this reason—the spiritual poverty of the ancients and the spiritual wealth of

Christians—that Tillotson and other latitudinarians see the “moral heathen” as far less reprehensible than the immoral Christian who has squandered his spiritual inheritance. As Samuel Scattergood reasoned, virtuous heathens deserve a “gentler Doom, than those Christians whose Virtue and

83 Ibid., 75. 84 Tillotson, Works, 10:211.

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Integrity hath come short of their’s.”85 This was also a convenient way to draw a clear line between ancient heathens and atheists. The un-Christianity of the ancients was not to be confused with the un-

Christianity of freethinkers, who, indeed, had tried to claim the ancients as their philosophical kin.86

In fact, the virtuous ancients would be ashamed of lax or apostate Christians: “For I am persuaded had we a Cato or a Seneca amongst us, they would be ashamed of the Lives and Practices of many such Christians, as are now a Dishonour to any System of Morals, that consults the Good of Mankind, either in this or the other World.”87

Tillotson dares a “degenerate Christian” to pity “moral heathens” such as Socrates and Cato since in reality, “those sins which are committed by Christians under the enjoyment of the Gospel are of a deeper dye and cloathed with blacker aggravations than the sins of Heathens are capable of.”88

Indeed, the phrase splendida peccata is used just as often in sermons to refer to the insincere performance of Christian piety as it is to the virtues of the ancients. It is false Christians, rather than virtuous pagans, these sermons suggest, who deserve their actions to be labelled as splendida peccata.

Isabel Rivers has also pointed out that “it is a recurrent motif of the latitude-men…that the heathen moralists put Christians to shame,” and we see it in sermons throughout the century.89

Benjamin Whichcote, defending his study of classical philosophy, says “The time I have spent in

Philosophers, I have no cause to repent-of; and the use I have made of them, I dare not disowne…it makes me secrettlie blush before God, when I find eyther my heart head or life challenged by them.”90

Similarly, Archbishop John Sharp preached:

85 Scattergood, Fifty two sermons, 2:121. 86 See Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 2; Ayres, Classical Culture, 152-164. 87 John Lawrence, Christian morals and Christian prudence, (London: 1720), 199. 88 Tillotson, Works, 1:143. 89 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 36. For more instances of this shaming motif, see Robert Warren, Practical Discourses (London: 1723), 1:85; Joseph Aickin, A sermon upon conformity of the humane will to the divine (London: 1705), 15-16; Thomas Watson, Ayta’pekia or, The art of divine contentment (London: 1719), 110; Daniel Turner, Dissertations Moral and Philosophical (London: 1775), 127. 90 Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms (London: 1753), 60.

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I am afraid that even a great many serious Men among us cannot think of several of the

Heathens, such Men as Socrates and Aristides, such Men as Cato, and Tully, and Seneca, and

a great many more such that might be named, without blushing for Shame that we come so

very far short of them, having a thousand times more Knowledge in the Things of God, and

more Means, and Encouragement, and Advantages for the improving ourselves in all sorts of

Virtue, than they had.91

In this shaming technique was an implicit and occasionally explicit spur to action: if you admire the glory of the ancients, imagine how much greater and heroic you could be when you have what they did not. “If Heathens only by the Light of Reason can do such brave Things,” wrote Thomas Freke, in his Essay Upon the Liberty of the Will (1715): “and arrive to so glorious a Perfection of Vertue and

Honour, cannot we Christians exceed, and do more, who have the addition of Revelation?”92

Addison’s own views of the splendid vices can be seen in Spectator 213, in which he offers a classification system of human action, first dividing actions into those that are inherently good, evil, and indifferent, and then dividing intentions into the same tripart scheme. For an intention to be classified as “good,” individuals must aim all their “Thoughts, Words, and Actions, at some laudable

End, whether it be the Glory of our Maker, the Good of Mankind, or the Benefit of our own Souls.”

Of the available combinations of action and intention, the best is a good action with a good intention; the worst, an evil action with evil intention. Beyond that, motives matter more than the deed: a good intention joined to an evil action “extenuates its malignity,” while an indifferent action done with a good intention “turns it to a Virtue.” On the other hand, a good action with an evil intention “perverts the best of Actions, and makes them in reality what the Fathers with a witty kind

91 John Sharp, The works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Sharp, Late Lord Archbishop of York, (London: 1749), 6:220. 92 Thomas Freke, Essay Upon the Liberty of the Will (London: 1715), 9-10.

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of Zeal have termed the Vertues of the Heathen World, so many shining Sins.” But this is the witty zeal of the Church Fathers, not Addison’s own beliefs.

At the end of the essay, he challenges this characterization of heathen virtues as good actions with evil intent, discussing Socrates as an example of a well-intentioned ancient pagan. Socrates spent the last hours of his life discoursing with his friends on the immortality of the soul. Shortly before he takes the cup of hemlock, Socrates says, “Whether or no God will approve of my Actions, I know not; but this I am sure of, that I have at all Times made it my Endeavour to please him, and I have a good Hope that this my Endeavour will be accepted by him.” Here is Socrates, that “divine

Philosopher,” acting with what Addison deems to be good intent: pleasing and glorifying the Creator.

Addison further justifies his choice of Socrates as a model of virtue and piety:

When I employ myself upon a Paper of Morality, I generally consider how I may recommend

the particular Virtue which I treat of, by the Precepts or Examples of the ancient Heathens;

by that Means, if possible, to shame those who have greater Advantages of knowing their

Duty, and therefore greater Obligations to perform it, into a better Course of Life; Besides

that many among us are unreasonably disposed to give a fairer hearing to a Pagan Philosopher,

than to a Christian Writer.

The first part is an echo of the latitudinarian motif of shaming Christians “who have greater

Advantages of knowing their Duty.” Addison takes it one step further: not only should Christians be ashamed that Socrates is morally superior to them, but they should also be ashamed that their classical tastes have given Addison no choice but to offer them Socrates instead of St Paul or another Biblical hero. As in the Lucretian metaphor that the bitter cup of truth must be rimmed with honey if it is to be swallowed, the only way Addison can entice his readers toward a love of Christian virtue is to sugarcoat it with classical wisdom.

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Cato’s “Gentler Doom”

In 1711, Socrates was Addison’s lure to Christian virtue. In 1713, it was Cato the Younger.93

For Addison, the moments leading up to Socrates’ execution offer the clearest insight into his moral character. The same may be said of Cato, and so it is to his suicide in the fifth act that we must now turn careful attention to see how Addison handled the most controversial part of the Cato legend.

Perhaps the most celebrated speech of the play, followed closely by Portius’s “The ways of heaven are dark and intricate” speech in the first act, is the “famous Soliloquy of Cato” that opens the fifth act, as

Thomas Broughton called it in 1768.94 Boswell “repeated Cato’s soliloquy on the immortality of the soul” to himself when he caught sight of London from Highgate Hill in 1762, and Johnson admired its “dignity” and “force.”95 And as I mentioned, lines from it were set to a hymn and Lady Lizard’s son declared its “sentiments” to be “virtuous.” The soliloquy begins:

It must be so—Plato, thou reason’st well!—

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,

Of falling into nought? why shrinks the soul

Back on herself, and startles at destruction?

’Tis the divinity that stirs within us;

’Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,

And intimates eternity to man.

93 Of course, Addison had begun writing Cato well before 1713. He had started writing the play in the 1690s as a student in Oxford and by the time he returned to England from a tour of the continent in 1704, he had drafted the first four acts. See Smithers, Addison, 250. It is also worth noting here that, according to Thomas Tickell, Addison had considered writing a tragedy about the death of Socrates. See Smithers, Addison, 424. 94 Thomas Broughton, A prospect of futurity (London: 1768), 21. 95 James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 43-44; Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, 7:79.

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Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!

Through what variety of untried being,

Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!

The wide, the unbounded prospect, lies before me;

But shadows, clouds, and darkness, rest upon it.

Here will I hold. If there’s a power above us,

(And that there is all nature cries aloud

Through all her works,) he must delight in virtue;

And that which he delights in, must be happy. (5.1.1-18)

Most immediately, Cato’s soliloquy can be read as a defense of the reasonableness of religion, the reality of the immortal soul, the existence of an afterlife, and a divinity “who delights in virtue.” All these aspects of Christianity were once again under attack in the early eighteenth century, so the speech was often read as a poetic a posteriori argument for religion and a repudiation of religious infidelity. In

The nature and place of Hell discovered (1748), George Craighead sees in Cato’s speech a compelling argument in favor of natural religion, since Cato uses the “dim Light of natural Reason,” to arrive at

Christian truth.”96

George Wright agrees that lines like “all nature cries aloud / Through all hers works” that there’s a “power above us” make a teleological argument for God’s existence, or an argument from design. “Let the Atheist,” Wright says, “who denies the being of his all-wise Creator, look to the flowers in yonder mead, the grass in yonder field, and the birds on every bough, twittering their evening songs to the Supreme Author of universal nature, and with the deepest prostration confess his folly, and own a God; let him joyfully adopt that fine soliloquy in Cato.”97 In A Prospect of Futurity

96 George Craighead, The nature and place of Hell discovered (London: 1748), 6. 97 George Wright, The rural Christian (London: 1781), 207-208.

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(1768), Thomas Broughton says that Cato’s mention of this “pleasing hope, this fond desire, / This longing after immortality?” “finely” illustrates a version of what is nowadays called the “God-shaped hole” argument: “Nature…does nothing in vain. Were there no Future State, Nature would have implanted in our Minds a Desire, which can never be satisfied, and raised in us an Expectation of what can never come to pass.”98 According to this argument, Cato would not desire or hope for immortal life if it did not exist.

To make the teleological argument, Cato also repudiates Epicurean materialism, which had experienced a resurgence in popularity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making it a philosophical bugbear for eighteenth-century Christians. Epicureans, who were often synonymous with atheists, believed that because everything in the universe was material, there was no immortal soul and no afterlife. We need not fear death, they said, because when we die, we cease to exist. If we don’t exist, we can no longer feel pain.

Cato has Epicureanism in mind when he asks, “Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, / Of falling into nought? why shrinks the soul / Back on herself, and startles at destruction?”

Cato rejects the Epicurean answer that to “sigh and sob, that thou shalt be no more” is to be a “fool,” and a “mean, ungrateful wretch.” Instead, he concludes that his apprehensions of death come from the stirring of the divinity within himself and the uncertainty he has about what eternity holds for him.

He then imagines his immortal soul, serene and untouched by the tumult of the world below him:

The soul secured in her existence, smiles

At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself

Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years,

But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,

98 Broughton, A prospect of futurity, 21.

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Unhurt amidst the wars of elements,

The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds. (5.1.25-31)

His description at the end of his soliloquy evokes Lucretian metaphysics with its violent collisions of atoms and elements spinning randomly through the void, suggesting that his certainty about the existence of the soul is untroubled and “unhurt” by the rival philosophical claims of Epicureanism.

While Cato’s soliloquy was celebrated in the eighteenth century as a manifesto of natural religion as well as a defense of the soul’s immortality and a takedown of atheistic materialism, it is also about the “imperfection of natural light.”99 Commentators honed in on his use of the word “hope” in the second line, reading his speech as making an important point about how Cato hoped rather than knew about the Christian afterlife. He expresses uncertainty about eternity: “The wide, the unbounded prospect, lies before me; / But shadows, clouds, and darkness, rest upon it.” He then asks, “But when! or where!” (5.1.19) will virtue be rewarded by the “power above us”? Receiving no answers, he concludes, “I’m weary of conjectures” (5.1.20). Unlike the ancient heathens, Christians “are not only certain of a future existence, but that the gospel makes the fullest and clearest discoveries of the nature and extent of the future happiness.”100 The most significant reason for their doubt is their reliance on philosophy rather than Christian revelation.

One writer characterized Cato’s doubts as the “dark peradventures, the trembling uncertainties, and fond ifs, the timid conjectures, the half-formed conclusions of virtuous and enlightened paganism… a Cyrus, a Cato, a Cicero, groping in the dark; rather hoping in immortality than daring to believe it.”101 Another said that Cato is “supposed to anticipate a succeeding state of happiness, and yet to experience an awful struggle between the incidental glimmerings of hope, and the overwhelming blackness of despair. Which, indeed, must ever be the case with those who have

99 A defense of some important doctrines of the Gospel, in twenty-six sermons (Glasgow: 1773), 1:100. 100 Francis Webb, The Morality of the New Testament (London: 1765), 389. 101 John Fell, Lectures on the evidences of Christianity (London: 1798), 242.

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only purblind reason, or, which is the same thing, philosophy for their guide.”102 Addison stages the insufficiency of philosophy in Cato’s reading of Plato’s Phaedo, his dialogue on the immortality of the soul. With Plato he philosophizes that if he stabs himself, he will not cease to exist, but will live on immortal. However, as his speech indicates, Plato’s philosophy brings him only so far as probability, not to certainty.

Even if Cato, like other ancient heroes, “had very little Knowledge of the true God, very dark and doubtful Notices of their Duty to their Creator, to themselves, and to their Fellow Creatures,”103 the play still indicates that Cato does his best to please the gods and to trust in providence. The most famous expression of Cato’s faithfulness is his son Portius’s famous “the ways of heaven are dark” speech in the first scene of the play:

Remember what our father oft has told us:

The ways of heaven are dark and intricate,

Puzzled in mazes, and perplexed with errors:

Our understanding traces ’em in vain,

Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search;

Nor sees with how much art the windings run,

Nor where the regular confusion ends. (1.1.47-53)

Richard Terry reads this passage as an expression of the “stoical doctrine of suspense, the refusal to adopt a position in the face of uncertainty.”104 He argues this position “was liable to attack from a

Christian perspective” because it evidenced “an absence of faith” and a “general malaise of mental and spiritual emptiness.”105 There is some merit to that reading: Christians did lament that the ancients

102 Samuel Fisher, The Christian’s monitor, adapted to the present alarming crisis (London: 1798), 13. 103 Watts, Defense, 16. 104 Terry, “Revolt in Utica,” 135. 105 Ibid., 135.

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“still were full of Doubts, Uncertainties, and Perplexities concerning” the immortality of the soul.106

Evidence also shows that eighteenth-century audiences read Portius’s speech to Marcus as a scripturally sound expression of the idea that all of us, believers and unbelievers alike, see through a glass darkly. Lady Lizard’s son says of that passage, “How elegant, just and virtuous is that reflection of Portius!”107 Both John Bennet in Divine Revelation Impartial and Universal and Vinchon Des Voeux in

A Philological and critical essay on Ecclesiastes (1760) see it as an illustration of the idea from the Old and

New Testament that “God’s judgments are unsearchable, and his ways are past finding out.”108

Addison’s Spectator 237 further clarifies how to read Cato’s uncertainty. He speculates that one of the pleasures man “shall enjoy in a future state” will be the “Contemplation of the Divine Wisdom in the Government of the World, and a Discovery of the secret and amazing Steps of Providence.” In our present earthly state, however, “We are not at present in a proper Situation to judge of the

Counsels by which Providence acts, since but little arrives at our Knowledge, and even that little we discern imperfectly.” To cope with our blindness of God’s ways, we must follow the wisdom of ancient philosophers such as Seneca and Plato who advised that we endure with patience whatever the gods have in store for us. To illustrate this point, he then quotes the same passage from Seneca that he uses as the epigraph to Cato: “there is not on Earth a Spectator more worthy the Regard of a

Creator intent on his Works than a brave Man superior to his Sufferings…it must be a Pleasure to

Jupiter himself to look down from Heaven, and see Cato amidst the Ruins of his Country preserving his Integrity.” This endurance, for Addison, is part of what it means to glorify God.

Henderson and Yellin read Addison’s stance on providence as evidence that Addison “subtly” criticizes “the hubris of Cato’s committing suicide” because Cato could not patiently endure the trials

106 Joseph Trapp, Sermons on moral and practical subjects (Reading: 1752), 2:321-322. 107 The Guardian, 1:352. 108 Vinchon Des Voeux, A Philological and critical essay on Ecclesiastes (London: 1760), 365. See John Bennet, Divine Revelation Impartial and Universal (London: 1783), 31.

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that the gods gave him.109 On the contrary, the use of the same Senecan quotation in the play as in the

Spectator suggests that Cato’s trust in providence is exemplary. Throughout the play, Cato and his family express their trust in the divine will in the face of an uncertain future. Unlike the Calvinist accounts which stressed how Cato’s suicide suggested that he trusted his own judgment above providence, Addison’s Cato has the patience of Job. Cato says, “While there is hope, do not distrust the gods” (2.1.90). Marcia declares, “Let us not, Lucia, aggravate our sorrows, / But to the gods permit the event of things” (1.6.78-79). Cato exclaims, “Thanks to the gods!” (4.4.70) when he finds out his son died valorously defending the Republic against Caesar, and he reassures Juba about the death of his father: “And merited, alas! a better fate; / But heaven thought otherwise” (2.4.17-18). Before Cato’s death, Marcia says, “commit the rest to heav’n” (5.4.26) and Lucius prays, “Heaven guard us all”

(5.4.64). Implicit is the latitudinarian shaming motif: none of us perfectly understand God’s plan, but if Cato, who sees even more darkly through the glass than a Christian who at least has scriptural revelation, can trust in Providence, then skeptical Christians have no excuse.

On this note, let us return to the final act to look more closely at Addison’s treatment of Cato’s death, especially to see whether there are any grounds to suggest that Cato’s good intentions might partially extenuate his suicide. At the end of the soliloquy, Cato determines to follow Plato: he’s convinced of the immortality of his soul and craves only a moment of rest to compose himself before leaving “this bad world” (4.4.8) for a better one. But before he takes the “soft refreshment of a moment’s sleep” (5.2.36) Portius intrudes, disturbed to find his father clutching an “instrument of death” (5.2.4). After he briefly loses his temper at his son, Cato collects himself, saying “’Tis well! again I’m master of myself,” (5.2.13) reassures his son that “All will be well again” (5.2.26) and asks for his obedience.

109 Henderson and Yellin, “Those Stubborn Principles,” 238-39.

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Eighteenth-century critics of Cato pointed to this moment of rage as evidence that his stoic resolve fails him. In Plutarch’s version, Cato’s suicide is “troublesome and messy,” a failed attempt to reenact the “sublime serenity” of Socrates’ suicide.110 Addison does not omit Cato’s philosophical lapse, but softens it in the play. According to Plutarch, Cato not only loses his temper with his son, but also strikes one of his servants so hard that he injures his hand, a detail which Plutarch later notes causes him to botch his own suicide.111 Addison’s version, on the other hand, leaves out Cato’s violent outburst against his servant. Addison gives Cato a noble death, where Plutarch’s is gruesome and undignified. After clumsily trying to stab himself, Plutarch’s Cato struggles, falls off his bed, and knocks over “a little mathematical table,” the sound of which summons the servants to his room.

There, they find him “weltering in his blood” with a “great part of his bowels out of his body.”112

Rather than letting the physician stitch up the wound, Cato pushed him away, “plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.113 In contrast, Addison’s Cato maintains

Socratic composure, stabbing himself discreetly off stage before the back scene opens to reveal him suffering like a true stoic: “pale and faint, / He gasps for breath, and, as his life flows from him, /

Demands to see his friends” (5.4.72-74).114

Addison’s Cato resists the Calvinist stereotypes. Where they emphasized Cato’s passion, impatience, and anger, Addison downplays his moment of fury, choosing instead to devote more stage time to his piety. In an echo of Addison’s Socrates in Spectator 213, Cato declares, “The righteous gods,

110 Zadorojnyi, “Cato’s Suicide in Plutarch,” 218. 111 See John Dryden, Plutarch’s Lives, ed. Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 2:314-315. 112 Ibid., 315-316. 113 Ibid., 316. 114 An early review in the Tory Examiner (April-1 May 173) also notes the differences between Plutarch and Addison’s version: “Perhaps the Horror of a Stoical Death, such as Cato’s appears to be in History, who is said to have torn out his own Bowels in a Frantick manner, after he had given the fatal Stab, might have been too shocking upon the English Stage, even to have born a Rehearsal; and therefore the Poet chose rather to let him expire upon a prospect of Immortality, however dark and doubtful, and divested him, in his last Moments, of that savage unrelenting Temper.” See Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: The Critical Heritage, 267-8.

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whom I have sought to please, / Will succor Cato, and preserve his children” (5.2.27-28). In his dying speech, he expresses his good intentions:

—I’m sick to death—Oh when shall I get loose

From this vain world, the abode of guilt and sorrow!

—And yet methinks a beam of light breaks in

On my departing soul. Alas! I fear

I’ve been too hasty. O ye powers that search

The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts,

If I have done amiss, impute it not! —

The best may err, but you are good, and—oh! [Dies.] (5.4.92-99)

Cato, like Socrates, has attempted, to the best of his abilities, to obey the will of God, though “the ways of heaven are dark” to him. As Spectator 213 indicates, Addison was willing to grant that the

“malignity” of a bad action, like suicide, might be partially extenuated by a good intention—in this case, Cato seeking to please the gods.

There are several other details worth noting in his last words. The “beam of light” suggests that Cato not only has intended to please the gods but that he receives some kind of divine assistance.

Moore agrees that it signifies a “ray of divine illumination.”115 This is consistent with the rest of the play. In our first introduction to Cato, we are told that he has the divine guardianship of Rome’s gods:

“Cato will soon be here…May all the guardian gods of Rome direct him” (2.1.6). While this divine assistance is never explicitly said to be grace, it recalls what latitudinarian writers described as the possibility of infusing “faith into them after an extraordinary manner.” Marcia prays as Cato sleeps,

O ye immortal powers, that guard the good,

Watch round his couch, and soften his repose,

115 Moore, A Full Inquiry, 2:115.

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Banish his sorrows, and becalm his soul

With easy dreams; remember all his virtues!

And show mankind that goodness is your care. (5.3.9-13)

Marcia’s prayer is confirmed when Lucius reports, “O Marcia, I have seen thy godlike father: / Some pow’r invisible supports his soul, / And bears it up in all its wonted greatness” (5.4.28-30). While

Marcia’s “immortal powers” that “guard the good” and Lucius’s “some pow’r invisible” is vague, it signals some kind of divine intervention that they would not have been able to recognize as grace given to those who choose to be faithful.

Indeed, this flash of revelation leaves Cato thinking that he has “done amiss” in taking his own life. Other careful eighteenth-century readers agree that this is how Cato’s words should be read.

Moore wrote that it is what “first open[s] to his mind, that the merit of self-murder…might be of a suspicious and doubtful nature.116 One of Budgell’s biographers also explained that by this speech,

Addison had “endeavoured to obviate the ill effects that might be supposed to arise from Cato’s example.”117 By giving Cato this moment of insight, Addison sticks to the historical record at the same time as he keeps open the possibility of God’s mercy while also warning “a Christian audience to avoid an imitation of his hero in the last action of his honest and virtuous life.”118 Cato can hardly be blamed for not knowing that suicide was an unchristian act, unlike his Christian audiences. After all, suicide, for the stoics, was acceptable only in extreme circumstances.119 As the latitudinarian Bishop Burnet

116 Ibid. 117 British biography; or, an accurate and impartial account of the lives and writings of eminent persons in Great Britain and Ireland (London: 1777), 9:422. 118 Moore, A Full Inquiry, 2:115-116. 119 For ancient, and especially Stoic, views on suicide, see John M. Cooper, “Greek philosophers on euthanasia and suicide,” in Reason and Emotion: Essays in Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 515-41; Miriam Griffin, “Philosophy, Cato and Roman Suicide,” Greece & Rome 33, no. 1 (1986): 64-77, 192; A. J. L. Van Hooff, From Euthanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity (London: 1990), 189-191.

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said, “Those who make the best use of that small measure of light that is given them, shall be judged according to it; and God will not require more of them than he has given them.”120

Ultimately, Addison, like other latitudinarian thinkers, leaves the judgement of Cato’s soul in

God’s hands. For Addison, suicide is wrong, but he also indicates that God is merciful, will consider the intention in Cato’s heart, and will not ask more than was given to him. In this way, Cato’s death exemplifies Addison’s theory of tragedy in Spectator 39: tragedy ought to “soften Insolence, sooth

Affliction, and subdue the Mind to the Dispensations of Providence.” Cato’s last words may express uncertainty about his fate, but they do not doubt that God’s judgment of his soul will be “good” and just. Similarly, Addison asks the audience to imitate Cato’s example, to subdue their minds and trust in God’s goodness, especially on the question of pagan salvation.

In witnessing Cato’s death and his repentance at the final hour, the audience cannot help but ask the question at the heart of the debate over the splendid vices: if God is good and just, but if faith and revelation are required for someone to be saved, how is it just and good that a man like Cato, trying his best to know the divine will, should not be saved? By keeping the outcome of the play open- ended, the play encourages a latitudinarian stance of non-judgement. “Yet who knows,” Samuel

Scattergood preached, “whether God, who is good to all, and whose Mercy is over all his Works, might not by some extraordinary Means before their Death reveal that Name, and give Faith to those excellent Persons, who were careful to live according to the best of their Knowledge?”121

The Eye of Cato

In closing, I’d like to consider one more way Cato features prominently in eighteenth-century homiletic literature: the motif of the “Eye of Cato.” In the earliest appearance I have been able to

120 Gilbert Burnet. An exposition of the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England (London: 1705), 172. 121 Scattergood, Fifty two sermons, 2:120.

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locate, Benjamin Whichcote references a saying of Seneca’s: “to set some great and worthy Person before a Man, if he would do worthily. Think saith one, of Cato.”122 The Senecan citation was used to reinforce the idea that if the ancients were spurred to virtue by the example of Cato, a mere human,

“how much more then,” would “the thinking of the Divine Majesty,” who is omniscient and omnipresent, inspire a Christian into moral behavior. The “Eye of Cato” made its way into several of

Tillotson sermons and recurs in dozens of sermons throughout the century.123 It also made its way into Addison’s Spectator 231: “when we are by ourselves, and in our greatest Solitudes, we should fancy that Cato stands before us, and sees every thing we do.”

In the play, characters follow Seneca’s prescription, constantly imagining Cato’s presence before their eyes, not just as a mortal, but as a divine observer. When Syphax criticizes Roman

Stoicism, Juba remonstrates him: “turn up thy eyes to Cato! / There may’st thou see to what a godlike height / The Roman virtues lift up mortal man” (1.4.49-51). Earlier in the first act, Juba says, “I’ll gaze for ever on thy godlike father / Transplanting, one by one, into my life, / His bright perfections, till I shine like him” (1.5.19-21). And several characters compare his judgement, and the desire for his approval, to following the will of God: Marcia says she prays for “men approved of by the gods and

Cato” (1.5.17) and after Cato dies, Lucius exclaims, “O Cato! O my friend! / Thy will shall be religiously observed” (5.4.101-102). Even Sempronius apes this Senecan rhetoric in order to fool

Cato’s supporters: “His virtues render our assembly awful, / They strike with something like religious fear” (1.2.19-20).

To some degree, Addison asks the same of his audience, who are meant to admire Cato’s patient resignation to the will of God in the face of profound uncertainty and even to blush in shame that they as Christians fall short of his perfections. Though Tillotson was evidently fond of the Senecan

122 Benjamin Whichcote, Twelve Sermons (London: 1721), 189. 123 See Tillotson, Works, 6:347, 7:171, 7:286.

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“Eye of Cato” motif in his sermons, he also saw the risk that human imitation of the divine might become human substitution for the divine: “The Stoick philosophers…do blasphemously advance their wise and virtuous man above God himself.”124 In praising the virtues of the wise Roman, perhaps

Addison’s stoic wise man became a god unto himself, an alternative to the Christian God rather than a means of pointing to God.

A successful dramatization of the latitudinarian stance on the ancient virtues meant Addison had a precarious balance to strike: allowing the possibility of Cato’s salvation without making it appear an endorsement of his suicide and celebrating how close Cato came to Christian truth through his reason without making revelation seem unnecessary. As is evident from the history of the play’s composition, writing the final act posed a particular challenge to Addison. It was the only part of the play that remained unwritten by the time Addison decided to bring the play to the stage. According to Samuel Johnson, he “seemed perversely and unaccountably unwilling” to write Cato’s suicide.125 At first he invited John Hughes to finish the fifth act, but “in a few days of intensive labour” finished it himself.126 Some of his early readers appreciated the careful judgment that was required to execute the denouement of the play. Moore praised the “caution of Addison, when obliged to disclose the last scene of his life,” and noted the “delicate touches” with which Addison wrote Cato’s final speeches that were required “for the better instruction of an English and Christian audience.”127 Were Addison’s writerly touches, after all, too delicate?

As we’ve seen, Cato’s original audiences were left with a troubling sense of ambivalence about the play’s portrayal of Cato and its moral message. On one hand, some saw the play as too strong an

124 Ibid., 7:17. 125 Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, 22:619. 126 Smithers, Addison, 252. For a discussion of Addison’s reluctance to finish the play and the differences between the first four acts and the fifth, see James S. Malek, “The Fifth Act of Addison’s ‘Cato,’” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 74, no. 3 (1973): 515-19. 127 Moore, A Full Inquiry, 2:114-116.

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endorsement of Cato, believing that the play had not done enough to show the limitations of Cato’s heathen virtue. “It may well be Matter of great Surprize,” John Francis wrote in 1773, “that one of the greatest Geniuses of the last Age, should ever think such an Action worthy that amiable Light he has set it in.”128 Others thought Addison had struck the right balance of celebrating Cato’s virtues so as to impress his audiences into imagining that if Cato could be this great, they as Christians could be even greater: “It is beautiful to consider a heathen thus persuading himself of the soul’s immortality; and we are grieved that he stained those reflections by suicide: but yet that fortitude which was the result of his meditations is worthy of our imitation...If Cato the heathen could brave this terrible king, what would not Cato and Christian have done?”129

What Addison wrote in Spectator 257 applies well to divided views of the play: “Actions are of so mixt a Nature…that the same Actions may represent a Man as Hypocritical and Designing to one, which make him appear a Saint or Hero to another.” With Cato as a hero to some and a villain to others, perhaps it would have been safer for Addison to have chosen a Christian hero, a St. Paul or even a Job. But Kelsall is not wrong when he says, “Roman virtue, not Christian piety, was what the

‘Augustans’ wanted to see.”130 As Addison knew, his age was “unreasonably disposed to give a fairer hearing to a Pagan Philosopher, than to a Christian Writer.” By choosing a classical rather than a

Christian hero, Addison could appeal to his age’s “ancient ardour,” as the prologue to the play puts it, before then reminding them that where Cato had failed as a pagan, Christians could go further.

The early critiques of Cato would suggest that Addison’s message was not clear enough, and that there was a fine line between using classical virtue as a rhetorical tool in Christian ethics and in turning it into a substitute for Christian ethics altogether. It is for this reason that Cato—in dramatizing the latitudinarian position—should be read as a particularly potent episode in the century’s crisis of

128 Francis, Sermons, 84-85. 129 Macdonald, Miscellaneous Sermons, 166-168. 130 Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” 161.

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Christian heroism. Budgell’s suicide three decades after the publication of The Christian Hero suggests how Richard Steele was not wrong to worry that modern Christians might become carried away with their admiration for classical morality. After all, Steele was fundamentally more a man of action than he was a man of philosophical speculation, and he tended to write from personal experience.131

Budgell’s suicide confirmed that this was not a merely theoretical issue but a confusion with palpable consequences.

Steele felt the appeal of the ancients as strongly as anyone. If Steele were a pious Christian with no attraction to the world of ancient Greece and Rome, he wouldn’t have written The Christian

Hero in the first place. As Winton points out and as Steele himself said, The Christian Hero was written as an exercise in self-persuasion, an attempt to remind himself that his love of the ancients had to be properly subordinated to Christian charity.132 In a sense, then, Steele treated the classics like he did other temptations in his life: they were often getting the best of him, but he was always optimistic he would show greater self-control in the face of future temptations. If it seems strange that Steele would endorse Cato, which would seem to be the exact kind of cultural production he had critiqued in The

Christian Hero, it is perhaps more helpful to think about it as an indulgence, a surrender to his love of the ancients, rather than a change of mind.

Thus, Budgell’s suicide, as well as the highly contentious responses to the play, and Addison and Steele’s own doubts about Cato as a historical figure, show just how treacherous the latitudinarian stance on ancient virtue could be: in allowing room for classical morality in their writings on Christian ethics, they risked destabilizing the proper hierarchy of Christian religion and classical morality.

Classical philosophy threatened to rival, and even replace, Christianity as a superior life philosophy in

131 Winton, Captain Steele, 50-51. 132 Ibid., 190.

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the hearts and minds of modern eighteenth-century Britons, so that it was to the eye of Cato, not the eye of God, they turned for the guidance of their lives.

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Chapter Three: Morality A-la-Mode in Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison

Perhaps with Addison’s Cato in mind, Samuel Richardson complained in a letter to Susanna

Highmore in 1750: “As for the old Romans, they were abominable fellows, thieves, robbers, plunderers…Yet from these banditti are our university men, and dramatic writers, to borrow their heroes.”1 Richardson had offered the reading public plenty of his own “abominable fellows” in Clarissa and Pamela. Richardson had successfully written about a “truly Christian heroine” in Clarissa and a

“virtuous young Woman” in Pamela, but he had yet to offer his readers a virtuous man (1:3).2 He had also witnessed the success of Fielding’s Tom Jones in 1749, whose hero’s virtues were, as Richardson said, the “vices of a truly good man” (3:339). By the time he wrote this letter, he had something else in mind: a Christian hero of the sort Steele had envisioned in 1701, who might also correct what he saw as Fielding’s failed attempt to offer a Christian hero in Tom Jones. When Richardson published Sir

Charles Grandison in 1753, there could be no mistaking this intent. Setting up his readers’ expectations of his hero’s masculine virtues, Richardson writes in the preface:

But it was insisted on by several of his Friends who were well assured he had the Materials in

his Power, that he should produce into public View the Character and Actions of a Man of

TRUE HONOUR…He has been enabled to obey these his Friends, and to complete his first

design: And now, therefore, presents to the Public, in Sir CHARLES GRANDISON, the

Example of a Man acting uniformly well thro’ a Variety of trying Scenes, because all his

Actions are regulated by one steady Principle: A Man of Religion and Virtue; of Liveliness,

and Spirit; accomplished and agreeable; happy in himself, and a Blessing to others. (1:4)

1 T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 548. 2 All citations of Sir Charles Grandison, except for citations from Richardson’s index, refer to Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). References will appear parenthetically.

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In the final letter of the novel, Harriet, the heroine and new wife to the glorious exemplar, gushes,

“What, my dear grandmamma, is the boasted character of most of those who are called HEROES, to the un-ostentatious merit of a TRULY GOOD MAN? In what a variety of amiable lights does such a one appear? In how many ways is he a blessing and a joy to his fellow-creatures?” (3:462). Every page in between is, as Richardson argues in the Index, “illuminated by his goodness and magnanimity.”3 To name just a few of many instances, Grandison is called a “glorious creature” and “The Christian: The

Hero: The Friend,” and is referred to as “the truly heroic Sir Charles Grandison” (3:477, 2:293, 1:193).

Clementina praises his “true god-like pity,” and his sister writes in a letter to Miss Selby that “Every rising, every setting sun, are witnesses of his divine philanthropy” and “godlike instances of my brother’s goodness” (2:614, 3:437).

As Harriet’s words to her grandmother and Richardson’s preface indicate, Grandison’s heroism is held up as a superior alternative to the heroism of “the old Romans” so much in vogue because of “dramatic writers” like Addison. Grandison’s “TRUE HONOUR” implies the existence of false honor; Harriet’s words about “the boasted character of most of those who are called HEROES” suggests many are called heroes who do not deserve the name. Like Steele, Richardson often contrasts

Grandison’s real heroic qualities with classical ideals of heroism, especially the heroes of ancient epic.

Indeed, Ian Watt and, more recently Henry Power, have drawn attention to Richardson’s hostility to the classical, and especially epic, tradition.4 The most commonly cited piece of evidence for

Richardson’s aversion to the classics is Richardson’s infamous letter to Lady Bradshaigh from 1749:

3 Samuel Richardson, Index in Sir Charles Grandison (London: 1753), 7:349. All references to the Index refer to this edition. 4 See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 242-247; Ian Watt, “Defoe and Richardson on Homer: A Study of the Relation of Novel and Epic in the Early Eighteenth Century,” The Review of English Studies 3, no. 12 (1952): 325-340; Power, Epic into Novel, 208; Henry Power, “The Classics and the English Novel,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 3 (1660-1790), edited by David Hopkins and Charles Martindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 560.

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I admire you for what you say of the fierce, fighting Iliad. Scholars, judicious scholars, dared

they to speak out, against a prejudice of thousands of years in its favour, I am persuaded would

find it possible for Homer to nod, at least. I am afraid this poem, noble as it truly is, has done

infinite mischief for a series of ages; since to it, and its copy the Eneid, is owing, in a great

measure, the savage spirit that has actuated, from the earliest ages to this time, the fighting

fellows, that, worse than lions or tigers, have ravaged the earth, and made it a field of blood.5

Pointing to this passage, critics have concluded that Richardson’s “main antipathy” to the epic was

“based on the manners and morals which it exhibited.”6 The Iliad valorized virtues that were

“masculine, bellicose, aristocratic, and pagan,” and therefore antithetical to Christian virtues such as meekness and charity.7 As in his criticism of Tom Jones, Richardson believed that these dangerous representations of false virtue were responsible for causing “infinite mischief.” This stated distaste for epic virtues is part of why Watt and Power say that Richardson, unlike his rival Fielding who made his generic affiliation with the epic explicit, rejected the ancient poets as a literary model for his novels.8

It was also in part because his classical education was, also unlike Fielding’s, “non-existent.”9 His letters, as Eaves and Kimpel have observed, contain “very few references to the Greek or Latin writers” and references to the classics in his novels are sparse.10 The traditional narrative of Richardson and Fielding’s rivalry as it contributed to the “rise” of the novel is that in their competing visions,

Richardson is the middle-class printer unconcerned with the relationship of his writing to classical

5 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 243. 6 Ibid. 7 Complaints about the valorization of martial virtues in the ancient world, of course, are not new to the eighteenth century. For an overview of the problem in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, see Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1830: Stress Points in the English Augustan Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 29-97. 8 Power, “The Classics and the English Novel,” 560; Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 245. 9 Watt, “Defoe and Richardson on Homer,” 325. For other discussions of Richardson’s lack of a classical education, see Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 282; Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 250-1. 10 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 571-572.

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forms, in part because of his focus on female virtue, while Fielding, with his elite, masculine classical education, turned to the classical epic for his vision of what the new genre could be.

As many critics since Watt have argued, this neat portrait of Richardson as the anti-classical and Fielding as the classical novelist does not adequately account for Richardson’s stance on the classics, or how he saw his work in relation to that tradition. Henry Power has observed that even if where there are “no obvious affinities with classical works” in Richardson’s novels, he still often positions them in relation to the ancient literary canon.11 This narrative about Richardson’s “apparent antipathy toward classical learning” has also caused us, as Robert G. Walker has pointed out, to overlook references and allusions in Richardson’s work to Greek and Roman writers.12 As Jocelyn

Harris, Douglas Murray, Nicholas D. Nace, Walker, and John Carroll have each shown through their tracking of references and allusions in Richardson’s work, “the knowledge of the famous classical writers was deeper in Richardson...than we might at first suspect.”13 Richardson’s familiarity with the classics came from reading English translations, conversations and recommendations from friends as well as through his work as a master printer and editor. We can, for example, safely assume his familiarity with ancient authors such as Aesop, Epictetus, Seneca, and Horace because he edited an edition of Aesop’s Fables in 1739, printed Elizabeth Carter’s translation of all the works of Epictetus in

11 Henry Power, “The Classics and the English Novel,” 553. 12 Robert G. Walker, “Richardson and the Classics: Two Notes (Converging),” N&Q 56, no. 2 (2009): 245. 13 Walker, “Richardson and the Classics,” 247. See also Nicholas D. Nace, “Parson Brand’s Ovid: Two Misattributions in Clarissa,” N&Q 57, no. 1 (2010): 91-93; Jocelyn Harris, “Learning and Genius in ‘Sir Charles Grandison,”’ Studies in the Eighteenth Century IV, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 167-191; John Carroll, “Richardson at Work: Revisions, Allusions, and Quotations in Clarissa,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century II, ed. R.F. Brissenden (Toronto: University of Press, 1973), 53-71; Douglas Murray, “Classical Myth in Richardson’s Clarissa: Ovid Revised,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3, no. 2 (1991): 113-124.

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1758, printed a translation of select epistles from Seneca on “several moral subjects” in 1739, and printed John Duncombe’s The Works of Horace in English Verse in 1757.14

Even the famous letter to Lady Bradshaigh implies not only a deeper knowledge of the classics, but a greater receptivity to classical writers than he has sometimes been given credit for. His words about how it is “possible for Homer to nod” reveal familiarity with Horace’s dictum from the Ars

Poetica—“quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus” (“sometimes good Homer dozes off”)—which Pope in An

Essay on Criticism translated as “Homer nods.”15 Horace’s adage seems to represent, at least to some extent, Richardson’s own view of Homer, since he admits in the letter that the Iliad is truly “noble” in spite of its faults. All this points to a qualified, but certainly not dismissive assessment of Homer’s literary power.

One also need not be as immersed in the classics as Fielding was to recognize that any defense of Christian virtue had to come to terms with the age’s partiality for classical culture. In the dedication to The Christian Hero, Steele writes that “Men of Wit and Gallantry” have run “into the Fashionable

Vice of Exploding Religion.”16 These were the elite men whose education had immersed them in the ancient Greek and Roman world from an early age, teaching them, as Joseph Fearon preached in a sermon addressed to the young men at St. Paul’s, to “reverence the Piety of Socrates,—Your honest

Hearts burn within you when you read of Brutus’s Patriotism,—Scipio you admire, and even the austerer Virtues of Cato charm you.”17 This reverence for classical heroes too often seduced them into the belief that “they shared more ground with philosophers like Cicero than with the credal variety of

14 For a comprehensive record of Richardson’s printing career see Keith Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London, Printer: A Study of His Printing Based on Ornament Use and Business Accounts (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001) and William M. Sale, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950). 15 Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 480; Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, l.180. 16 Steele, The Christian Hero, 3 17 Joseph Fearon, A sermon preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, on January 25, 1755 (London: 1755), 15.

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Christianity,” which made them more susceptible to freethinking and heterodoxy.18 In 1753, the year he published Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson wrote to Patrick Delaney expressing his belief that a classical education probably did more damage to young men than good:

I always thought, that the Cause of the Christian Religion was sometimes far from being

strengthened by the implicit Regard that is paid to the Pagan Ancients, however, in the main,

admirable. Men have been disciplined into a Reverence for them in their Youth; and have I

not heard Homer and Virgil preferred to the Bible, and all the glorious Things contained in

it?19

As in his letter to Lady Bradshaigh four years earlier, Richardson expresses some admiration for the

“Pagan Ancients” here. Like Steele and Joseph Fearon, Richardson worried that ancient “reverence” took the place of Christian reverence.

When Johnson declared to Boswell in 1763, that he “love[s] the young dogs of this age” because “they have more generous sentiments in every respect” and “they have more wit and humour and knowledge of life than we had,” he was probably the only one who felt that way.20 For most, these young men represented a dangerous moral turn in English society. They had strayed too far from the path of orthodox Christianity, allowing their love for Homer over the Hebrews, and their passion for collecting Roman marbles over saints’ relics, to lead them into a “Universal Destructive Torrent of

Error and Pleasure.”21 Both Richardson and Fielding agreed with the diagnosis that the classics had led young men morally astray. However, they took different approaches to this problem in their novels.

18 Ayres, Classical Culture, xv. 19 Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 260. 20 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1:445. 21 Steele, The Christian Hero, 9.

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Fielding’s conscious fashioning of his stories after the epic should not be confused with endorsement of its morality. Nancy Mace has pointed out that in the ongoing “lively debate” over the relationship between Fielding’s novels and the epic, critics have not always paid enough attention to the question of why Fielding, if he considers his novels as a part of the epic tradition, relies so heavily on mock heroics.22 For its comic effects, mock epic uses the incongruity between epic rhetorical and generic conventions and its application to lowly, or ordinary modern subject matter. The underlying assumption of mock epic, therefore, is that there is a fundamental disconnect between the world of the ancient epic and the modern world—in this case, the world of the modern realist novel. There are two different reasons for exposing this gap. On the one hand, authors could use mock epic to draw attention to just how far the modern world has declined since the days of the ancients by comparing

“the triviality of modern behaviour” to the exalted ideals of the ancient heroes.23 From this perspective, mock epic “can be seen as loyally mourning the passing of epic values” that are no longer possible in a declining modern world.24 On the other hand, the mock epic mode might stress the idea that ancient values are no longer relevant in the modern age. To attempt to live in the modern world according to ancient heroic standards will result in Quixotic errors. In short, one can either see the mock epic as an indictment of modern manners or as an indictment of epic manners. Fielding, in other words, is engaged in a modernist project that presages James Joyce, whose love and hate relationship with the epic in Ulysses has garnered the type of critical nuance and attention that Fielding’s comedy somehow has not.

Joining Mace, I too see Fielding’s mock epic as motivated by this latter conviction and agree that “his mock-heroics betray his ambivalence about the epic hero and his concern that the moral

22 Nancy Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 62. 23 Power, Epic into Novel, 126. 24 Ibid., 19.

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values inherent in these ancient poems were not compatible with Christianity.”25 Fielding’s mock epic does not place him in the company of Pope or Swift, who—though they expressed ambivalence about the ancients throughout their lives—often use the mock-heroic mode to highlight the degeneracy of the modern world.26 Instead, Fielding joins Addison and Steele who want to elevate the ordinary, and even lowly, Christian virtues to the status of heroic virtues.27

In The Christian Hero, Steele compared life to a journey, which is the same metaphor that guides

Tom Jones. “When we are to set out on a Journey,” Steele writes, it would be “Phantastical” were we to

“dress for a Ball” instead of in clothing durable enough for the “Accidents” and “Change of Weather” we might meet along the way.28 Likewise, when we embark on the “Road of Life,” we must equip ourselves with the beliefs “that can make us chearful, ready and prepar’d for all Occasions, and can support us against all Encounters.”29 In this analogy, Steele equates Christian philosophy with humble travel clothes and the inappropriate but fashionable clothing as classical philosophy. Fielding adopts a similar emblematic design for the plot of Tom Jones: Tom’s journey through London with Partridge in pursuit of Sophia is an allegory about life’s pursuit of wisdom, since “sophia” is the Greek word for wisdom.30 At first, Tom falls prey to the classical heroic ideal, proceeding as if the classics will help him find wisdom. It is significant that the companion of his journey is the inept schoolmaster

Partridge, whose botched recall of quotes from William Lily’s Short Introduction to Grammar, a standard

25 Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels, 62. 26 For discussions of the tensions in Pope and Swift’s attitudes toward the ancients, see Hedrick, “The Mask of Cicero: Jonathan Swift, Classical Rhetoric and A Modest Proposal,” 1-12; Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 29-92. 27 For Addison’s elevation of ordinary Christian virtues to the status of heroic virtues see, for example, Spectator 248 (“Men of publick Spirit differ rather in their Circumstances than their Virtue; and the Man who does all he can in a low Station, is more a Hero than he who omits any worthy Action he is able to accomplish in a great one”), Spectator 356 (“Yet these are so far from Heroick Virtues, that they are but the ordinary Duties of a Christian”), and Spectator 248 (“It bears some Spice of romantick Madness, for a Man to imagine that he must grow ambitious, or seek Adventures, to be able to do great Actions. It is in every Man’s Power in the World who is above meer Poverty, not only to do Things worthy but heroic”). 28 Steele, The Christian Hero, 13-14. 29 Ibid., 14. 30 See Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 164-192.

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Eton Latin textbook, challenges the common assumption, which we see Mr. Walden express in Sir

Charles Grandison, that studying ancient languages helps students access a treasure trove of moral wisdom they can apply to contemporary life. On the contrary, the snippets of Latin that Partridge has ready for every occasion never allow him or Tom to reflect with any perspicacity on the events that befall them.

As Mace has observed, “The use of epic motifs in Tom Jones underscores Tom’s unrealistic view of the world, and his imprudent actions early in the novel.”31 In other words, the mock epic is focalized through Tom’s perspective, highlighting the disconnect between Tom’s idealized heroic ambitions and modern reality. Tom mistakenly models himself after two different heroes in the Iliad:

Achilles, the fighter, and Paris, the lover. Unlike Paris, who has the divine guardianship of Aphrodite,

Tom has love affairs with base women, Molly Seagrim and Jenny Jones, and this only leads him into error, momentarily causing him to abandon his pursuit of his true love Sophia and, also emblematically, a life of wisdom. We see Tom’s heroic ambitions at work through the mock epic to describe the amorous encounter between Jenny, alias Mrs. Waters, and Tom after he rescues her from

Northerton. In this chapter, Tom imagines himself as an epic hero, with “his masculine Person and

Mien” worthy of being compared to “Hercules” and “Adonis.”32 Like Paris, whose seduction of Helen mobilizes a thousand ships, Tom becomes in the mock epic battle that proceeds with a flood of epic conventions—an invocation to the muses (“say then, ye Graces, you that inhabit the heavenly

Mansions of Seraphina’s Countenance”), a battle (“she discharged a Volley of small Charms” and “she employed in making ready every Engine of Amorous Warfare”), and divine intervention (“but the

God of Eating preserved his Votary”)—an amorous conqueror armed with “the whole Artillery of

31 Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels, 72. 32 Fielding, Tom Jones, A Foundling, 510.

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Love.”33 Jenny Jones, however, is no Helen and Tom no Paris. Tom’s desire to emulate the Homeric heroes later leads him to face the moral tragedy of having potentially committed incest.

Tom’s striving after the martial virtue of Achilles also sets him on the wrong path, in both a literal and figurative way, when he is recruited to join a company of soldiers marching north to quell one of the Jacobite rebellions. The life of a soldier appeals to Tom because of the “Heroic Ingredients in his Composition.”34 Tom airbrushes the often undignified realities of modern martial life by classicizing them. During the march, for example, Tom justifies the crude jokes of soldiers directed at the officers, “some of which were of the coarser Kind, and very near bordering on Scandal” by likening the scene to classical history: “This brought to our Heroe’s Mind the Custom which he had read of among the Greeks and Romans, of indulging, on certain Festivals and solemn Occasions, the Liberty to Slaves, of using an uncontrouled Freedom of Speech towards their Masters.”35 Tom’s epic imaginings are punctured when he shares the comparison with his fellow soldiers, who have no idea what he’s talking about:

As soon as Dinner was ended, Jones informed the Company of the Merriment which had

passed among the Soldiers upon their March; “and yet,” says he, “notwithstanding all their

Vociferation, I dare swear they will behave more like Grecians than Trojans when they come

to the Enemy.” “Grecians and Trojans!” says one of the Ensigns, “who the Devil are they? I

have heard of all the Troops in Europe, but never of any such as these.”36

Tom’s arrival in London marks a turning point in his heroic quest, when his epic misadventures, culminate in the threat of two great evils, corresponding to his respective attempts to imitate the ancients romantically and martially: incest and a duel. After narrowly avoiding ruin, Tom is forced to

33 Ibid., 511-512. 34 Ibid., 368. 35 Ibid., 369. 36 Ibid., 372.

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face reality and to “question the morality of the ancient heroic ideal.”37 As Mace has insightfully pointed out, it is not until Tom “abandons his military aspirations and pursues Sophia to London,” that the mock epic battle descriptions cease.38 The suspension of the mock epic mode, then, corresponds with the beginning of Tom’s moral reformation. By the end, he emerges as a distinctly modern, Christian hero: “the new man of English society, the man who needs education, experience, prudence, wisdom, and the grace of a benevolent deity to fulfill his responsible place in the fabric of

English life.”39

As Richardson wrote in the concluding note to Grandison, he did not find Tom’s reform convincing, calling it a “hasty reformation, introduced, in contradiction to all probability, for the sake of patching up what is called a happy ending?” (3:466). Richardson also tackles the problem of young men whose hearts burn after classical heroes, but unlike Fielding he writes a character who already is a Christian hero, rather than a character who needs to learn to become one. However, even as the already existing benevolence and charity of Sir Charles’s Christian heroism is offered as an alternative to the “savage spirit” of the “fighting fellows” of the Iliad and Aeneid, it is still the case that Sir Charles himself quotes the classics, defends the value of learning ancient languages and participates in the elite culture of admiring and collecting Greek and Roman antiquities. In these activities, Sir Charles behaves like one of the very men who had created the problem of the “Christian Hero” in the first place.

In Guardian 21, Steele had written that he did not despair yet “to bring men of wit into a love and admiration of sacred writings” and that he hoped to “see the day when it shall be as much in fashion among men of politeness to admire a rapture of St. Paul as any fine expression in Virgil or

Horace; and to see a well-dressed young man produce an evangelist out of his pocket, and be no more

37 Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels, 72. 38 Ibid. 39 J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 184.

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out of countenance than if it were a classic printed by Elzevir.”40 Both Steele and Richardson recognized that if these fashionable young were to be persuaded that “no Principles But those of

Religion are Sufficient to make a Great Man,” then Christianity would have to be packaged and marketed in a way that would appeal to their classical sensibilities.41

To do this, Richardson’s approach in Sir Charles Grandison resembles that of the Earl of

Shaftesbury, who had lamented that moral philosophy had become cloistered within the walls of universities and had suffered in the hands of pedants and preachers. He therefore sought to shake the dust from philosophical discourse and “restore it to the camps and courts” by addressing “himself to young men in public life, hoping that by the indirections of his style and method to woo them away from the attractions of scepticism or virtuosoship to the life of virtue.”42 His strategy was to take the passions of these “Men of Note; whether they are Authors or Politicians, Virtuosi or Fine-Gentlemen” for “lesser objects—paintings, houses, gardens, intellectual speculation” and refashion their taste by turning it to a higher object: the love of wisdom and moral beauty and truth.43 In short, Shaftesbury aimed to “lure the virtuoso to virtue.”44

Though Shaftesbury differs from Richardson in that Shaftesbury’s goal was less to promote orthodox Christian moral teachings than the love of philosophical inquiry, Richardson otherwise adopts a similar strategy. Rather than turning his back on the classics, Richardson harnesses their prestige in order to lure the freethinker, man of fashion, and virtuoso to a life of Christian virtue through his exemplar Sir Charles Grandison, himself a fine gentleman. Steele too attempts something like this in The Christian Hero when he depicts St. Paul as a “Gentleman” who is “qualified to converse

40 The Guardian, 1:126. 41 Steele, The Christian Hero, 1. 42 Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 87. 43 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 3:49; Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 143. 44 Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 143. For more on this strategy, see Ayres, Classical Culture, 25, 56; Bruce Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 20-21.

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with the politer World by his Acquaintance with their Studies, Laws and Customs.”45 In his response to Steele’s The Christian Hero, Richardson appropriates the fashionable classicism of his day, the style rather than the substance, just as St. Paul became conversant in classical philosophy and skilled in rhetoric in order to convert the Romans to Christianity.

In addition to St. Paul, there is a well-established precedent for this strategy in the Christian humanist tradition that goes back to the early Church. As chapter one discusses, there were two main

Christian responses to the relationship of classical philosophy and culture to Christianity: that of

Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria. For Tertullian, classical philosophy was to blame for the growth of heresy in the Church, and so it had no place in the new religion. Clement of Alexandria, on the other hand, thought Christians could make use of what was true in classical philosophy to strengthen

Christian teachings. Augustine memorably took Clement of Alexandria’s side in his discussion of

“Egyptian Gold” in De Doctrina Christiana: Just as the Israelites in Exodus took the clothes, idols, and the gold and silver ornaments of the Egyptians so as to “make better use of them,” so too must

Christians take with them those ideas “which are more appropriate to the service of the truth.”46

Richardson offers a modern literalization of the Augustinian motif of “Egyptian Gold” by creating a hero who is both a devout Christian and a fine gentleman who can visit Herculaneum and praise the fine sayings of Horace with the best of the virtuosi. By appropriating the trappings of fashionable classicism, Grandison entices his readers from a life of virtu to virtue and draws them toward the beauty of Christian morality through their love of ancient marbles. Throughout the novel,

Grandison praises the nobility of Homer’s epic, the beauty of Homer’s language and knowledge of human nature. However, as Richardson’s novel insists, without Christian revelation, epic morality is bound to fall short of the sublimity of the Christian hero, who alone is truly great. Richardson’s novel,

45 Steele, The Christian Hero, 53. 46 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 64-65.

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then, is not so much a rejection of the classical epic as it is his attempt to improve upon and perfect its morality, and, like Milton before him, “to soar / Above th’ Aonian Mount.”

From Virtu to Virtue

Richardson places Grandison squarely in what Philip Ayres has called eighteenth-century

England’s “oligarchy of virtue,” in which members of the British aristocracy fashioned themselves after the ancient Romans through “their demeanour, their speeches, their busts and statues, houses and gardens.”47 Like other elite young men, Grandison quotes the ancients and cultivates a taste for classical antiquity. He joins Lord G. in “discourse” about travel and classical connoisseurship—What

Charlotte Grandison calls, “those parts of nice Knowlege...with which the Royal Society here, and the learned and polite of other nations, entertain themselves”—and praises the ancients, saying, “You know what the past and present ages have owed, and what all future will owe, to Homer, Aristotle, Virgil,

Cicero” (1:229, 3:249). In one of the novel’s first introductions to Grandison, he recounts to Mr. Reeves how he saved Harriet from the rakish clutches of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, comparing the rescue to a story from Pliny: “Have you not read, Mr. Reeves (Pliny, I think, gives the relation) of a frighted bird, that, pursued by an hawk, flew for protection into the bosom of a man passing by? In like manner your lovely cousin, the moment I returned to the chariot-door, instead of accepting of my offered hand, threw herself into my arms” (1:141).

Though the story is in fact a misattribution, the reference to Pliny establishes Grandison as a fashionable member of England’s elite ruling class whose humanistic education has furnished him with a stock of edifying ancient proverbs, rather than as a pedant like Mr. Walden who quotes obscure ancient authors to establish his own intellectual superiority. As Joseph M. Levine notes, Pliny the

Younger had particular social cachet among the elite: when an Englishman read the letters of Pliny or

47 Ayres, Classical Culture, xiv.

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Cicero, he says, “he discovered in them a mirror of himself,” an ancient Roman gentlemen who could

‘teach him the meaning of ancienneté’’ in the modern world.48 For instance, Pliny’s descriptions of his gardens at his seaside villa at Laurentum and his villa in Tuscany influenced landscaping trends for

English estates.49 Alexander Pope’s gardens at Twickenham were partially inspired by Pliny’s gardens, and the grounds at Holkham Hall and Chiswick House were modeled on Pliny’s gardens via Robert

Castell’s reconstruction of them in Villas of the Ancients (1728).50 Pliny’s letters existed in several best- selling English translations, most notably William Melmoth’s 1746 translation, which Richardson likely read, and the Earl of Orrery’s 1751 edition.51

Sir Charles embodies the humanist educational ideal for men throughout the novel, in which the goal of studying the classical humanities—grammar, rhetoric, history, moral philosophy, and literature—was not to make scholars but “to instruct the young in all that was required to govern” by joining eloquence with “moral and political wisdom.”52 This formation of England’s future statesmen and leaders, an education which Richardson himself did not benefit from, began with intensive training in the classics at elite public schools like Eton and Westminster and was completed on the Grand

Tour, a rite of passage in which a “young British male patrician” accompanied by a tutor embarked on a fixed travel itinerary that centered on Rome for a “lengthy period of absence, averaging two or three years.”53 As Bruce Redford and Sarah Goldsmith have discussed, the Grand Tour was ideally meant “to form, strengthen, and sustain the patriciate of Great Britain” by accomplishing five goals:

48 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 6. 49 For Pliny’s descriptions of his gardens, see Pliny’s Letters 2.17 and 5.6. 50 Ayres, Classical Culture, 126-7, 129-130. 51 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 6. In a letter from 1749 or 1750, Richardson wrote to Susanna Highmore: “I am very much obliged to you, for your transcriptions and observations from Pliny; as you say, I should never find time to read the book.” See Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 572. 52 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 5. 53 Redford, Venice, 14.

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intellectual, social, ethical, aesthetic, and political.54 Intellectually, “seeing Men, and conversing with

People of tempers, Customs, and Ways of living, different from one another, and especially from those of his Parish and Neighbourhood,” as John Locke wrote, would help cultivate “Wisdom and

Prudence” by counteracting the ignorance that comes from a “sedentary, provincial life” and the pedantry encouraged by the study of ancient languages.55

Socially, it was supposed to help the young gentleman acquire breeding and polish in his manners. Chesterfield summarized the “formula” for the ideal “cosmopolitan gentleman:” “a familiarity with the ancient authors and inculcation of grace, propriety and moderation learned there, made for a classical gravitas which would then be softened by an easy elegance, charm and gentility best learned on the Continent and especially from the French.”56 Further, the Grand Tour was seen as a “sexual opportunity” for young men to “siphon off adolescent ardor, while enhancing potency and skill,” before returning to England to settle down and marry.57 Ethically, the difficulties of travel were meant to forge the “virtues of manly fortitude and self-reliance,” and to rid him of any effeminacy or weakness, especially to wean him from “the dangerous fondness of his mother.”58 In her study,

Masculinity and the Dangers of the Grand Tour, Goldsmith has focused on danger as a formative test for cultivating “hardy masculinity” in Grand Tourists. Grand Tour itineraries often included opportunities for young travelers to step “out of their carriages, onto the roads and onto the Alpine mountains and glaciers, and the slopes of Vesuvius.”59 This “culture of climbing and exploring,” she argues, fostered an emerging ideal of “muscular Christianity” at the end of the eighteenth century.60

54 Ibid., 7. See Sarah Goldsmith, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour (London: University of London Press, 2020), 209. 55 Redford, Venice, 13. 56 Ayres, Classical Culture, 53. 57 Redford, Venice, 17. 58 Ibid., 11. 59 Goldsmith, Masculinity, 12. 60 Ibid., 12, 211.

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Ethics and aesthetics united on the Grand Tour. An important part of the Grand Tour itinerary was the study of the fine arts.61 Following Shaftesbury, the virtuous man was also a virtuoso, one whose connoisseurship was not an end in itself, but one whose refined tastes led him to contemplate higher forms of moral beauty.62 Young Englishmen, returning from the continent, brought with them spolia: “antiquities, copies of antiquities, portraits, landscape views, prints and drawings” that could be displayed at home, trophies that solidified and signaled their status among

England’s cultural elite.63

Politically, visiting the courts of Europe was supposed to serve “as a school for stagecraft, which allows the patrician to fulfill his destiny as a ruler of a nation.”64 Contemplating the absolutism of the French and Italian governance—as well as the luxury and superstition of Roman Catholicism— the young traveler ideally became “a more loyal supporter of the British political system” who was attached “more securely to the via media of the Anglican Church.”65 According to Francis Drake, the purpose of the Grand Tour was to learn “to love our own happy island, by comparing the many benefits, and blessings we enjoy, above any other country, and climate, in the world.”66

In short, the idealized objectives of the Grand Tour were, as Thomas Nugent described in his guidebook The Grand Tour (1749), “to enrich the mind with knowledge, to rectify the judgment, to remove the prejudices of education, to compose the outward manners, and in a word to form the complete gentleman.”67 Upon returning to England—transformed into a “complete gentleman” by becoming a “gentleman-classicist” and “possessor of the past”—the young patrician was expected

61 See Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003), 277-314. 62 Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 143. 63 Redford, Venice, 16. 64 Ibid., 11. 65 See Black, The British Abroad, 261-276. 66 Redford, Venice, 13. 67 Ibid., 14. For more on the idealized objectives of the Grand Tour, see Black, The British Abroad, 340.

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“to fill the offices and perform the duties of an adult” by taking an English Protestant wife and entering public life.68 In Sir Charles Grandison, Harriet is suspicious of the institution of the Grand Tour, which was in its heyday when Richardson was writing the novel:

Travelling! Young men travelling! I cannot, my dear, but think it a very nonsensical thing!

What can they see, but the ruins of the gay, once busy world, of which they have read? To see

a parcel of giddy boys, under the direction of tutors, or governors, hunting after—What?—

Nothing; or at best but ruins of ruins; for the imagination, aided by reflexion, must be left,

after all, to make out the greater glories which the grave-digger Time has buried too deep for

discovery. And when this grand tour is completed, the travel’d youth returns: And, what is his

boast? Why to be able to tell, perhaps his better-taught friend, who has never been out of his

native country, that he has seen in ruins, what the other has a juster idea of, from reading: And

of which, it is more than probable, he can give a much better account than the traveller. (2:291)

Many contemporaries shared Harriet’s criticisms of the Grand Tour. As good as the goals of the

Grand Tour sounded in theory, they were rarely achieved in reality.69 Redford has discussed that there was a paradox at the heart of the Grand Tour: “by programmatically exposing the young traveler to opportunities that were also temptations, it continually threatened to undo itself.”70 It is no wonder, then, that critics often complained that young men returned from the Tour with more vices than virtues, that they arrived in England, in the words of Pope’s Dunciad, as “gay embroider’d” and

“titt’ring,” accompanied by a foppish “laced governor from France” and a European paramour.71

Reduced “to macaronic incoherence” by their travels abroad, young aristocrats were transformed into

68 Redford, Venice, 9, 15. 69 Black, The British Abroad, 328-332. 70 Redford, Venice, 25. 71 Ibid., 5.

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“empty caricatures of the heroic and humanistic ideal” that the Grand Tour was ideally supposed to achieve.72

We catch a glimpse in the novel of this reality of the Grand Tour as an institution that undoes, rather than completes, the gentleman when Dr. Bartlett gives Harriet an account of his meeting Sir

Charles on the Tour. Sir Charles had the misfortune of traveling with a corrupt tutor who had laid

“several snares...for his virtue,” while Dr. Bartlett had been prevailed upon to take on a “profligate pupil” who entered into a “riotous” way of life and plotted with the help of his “vile” Venetian mistress to have Dr. Bartlett thrown into a Turkish prison (1:457). This “flagitious” youth at last became a

“sacrifice to his dissoluteness” and his death is described as “a deliverance to his Family, to the Doctor, and the Earth” (1:461).

As suspicious as Harriet is of the efficacy of what she calls “the fashionable education of youth of condition,” she has no doubt that Sir Charles has optimized his travels abroad. “Is every traveller,” she asks, “a Sir Charles Grandison?” (2:291). Richardson presents Sir Charles as the ideal Grand

Tourist, and the exception rather than the rule, who improves in all objectives, socially, intellectually, politically, ethically, and aesthetically. Socially, Sir Charles has achieved the Chesterfieldian ideal of ease and dignity. Harriet writes of his manner to Charlotte Grandison: “The Ladies...declared, that he was the gallantest man they ever were in company with. He said the easiest, politest things, they ever heard spoken...Such dignity they observed (so does every-body), yet so much ease, in all he said, as well as in his whole behaviour—Born to be a public man, would his pride permit him to aim at being so!” (3:138-9). Although Richardson does not seem to approve of the Grand Tour as a “sexual opportunity” for young men—Charlotte tells Harriet that Sir Charles is “virtuous, even, as I believe, to chastity”—he makes up for this unfashionable virtue by allowing his hero romantic entanglements with Clementina and Lady Olivia, who tries to seduce him (2:947). Lord L.’s insistence that Lady Olivia

72 Ibid., 6.

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is “but one of those who admired him where-ever he set his foot” assures the reader that Sir Charles is chaste not for lack of opportunity (1:443).

Lest readers mistake Sir Charles’s Christian charity for weakness or maternal coddling,

Richardson goes great lengths to assure them that he has achieved the Tour’s ethical goals by cultivating manly fortitude. Growing up, Sir Charles receives competing instruction from his parents: his father teaches him to become an expert swordsman, while his mother teaches him “moral rectitude” and the “first principles of Christianity” (1:261). When she dies, he is “very much grieved,” and so “In order to abate my grief,” he recounts, his father “was pleased to consent to my going abroad, in order to make the Grand Tour” (1:263). Thus, the Grand Tour, as recommended by writers of guidebooks, serves as a way to moderate his attachment to his mother, while also showing that his continuing commitment to his mother’s Christian lessons—which he says were “indelibly impressed upon my heart”—is not due to “the dangerous fondness of his mother” (1:262).73 When we hear accounts of his “fearless” ascent of the treacherous Mount Cenis or his encounter with six armed thieves in a German wood, there can be no doubt of Sir Charles’s courage (2:446).74

Politically, Sir Charles returns to England ready to fulfill his duties, both domestic and public, as a member of England’s ruling class. As the reader is told at multiple points, his extended time abroad has taught him to appreciate his native country and religion. Of the Church of England he declares, “the religion of my country is the religion of my choice” (2:155). Lucy Selby writes in a letter to Charlotte: “He is, as I have often heard you say, in the noblest sense, a Citizen of the World: But, see we not, that his long residence abroad, has only the more endeared to him the Religion, the

Government, the Manners of England? You know, that on a double Principle of Religion and Policy, he encourages the Trades-people, the Manufactures, the Servants, of his own Country” (3:263). Here,

73 Redford, Venice, 11. 74 For accounts of Grand Tourists ascending Mount Cenis as part of their travel itineraries, as well as the experience of mountaineering abroad, see Goldsmith, Masculinity, 141-184.

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we see Sir Charles striking a balance between the intellectual and political goals of the tour: he avoids provincialism by living among men of many nations, while at the same time such experience as a

“citizen of the world” has taught him to appreciate the superiority of English ways to all others. As such, he marries an English Protestant rather than an Italian Catholic, and though we are told his pride holds him back from aspiring to public life, the end of the novel leaves him considering the responsibilities of a future in Parliament (3:348-349).

Intellectually, Sir Charles is no pedant, and aesthetically, he is no dandy. Like other young aristocrats, he cultivates a taste for antiquities while abroad and ornaments his English estate with classical spolia. One activity that had become increasingly popular on the Grand Tour was to observe ancient archaeological sites. In the novel, Grandison mentions making his second visit to

Herculaneum: “If I go from thence to Naples, I shall perhaps once more, in the General’s company, visit Portici, in order to make more accurate observations than I have hitherto done, on those treasures of antiquity which have been discovered in the antient Herculaneum” (2:605). Herculaneum was an ancient seaside resort for the Roman elite that was buried, along with the nearby city of Pompeii, when

Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Pliny the Younger had famously recorded an account of the tragedy in his letters, which is perhaps one of the reasons why Sir Charles is so eager to return to the site. The ruins of Herculaneum were discovered in 1709 and excavations were underway until 1711, when they stopped for fear that the buildings would collapse. Major excavations resumed in 1738 under the watchful eye of Charles III of Spain, and excavations of Pompeii began in 1748, the same year Fielding composed Tom Jones.75

75 See Coltman, Fabricating the Antique, 122.

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Figure 3.1: Francesco Bartolozzi, Fan, 1779, etching and gouache on vellum, with carved and pierced ivory sticks, The Victoria & Albert Museum.

Figure 3.2: Fürstenberg Porcelain Manufacturers, Teapot, c. 1790, hard-paste porcelain, press- moulded, painted and gilded, The Victoria & Albert Museum.

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As Sir Charles’s mention of “treasures” alludes to, the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum was exciting because the towns had been preserved in situ and all of their antiquities—frescoes, paintings, mosaics, bronzes and marble statues, and scrolls of classical works previously lost—seemed to offer unmediated access to the ancient Roman world.76 When Horace Walpole visited Herculaneum in 1740, he marveled, “There is nothing of the kind known in the world; I mean a Roman city entire of that age, and that has not been corrupted by modern repairs.”77 Combined with the digs and discoveries of Roman remains on British soil, the zeal for the “living antiquity” of Herculaneum resulted in two different rival folios cataloguing the town’s pristinely preserved treasures that were published the same decade as Grandison: the luxury volumes of Le Antichità di Ercolano which were published over decades starting in 1757 but, because of a royal patent, not for public sale. More widely available was Observations upon the Antiquities of the town of Herculaneum, published in London in 1753.78

These and subsequent works such as T. Martyn and J. Lettice’s The Antiquities of Herculaneum (1773) inspired the trend for neoclassical design in the later half of the eighteenth century, and the motifs collected in these volumes were endlessly reproduced in everything from waistcoats, fans, and transferware to Wedgwood pottery, vases, furniture, ceiling and wall decorations. More than a fad, a new taste for old things drew Italian designers to London where the neoclassical style embedded itself in British material culture. For example, the London-made fan on the previous page, which was designed by Francesco Bartolozzi who worked in London from 1764 to 1802, features motifs based on wall paintings found in Herculaneum (Figure 3.1). Similarly, right below it, the porcelain teapot’s central medallion revels in the “living antiquity” of Pompeii (Figure 3.2). Writing from Naples in 1785,

William Blackett reports on the frescoes in Pompeian houses, astonished that “the colours [are] as

76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 97. 78 Ibid., 99.

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fresh if done only yesterday.”79 This teapot vividly reproduces the highly desirable shade of red that came to be associated with Pompeian wall paintings and soon, with British neoclassicism.80 These more muted Wedgwood medallions shown in Figures 3.3 and 3.4 were designed as large ornaments to decorate interior spaces, such as hallways.81 The relief design of a female centaur and bacchante on the white terracotta roundel was lifted directly from Martyn and Lettice’s The Antiquities of Herculaneum.

The dancing nymph in high relief on the basalt plaque dating from 1775 was similarly drawn from a wall-painting at Herculaneum. Herculaneum was also reproduced in textile. It is easy to imagine Sir

Hargrave or Lovelace donning this lavish silk waistcoat appliquéed with silk medallions of festive centaurs, satyrs and bacchantes chosen from the first three volumes of Le Antichità di Ercolano (Figure

3.5).82

Sir Charles’s mention of making “more accurate observations” invokes new advancements that were being made in establishing archaeology as a rigorous academic and quasi-scientific discipline that applied the empirical methods of the Royal Society to the study of antiquities, even at home.83

London was filled with men who, nostalgic for their time on the continent, formed clubs and societies devoted to the continued study and appreciation of antiquity and the fine arts.84 The Society of

Dilettanti was one such group that during the 1750s and 60s developed a “more systematic interest in classical archaeology.”85 Maligned by its popular association with Francis Dashwood, the society in

79 Coltman, Fabricating the Antique, 120. 80 Ibid., 115. 81 For more on Josiah Wedgwood’s popular imitations and reproductions of classical wares, see Coltman, Fabricating the Antique, 85-94; Kirsten Hall, “Tully’s the Fashion: Ciceronian Fame in Frances Burney’s Cecilia,” The Burney Journal 15 (2018): 93-94. 82 For more commentary on this waistcoat, see Hall, “Tully’s the Fashion,” 96-98; Angela McShane, “Princely Patrongage in Europe, 1600-1800,” in Princely Treasures: European Masterpieces 1600-1800, from the Victoria and Albert Museum, ed. Sarah Medlam and Lesley Ellis Miller (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), 16-41. 83 Redford, Dilettanti, 44. 84 Ibid., 2-3. 85 Ibid., 13.

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Figure 3.3: Josiah Wedgwood, Medallion, c. 1772, white ‘terracotta’ stoneware, The Victoria & Albert Museum.

Figure 3.4: Josiah Wedgwood, Plaque, c. 1775, black basalt, The Victoria & Albert Museum.

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Figure 3.5: Waistcoat, 1780s, silk, backed and lined with linen; embroidered with silk and chenille and appliquéed with painted silk medallions, Victoria and Albert Museum.

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point of fact sponsored archaeological expeditions and was responsible for pioneering a new genre, the “proto-archaeological folio” that strove for “clarity, reliability, and precision” in both the descriptions and illustrations of sites and objects.86 Sir Charles’s two visits to Herculaneum in the novel recall George Knapton’s two separate visits to Italy to make observations at that site, with findings published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1740.87 Sir Charles’s desire for making

“more accurate observations,” therefore, places him at the cutting edge of new archaeological practices that were emerging in the 1750s and associates him with the endeavors of elite historically-minded clubs such as the Dilettanti. It was, however, a dangerous association. The Dilettanti reveled in sacrilegious rites and indulged in bacchanals inspired by their travel abroad. Their debaucheries were proof not only of the corrupting influence of the Tour but of the moral dangers of emulating “Grecian taste and Roman Spirit.”88

The novel gives us further glimpses of Grandison’s classical connoisseurship, since he, like other alumni of the Grand Tour such as Sir William Hamilton, the 8th Earl of Pembroke, Lord

Burlington, and Charles Towneley, brings ancient Rome back home with him. His aesthetic education on the Tour evidently paying off in his recent improvements to the estate, Harriet repeatedly describes the furnishings as “elegant” and “noble” and “fine,” and rooms as “handsome, and furnished in an elegant, but not sumptuous taste” (3:271). His study is ornamented with “statues, bustoes, bronzes” and pictures “of the best masters of the Italian and Flemish schools” (3:271). Presumably souvenirs from the Grand Tour, these pictures likely refer to works of the Italian Renaissance and the Golden

Age of the Low Countries—the taste for which was formed by Jonathan Richardson Senior and

Junior, whose stated goal in their popular guide An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings,

86 Ibid., 11 87 Redford, Dilettanti, 13. 88 “Grecian taste and Roman Spirit” was one of the mottoes of the Dilettanti. For more on the impious antics of Dashwood’s Hell-Fire Club and the Dilettanti, see Redford, Dilettanti, 5-9, 33-37; Janine Barchas, “Hell- Fire Jane: Austen and the Dashwoods of West Wycombe,” Eighteenth Century Life 33, no. 3 (2009): 1-36.

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and Pictures in Italy (1722) was “to endeavour to persuade our Nobility, and Gentry to become Lovers of Painting, and Connoisseurs.”89 Grandison’s collection of pictures shows he took the formation of his artistic tastes seriously.

Marble and bronze statues and busts were also sought after by classical connoisseurs, and estates such as Wilton, Easton, Holkham, and Houghton featured some of the best private collections of antique busts and statues in England.90 The practice of collecting antiquities for private European collections dates back to the Renaissance, and in England the vogue in the eighteenth century for collecting can be traced back to the decades before the English Civil War.91 Starting in the late seventeenth century, English collectors amassed increasingly impressive collections of antiquities as a desire to recreate at home the spirit of antiquity they had tasted abroad. However, not until the 1750s were these collections exhibited as public art through the growth of house tourism and museums which allowed the wider public to view grand portrait galleries in stately homes and visit exhibitions in London.92 The British Museum, the first of its kind, was established in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759. The foundation of the British Museum’s collection, together with several other libraries, was the private collection of Sir Hans Sloane, who had amassed over 71,000 items, including books, manuscripts, prints, medals, coins, natural specimens, and antiquities from around the world and bequeathed it to King George II.93

89 Redford, Venice, 36. For the popularity of Van Dyck and other Flemish artists in eighteenth-century England, see Redford, Dilettanti, 38-39; Black, The British Abroad, 295-296. For English interest in Italian paintings in the eighteenth century, see John R. Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in Its History and Art (London: Faber, 1954). 90 Ayres, Classical Culture, 136-9. 91 Ibid., 132-133. 92 For more on house tourism, see Jocelyn Anderson, Touring and Publicizing England's Country Houses in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 93 See Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum, ed. A. MacGregor (London: BMP, 1994).

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Sir Charles’s study also holds two cabinets containing the ancestral collection of Lady Olivia, which she says she gives to him as atonement “for the attempts I have made upon your liberty, and more than once (but Oh! with how feeble a hand!) upon your life!” (2:648). Sir Charles details Lady

Olivia’s family collection in a letter to Dr. Bartlett:

Placed in a distinguished manner, were the two rich cabinets of medals, gems, and other

curiosities presented to him by Lady Olivia. He mentioned what they contained, and by whom

presented; and said, he would shew us at leisure the contents. They are not mine, added he. I

only give them a place till the generous owner shall make some worthy man happy. His they

must be. It would be a kind of robbery to take them from a family, that, for near a century

past, have been collecting them. (3:271)

This is no ordinary collection. The work of “two or three generations,” Lady Olivia writes, “The medals alone make a collection that would do credit to the cabinet of a sovereign Prince” (2:648). Sir

Charles’s description of the cabinets and his reticence to accept a gift “of so high a price” recalls a number of magnificent Renaissance Italian collections that would have been admired by English virtuosi eager to develop their own: one, the medal collection of Franceso Angeloni (1569-1652), described by John Evelyn as “one of the best collections...in Europe,” and another, the medal collection of the Gottifredi, “the absolute best collection in Rome.”94 Evelyn’s own Florentine cabinet, veneered in ivory and ornamented by plaques showing scenes from Roman mythology, gives a hint as to the possible style of Lady Olivia’s cabinets (Figure 3.6).

94 J.G. Pollard, “England and the Italian Medal” in England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J.B. Trapp, ed. Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990), 197.

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Figure 3.6: Domenico Benotti and Francesco Fanelli, Cabinet on Stand, 1644-1646, Veneered with ebony on a pine carcase, with oak drawer linings; inlaid with panels of Florentine pietre dure; contemporary and later bronze mounts, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Or, perhaps Richardson had in mind the Medici medal collection, “the grandest of all the

Italian collections,” which he could have read about in Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of

Italy.95 That medal collection was the work of generations of Medicis starting in the fifteenth century, just as Lady Olivia’s is the work of several generations of a noble Italian family.96 Lady Olivia describes the collections as “in your taste” and Grandison mentions in a letter to Dr. Bartlett that he “always

95 See Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (London: 1753), 235-247. 96 Ibid. For more on the Medici medal collection, see J. Graham Pollard, “The Italian Renaissance Medal: Collecting and Connoisseurship,” Studies in the History of Art 21 (1987): 161-169.

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admired” them (2:648; 2:650). The collection of Lady Olivia serves two purposes: his “taste” for her family’s collection affirms that Sir Charles takes seriously his aesthetic education on the continent, and her gift of it allows him to complete that aesthetic training by returning to England with spolia of the highest value from abroad. In this case, the cabinet is a trophy awarded to him for his virtuous resistance of Lady Olivia’s passionate pursuit. As with Sir Charles’s archaeological interests, the gift of the cabinet is a reminder of the sexual and aesthetic temptations Grand Tourists faced abroad. This is perhaps why Sir Charles, as much as he admires the cabinet, insists the gift is only a loan.

Figure 3.7: Jacques Rigaund, “Plate 13: View at the lesser obelisk” from Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire, c. 1733/39, etching, British Museum.

Richardson’s descriptions of the landscape further place Grandison Hall in the company of great estates around England, which featured neoclassical garden architecture. Grandison Hall

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includes a “plain villa, in the rustic taste,” “little temples,” and an obelisk (3:273; 3:455). While small, decorative obelisks are found in Elizabethan and Jacobean funerary sculpture, free-standing obelisks used as garden ornaments became a trend in the 1730s and then again in the 1750s, such as we see here in the obelisk at Stowe (Figure 3.7).97 Pope, whose adoration for the ancients is at the heart of his poetry and who was a Roman Catholic, raised a memorial obelisk to his mother in the gardens at

Twickenham in 1735, not far from London. In addition, estates as far-flung as Stowe, Hagley Hall, and Wentworth Castle all feature memorial obelisks that date from the 1750s.98 “Although Egyptian in origin,” David Jacques has pointed out, “they were seen by every tourist in Rome, marking intersections of roads or garden walks.”99 Symbols of Roman imperial conquest, English garden obelisks, as the spolia of modern Englishmen trying to resurrect the ancient past, visually signaled that the English were the inheritors of Rome’s political and cultural greatness.100

The popularity of the “villa,” an uncommon description for English architecture before 1730, corresponds with the rise of Palladian design.101 The villa on the grounds of Grandison Hall could have been part of the larger trend between the 1720s and 60s to build villas inspired by the well- preserved villas in Pompeii and Herculaneum, as if to make it possible to imagine oneself as Pliny at his Tuscan or Laurentium villas or Cicero at his villas in Arpinum or Tusculum.102 Garden temples were another “ready way to replicate or recollect Roman antiquity.”103 Many of these—Stourhead’s

Pantheon (1752-6), or Kew’s Temple of the Sun (1761)—drew inspiration from Roman originals.104

97 Richard Hewlings, “Ripon’s Forum Populi,” Architectural History 24 (1981): 40. 98 Ibid., 40-41. 99 David Jacques, Gardens of Court and Country English Design, 1630-1730 (London: Paul Mellon Centre, 2017), 244. 100 Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 53. 101 Ayres, Classical Culture, 126. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 130. 104 Ibid., 131.

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The vogue for classical temples was so widespread that toward the end of the century, William Jones complained, “How conspicuous are all the temples of the Heathen idols in the famous gardens of

Stowe in Buckinghamshire; while the parish church, which happens to stand within the precincts, is industriously shrouded behind evergreens and other trees, as an object impertinent, or at least of no importance to a spectator of modern taste.”105 The taste for “Temples to all the pagan divinities,” more so than obelisks and villas, posed a challenge to England’s status as a Christian nation, pointing to the unsettling reality that aesthetic preference for the classical world had become, for some, a religious and philosophical preference as well.

As with Lady Olivia’s cabinets and Sir Charles’s archaeological endeavors, the temples, obelisk, and villa on the grounds of Grandison Hall bring Sir Charles dangerously close to the aesthetic interests of elite libertines. This “strange kinship,” as Mary V. Yates has called it, to rakish characters such as Lovelace or real-world hellfire celebrants such as Francis Dashwood, is a deliberate part of

Richardson’s intention in the novel.106 Aesthetically, Sir Charles resembles elite men of fashion.

Morally, however, he is a Christian, not a freethinker. Throughout the novel, Sir Charles appeals to these shared aesthetic sensibilities, classical connoisseurship in particular, in order to draw young, aristocratic men from a love of virtu to an appreciation for higher things, such as Christian virtue and moral goodness.

However, Richardson knew better than anyone the difficulty of controlling readers’ responses to fiction. For him, the epistolary form had proved especially unstable with Clarissa, as evidenced by his readers’ sympathy with Lovelace, whom Richardson had intended as the villain.107 In an effort to correct what he saw as his readers’ mistaken opinions of Lovelace, Richardson buttressed subsequent

105 Jones, Reflexions, 6. 106 Mary V. Yates, “The Christian Rake in Sir Charles Grandison,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 24, no. 3 (1984): 550. 107 See Tom Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 142-198.

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editions with increasingly elaborate “editorial machinery,” such as “didactic footnotes,” that could guide the reader with explicit authorial commentary where the epistolary form could not.108 In Sir

Charles Grandison, Richardson also attempts to maintain authorial control over his novel with a similar apparatus of addenda; in this case, he includes at the beginning of the novel, “a self-congratulatory

Preface, a laudatory sonnet by T[homas] E[dwards], and a one-page catalogue labeled ‘Names of the

Principal Persons.’”109 At the end of the last volume, he adds “‘A Concluding Note by the Editor’; an

‘Address to the Public’ complaining of the novel’s Dublin piracy; an awkward compilation of the book’s ‘Similes and Allusions’; and a 100-page ‘Historical and Characteristical Index’” expressive of the authority awarded classical texts and scientific reference works.110 In the novel’s central story,

Richardson tries to anticipate rogue readerly responses to Sir Charles by modelling the correct responses in the novel’s characters. For example, given the dangerous amount of overlap between a character such as Lovelace and Sir Charles, Richardson anticipates that Sir Charles will be mistaken for a rake by having other characters in the novel doubt his goodness.

“Sooner or later,” Yates observes, “nearly everyone mistakes Grandison for a rake.”111 In the most notable instance of this, Harriet hears reports of Sir Charles dining with Greville and his friends, alarmed that he “led the mirth” as the “liveliest man in the company” (3:137). She questions his goodness—“I am afraid he is a reveller. Can he be so very good a man?”—before correcting herself:

“O yes, yes, yes! wicked Harriet! What is in thy heart, to doubt it?. . . as if a good man could not be a man of vivacity and spirit! From whom can spirits, can chearfulness, can debonnairness, be expected, if not from a good man?” (3:138). Here, Richardson once again uses Harriet to shape his readers’ attitudes to Sir Charles. It is Harriet, the good woman, who models how the “good” reader should

108 Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 137. 109 Ibid., 175. 110 Ibid. 111 Yates, “The Christian Rake,” 554. See also Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 396.

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read. By having her express and then correct her doubts about his goodness, Richardson attempts to forestall the same mistake in his readers.

Lest the aesthetic sensibilities that Sir Charles shares with other elite, classically educated men lead the reader to assume that he shares their moral sensibilities as well, Richardson carefully orchestrates the scenes where he dramatizes the Shaftesburian dictum that virtu draws us to virtue using the didactic potential of editorial addenda, particularly the Index, as well as modelling in his characters what he sees as the correct response to Sir Charles’s actions. To return to the classical landscaping of Grandison Hall, Richardson reassures the reader that Sir Charles does not let these decorative temples and obelisks overshadow the real places of Christian worship. In several letters, Sir

Charles mentions that in the general improvements he makes to the estate and the grounds, he does not neglect improvements to the parish church of which he’s the benefactor and patron: “the church is completely beautified, according to my directions” and “The doctor says, he longs to know how he approves of the decorations of his church” (2:7; 2:160). The repeated mentions of Sir Charles

“beautifying his church” help to the reinforce the idea that Sir Charles prioritizes his church and that he does not see it as a place of “no importance” in comparison to temples, obelisks, and villas.

During the tour of Grandison Hall, Harriet moralizes and comments on the aesthetic beauty of the décor and landscaping, again modelling the way that the reader is supposed to see it as a reflection of his goodness, not a danger to it. Harriet writes, “The gardens and lawns seem from the windows of this spacious house to be as boundless as the mind of the owner, and as free and open as his countenance” and the “flourishing” of Sir Charles’s orangery is a reminder that “everything indeed is, that belongs to Sir Charles Grandison” (3:272; 3:273). Richardson often applies the language of connoisseurship to discussions of Sir Charles’s Christian virtue. After a “sumptuous and well-ordered” dinner at Grandison Hall, Sir Charles leads them to the music parlour where he performs a song of

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his own composition on his organ, an instrument primarily used for sacred music (3:274).112 The song is Platonic in its reference to how Harriet’s “charms of mind” meet those of her “person” and her

“Form” gives a “bliss beyond...sight” (3:274). Likewise, Harriet’s response to Sir Charles’s performance of the song unites the spiritual and the sensual, a risky combination which Richardson attempts to keep under moral control. Among the corrupting influences young men encountered on the Grand Tour, critics worried about music, particularly opera.113 With its Catholic, foreign origins, opera was looked on as an “unnatural art” that stirred the passions and had an emasculating effect on its male listeners.114

As her aunt and Lucy each take one of her hands, “Tears of joy” run down her cheeks as the song leaves her speechless (3:275). The song fills her with feelings of “Love and Gratitude,” but most importantly, gives her a religious experience: “I thought at the time, I had a foretaste of the joys of heaven” (3:275). Here, “foretaste” speaks to an aesthetic experience of religious rapture, one that recalls Catholic baroque art that English tourists would have seen abroad, especially Bernini’s sculpture

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome (Figure 3.8). English Protestants were suspicious of such depictions of religious pleasure. Colen Campbell, the Palladian architect and protégé of Lord Burlington, for example, decried the works of Bernini as “affected and licentious.”115 Clubs such as the Dilettanti often exploited Catholic iconography for its salacious potential.116 For example, Sir Francis Dashwood commissioned a portrait of himself as a Franciscan friar with his eyes fixed adoringly on the “pudenda of the Venus de’ Medici” (Figure 3.9).117

112 Grandison owns a residence organ, which was a pipe organ smaller than the organs used in churches and which became more popular in private residences either for personal devotion or to perform secular music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 113 Redford, Venice, 22. 114 Black, The British Abroad, 290. 115 Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 154. 116 Redford, Dilettanti, 33-37. 117 Ibid., 33.

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Figure 3.8: Giancarlo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, 1647-1652, marble, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

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Figure 3.9: George Knapton, Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord LeDespencer, 1742, oil on canvas, 91.4 x 71.1 cm, London, Society of Dilettanti.

Between Harriet’s rapture and Sir Charles’s evident fondness for music, Richardson navigates this potentially morally treacherous moment by redirecting the reader’s attention to the nobility of the song, moving from aesthetic appreciation to moral appreciation. Harriet reiterates that her joy comes from the knowledge that her husband is a “good man” and reassures the reader that his love for her is “pure” (3:275). Richardson repeatedly elides the aesthetic and ethical elsewhere in the novel. Shortly after Sir Charles’s performance in the music parlor, Harriet comes across a copy of the Book of

Common Prayer in Sir Charles’s closet which contains a folded piece of paper on which he has written

“Reflections, mingled and concluded with solemn addresses to the Almighty” (3.292). In the way that virtuosi spoke about unearthing precious classical manuscripts from Pompeii or Herculaneum, Harriet enthusiastically recounts how she discovers “a TREASURE, an invaluable treasure” in these religious reflections, which she carefully transcribes for her grandmother (3:292). In another instance, Harriet

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recounts a “charming conversation” between her grandmother and Sir Charles, which “began with dress, and fashion, and such-like trifling subjects; but ended in the noblest” (3:140). In this conversation, which begins with lesser objects such as fashion and ends with moral reflections,

Richardson follows the Shaftesburian formula of starting with virtu and ending in virtue.

Later in the novel, Sir Charles speaks of collecting worthy friends as he would fine marble busts. In a letter to Dr. Bartlett written while he’s in Italy, he talks about how when he settles back in

England, he “shall endeavor to draw around me such a collection of worthies, as shall make my neighborhood one of the happiest spots in Britain” (2:629). His words recall the famous garden temples at Stowe, which included the Temple of Ancient Virtue (1737), a Temple of British Worthies

(1734-35), and a Temple of Friendship (1739), the latter two of which contained neoclassical marble busts of modern figures, some actual friends of Lord Cobham (Figure 3.10). In fact, Sir Charles proposes building a temple to honor his friendship with Clementina and Harriet in the last volume of the novel: “Sir Charles said (and he is drawing a plan accordingly) that a little temple should be erected on that very spot, to be consecrated to our triple friendship” (3:455). Equating his friends with his collecting might seem to the reader to be a misguided analogy, but, as he does elsewhere, Richardson guides his reader’s interpretation by making his intentions more explicit in the Index. Under the entry for “Friendship,” he cites this scene as an illustration of the principle that friendship is a “noble perfection of the human mind.”118

118 Richardson, Index in Grandison, 7:332.

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Figure 3.10: George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow, or a Description of the Most Notable House, Gardens & Magnificent Buildings Therein, of the Right Hon.ble Earl Temple, Viscount & Baron Cobham, 1753, etching.

Sir Charles’s taste for lower material things including damask, medals, and classical temples is meant to point toward higher goods, such as his Christian benevolence and love of moral virtue.

Though in his collecting and knowledge of classical antiquities and fine arts Sir Charles resembles morally questionable elite clubs such as the Dilettanti, the Society of Roman Knights, or the Society of Antiquaries, and England’s most significant aristocratic collectors, Richardson is careful to guide his readers away from mistakenly identifying Sir Charles with these groups. The Index announces that

Sir Charles, unlike many of his peers, knows how to conform to modern fashions without compromising his Christian beliefs or being “misled either by false glory, or false shame” (1:182).

Under the entry for Sir Charles, Richardson states that “He complies with such customs of the world as are of an indifferent nature; but is inflexible with regard to evil ones, how fashionable soever.”119

119 Ibid., 341-342.

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Repeatedly, Richardson insists that Sir Charles “uses the fashion, without abusing it” (2:498). In a letter Sir Charles writes to Dr. Bartlett about purifying “libertine principles,” he says, “I pretend not to be above complying with the laudable customs of the world…I have always, in things indifferent, been willing to take the world as I find it; and conform to it” (2:50; 3:36). The language here of Sir

Charles’s willingness to conform to “things indifferent” or the things of the world that are of an

“indifferent nature” recalls the Christian theological concept of adiaphora. Adiaphora, usually translated as “indifferents” or “things indifferent,” were matters in religious doctrine that were inessential, or of secondary importance, to faith. The idea of adiaphora became one of the distinguishing characteristics of the latitudinarians, who adopted it as a pragmatic strategy to reconcile warring Protestant factions and unite the Anglican community against outside threats, such as freethinking and Roman

Catholicism.120

The latitudinarians hoped that most Christians could agree on, in Joseph Glanvill’s words, a

“few, plain, Fundamentals of Faith.”121 For the latitudinarians, the fundamentals of religion, or “those

Christian beliefs bearing on the salvation of Men,” were easily accessible through reason and clearly elucidated in Scripture.122 The latitudinarians were not always specific about which Christian teachings counted as fundamentals, and which were “things indifferent,” but, as Müller writes, “One way or another, it seems, the Latitudinarians regarded the fundamentals of religion as concerned with

120 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 25. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., 26.

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morality.”123 Adiaphora, for the latitudinarians, most often included external concerns, such as ecclesiastical organization and ceremony.124

In the name of civil and religious unity, the latitudinarians reduced Christianity to a handful of what they thought were self-evident principles, the culmination of which was a “minimalist creed.”125

Sir Charles also adopts the latitudinarian stance on adiaphora, conforming to the fashions of the world in things indifferent. For him, adiaphora are anything “which regard not morals” (3:124). This includes manners and dress. “In my own dress,” he says, “I am generally a conformist to the fashion” (3:124).

When he is in company, he “accommodates himself to the persons he has to deal with” (2:272). Rather than preaching about Christian morals or frightening “gay company with grave maxims,” he chooses

“to descend,” acting the part of “a man of gay wit” (2:272). Although Sir Charles expresses the conviction that “We live in such an age...that I believe more good may be done by seeming to relax a little, than by strictness of behaviour,” his uncanny resemblance to the very men he’s trying to convert, as we’ve already seen, occasionally alarms other characters (3:140).

In Sir Charles’s book, it is better to be mistaken for a man of wit than to be accused of singularity. Sir Charles follows Addison’s Spectator 576, the topic of which is a “right idea of

Singularity.” For Addison, “singularity,” by which he means acting or thinking in a way that is contrary to the customs of the world, is “laudable, when, in Contradiction to a Multitude, it adheres to the

Dictates of Conscience, Morality, and Honour.” “Singularity in Concerns of this Kind,” he continues,

“is to be looked upon as heroick Bravery, in which a Man leaves the Species only as he soars above

123 Ibid., 28. Cudworth, Glanvill, and Clarke were unusually explicit about what they considered to be the fundamentals of faith. For Cudworth, the three “Fundamentals or Essentials of True Religion” were belief in one God and his providence; Faith in his goodness and the “existence of an eternal and immutable morality;” the belief that man’s will is free. Glanvill also listed three: the existence of God, that Man is from God, and the distinction between “Moral, Good, and Evil.” As for Clarke, there were four: “faith in God, repentance, the ‘Doctrine of Baptisms and of laying on of hands,’ and belief in the doctrine of futurity.” See Müller, Latitudinarianism, 26-28. 124 Rivers, Whichcote to Wesley, 26. 125 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 26.

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it.” On the other hand, in “things of no importance,” such as “Dress, Behaviour, Conversation, and all the little Intercourses of Life,” there is “a certain Deference due to Custom.”

In direct echoes of Addison, Charlotte says of her brother, “He scruples not to modernize a little; but then you see, that it is in compliance with the fashion, and to avoid singularity; a fault to which great minds are perhaps too often subject, tho’ he is so much above it,” and Harriet writes, “He is above quarreling with the world for trifles: But he is still more above making such compliances with it, as would impeach either his honour or conscience” (1:230; 1:182).126 Charlotte identifies singularity as the vice of religious fanatics such as Methodists. Though they adhere to the dictates of their consciences, they fail to accommodate their manners and conversation to the modern world. The result, she says, is that these religious “overdoers...make religion look unlovely, and put underdoers out of heart” (2:398). Unlike the Methodists, Richardson insists Sir Charles succeeds in making religion lovely to all the characters in the novel, but especially to men of wit and gallantry.127

The new battle line between ancient martial valor and Christian virtue is most evident in the scene where Sir Charles answers Sir Hargraves’s challenge to a duel by arriving at his residence and successfully persuading Hargrave’s friends of the ignobility of dueling. Over the course of his speech on the barbarity of such a practice among men of honor, Hargrave’s friends, “overcome by Sir

Charles’s magnanimity,” hang on his every word, exclaiming, “He has won me to his side. By the great

126 It would appear that Sir Charles’s attitude about adiaphora was Elizabeth Carter’s idea. In a letter to Catherine Talbot where they were discussing Richardson’s “good man,” she suggested that he should show “a steady opposition to false maxims of the world in essential points, and a perfectly good-natured compliance in trifles.” See Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 355. 127 In real life, Richardson seems to have had some measure of success in this. Famously, Richardson received a letter in 1754 from an ex-libertine in debtor’s prison, effusive in his gratitude to Richardson for “effecting in a few hours by yr. Sr. Charles Grandison wt. five years Imprisonment wth. all the Want & Indigence imaginable annex’d to it could not.” He claimed, as Eaves and Kimpel recount, that “Sir Charles had made him in love with virtue, and he would always deem Richardson the source of every good that might accrue to him. This letter must have warmed Richardson’s heart—the reform of the B.F.’s of the world was exactly the kind of end he most desired. He mentioned the letter with pride to Lady Bradshaigh.” See Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 403.

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God of Heaven, I had rather have Sir Charles Grandison for my friend than the greatest Prince on earth!” and “D---n me, if I have not hitherto lived to nothing but to my shame! I had rather be Sir

Charles Grandison in this one past hour, than the Great Mogul all my life” (1:252).128 Mr. Jordan, who says, “I am charmed with your sentiments, Sir Charles,” declares to Sir Charles that he has made him his “proselyte” and “I never saw an hero till now” (1:264). Mr. Merceda and Mr. Bagenhall even

“reproached each other, as if they had no notion of what was great and noble in man till now” (1:252).

Repeatedly, Richardson emphasizes Sir Charles’s power to convert libertines.

In another scene, Sir Charles dazzles his free-living uncle, Lord W., who went into his meeting with his nephew expecting to “laugh at his cousin Charles, when he came to England, on his pious turn,” and “boast, that he would enter him into the town-diversions, and make a man of him” (1:360).

Instead, he finds himself “delighted with his nephew’s notions” and prophesies “that he would be a great man” (1:381). In spite of his aversion to martial life, Sir Charles manages to win over soldiers as well. In the second volume, Sir Charles meets with four fashionable military men at the Cocoa-tree, an exclusive men’s club, in order to free his sister from her engagement to the charming but disingenuous Captain Anderson. Both Colonel Martin and Colonel Mackenzie speak in “a very high manner” of Sir Charles’s bravery (1:438). In short, as Lord D. proclaims, “What I hear said of him, every time he is mentioned in company, is enough to fire a young man with emulation” (2:287).

By conforming to things indifferent, including fashionable classicism and modern manners,

Richardson argues that Sir Charles can make things that do matter—piety, faith, and Christian morality—look lovely to those he wants to convert. We see Richardson attempting to guide his readers to this conclusion by the way that the libertines themselves repeatedly insist that they’ve become

Grandisonian converts. Through their love of classical antiquities and the fine arts, Sir Charles entices young men not just from a life of virtu to virtue, but from classical virtue to Christian virtue. Sir Charles

128 Richardson, Index in Grandison, 7:354.

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embodies the ideals of the Christian humanist tradition: rather than rejecting the classical tradition altogether, he takes what is useful and true from it and puts it in the service of Christian teachings.

Like the Israelites in Exodus who take the treasures of the Egyptians to put them to better purpose, as Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana wrote, Samuel Richardson insists that Sir Charles takes the treasures of the ancients to beautify Christian morality.

Throughout the novel, Sir Charles conforms to the classical tradition in order to assert the superior moral claims of Christianity over classical philosophy, and especially over epic morality. Sir

Charles’s recounting of the story from Pliny, which would seem to be a throwaway reference, is a deft instance of Sir Charles taking a love of a lower thing, or something “indifferent,” and raising it higher.

Richardson designs for the ancient anecdote to catch the attention of a man of wit by appealing to his love of Pliny and classical quotation, and then to draw his attention to the Christian ethic at the heart of the novel: to be great is to be good, and to be good is to do good. Thus, Richardson dresses

Christian virtue up in the guise of fashionable classicism.

Sir Charles takes the same approach with epic morality, showing how it can point the way to greater Christian truths, rather than rejecting it outright. Take, for instance, another passage that scholars usually cite as evidence for Richardson’s hostility toward epic morality, Charlotte Grandison’s diatribe against poets:

But men and women are cheats to one another. But we may, in a great measure, thank the

poetical tribe for the fascination. I hate them all. Are they not inflamers of the worst passions?

With regard to the Epics, would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman,

had it not been for Homer? Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the Epic poets

been the occasion, by propagating false honour, false glory, and false religion? Those of the

amorous class ought in all ages (could their future geniuses for tinkling sound and measure

have been known) to have been strangled in their cradles. Abusers of talents given them for

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better purposes (for all this time I put sacred poesy out of the question) and avowedly claiming

a right to be licentious, and to overleap the bounds of decency, truth and nature. (3:197-198)

At first glance, Charlotte’s words read as a straightforward indictment of epic poets, whose poetic abuses are responsible for “violences, murders, depredations.” However, as with Richardson’s letter to Lady Bradshaigh, Charlotte’s argument against classical epic is itself an ancient argument. Charlotte shares her disapproval of epic poetry with Plato, whom she mentions directly a few lines later.129 In

Book III and X of the Republic, Plato banishes poets from his ideal commonwealth because they inflame the passions by promoting dangerous falsehoods. Her critique of Homer for “propagating false honour, false glory, and false religion,” paraphrases what Plato says in Book III about the immorality of Homer’s heroes and gods: “Nor let us suffer them to attempt to persuade our youth that the Gods create evil: and that heroes are no way better than men. For, as we said formerly, these things are neither holy, nor true.”130 According to both Plato and Charlotte, Homer’s Iliad, as she says,

“overleap[s] the bounds of...truth, and nature.”

Charlotte’s reference to Alexander the Great shows that Richardson also knows his Plutarch— a knowledge which he is comfortable ascribing to an educated woman. In his Life of Alexander,

Plutarch relates how Alexander the Great admired the Iliad so much for its “treasure of all military virtue and knowledge” that he kept his copy, along with a dagger, under his pillow.131 Alexander’s heroic ethos as a warrior is corrected elsewhere in Richardson’s novel, especially in its other references to Handel’s musical ode, Alexander’s Feast, which Handel adapted from Dryden’s ode Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Music (1697). The ode is set during a banquet hosted by Alexander the Great and his

129 Charlotte continues in her letter, “Had I remembered that, I would have spared you my reflexions upon the poets and poetasters of all ages, the truly-inspired ones excepted: And yet I think the others should have been banished our commonwealth, as well as Plato’s” (3:198). 130 Plato, The Republic, trans. by Harry Spens (Glasgow: 1763), 94. This was the first translation of Plato’s Republic into English. 131 Dryden, Plutarch’s Lives, 2:144.

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mistress Thais in the city of Persepolis, which Alexander captured from the Persian king Darius. Sir

Charles expands and ennobles the pagan sentiments of Alexander’s Feast in line with Christian morality.

On the day of Charlotte’s marriage to Lord G., the wedding party “introduced a little concert. Mr.

Beauchamp took the violin; Lord L. the bass-viol; Lord G. the German-flute; Lord W. sung base; Lady

L. Lady G. and the Earl joined in the chorus.” They sing the aria from Alexander’s Feast: “Happy, happy, happy pair! / None but the brave deserves the fair” (2:345). We are told, however, that Sir

Charles changes the lyrics from “None but the brave deserves the fair” to “None but the good deserves the fair,” since he prefers the word “good” to “brave” (2:345). Though, as Harriet observes approvingly, Sir Charles is “himself equally brave and good” (2:345). Here, Richardson indicates that bravery is still a virtue, but only when it is consistent with goodness.

Sir Charles’s preference for goodness over bravery is consistent with the rest of the novel, in which Richardson does not dismiss the virtue of courage typically associated with Homer and Virgil’s martial heroes but subordinates it to Christian charity. Courage unmotivated by charity, according to

Richardson, is only false glory. Richardson’s ethic of Christian heroism, in which charity drives courage, is strikingly similar to what Steele outlines in The Christian Hero. For Steele, the Roman heroes are “bloody men” who pursue their own glory with “the utmost vengeance.”132 What makes the

Christian greater than the ancient hero is that he recognizes the divine “Command of Loving one another.”133 The Christian, then, who “Imbibes that noble Principle is in no Danger of insolently

Transgressing against his Fellow Creatures.”134 Rather than turning to violence, “that noble Spark of

Coelestial Fire, we call Charity or Compassion” opens man’s heart and allows him to “Embrace all

132 Steele, The Christian Hero, 80. 133 Ibid., 78. 134 Ibid.

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Mankind.”135 This charity, for Steele in The Christian Hero is the root of true courage, for, as he says, “a

Coward has often Fought, a Coward has often Conquer’d but a Coward never Forgave.”136

With Steele, Sir Charles agrees that “doing Good” is the “noblest Power.”137 “His whole delight,” Dr. Bartlett says, “is in doing good. It has always been so: And to mend the hearts, as well as fortunes, of men, is his glory” (2:61). Sir Charles’s example serves as a Christian correction of the ancient heroes who believe “glory is to be gain’d in the martial field” and “in whose praise fame has crack’d a dozen trumpets” (1:62). As Dr. Bartlett declares, “Caesar…was not quicker to destroy, than

Sir Charles Grandison is to relieve” (1:446). For this reason, it does not come as a surprise that Sir

Charles is opposed to dueling as an aristocratic practice that encourages “false glory,” since duels are often motivated by a desire for revenge, the opposite of charity. In Richardson’s “Six Original Letters

Upon Duelling,” which remained unpublished during his lifetime and were probably edited out of

Familiar Letters, he writes that “there is more true bravery in forgiving an injury, than in resenting it.”138

Sir Charles, accordingly, refuses to duel not because he is a coward but because he believes true acts of courage are motivated by charity, not revenge. This is why Sir Charles’s violence against Sir

Hargrave at the beginning of the novel is justified: he expertly disarms and wounds Sir Hargrave in the name of rescuing Harriet.

Interestingly, Sir Charles denies that dueling was deemed a heroic practice in the ancient

Roman world.139 He explains to Sir Hargrave and his libertine friends how he decided to look into the history of dueling after his father sent him abroad on the Grand Tour: “it was natural for me to look into history, for the rise and progress of a custom so much and so justly my aversion; and which was

135 Ibid. 136 Ibid., 80. 137 See Spectator 230. 138 Samuel Richardson, Early Works, ed. Alexander Petit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 530. For an overview of “Six Letters” see Barchas, Graphic Design, 202-203. 139 Classical historians continue to debate the role of single combat in Ancient Rome and Greece. See S.P. Oakley, “Single Combat in the Roman Republic,” The Classical Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1985): 392-410.

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so contrary to all laws divine and human, and particularly to that true heroism which Christianity enjoins, when it recommends meekness, moderation, and humility, as the glory of the human nature”

(1:263). He looks first to the ancient Romans: “I then had recourse, proceeded he, to the histories of nations famous for their courage. That of the Romans, who by that quality obtained the empire of the world, was my first subject. I found not any traces in their history, which could countenance the savage custom” (1:263). He continues, showing his knowledge both of Roman history and his admiration for the ancient Roman stance against dueling. Of the “Horatii and Curatii” he makes exception, for theirs was not a private duel, but a “public, a national combat” arranged “for the sake of sparing a greater effusion of blood” than if the cities of Alba and Rome had sent their armies into battle (1:263-264).

Sir Charles also cites the example of Augustus who received a challenge to a duel from Mark Antony.

“Who, gentlemen,” Sir Charles asks, “thought of branding as a coward that Prince, on his answering,

‘That, if Antony were weary of his life, he might find many other ways to end it than by his sword?’”

(1:264). Sir Charles, in short, finds that the blame of this “this unchristian custom” originates not with ancient Romans, but arose instead in “the barbarous northern nations” (1:263).

Sir Charles cites classical authority in support of his Christian argument against the custom of dueling by explaining how the ancients had anticipated Christian teachings. Rhetorically, this is well calculated to persuade his audience, who, in the words of Addison, are more “disposed to give a fairer hearing to a Pagan Philosopher, than to a Christian Writer.”140 Here again we see how Richardson orchestrates Sir Charles’s lecture according to the Shaftesburian dictum: To persuade these elite men of wit, he first appeals to their love of the ancients in order to lead them to the truth of Christian moral teachings. Rather than dismissing classical morality, Richardson demonstrates through Sir

Charles how it can be judiciously invoked in support of Christianity.

140 Spectator 213.

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Richardson and Homer Divide the Crown

Unlike Fielding, Richardson never claimed to have written an epic.141 That does not mean, however, that Richardson did not concern himself with the “epic genealogy.”142 On the contrary, we have already seen how Richardson offers Sir Charles’s Christian heroism as a superior alternative to ancient heroism. In addition, Richardson directly addresses the epic during his domestic re-staging of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns at the beginning of the novel, which was a controversy that broke out in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a reprise to the parallel querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in the Académie Française of the seventeenth century.143

During a dinner party, Harriet reluctantly debates the pedantic Mr. Walden about the merit of studying ancient languages in school. Harriet believes that the emphasis on studying Latin and Greek takes too much away from what ought to be the end of education: “But, in my humble opinion, neither a learned, nor what is called a fine education, has any other value than as each tends to improve the morals of men, and to make them wise and good” (1:48). Mr. Walden replies that ancient texts are a source of moral improvement, and that studying ancient languages is a necessary first step to unlocking their wisdom. She concedes to this point: “Languages, I own, Sir, are of use, to let us into the knowlege for which so many of the antients were famous—But…But have not the moderns, Sir, if I must speak, if they have equal genius’s, the same heavens, the same earth, the same works of God, or of nature, as it is called, to contemplate upon, and improve by?” (1:52). Later, after her querelle with Walden has concluded, she ruminates again on this same point: “And why is the Grecian Homer,” Harriet asks,

“to this day, so much admired, as he is in all these nations, and in every other nation where he has been read, and will be, to the world’s end, but because he writes to nature? And is not the language of nature one language throughout the world, tho’ there are different modes of speech to express it by?”

141 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 282. 142 Watt, “Defoe and Richardson on Homer,” 325. 143 For an excellent study of the English Quarrel see Levine, The Battle of the Books.

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(1:185). Reflecting on her account of the debate with Walden, Sir Charles sides with Harriet: “stores of unexhausted knowlege lie in the works of those great Antients, which suffered in the hands of poor

Mr. Walden: You know what the past and present ages have owed, and what all future will owe, to

Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero” (3:249). In other words, both Harriet and Sir Charles admire Homer

“because he writes to nature.”

That Homer was, as Richardson states in the Index, “Justly admired for his writing to nature,” was a critical commonplace in the eighteenth century and one of the central issues in the English

Quarrel.144 Broadly speaking, the so-called “Ancients” valued the ancients as a source of authority, a fount of universal wisdom that could continue to guide modern life. The ancient writers had already discovered everything that was important to know and the best that modern thinkers could hope for was to imitate and learn from them. The “Moderns,” on the other hand, believed current advances in all fields of study, especially the natural sciences, made it possible to surpass the achievements and learning of the ancient world. In particular, they championed the new sciences of philology and archaeology. During the Renaissance, humanist scholars began to develop the techniques and methods of modern philology in order to study and make sense of the ancient authors they had just begun to rediscover. However, this scholarship, the purpose of which was to reconstruct the world in which these authors lived and worked, “began to chip away” at the authority of the ancients, who “they exalted...to a universal timeless status,” revealing mistakes of translation and transcription, or so-called

“anomalies in the old authors,” and a world that was often strange and alien from their own.145

Paradoxically, then, “It was classical philology, more than anything, that seemed to threaten the authority of the ancient authors.”146

144 Richardson, Index in Grandison, 7:355. 145 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 2. 146 Ibid., 132.

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Homer emerged as a key figure in later episodes of the Quarrel.147 The Ancients reverenced

Homer as the great poet who offered timeless wisdom about human nature. In his Réflexions sur la poétique, which was translated into English in 1674 by Thomas Reymer, René Rapin praised Homer for his “true” and “natural” writing, the sublimity of which “animates the soul” and “go[es] straight to the heart.”148 For Pope, “Nature and Homer... were the same.”149 The poet John Oldham wrote of

Homer in 1681:

Whate’re the spacious field of air contain,

Or far extended territories of the main,

Is by thy skilful pencil so exactly shown,

We scarce discern where thou, or Nature best has drawn.150

The Moderns, on the other hand, did not share this exalted view of Homer as the fountainhead of all the wisdom of Western civilization. Modern scholarship drew attention not to the continuities between Homer and the modern world, but made it more obvious that modern manners and customs

“were not those of the age of the Greek heroes, and that it had different values, both moral and poetical.”151 Richard Bentley, who considered publishing his own scholarly edition of the Iliad but never completed it, asserted that the Iliad did not show “a universal Knowledge of things.”152 Thomas

Blackwell pioneered the historicist approach to Homer in his Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer

(1735), accounting for “Homer’s genius by examining the Homeric epics in relation to the social, historical, and geographical circumstances in which they were composed.”153

147 See Levine, The Battle of the Books, 122-180. 148 David Hopkins, “Homer,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 3 (1660- 1790), edited by David Hopkins and Charles Martindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 167. 149 Ibid., 168. 150 Ibid., 168. 151 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 131. 152 Ibid., 160. 153 Hopkins, “Homer,” 181. See also Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 245.

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The Moderns revealed not only the historical contingency of Homer’s great epics, but incongruities and imperfections in the texts. Bentley, for instance, was skeptical that Homer had written the text of the Iliad as we now have it, casting doubt on Homer’s genius: “Take my word for it, poor Homer in those circumstances and early times had never such aspiring thoughts. He wrote a sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at Festivals and other days of Merriment...These loose songs were not connected together, in this form of an epic poem, till Pisistratis’ time about 500 years after.”154 In short, while the Ancients saw the immediacy of the wisdom of the ancient poets for modern life, the Moderns saw the difference between ancient and modern times.

With the Ancients, then, Harriet and Sir Charles admire Homer’s universality. But, as we see in her response to Walden, she also complicates her position with a more modern perspective: both the ancients and the moderns have access to universal nature, so there is no reason why the moderns cannot write to nature as well as Homer did. In fact, Harriet observes, the moderns actually have the advantage, since they not only have nature but also Christian revelation:

But supposing the knowlege of these antients, continued I, as great as you please, is it not to

be lamented, is it not, indeed, strange, that none of the modern learned, notwithstanding the

advantage of their works (most of which they have taught to speak our language);

notwithstanding the later important discoveries in many branches of science; notwithstanding

a Revelation from Heaven, to which the religion of the Pagans was foolishness (and on which

foolishness, however, I am told, most of the works of antiquity are founded); should have

deserved a higher consideration in the comparison, than as pygmies to giants? (1:54).

It is because of “new discoveries as by revelation” that Harriet has reason to think her age “more enlightened” (1:55). Homer may have been a great poet of nature, but his greatness was limited because

154 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 160.

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he did not have access to Christian Revelation. Though the moderns, as Harriet points out, have the

“advantage,” no modern poet had yet claimed Homer’s laurels. The only real contender for Homer’s success was Milton, though that was still the subject of debate in Richardson’s time. Addison, for example, though he, as Mr. Walden, points out, “gives but the second place to Milton,” also said that of the moral teachings of the two, Paradise Lost’s are the greater: “there is an unquestionable

Magnificence in every Part of Paradise Lost, and indeed a much greater than could have been formed upon any Pagan System.”155 Not everyone could agree that Milton had surpassed Homer as the greatest epic writer because, according to both Addison and the characters in Sir Charles Grandison, he leaned too heavily on epic literary conventions and classical references and allusions. Addison wrote in

Spectator 297, that a “Blemish” in Paradise Lost “is his frequent Allusion to Heathen Fables, which are not certainly of a Piece with the Divine Subject, of which he treats.” Richardson echoes this point during Mr. Walden and Harriet’s debate, when Mr. Walden points out that Milton’s “very frequent allusions to them, and his knowlege of their mythology,” show how he “is infinitely obliged to the great antients” (1:56). Harriet responds that this reliance is a blemish, not an advantage:

His knowlege of their mythology, Sir!—His own subject so greatly, so nobly, so divinely, above

that mythology!—I have been taught to think, by a very learned man, that it was a

condescension in Milton to the taste of persons of more reading than genius in the age in

which he wrote, to introduce so often as he does, his allusions to the pagan mythology: And

that he neither raised his sublime subject, nor did credit to his vast genius, by it. (1:56)

Harriet’s conviction that Milton had done a disservice to his “vast genius” by imitating ancient epics with his allusions to pagan mythology recalls Edward Young’s theory of literary genius in Conjectures on Original Composition In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (1759).

155 Spectator 267.

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Young departed from the popular view of his day that literary greatness comes from imitating ancient authors. In An Essay on Criticism, Pope had declared, “To copy nature is to copy them,” and the epic poet Sir Richard Blackmore agreed: “no future Author…is likely to succeed, if he deviates far from those Models, and much less if he leaves them quite out of Sight.”156 Young distinguishes between two types of imitation: “Imitations are of two kinds; one of Nature, one of Authors: The first we call originals, and confine the term Imitation to the second.”157 By this metric, Homer is great because he had imitated nature. Swift had made the same point in The Battle of the Books, where ancient writers are like the bee who ventures into the fields and flowers and “by an universal Range, with long search, much Study, true Judgment, and Distinction of Things, brings home Honey and Wax.”158 On the other hand, the modern writer who imitates Homer in the hopes of imitating nature through him can at best hope to be only a pale copy of the original. Better, in Young’s mind, to go directly to the flowers and fields oneself.

In 1756, Young sent the manuscript to Richardson with the request that “you may favour it with some strokes of your pen.”159 In one of the passages Richardson contributed, he writes:

After all, the first ancients had no merit in being originals: they could not be imitators. Modern

writers have a choice to make; and therefore have a merit in their power. They may soar in the

regions of liberty, or move in the soft fetters of easy imitation; and imitation has as many

156 Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, l. 140; Levine, The Battle of the Books, 144. 157 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (London: 1759), 9. 158 Jonathan Swift, A tale of a tub. Written for the universal improvement of mankind. To which is added, an account of a battel between the antient and modern books in St. James's library (London: 1704), 248. 159 As McKillop and Watt have pointed out, Richardson’s contributions to the Conjectures were “responsible for a general sharpening of Young’s polemic in the direction of a new anti-classical hierarchy of literary values.” See Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 247. Specifically, Richardson’s changes show, according to McKillop, a desire to “break the molds of neo-classicism to make way for pietism” and “depreciate the dii majores of secular literature in favor of a new Christian dispensation.” See Alan D. McKillop, “Richardson, Young, and the ‘Conjectures,’” Modern Philology 22, no. 4 (1925): 393. For more on the composition of the Conjectures, and Richardson’s hand in it, see also Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 432-436.

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plausible reasons to urge, as pleasure had to offer Hercules. Hercules made the choice of an

hero, and so became immortal.160

Richardson adopts a popular neoclassical motif, the “Choice of Hercules,” to imagine the choice the modern writer must make between “easy imitation” of the ancients, or the goal of originality as akin to a choice between vice and virtue (Figure 3.11). Paradoxically, the modern who chooses to abandon ancient precedent becomes, by means of this analogy, more like the ancients than if he had imitated them directly. Young explores this paradox further in the following paragraph: “Must we then, you say, not imitate antient Authors? Imitate them, by all means; but imitate aright. He that imitates the divine Iliad, does not imitate Homer…Tread in his steps to the sole Fountain of Immortality; drink where he drank, at the true Helicon, that is, at the breast of Nature: Imitate; but imitate not the

Composition, but the Man.”161 To become like Homer one must not copy what he wrote but how— not by following Aristotle’s rules in the Poetics and, like Milton, relying extensively on ancient epic conventions such as epic similes, invocations to the muses, and allusions to their literature and mythology but, like him, writing to nature.

Many of Richardson’s own early readers saw him as making the heroic authorial choice and evaluated his novels according to Young’s theory, praising him especially for his ability to write to nature. Thomas Edwards called Richardson “the great Master of the heart.”162 Diderot wrote, “The more one understands nature, the more one loves truth, the greater is one’s esteem for the works of

Richardson.”163 Johnson paid him a similar compliment as one “who has enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.”164 Of Sir Charles Grandison,

160 Young, Conjectures, 18-19. 161 Ibid., 20-21. 162 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 287. 163 For the French, see Denis Diderot, Collection complette des ouvres philosophiques, littéraires et dramatiques de M. Diderot (Londres: 1773), 387-407. 164 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 338

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in particular, Frances Grainger thought it, “ye the complete system of life & manners, & ye best calculated for ye amendment of the head & heart, that ever has been exhibited in Prophane writing.”165

And John Chapone declared Sir Charles was “the noblest Representation, that ever did Honour to

Human Nature.”166

Figure 3.11: Benjamin West, The Choice of Hercules between Virtue and Pleasure, 1764, oil on canvas, 40 x 48 in, The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Richardson’s originality was heroic enough for some to nominate him as Homer’s successor.

Johnson said there are “few sentiments that might not be traced up to Homer, Shakespeare &

165 Ibid., 403. 166 Ibid.

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Richardson.”167 Diderot canonized Richardson in his “Éloge de Richardson,” saying, “I shall keep you on the same shelf as Moses, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles.”168 Mercier did not mince any words when he claimed in 1773 that “Richardson is the modern Homer.”169 The poet Anna Williams in her laudatory verses on Sir Charles Grandison imagined a kind of literary apotheosis for Richardson, crowning him with laurels alongside the other deified poets of the ancient world: “Thou goest to join the great of ancient days, / Thy dust shall emblematick shades embow’r, / The hero’s laurel, and the maiden’s flow’r.”170 John Duncombe’s verses “to the author of Clarissa,” which Richardson affixed to the third and fourth editions of the novel, conclude,

Ev’n Plato, in Lyceum’s awful shade,

Th’ instructive page with transport had survey’d;

And own’d its author to have well supply’d

The place his Laws to Homer’s self deny’d.171

According to Duncombe, where Homer would have been excluded from Plato’s republic “on account of the bad tendency of the morals he ascribes to his Gods and Heroes,” Richardson would have secured a place.172 On the other hand, the anonymous author of Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison,

Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) disagreed that Richardson deserved a place next to “the divine Homer.”173

After a long excursus comparing the heroes of Homer to the heroes and heroines of Richardson, the author concludes, “But you, Sir, are not a Homer, and are besides totally ignorant of that art, without

167 Ibid., 588. 168 Ibid., 605. 169 Allen Michie, Richardson and Fielding: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 61. 170 Anna Williams, “Verses addressed to Mr. Richardson, On His History of Sir Charles Grandison,” in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London: 1766), 34. 171 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (London: 1759), 8:303. 172 Ibid. 173 Lover of Virtue, Critical remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela (London: 1754), 11.

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the frequent exercise of which no other authors have ever attained to a great and lasting reputation.”174

Even Richardson’s severest critics acknowledged they had to reach to the heavens in order to bring him back down to earth.

In sum, rather than reject the classics, Richardson participated in the long line of Christian humanists—from Clement of Alexandria and Augustine, to Erasmus and the latitudinarians—who tried to synthesize Christian and classical culture. Concerned, like Steele, that ancient morality had stolen the hearts of many of his contemporaries, he responded with Sir Charles Grandison and offered a Christian hero who would heed Charlotte Grandison’s warning about the dangers of making religion look “unlovely.” Answering Steele’s call for “Elegant Pens” to represent the attractions of Christianity, in Sir Charles Grandison, he attempts to render the lessons of Christianity less “irksome” to “the Young, the Gay” among his readers by appealing to their love of the ancients and the era’s rage for fashionable neoclassicism.175

Another passage Richardson contributed to the Conjectures serves to clinch Richardson’s

Shaftesburian strategy to educate the ethical sensibilities of his readers by appealing to their tastes through the vivid image of a wanderer in a garden: “A serious thought, standing single among many of a lighter kind, will sometimes strike the careless wanderer, who roamed only for amusement, with useful awe: as monumental marble, scattered in a wide pleasure-garden, (and such there are), will call to recollection those who would never have gone to seek it in a church-yard full of mournful yews.”176

Readers of Sir Charles Grandison, then, wandering through pleasing descriptions of the hero’s fine collection of bronzes and gems, his time on the Grand Tour visiting ancient ruins, and the neoclassical landscaping at Grandison Hall are repeatedly struck by a more serious thought—the thought that, to

174 Ibid., 57. 175 From a letter Samuel Richardson wrote to Lady Bradshaigh in 1748. See Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, 88. 176 Young, Conjectures, 2.

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borrow from a sermon published toward the end of the century, “Christianity is the pure fountain of honour and generosity. Human philosophy, whether in the guise of Greece or Rome, hides its diminished head before it. To do good, hoping for nothing again, is a noble, a sublime principle, that far excels any ostentatious heroism, that soars far beyond the reach of Roman virtue.”177 Christianity, for Richardson, offers a model of heroism that far exceeds any ancient philosophy in popularity during the eighteenth century. Richardson’s early readers acknowledged, as the author of Critical Remarks put it, that he had indeed “very pleasantly contrived to find a place...in Homer’s room.”178 By offering a

Christian hero who he believed could surpass Homer and Virgil’s heroes by embodying “the great and glorious truths of Christianity,” Richardson only rejects the morality of the epic—not its ambitions

(1:440).

177 Trinder, Practical Sermons, 188. 178 Critical remarks, 53.

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Chapter Four: Metallurgical Satire in Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield

In 1724, the notorious freethinker Anthony Collins published A discourse of the grounds and reasons of the Christian religion. In the preface, he calls for a “new Cervantes” to give the world a comic portrait of “Saint-errants,” religious fanatics whose characters unite “Zeal and Ignorance.”1 It is this

“most absurd and ridiculous Composition” which leads men to be dogmatic in opinions they don’t fully understand and to persecute those who disagree with them.2 History and common life supply many instances of this religious buffoonery, so “if some great genius would but give an account of the actions of these,” he says, “he might give us a more useful and entertaining work than CERVANTES has done.”3

“Some great Genius” eventually arrived in 1742, when Henry Fielding announced on the title page of Joseph Andrews that his “history” had been “Written in Imitation of The Manner of Cervantes,

Author of Don Quixote.”4 In Joseph Andrews, Fielding created the quixotic parson Abraham Adams, a

Don Quixote in a cassock—not a knight errant but a saint errant. Parson Adams, however, was not exactly what Collins had in mind. His “Zeal” is not a persecuting or evangelizing spirit but, as Fielding introduces him to us in the third chapter, “good Nature” which makes him “generous, friendly and brave to an Excess.”5 His “Ignorance” is not ignorance of church teachings—indeed, Adams is an

“excellent Scholar” who “had treasured up a Fund of Learning rarely to be met with at a University”— but ignorance of “the Ways of the World, as an Infant just entered into it could possibly be.”6 At the end of the preface, Fielding declared that the character of Adams “is not to be found in any Book

1 Anthony Collins, A discourse of the grounds and reasons of the Christian religion (London: 1724), xli, xl, xxxvii. 2 Ibid., xxxvii 3 Ibid., xl. 4 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 1. According to the annotated catalogue of Fielding’s library, he owned a copy of Collins’s A discourse of free-thinking. See Fielding’s Library: An Annotated Catalogue, ed. Frederick G. Ribble and Anne G. Ribble (Charlottesville: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1996), 77-78. 5 Ibid., 23. 6 Ibid., 22-23.

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now extant.”7 William Shenstone agreed: “That was an original, I think; unattempted before.”8 In the wake of Joseph Andrews, there was a well-documented trend for quixotic imitations, “for which Fielding was the most important vehicle.”9 More particularly, the wholly original Parson Adams became the pattern for a new type of saint-errant character, inspiring a flurry of imitations throughout the century, most notably Goldsmith’s Dr. Charles Primrose.10

In the preface, Fielding also boasts that the character of Adams “is the most glaring in the whole.”11 Johnson’s Dictionary defined “glaring” as “any thing very shocking.” Indeed, there was something shocking, or at least surprising, about these good-natured, but quixotic, clergymen. This pleasant shock is also true for Goldsmith’s parson in The Vicar of Wakefield. Since the mid-twentieth century, readers have been divided about how to respond to him. Was Goldsmith’s unworldly vicar meant to be an object of ridicule in the way Collins wanted us to laugh at religious fanatics? Or were we supposed to admire his innocence and good nature in spite of his absurdities? Were we, in short, supposed to laugh at him or with him? Goldsmith’s Dr. Primrose has been a “sentimental hero for some, an unwitting satiric butt for others.”12 George F. Haggerty has said that the “crisis of critical interpretation” centers on this question: “to what degree is The Vicar of Wakefield ironic?”13

7 Ibid., 10. 8 Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood (London: Routledge, 1969), 159. 9 See Brean S. Hammond, “Mid-Century English Quixotism and the Defense of the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 3 (1998): 247-268; Susan Staves, “Don Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England,” Comparative Literature 24, no. 3 (1972): 193-215; Paul Goring, “Anglicanism, Enthusiasm and Quixotism: Preaching and Politeness in Mid-Eighteenth Century Literature,” Literature & Theology 15, no. 4 (2001): 250. 10 This also includes Sterne’s Parson Yorick in A Sentimental Journey and Richard Graves’s Geoffry Wildgoose in The Spiritual Quixote. 11 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 10. 12 James Kim, “Goldsmith’s Manhood: Hegemonic Masculinity and Sentimental Irony in The Vicar of Wakefield,” The Eighteenth Century 59, no. 1 (2018): 22. 13 George F. Haggerty, “Satire and Sentiment in The Vicar of Wakefield,” The Eighteenth Century 32, no.1 (1991): 25-38.

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For eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers of the novel, the idea of Goldsmith as Swiftian satirist who lashes “the often naïve, and seemingly idiotic, parson…plays no part whatsoever.”14

Instead, early readers like Lady Sarah Pennington and Frances Burney admired the good-natured parson for his “simple, unaffected contentment—and family domestic happiness.”15 “This Vicar,” wrote Burney in a diary entry from 1768, “is a very venerable old man…contented, humble, pious, virtuous, [quite a darling character].”16 If there was any criticism of Primrose it was for his “vanity” and “credulity,” as an unsigned piece in the Critical Review from 1766 remarked, as well as his “very bold and singular opinions.”17 With Burney and other early readers who largely admired Goldsmith’s vicar, Stuart Tave characterized him as “a delightful gentleman with his amiable little oddities.”18 Tave has identified Primrose, along with Parson Adams, as what he calls an “amiable humorist.” The

“humorist,” a character type that became popular in the second half of the eighteenth century, is one whose follies and oddities—which are not the result of vice but of a simplicity and good nature that often makes him naïve in the ways of the world—are meant to excite an affectionate chuckle and endear him to the reader. In these readings, Primrose is a “‘sentimental’ paragon whose oddities are the product of a deep unprudential goodness, a comic equivalent of the Erasmian holy fool.”19

Within a few years of Tave’s sentimental reading, what Preston characterizes as “revisionist” readings of the novel as satire rather than sentiment began to proliferate.20 The “most articulate” and best known of these is Robert H. Hopkins’s The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith (1969), which boldly

14 Oliver Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage, ed. G.S. Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1995), 12. 15 Ibid., 52. 16 Ibid., 53. 17 Ibid. 18 Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960), 147. 19 Claude Rawson, “Henry Fielding” in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century-Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 136. 20 Thomas R. Preston, “The Uses of Adversity: Worldly Detachment and Heavenly Treasure in ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’” Studies in Philology 81, no. 2 (1984): 229.

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chides readers for having misinterpreted Goldsmith’s novel “for over 175 years.”21 Hopkins and other revisionist critics such as John Dussinger, Barbara Benedict, and Marshall Brown ask us to read between the lines of Primrose’s first-person narration and to recognize that Goldsmith intends

Primrose as an “object of satire,” a hypocritical and “pious fraud” who is “really a money-conscious, fortune-hunting materialist, practicing benevolence as a good business investment and treating his children as ‘annuities for old age.’”22 These readings, in other words, read Primrose in the spirit

Anthony Collins urged. Regardless, the jury is still out on Goldsmith’s hero. For every satiric reading of the novel, there are arguments from critics such as Howard Weinbrot and Eric Rothstein, Richard

C. Taylor, Oliver W. Ferguson, and Thomas R. Preston who challenge, to use Weinbrot and

Rothstein’s words, that there is “a pervasive, secret irony” in the novel.23

The question is not whether the reader laughs at The Vicar of Wakefield, but why the reader laughs. The reason for the reader’s amusement has remained as the critical crux of the novel, with some arguing that Goldsmith intended the reader to ridicule the follies of Dr. Primrose in the spirit

Collins originally called for, while other critics believe Goldsmith intended the reader to smile kindly and affectionately at this eccentric and naïve, but otherwise admirable and good-natured, parson. Even if it were the latter reading, it is still not clear why Goldsmith urges readers to laugh at a character he holds up to be admired. To state the question more pointedly: how could a model of heroism that encourages readers to laugh at the hero be an effective response to Steele’s crisis?

21 Kim, “Goldsmith’s Manhood,” 26. See Robert H. Hopkins, The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1969). 22 Preston, “Uses of Adversity,” 229-230. See John Dussinger, “The Vicar of Wakefield: A ‘Sickly Sensibility’ and the Reward of Fortune,” in The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (The Hague: De Gruyter, 1974), 148-72; Barbara Benedict, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994), 47-68; Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1994), 141–80. 23 Howard Weinbrot and Eric Rothstein, “The Vicar of Wakefield, Mr. Wilmot, and the ‘Whistonean Controversy,’” Philological Quarterly 55, no. 2 (1976): 225. See also Oliver W. Ferguson, “Dr. Primrose and Goldsmith’s Clerical Ideal,” PQ 54 (1975): 323-32; Richard C. Taylor, “Goldsmith’s First Vicar,” The Review of English Studies 41, no. 162 (1990): 191-199.

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Steele’s crisis was a crisis not simply because the best modern writers celebrated ancient heroes to the neglect of modern Christian heroes, but because contemporary “elegant pens” denigrated the church through mockery and raillery. Fielding called it the “Fashionable Vice of the Times.”24 Simon

Dickie has documented the enduring popularity of pranks such as “priest baiting,” and Vic Gatrell has explained how in the later part of the century, London printshops exploded with anticlerical caricatures.25 “Although jokes about idle, pluralist, tithe-battening, drunken and overfed parsons drew on centuries-old prototypes,” Gatrell writes, “they multiplied, diversified, and sharpened in this period.”26 Anticlerical comedy was also a problem in the theater. Addison complained in Spectator 446 how it is “fashionable to ridicule Religion, or its Professors” on “our English Stage,” and Jeremy

Collier devoted an entire chapter in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage to

“the Clergy abused by the Stage.”27 From the pulpit, Edward Stillingfleet preached that “among persons of civility and honour above all others, Religion might at least be treated with the respect and reverence due to the concernments of it; that it be not made the sport of Entertainments, nor the common subject of Plays and Comedies.”28 In sermons and Spectator essays alike, writers worried that the Church of England was not receiving the respect it deserved.29

Chief among the elegant writers who squandered his genius in jokes that harmed the Christian cause was the freethinker and deist Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-

1713). When he published his anonymous A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm in 1708, Shaftesbury launched what was arguably the century’s most important debate over the relationship between comedy and

24 Battestin, The Moral Basis of Henry Fielding’s Art, 130. 25 Simon Dickie, “Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005): 271-332; Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 470-2. 26 Ibid., 470. 27 Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (London: 1698), 97-139. 28 Stillingfleet, Fifty sermons, 26. 29 See Battestin, The Moral Basis of Henry Fielding’s Art, 130-149.

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religion and the place of raillery in philosophical and theological inquiry. Shaftesbury’s theory in the

Letter that ridicule was the best way to distinguish true gravity from false gravity caught fire, and by the time Goldsmith was writing, Shaftesbury’s “test of ridicule” had become proverbial, with everyone from Samuel Johnson and William Warburton to Mary Astell and Hannah More weighing in on the issue of the religious function of humor. What made Shaftesbury’s “test of ridicule” so controversial was that it did not exempt religion from the serious subjects that ought to be tested in the crucible of wit. What the Letter implied was that if Christianity were true it would withstand any attempts to make it look ridiculous. Christians need not worry that a few jokes would bring the Church of England to its knees. Devout Christians, who were largely skeptics of Shaftesbury’s test, answered that “wit is a keen instrument” that must be handled with care, since it “can cut and gash” regardless of whether something deserves it or not.30

While some in the Church thought the solution to antireligious jokes was to banish such raillery from public discourse altogether, others recognized that wit was a powerful and persuasive tool that needed to be put in the right hands. Like Steele, who acknowledged in the preface to The

Christian Hero that “Men of Wit…have an almost Irresistible Dominion over us,” there were those who lamented not the use of wit, but the fact that the most talented wits had wasted their abilities attacking the church.31 “Glorifying God and religion,” Tillotson wrote, “would be noble exercises indeed for the tongues and pens of the greatest wits.”32 Edward Fowler, writing of Shaftesbury, agreed:

“I cannot but with some regret Reflect, What excellent Persons this, and such other Gentlemen might be, if they bent their Wit and great parts some better way, than for the beating down the Truths of

Piety and Religion. Their Minds might be adorned with the richest Fruits of Wisdom and Virtue.”33

30 Tillotson, Works, 1:68. 31 Steele, The Christian Hero, 7. 32 Tillotson, Works, 1:68. 33 Edward Fowler, Reflections upon a letter concerning enthusiasm, To my Lord *****. In another letter to a lord (London: 1709), 98.

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Latitudinarian divines proposed, “for fashion’s sake,” that wit could be reclaimed from libertines and freethinkers and, as in Augustine’s metaphor of “Egyptian gold,” be put in the service of Christian truth.34

In Sermon XIV “Against Foolish Talking and Jesting,” Barrow said that divines need not be

“obliged ever to talk like philosophers, assigning dry reasons for every thing, and dropping grave sentences upon all occasions.”35 Instead, wit needed to be rescued from freethinkers and libertines and enlisted in the service of Christianity:

It is wit that wageth the war against reason, against virtue, against religion…it may therefore

be needful in our warfare, for those dearest concerns, to sort the manner of our fighting with

that of our adversaries, and with the same kind of arms to protect goodness, whereby they do

assail it…If wit may happily serve under the banner of truth and virtue we may impress it for

that service: and good it were to rescue so worthy a faculty from so vile abuse.36

Charm, not chastisement, as Robert Harper might say, would lead people back from infidelity and atheism to the church:

an ingenious vein coupled with an honest mind, may be a good talent; he shall employ wit

commendably, who by it can further the interest of goodness, alluring men first to listen, then

inducing them to consent unto its wholesome dictates and precepts. Since men are so

irreclaimably disposed to mirth and laughter, it may be well to set them in the right pin, to

divert their humour into the proper channel, that they may please themselves in deriding things

which deserve it, ceasing to laugh at that which requireth reverence...37

34 Isaac Barrow, The sermons of the learned Dr Isaac Barrow, late Master of Trinity-College, in Cambridge. Published by Archbishop Tillotson (Edinburgh: 1751), 1:325. 35 Ibid., 320-321. 36 Ibid., 324. 37 Ibid., 325

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Following the lead of Barrow and Tillotson, early novelists responded to Steele’s call for “Elegant

Pens” to take up the cause of Christian heroism by diverting “mirth and laughter” into the proper channel.38 Specifically, Goldsmith remedies Fowler’s disappointment that Shaftesbury’s talent had been used for ill ends by reclaiming the “test of ridicule” for the cause of religion. Owen Aldridge has said of Shaftesbury’s test, “A subject which occupied famous philosophers, poets, physicians, divines, and artists of the eighteenth century is a subject of both historic and esthetic importance.”39 The debate in philosophical discourse over the role of humor is also of literary importance, for when Aldridge and Templeman looked closely at the way the debate about Shaftesbury’s test of ridicule played out in religious and philosophical essays and pamphlets, they failed to consider the way this debate was also taken up in fiction.40

Goldsmith imaginatively engages in the debate over Shaftesbury’s theory of ridicule through his story about the Primrose family. Read in light of this debate, I argue that the ambivalence of The

Vicar of Wakefield’s comedy makes sense given that laughter need not undermine Primrose, but can instead affirm him. According to Johnson’s Dictionary a “Glare” is also an “overpowering lustre; splendor, such as dazzles the eye.” True to his surname, Goldsmith subjects his clerical hero to the

Shaftesburian crucible of wit, and like gold that has been purified through the refining process,

Primrose emerges triumphant, his virtues no less brilliant for having been ridiculed.41 In this chapter

I contend that no examination of Christian heroism in the eighteenth century would be complete without looking at the century’s most singular type of hero: the quixotic clergyman who seems to inspire laughter as much as admiration. Reclaiming comedy from its libertine and freethinking

38 Barrow, Sermons, 1:325. 39 Owen Aldridge, “Shaftesbury and the Test of Truth,” PMLA 60, no. 1 (1945): 130. 40 See also William Darby Templeman, “Warburton and Brown Continue the Battle over Ridicule,” Huntington Library Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1953): 17-36. 41 I cannot find any evidence that Goldsmith was intentionally punning on his own name.

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adversaries was an important way Anglican writers such as Goldsmith responded to the century’s crisis of Christian heroism.

In 1708, Shaftesbury published A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm.42 Addressed to Lord Sommer, the primary subject of the letter purported to be religious “enthusiasm,” although many of its early readers agreed that Shaftesbury’s discussion of ridicule was, in the words of Edward Fowler, the “very

Cream, as it were, of all his Performance” and the “Spice and Perfume” that runs “through the whole

Piece.”43 Shaftesbury introduces his controversial “test of ridicule” by observing how he “often wonder’d to see Men of Sense so mightily alarm’d at the approach of any thing like Ridicule on certain

Subjects.”44 According to him, people hesitate to ridicule “grave” or “serious” subjects because they are afraid of being irreverent.

However, it is gravity, not ridicule we should fear, since follies, falsehoods, and vices often disguise themselves as wisdom and truth: “But let us see first whether they are really grave or no: for in the manner we may conceive ‘em, they may peradventure be very grave and weighty in our

Imagination; but very ridiculous and impertinent in their own nature. Gravity is of the very Essence of

Imposture.”45 The best way “to know always true Gravity from the false” is to apply the “Test of

Ridicule:” “Now what Rule or Measure is there in the World, except in the considering of the real

Temper of Things, to find which are truly serious, and what ridiculous? And how can this be done, unless by applying the Ridicule, to see whether it will bear?”46

42 N.B. I will be citing from the version of the Letter published in Characteristicks (1711), not the original published in 1708. For more on the composition and publication of Shaftesbury’s Letter, see Richard B. Woolf, “The Publication of Shaftesbury’s ‘Letter concerning Enthusiasm,’” Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 236-241. 43 Fowler, Reflections, 21. 44 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 1:16. 45 Ibid., 16-17. 46 Ibid.

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Nowhere is this question more important for Shaftesbury than in matters of religion. Because people are apt to take religion so seriously, all manner of ridiculous and false religious practices and beliefs are allowed to pass untested among those that are true. This is where Shaftesbury’s concept of

“enthusiasm” becomes important. Shaftesbury’s real meaning, scholars agree, is notoriously difficult to pin down, particularly because his “flippant bantering tone” can make it difficult to tell whether he is “speaking earnestly or ironically, with his fist in the air or his tongue in his cheek.”47 One of the ways he uses it seems similar to Collins’s discussion of “Zeal and Ignorance:” Enthusiasm is the

“distemper” that plagues fanatical religious sects who are dominated by a spirit of superstition, irrationality, and perhaps most importantly, melancholy, or “sober Sadness.”48 The worst way to prevent the spread of enthusiasm and superstition is for governments to suppress or persecute it violently, since “Bloodshed, Wars, Persecutions and Devastations” only fan the flame of religious zeal.49

The best antidote to enthusiasm and fanaticism is to subject it to the crucible of ridicule—or, in the terms he uses interchangeably with ridicule: wit, raillery, banter, drollery, and good humor.50 In fact, “Good Humour is not only the best Security against Enthusiasm,” he says, “but the best

Foundation of Piety and true Religion.”51 Those things that are true will easily withstand the test. Thus, we should not be afraid for good and true things to undergo close examination, since closer inspection

47 Aldridge, “Shaftesbury and the Test of Truth,” 130. After criticizing religious enthusiasm for most of the letter, Shaftesbury surprisingly offers a positive vision of enthusiasm’s role in the philosophical and religious life at the end of the letter. For interpretations of Shaftesbury’s views of enthusiasm see Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 148-149; Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967); Patrick Müller, “‘Dwell with honesty & beauty & order’: The Paradox of Theodicy in Shaftesbury’s Thought,” Aufklärung 22 (2010): 201–31; Douglas Den Uyl, Forward to Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Douglas den Uyl (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 5-6; Lawrence E. Klein, Introduction to Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xxix-xxxiii. 48 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 1:17. 49 Ibid., 19. 50 See Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 37. 51 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 1:20.

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will only confirm their worthiness: “For, if it be genuine and sincere, it will not only stand the Proof, but thrive and gain advantage from hence: if it be spurious, or mix’d with any Imposture, it will be detected and expos’d.”52 Here, Shaftesbury draws an analogy between the ethical purpose of ridicule and metallurgy, the process by which valuable metals are purified and tested by being subjected to high temperatures. Johnson’s Dictionary defines “To Refine” as “to purify; to clear from dross and recrement” and “The act of purifying, by clearing any thing from dross as recrementitious matter.”

Metallurgical refinement, or purification through fire, is also a common Biblical analogy for moral purification and the testing of true spiritual worth. Johnson cites Zechariah 13:9: “I will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried.”53 Others, primarily Shaftesbury’s critics, futher developed the comparison. Edward Fowler, the prominent latitudinarian Bishop of Gloucester who was one of the first to publish a critical response to Shaftesbury’s letter called his test, “this Infallible

Rule; this Lydius Lapis of Truth, Falsehood, and Enthusiasm.”54 The third dialogue of George

Berkeley’s Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher (1732), takes Shaftesbury to task and concludes, “It shou’d seem, therefore, that Ridicule is no such sovereign Touchstone and Test of Truth, as you Gentlemen imagine.”55 Both Berkeley and Fowler liken the test to a “touchstone,” a type of stone known to the ancients as “Lapis Lydius,” which could be used to test gold alloys by observing the color of the mark it made on the stone.

Goldsmith was not only aware of but seemed to approve of Shaftesbury’s theory of ridicule as a crucible which separates religious truth from falsehood. In Letter XCI of The Citizen of the World, the subject of which is different Protestant sects in England, Goldsmith paraphrases the main points of A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. Writing of Methodism, Goldsmith observes, “Yet you must not

52 Ibid., 24. 53 Ibid. 54 Fowler, Reflections, 22-23. 55 George Berkeley, Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher (London: 1732), 124.

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conceive this modern sect as differing in opinion from those of the established religion: Difference of opinion indeed formerly divided their sectaries…but at the present they are arrived at such refinement in religion making, that they have actually formed a new sect without a new opinion.”56 In other words, contemporary debate among different Protestant groups is so trivial that it amounts to conflict over nothing. Note Goldsmith’s use of the word “refinement” here, by which he means Johnson’s second definition: “to improve in point of accuracy or delicacy.” Early in his career, Goldsmith published the minor work, Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), which argues that the grow of intellectual “refinement” in European arts and letters is evidence of cultural decline. During the twilight years of the Roman Empire, pedantry replaced learning: “we shall perceive more skill in the sciences among the professors of them, more abstruse and deeper enquiry into every philosophical subject, and a greater shew of subtility and close reasoning…But their writings were mere speculative amusements, and all their researches exhausted upon trifles” (1:269). Modern learning is similarly disguised in the “fopperies of scholastic finery,” pretending to be more serious than it actually is

(1:278). Like Shaftesbury, Goldsmith abhors false gravity and imposture, observing that “The solemnity worn by many of our modern writers is, I fear, often the mask of dulness” (1:322). The

“most trifling performance among us,” he continues, “now assumes all the didactic stiffness of wisdom” (1:319).

The problem of refinement, according to Goldsmith’s letter, extends to theological disputes among English Protestants who quibble over insignificant points of Christian doctrine. This is also the case in The Vicar of Wakefield, where Primrose exhausts his research on trifles. From the beginning of the novel, the reader is told that Primrose enjoys “philosophical disputes” (4:28) and “philosophical arguments” (4:33). Primrose’s own favorite theological hobby horse is the “Whistonean controversy”

56 All citations of Oliver Goldsmith’s work refer to The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 2:430-1. Further references will appear in the text parenthetically.

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(4:8). According to Primrose, the controversy concerns strict monogamy, and he, like Whiston, believes it is “unlawful for a priest of the church of England, after the death of his first wife, to take a second” (4:22). Primrose describes it as a “peculiar tenet,” which seems to increase in importance the more he reflects on it (4:22). After he was “initiated into this important dispute, on which so many laborious volumes have been written,” he published his own tracts on the subject, which “never sold”

(4:22). Few people, in other words, agree with Primrose that monogamy is a significant theological problem. Primrose’s friends call this obsession his “weak side” (4:22). This is undoubtedly what

Burney was referring to when she commented on his “very singular opinions.” In fact, as Weinbrot and Rothstein have discovered, there is no hard evidence for a Whistonean controversy involving clerical monogamy.57 Whiston did share Primrose’s views about marriage, but it was a minor position, a throwaway compared to the more serious controversy surrounding his heterodox views on the

Trinity. 58

That Primrose imagined the controversy does not stop it from having a real impact on his and his family’s life. Just as “refinement in religion making” has created unnecessary division within the

Protestant community, so too does Primrose’s Whistonean hobby horse create needless conflict. At the beginning of the novel, Primrose describes how he decided to show his latest tract to his friend, the archdeacon, Mr. Wilmot. Unfortunately for Primrose, Wilmot, whose daughter is engaged to marry

Primrose’s son, “was most violently attached to the contrary opinion,” and a spirited dispute broke out: Wilmot accused him of being “heterodox,” Primrose “retorted the charge: he replied, and I rejoined” (4:24). The controversy became so heated that the engagement between their children is broken off. Ironically, Primrose’s commitment to this idiosyncratic philosophical position on monogamy ends up destroying his son’s real chances at marriage, at least until the end of the novel.

57 Weinbrot and Rothstein, “Whistonean Controversy,” 229. 58 Ibid.

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Like Shaftesbury, Goldsmith believed in the corrective purposes of laughter and, in particular, that ridiculous beliefs should be exposed to the test of ridicule to see whether they are truly serious, or only falsely grave. In the same letter from The Citizen of the World, Goldsmith argues that “laughter is [the] aversion” of religious “Enthusiasts” who “weep for their amusement” because they are afraid that their beliefs will be exposed as false (2:430):

Yet there is still a stronger reason for the enthusiast’s being an enemy to laughter, namely, for

his being himself so proper an object of ridicule. It is remarkable that the propagators of false

doctrines have ever been averse to mirth, and always began by recommending gravity, when

they intended to disseminate imposture...Ridicule has ever been the most powerful enemy of

enthusiasm, and probably the only antagonist that can be opposed to it with success.

Persecution only serves to propagate new religions. (2:430-1)

Conformists to the Church of England, on the other hand, embrace laughter because they do not fear detection. Goldsmith’s distinction here between “weeping” dissenters and laughing conformists recalls both Addison’s Spectator no. 494 on how cheerfulness is more becoming to Christians than the gloom and melancholy of dissenters as well as divines who maintained, as the high churchman Robert

South put it, “Piety engages no man to be dull.”59 It also brings to mind Goldsmith’s famous “An

Essay on the Theatre; or, A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy,” which he published in The Westminster Magazine in the year before his death in 1774. In this essay, he condemns so-called “sentimental comedy” in which the “virtues of private life are exhibited, rather than the vices exposed” (3:212). What he calls “true comedy,” or “laughing comedy,” on the other hand, displays vices and follies so as to render them ridiculous (3:210). With this conception of comedy, Goldsmith was hoping to restore Aristotle’s definition, which was that comedy, unlike tragedy, is “a picture of the frailties of the lower part of mankind” (3:210). With Shaftesbury, and ancient theorists of comedy,

59 Robert South, Thirty Six Sermons and Discourses, On Several Subjects and Occasions (Dublin: 1720), 2:6.

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Goldsmith agreed that the purpose of comedy was not to falsely elevate its subjects—so that “folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended”—but to unmask them for what they really are (3:212).60

Primrose’s “refined imagination” causes not only undue suffering to him and his family, but also exposes him and his family to ridicule, partly because they take themselves too seriously to detect the difference between true and false gravity (4:162). Moses, who takes after his father, only had the

“the satisfaction of being laughed at” after he tries to entertain Squire Thornhill with “a question or two from the ancients,” and Deborah’s confidence that Olivia’s skill in theological controversy will be enough to convert the free-living Squire Thornhill appears especially ludicrous after he persuades her to elope with him (4:36). Primrose’s humiliation culminates in the scene where he attempts to sell the second family horse at the local fair, after Moses is scammed out of the first horse. Following an unsuccessful morning, Primrose joins an old friend, a “brother clergyman” at the alehouse where they talk about Primrose’s interest in the “Whistonean controversy, my last pamphlet, the archdeacon’s reply, and the hard measure that was dealt me” (4:72). There, he also spots a “venerable old man, who sat wholly intent over a large book” (4:72). Primrose effuses, “I never in my life saw a figure that prepossessed me more favorably” (4:72). Primrose repeats his characterization of this man as

“venerable:” “His locks of silver grey venerably shaded his temples” (4:72).

The “venerable old man,” whose real name is Jenkinson, overhears Primrose talking with his friend, approaches him, and flatters his intellectual pride by asking if he’s in “any way related to the great Primrose, that couragious monogamist, who had been the bulwark of the church” (4:73).

Primrose instantly offers him his esteem and friendship and they begin talking on “several subjects”

(4:73). Primrose muses:

60 For more on how ancient comedy influenced eighteenth-century drama, see Malcolm Kelsall, “The Classics and Eighteenth-Century Theatre,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 3 (1660-1790), edited by David Hopkins and Charles Martindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 447- 476.

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at first I thought he seemed rather devout than learned, and began to think he despised all

human doctrines as dross. Yet this no way lessened him in my esteem; for I had for some time

begun privately to harbour such an opinion myself. I therefore took occasion to observe, that

the world in general began to be blameably indifferent as to doctrinal matters, and followed

human speculations too much. (4:73)

Here, Primrose differentiates between being “devout” and “learned.” As discussed in the first chapter, he internalizes a distinction drawn by many divines between philosophy—or, here, “human speculations” and “human doctrines”— and faith. John Bunyan, for example, believed that the latitudinarians focused too much on “vain Philosophy” and worldly wisdom in their sermons at the expense of scriptural revelation and grace. Primrose, like the latitudinarians, is drawn toward human learning. Though Primrose’s thoughts offer evidence of a shift in his values away from philosophy, it is not enough of a change for Jenkinson to fail to take advantage of Primrose’s “weak side.”

Jenkinson successfully manipulates Primrose’s weakness for theological speculation by drawing him into an abstruse conversation about ancient cosmogony, a subject which has “puzzled philosophers of all ages” (4:74). Jenkinson launches into a nonsensical monologue about the ancient heathen cosmogonies of ‘Sanconiathon, Manetho, Berosus, and Ocellus Lucanus,” occasionally throwing in some muddled Greek quotations (4:74). As Weinbrot and Rothstein have pointed out,

Jenkinson’s “obfuscating patter” parodies William Whiston’s actual writings on natural theology.61

Through his interest in natural philosophy and contact with Newton and Clarke, “Whiston embraced an anti-trinitarian theology similar to Arianism.”62 He became especially interested in cosmography, and part of his aim was to square Christian scriptural accounts of creation with ancient accounts.

Proving true Tertullian’s fear that too much ancient philosophy would lead to the growth of heresy in

61 Weinbrot and Rothstein, “Whistonean Controversy,” 236. 62 Stephen D. Snobelen, “Whiston, William (1667–1752), natural philosopher and theologian,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004, Online.

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the Church, Whiston’s attempts to make “sacred and heathen systems jibe” are likely to blame for his

Arianism.63 Goldsmith’s inclusion of a parodic version of Whiston’s cosmological theories throws into sharp relief just how trifling Primrose’s obsession with monogamy is. Compared with a real theological controversy like Arianism in the Church of England, monogamy is an insignificant issue. Further,

Primrose’s reverence for Jenkinson’s learned performance blinds him to the imposture. Employing a metallurgical analogy, Primrose challenges Jenkinson and attempts to lead him into a theological

“controversy,” declaring he will “bring him to the touch-stone” (4:74). Primrose, however, fails to unmask him. Perhaps if Primrose had been willing to doubt Jenkinson’s gravity, even laugh at him,

Primrose would have recognized Jenkinson’s speech as the meaningless nonsense it was.

The fact that Primrose responds so enthusiastically to Jenkinson’s speech also suggests–– particularly to the reader who knows how Whiston’s attempts to synthesize classical and Christian cosmological accounts led him to adopt heretical views on the Trinity—that what needs correcting in

Primrose’s intellectual habits is his overreliance on classical philosophy at the expense of Christian revelation and faith. Primrose’s love of pagan philosophical systems is memorably visualized a few chapters later when the Primroses commission a family portrait. In the painting, Primrose is depicted as handing over his “books on the Whistonian” controversy to his wife, who is modelled as the pagan goddess Venus (4:83). First, it is funny that Primrose hands over his writings on Christian monogamy to the ancient Roman goddess of love. Second, it emblematizes Primrose’s own love, which he shares with Whiston, for classical philosophy, and his desire to bring human learning to his vocation as a priest.

With other clergy of the Church of England, Primrose quibbles over issues of minor importance, rendering him unable to detect the difference between true and false learning. His love of obscure philosophical speculation is also what makes him vulnerable to ridicule in his encounter

63 Weinbrot and Rothstein, “Whistonean Controversy,” 236.

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with Jenkinson, who flatters his pride by pretending to value Primrose’s contributions to what ultimately, especially in comparison to Whiston’s true cosmological controversy, amounts to nothing.

Shaftesbury’s adage that “Gravity is of the very Essence of Imposture,” rings true in this episode, since it is a “reverend-looking” gentleman who pulls off the cheat, the same reverend gentleman who tricks his son Moses into buying a “groce of green spectacles, with silver rims and shagreen cases” (4:67).

Both cheats involve a play on Shaftesbury’s test of ridicule as metallurgy. When Moses returns with the spectacles, he is convinced that the “silver rims alone will sell for double the money” (4:67). His parents easily perceive that their son has been “imposed upon:” the silver rims, Charles declares, “are not worth six-pence, for I perceive they are only copper varnished over” (4:68). Moses’s failure to detect that the silver rims are actually cheap copper serves as an emblem for his inability to see that the “reverend-looking man” is a con man. Similarly, Primrose’s suspicion that Jenkinson deems all human learning to be “dross,” or the impurities that form on the surface of molten metal during the refining process, point to Primrose’s own confusion about how to distinguish between true and false religious beliefs.

Goldsmith’s interest in Shaftesbury’s metallurgy analogy is most apparent at the end of his letter from The Citizen of the World. After he finishes paraphrasing Shaftesbury’s view that “Ridicule has ever been the most powerful enemy of enthusiasm,” he concludes, as Addison frequently did in the

Spectator, with an illustrative anecdote. During the reign of the Spanish King Philip II, two rival sects of friars in Salamanca were engaged in fierce “disputes of divinity” (2:432). One side claimed “more extraordinary miracles” while the other was “reckoned most authentic” (2:432). To prevent the outbreak of civil war, they were “prevailed upon to submit their legends to the fiery trial, and that which came forth untouched by the fire, was to have the victory, and to be honored with a double share of reverence” (2:432). Crowds gathered to see their miracles tested:

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The friars on each side approached, and confidently threw their respective legends into the

flames, when lo to the utter disappointment of all the assembly, instead of a miracle, both

legends were consumed. Nothing but this turning both parties into contempt could have

prevented the effusion of blood. The people laughed at their former folly, and wondered why

they fell out. (2:432)

Goldsmith may have had in mind the story of the miracle at Fanjeaux, France: in 1206 the Albigenses challenged St. Dominic to a public contest concerning a point of Church doctrine. A large crowd gathered to watch each throw their writings into a fire. The heretical writings of the Albigenses were destroyed by the flames, while Dominic’s were miraculously untouched. Goldsmith revises the story in several ways, the most important of which is that neither of the writings survive the fire. It is not clear when they laugh at their “former folly” whether the folly refers to the dispute itself or their belief that a fire would miraculously settle their dispute. In either case, however, laughter emerges at the end of Goldsmith’s story as the real test of truth.

It makes sense that Goldsmith, as a Protestant, would choose a story about the writings of two rival Catholic sects being destroyed. With Shaftesbury, he believed ridicule would expose false religious beliefs. Notably, Tillotson concurred that every man has “a right to dispute against a false religion, and to urge it with all its absurd and ridiculous consequences, as the ancient fathers did in their disputes with the heathen.”64 They disagreed, however, about what “true Religion” was. For

Goldsmith and Tillotson, ridicule could effectively be directed against those outside the pale of the

Church of England: Catholics, dissenters, Methodists, atheists, and freethinkers. A cursory read of

Shaftesbury’s Letter might suggest that he agreed. Shaftesbury’s early readers, however, were quick to see through Shaftesbury’s Christian posturing (“as good Protestants, my Lord, as you and I are”) and

64 Tillotson, Works, 1:60.

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to identify in the Letter his covert attempts to undermine orthodox Christianity.65 When he wrote,

“Good Humour is…the best Foundation of Piety and true Religion,” they read between the lines, taking what he meant by “true Religion” to be not orthodox Protestantism but the author’s own hidden deistical beliefs.66

This raises an important point about Shaftesbury’s test, which was that it was widely decried as an underhanded method freethinkers used to subvert the Church of England. When Shaftesbury urged the importance of speaking with “Freedom and Pleasantness on such a Subject as God” he was referring to the fact that free speech was limited in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.67 Though the Licensing Act, which prohibited the publication of seditious or offensive books, lapsed in 1695, blasphemy—meaning everything from “swearing to denying the existence of God”—was still a punishable offence under common law.68 The legal status of blasphemy, along with its lack of enforcement, frustrated both the clergy, who were outraged that heterodoxy was going unpunished, and freethinkers who were not allowed to express their ideas plainly.69 As a result, freethinkers turned to the rhetorical techniques of irony and equivocation as a way of protecting themselves.70 Their use of irony—“also referred to by the related terms of wit, raillery, banter, drollery, good humour, and ridicule”—angered their orthodox enemies, who saw such intentional ambiguity and levity in their writings as a kind of refusal “to argue the issues seriously with their opponents because they knew that they would lose.”71 Both Collins and Shaftesbury rebutted that irony would not be needed in a society where people were not ostracized or punished for freely speaking their minds. In this way, their

65 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 1:22. 66 Ibid., 20. 67 Ibid., 21. 68 Rivers, Shaftesbury to Hume, 32. 69 Ibid., 32-33. 70 Ibid., 31-50. 71 Ibid., 37.

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transgressive use of comedy aligns them with the Old Comedy of Greek playwrights, most notably

Aristophanes, who disguised trenchant political critique as buffoonery.72

By the time Shaftesbury wrote the Letter, it was well known that ridicule, to borrow Hannah

More’s words, was “the most deadly weapon in the whole arsenal of impiety.”73 Religion had already been the butt of countless freethinking and libertine jokes, and the clergy, who didn’t seem to set much store in the Christian idea of being a fool for Christ—1 Corinthian 4:10, “We are fools for

Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye are honourable, but we are despised”—were not willing to sit by and bear the mockery passively. The major Restoration latitudinarians Barrow, Tillotson, and Stillingfleet preached against the abuse of wit and the “folly of scoffing at religion.” All agreed that in “this pleasant and jocular age” as Barrow put it, which is “so infinitely addicted” to raillery, ridicule is a powerful tool that is often abused by being applied to inappropriate subjects, religion chief among them.74 Stillingfleet advised, “whether the matters of

Religion be true or no, they are surely things which ought to be seriously thought and spoken of. It is certainly no jesting matter to affront a God of infinite Majesty and Power,” and Tillotson insisted,

“To deride God and religion is the highest kind of impiety.”75

The facetious anonymous letter soon became the talk of the town, with the first printed critique coming from an anonymous pamphlet entitled Remarks upon the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. In a Letter to a Gentleman (1708), which took Shaftesbury to task for “his sly design.”76 Within a year, it attracted the further notice of Edward Fowler and Mary Astell, the philosopher and writer best known

72 For more on Old Comedy in the eighteenth century, see Kelsall, “The Classics and Eighteenth-Century Theatre,” 461-470. Shaftesbury discusses Aristophanes’ treatment of Socrates in his letter. For more on Aristophanes and Shaftesbury, see Raymond A. Anselment, “Socrates and The Clouds: Shaftesbury and A Socratic Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 2 (1978): 171-182. 73 Hannah More, Strictures on the modern system of female education (London: 1799), 1:12-13. 74 Barrow, Sermons, 1:317. 75 Stillingfleet, Fifty sermons, 26; Tillotson, Works, 1:57. 76 Remarks upon the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. In a Letter to a Gentleman (London: 1708), 1.

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now for her book A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694). All three of these pamphlets agreed that the letter was designed to “unsettle and unhinge” its readers’ “Faith, and ruffle their Minds, and Advance wanton Scepticism,” all while pretending to be orthodox.77 By the mid-eighteenth century,

Shaftesbury’s test of ridicule had become proverbial as an excuse for freethinking libertines and wits to mock the Church of England. “Lord Shaftesbury’s test,” Lovelace tells Clarissa, “is part of the rake’s creed, and what I may call the whetstone of infidelity.”78

By the 1750s, only a few years before Goldsmith began writing The Vicar of Wakefield, the debate over Shaftesbury’s test of ridicule had swelled to thousands of pages of prolix rebuttals, elaborate proofs, and extensive, sometimes hairsplitting, taxonomies and definitions of ridicule. After

George Berkeley rebuked “the finest and wittiest railleurs in the world, whose ridicule is the surest test of truth” in Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher, the next, most prolonged and famous chapter in the debate began in 1738 when William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, attacked Shaftesbury in the

“Dedication to the Free-Thinkers” prefacing his Divine Legation of Moses.79 For Warburton, “nothing can be falser” than that “clear, unquestioned Virtues cannot be obscured, however attempted to be disguised, nor consequently, become ridiculous however represented.”80 Mark Akenside disagreed with Warburton and, as Samuel Johnson put it in his Life of Akenside, “adopted Shaftesbury’s foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the discovery of truth” in the notes to The Pleasures of the

Imagination (1744). During the ensuing skirmish with Akenside, Warburton enlisted the aid of the

Reverend John Brown and urged him to write a book examining “all Lord Shaftesbury says against religion.”81 The result was the book Essays on the Characteristics of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1751), and it was

77 Ibid., 10. See also Astell, Bart’lemy Fair: Or an Enquiry after Wit (London: 1709); Fowler, Reflections. 78 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 443. 79 Berkeley, Alciphron, 124. 80 William Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses (London: 1738), xiii. 81 Templeman, “Warburton and Brown Continue the Battle over Ridicule,” 30.

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“received by the public with a high degree of applause.”82 The first essay “On Ridicule, considered as a Test of Truth” offered “three elaborate proofs that reason rather than ridicule is the test of truth.”83

Brown’s Essay drew a number of critics who rushed to Shaftesbury’s defense: Charles Bulkley’s A

Vindication of my Lord Shaftesbury, on the subject of ridicule (1751), the anonymous Animadversions on Mr.

Brown’s three Essays on the Characteristics (1752), and Allan Ramsay’s An Essay on Ridicule (1753). This

Homeric catalogue of pamphlets and essays could, alas, be even longer.84 There was one thing all of them shared: to use Barrow’s words, they were “obliged ever to talk like philosophers, assigning dry reasons for every thing.”85 In all the ink that had been spilt over this controversy, few had risen to

Shaftesbury’s wit and elegance, and certainly none had attempted in prose or verse what Steele and

Barrow thought most important: “to rescue so worthy a faculty from so vile abuse.”86 The task of reclaiming humor for the Christian cause would be taken up by the comic novelists, and chiefly, as I will discuss here, by Oliver Goldsmith.

Goldsmith too was aware of his age’s penchant for “Clergy banter,” expecting in the advertisement to The Vicar of Wakefield that fashionable readers will laugh at his “hero” in spite of his good qualities:

The hero of this piece unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest,

an husbandman, and the father of a family. He is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey,

as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity. In this age of opulence and refinement whom

can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life, will turn with disdain from the

simplicity of his country fire-side. Such as mistake ribaldry for humour, will find no wit in his

82 Ibid. 83 Aldridge, “Shaftesbury and the Test of Truth,” 144. 84 See Aldridge, “Shaftesbury and the Test of Truth;” Templeman, “Warburton and Brown Continue the Battle over Ridicule;” Tave, Humorist, 35-39. 85 Barrow, Sermons, 1:320-321. 86 Ibid., 324.

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harmless conversation; and such as have been taught to deride religion, will laugh at one whose

chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity. (4:14)

As we’ve already seen, Goldsmith’s theory of comedy aligns with Shaftesbury’s: both see comedy as a refining process. Goldsmith, however, was confident that because the teachings of the Church of

England were, as Shaftesbury said, “genuine and sincere,” that they would “not only stand the Proof, but thrive and gain advantage from hence.” Heeding the advice of the latitudinarian homilists,

Goldsmith reclaims the test of ridicule from Shaftesbury, using it not in the way of ancient Old

Comedy—which was said by one critic in 1742 to be “sharp, and satirical, and extremely abusive”— but to be corrective and gentle.87 He beats those who “have been taught to deride religion” to the draw by placing his clerical hero in the crucible of comic situations himself. In the process, Goldsmith tests and proves the moral worth of his hero.

Let’s turn to the end of the novel when Primrose preaches to the prisoners after Mr. Thornhill, angry at Primrose for insulting him, revenges himself upon the Primrose family by demanding they pay their annual rent, knowing they are not able to afford it. When Primrose fails to hand over the rent, Thornhill has him thrown in prison. There, Primrose witnesses the “insensibility” of the inmates and, moved by “compassion,” determines it is his duty “to attempt to reclaim them” (4:144). In these chapters, Goldsmith sets up some of the common comic tropes his readers had come to recognize from anticlerical satire—such as the motifs of the “sleeping congregation” and the “Vicar and

Moses”—to test Primrose. In both Hogarth’s The Sleeping Congregation (Figure 4.1) and Rowlandson’s

A Sleepy Congregation (Figure 4.2), a clergyman preaches to an indifferent, and mostly somnolent, flock.

The “Vicar and Moses” was a popular ballad in the eighteenth century, and it told the story of a Vicar

87 Kelsall, “The Classics and Eighteenth-Century Theatre,” 461.

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Figure 4.1: William Hogarth, The Sleepy Congregation, 1762, etching and engraving, 27.9 x 21.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Figure 4.2: Thomas Rowlandson, A Sleepy Congregation, 1811, hand-colored etching, 33.6 × 23.1 cm, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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who was more interested in drinking at the local tavern than fulfilling his priestly duties.88 Ralph

Wood’s Staffordshire pearlware figurines (Figure 4.3), show the Vicar asleep in the pulpit while his beadle, Moses, preaches. Inspired by Hogarth’s The Sleeping Congregation, these Staffordshire figures, which became popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, took Hogarth’s joke about the ineffectual preaching in the Church of England one step further, by showing how sermons did not just bore congregations, but even put the Vicar himself to sleep. Goldsmith discussed the stereotype of drowsy, distracted Anglican congregations in Letter XLI from The Citizen of the World.

Lien Chi Altangi describes visiting St Paul’s where he expects to see the “fervent devotion of the congregation” (2:175). Instead, “one of the worshippers appeared to be ogling the company through a glass; another fervent not in addresses to heaven, but to his mistress; a third whispered, a fourth took snuff; and the priest himself in a drowsy tone, read over the duties of the day” (2:175).

In The Vicar of Wakefield, Primrose faces a similarly uninterested congregation in the prison.

Goldsmith sets up this familiar anticlerical comic formula when Primrose announces his plan “of reforming the prisoners” by preaching to them (4:148). His wife and children recognize the potential for humiliation by warning him that his “endeavours would no way contribute to their amendment, but might probably disgrace my calling” (4:148). Jenkinson (whom Primrose encounters again in the prison) “laughed heartily” at Primrose’s proposal (4:145). Primrose’s plan to reform the prisoners likely strikes his family and Jenkinson as quixotic. Based on what they know of Primrose’s penchant for philosophical disputation, they probably expect him to deliver some learned discourse on the

Whistonean controversy, or something that would similarly expose his “weak side” and “afford a new fund of entertainment” for the prisoners (4:145).

Goldsmith diagnosed scholarly sermons as one of the primary reasons for widespread congregational apathy. In his essay “Of Eloquence,” Goldsmith writes that the “vulgar of England”

88 See Gatrell, City of Laughter, 470-1.

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Figure 4.3: The Factory of Ralph Wood II, Vicar and Moses, c. 1782-1795, lead-glazed earthenware, 24.1 x 11.4 x 14 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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remain ignorant because their preachers “with the most pretty gentleman-like serenity, deliver their cool discourses, and address the reason of men, who have never reasoned in all their lives. They are told of cause and effect, of beings self existent, and the universal scale of beings. They are informed of the excellence of the Bangorian controversy, and the absurdity of an intermediate state” (1:480).

Given Primrose’s own love of disputation and theological controversy, it would seem that Goldsmith intentionally sets up this scene for the reader to expect Primrose to fulfill the stereotype of the learned

Anglican priest who puts his congregation to sleep with his dull sermons.

When Primrose descends to the “common prison” for the first time, he finds himself faced with their “insensibility,” though they are not so much sleepy as they are satirical, expecting to find some comic “entertainment” in Primrose’s preaching (4:145). Rowlandson’s illustration of this scene for an edition of The Vicar of Wakefield published in 1817 (Figure 4.4) replays some of Hogarth’s and his own visual tropes from the “sleepy congregation” motif. In the illustration, some congregants do not pay attention, others scratch their heads in confusion, while others, their faces fixed in leers, stand with their arms crossed in hostility or in mocking attention. Goldsmith describe how the inmates respond to Primrose’s preaching:

I therefore read them a portion of the service with a loud unaffected voice, and found my

audience perfectly merry upon the occasion. Lewd whispers, groans of contrition burlesqued,

winking and coughing, alternately excited laughter. However, I continued with my natural

solemnity to read on, sensible that what I did might amend some, but could itself receive no

contamination from any. (4:145)

Even in the face of ridicule, he decides to persevere. When he returns a second time, he finds them

“very merry” and “each prepared with some gaol trick” to play on him as he preaches:

Thus, as I was going to begin, one turned my wig awry, as if by accident, and then asked my

pardon. A second, who stood at some distance, had a knack of spitting through his teeth,

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Figure 4.4: Thomas Rowlandson, The Vicar Preaching to the Prisoners, from “The Vicar of Wakefield,” 1817, Hand-colored etching and aquatint, 14.3 × 23.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

which fell in showers upon my book. A third would cry amen in such an affected tone as gave

the rest great delight. A fourth had slily picked my pocket of my spectacles. But there was one

whose trick gave more universal pleasure than all the rest; for observing the manner in which

I had disposed my books on the table before me, he very dextrously displaced one of them,

and put an obscene jest-book of his own in the place. However I took no notice of all that

this mischievous groupe of little beings could do; but went on, perfectly sensible that what

was ridiculous in my attempt, would excite mirth only the first or second time, while what was

serious would be permanent. My design succeeded, and in less than six days some were

penitent, and all attentive. (4:148)

Both scenes are recognizable as a Shaftesburian test of ridicule: in the face of the prisoner’s laughter,

Primrose knows “what was ridiculous in my attempt, would excite mirth” and “what was serious

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would be permanent.” In other words, the crucible of comedy will separate what is ridiculous from what is truly worthy. Over the course of these two lectures, he gradually gains their attention and respect, and what Primrose describes as his own “unaffected voice” and “natural solemnity,” withstand the test, proving, as Shaftesbury would say, “genuine and sincere” rather than “spurious.”

What stands out as truly commendable, or “serious” and “permanent,” in his efforts to convert the prisoners is, first, his corrected approach to his pastoral duties. Rather than preaching in a dry manner on his own philosophical hobby horse, he satisfies here what Goldsmith saw as the true duty of the parish priest, which is to address his sermons not “to the squire, the philosopher, and the pedant,” but to the “poor,” those “who really want instruction” (1:480). Goldsmith clinches the scene as a Shaftesburian test by explaining Primrose’s pastoral mission with another metallurgical analogy: those “whose souls are held as dross, only wanted the hand of a refiner” (4:151). The word “dross” connects this scene back to Primrose’s encounter with Jenkinson, highlighting the ways Primrose has improved since that mortifying moment. Whereas before Primrose prided himself on his philosophical learning, here he has corrected his approach, addressing himself to the prisoners not through “studied periods, or cold disquisitions” but through the “honest spontaneous dictates of the heart” (1:481).

Indeed, Primrose admits that in making it his goal to “mend” the prisoners through his instructions,

“it will assuredly mend myself” (4:148). Primrose has had his intellectual pride refined out of him, and he emerges during the prison scene as an exemplary preacher who has achieved what Goldsmith deems to be true eloquence. Rowlandson visualizes this in his illustration through the Vicar’s posture.

In Rowlandson’s A Sleepy Congregation, a fleshy clergyman practically launches himself over the top of the rostrum in a desperate attempt to wake his parishioners, while Hogarth’s pedantic parson is hunched over his sermon with a magnifying glass, perhaps even less aware of his flock than they are of him. In contrast, Rowlandson draws Primrose in the “adlocutio,” or orator’s, pose, which in classical Roman statuary was reserved as the heroic posture for emperors and other leaders, as in the

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first-century statue Augustus of Prima Porta. Primrose stands with a similarly heroic gesture, his hand outstretched toward the prisoners, his eyes fixed on them, rather than the sermon on the table.

Goldsmith devotes an entire chapter to one of the sermons Primrose preaches in the prison.

His sermon falls into the category of sermons I identified in the first chapter as the “Advantages of

Christianity.” Like Swift and Sterne before him, Primrose argues that “philosophy is weak; but religion comforts in an higher strain” (4:161). With Steele in The Christian Hero, Primrose agrees that true consolation in the face of suffering comes from religion, not philosophy. “The consolations of philosophy,” he says, “are very amusing, but often fallacious” (4:160). Throughout the novel,

Primrose’s philosophical side has indeed been his “weak” side, the part of his character that most exposes him to ridicule. In the sermon, however, we see him fully embrace what he had just begun to acknowledge in the exchange with Jenkinson: that human speculation is “dross” compared with

Christian faith and devotion. Goldsmith’s play on the multiple meanings of “refinement” comes full circle in Primrose’s sermon. He preaches, “No vain efforts of a refined imagination can sooth the wants of nature, can give elastic sweetness to the dank vapour of a dungeon, or ease to the throbbings of a broken heart. Let the philosopher from his couch of softness tell us that we can resist all these”

(4:162). Here, Primrose renounces his disputatious ways, recognizing that the true duty of the clergyman is less to engage in philosophical speculation and human learning than it is to minister to those most in need.

Goldsmith builds up, and then deflates, the reader’s comic expectations during Primrose’s time in prison. Tested by familiar anticlerical comic tropes, Primrose emerges purified of his moral dross, his intellectual pride, with his clerical virtues gleaming. The revisionist readings of the novel that would have readers interpret Primrose ironically, as a pious fraud whose “unaffected voice” and

“natural solemnity,” are revealed to be an imposture. On the contrary, the comic test reveals

Primrose’s care for the spiritual wellbeing of the prisoners to be “genuine” and “sincere,” and his

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sermon spoken from the heart. The mocking prisoners stand in for the readers who, as Goldsmith anticipates in the advertisement, open the novel ready to laugh. However, rather than turn the ridicule back on these droll readers, Goldsmith offers them a chance to reform, modelling for them the response of the prisoners who begin by ridiculing the Vicar and end by admiring him. Goldsmith uses comedy, as Barrow suggested, to lure “men first to listen” by making them laugh before then “inducing them to consent unto its wholesome dictates and precepts.”

In The Providence of Wit, Martin Battestin suggests that The Vicar of Wakefield is a retelling of the

Job story, in which Goldsmith’s Vicar, like Job, is tested through suffering and tragedy.89 I would argue further that Primrose is also tested through comedy. Goldsmith puts his clerical hero through a test of laughter, and in this process he is refined of his moral failings of intellectual pride and vanity, while his good qualities, as it is said in Job 23:10, “come forth as gold.” At the beginning of this chapter, I proposed that the main question for Goldsmith’s novel is not whether we laugh, but why we laugh. In the novel, Primrose refers to the Christian God as “my heavenly corrector” (4:143). Goldsmith, like the latitudinarian homilists, believed that laughter’s corrective purpose has its source in Christian morality. For that reason, wit and good humor must be reclaimed from freethinkers and libertines, who have abused its powers, and restored to its rightful purpose. Unlike the latitudinarians, however,

Goldsmith is more skeptical about the role of human learning, and especially classical philosophy, in the Christian life. Throughout his writings, Goldsmith critiques the enthusiasm and heart religion of

Methodism and the Evangelical movement. He also thought it was equally dangerous to eschew enthusiasm altogether. For Goldsmith, Anglican divines err too much on the side of unemotional preaching, afraid of being seen as religious fanatics. They are, as Goldsmith wrote, “afraid of the imputation of enthusiasm” and therefore are “studious of being only thought fine gentlemen” (3:49).

89 Battestin, The Providence of Wit, 193-214.

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As a result, sermons were written to appeal primarily to the head, not the heart, therefore putting congregations, and even the clergy themselves, straight to sleep.

Goldsmith shares Shaftesbury’s wariness of enthusiasm, but recognizes that “the enthusiast ever makes disciples, the calm unpassioned speaker seldom if ever” (3:49). Like Shaftesbury, who believed that the philosopher must demonstrate some measure of enthusiasm if he is going to draw people to a love of philosophical wisdom, so too does Goldsmith recognize that the preacher must stir the hearts of his congregation if he’s going to kindle in them a love for Christian teachings. Steele had complained that among his contemporaries it was all too common that the idea of an ancient

Roman “warms and kindles” our hearts while a “Primitive Christian” “chills Ambition” and inspires nothing more than “the cold Approbation of a Duty.” Goldsmith appreciated that the way to win people over to the Christian life was not through rigorous theological disputation or polemics but by appealing to their hearts. The Vicar of Wakefield is ultimately about the renunciation of ancient philosophy and “human speculation.” For Collins, the “saint errant” was a Christian who was zealous in the faith and ignorant of doctrine. This is not the case for Goldsmith, who reveals these to be desirable, even heroic, qualities: Primrose learns over the course of the novel that human speculation itself is a kind of ignorance and that a healthy measure of religious zeal is the best chance for winning over those who are most hostile to Christian teachings.

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Chapter 5: The Austen Synthesis

Carved into the memorial slab marking her final resting place in Winchester Cathedral, Jane

Austen’s conventional epitaph praises her Christian virtues.1 As many of Austen’s biographers have observed, it mentions nothing about her life’s work as a novelist.2 Instead, it tells us she supported her final illness “with the patience and hopes of a Christian,” celebrates “the benevolence of her heart” and “the sweetness of her temper,” and concludes with the “hope that her charity, devotion, faith, and purity, have rendered her soul acceptable in the sight of her REDEEMER.” If her epitaph conspicuously left out any mention of her as a writer, it has also been said that her novels leave out anything about her Christian faith. As Peter Knox-Shaw has noted, “she ranks among the least proselytizing of Christian novelists.”3

As a result, Austen’s secular plots about marriage markets and money have long been uneasy bedfellows with her religious faith in the minds of her readers and critics. In biographies of Austen, for example, “her Christian convictions have either been ignored or mentioned briefly and with apparent reluctance, as though they formed an embarrassing topic likely to make Jane Austen unapproachable to present-day readers.”4 Or, as Michael Giffin has observed, “Austen is often thought of as a secular author because religion seems absent from her novels.”5 Thus, critics in recent years—including Irene Collins, Christopher Brooke, Peter Knox-Shaw, William Jarvis,

Michael Giffin, and Laura Mooneyham White—have attempted to “heal the breach” as Mr. Collins

1 For a discussion of the conventional language of the epitaph Henry Austen wrote for his sister, see Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 27. 2 See, for example, Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 275; Fiona Stafford, Brief Lives: Jane Austen (London: Hesperus Press, 2008), 104; Carol Shields, Jane Austen (New York: Penguin, 2001), 174; Marilyn Roberts, “Austen and the Tradition of Masculine Benevolence,” Eighteenth-Century Life 45, no. 1 (2021): 90. 3 Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 9. 4 Irene Collins, Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter (London: The Hambledon Press, 1998), xi. 5 Michael Giffin, “Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England,” Persuasions 23, no. 1 (2002). Online.

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puts it in a letter to Mr. Bennet, by joining together accounts of early nineteenth-century church history with Austen’s novels and biography.6 The portrait that has emerged is not one of the

Evangelical Austen or the secular Austen, but the latitudinarian Austen, a “deeply religious woman”

“committed to the via media of Georgian Anglicanism.”7

With the latitudinarian divines, Austen believed, “Moral Virtue is the Foundation and the

Summ, the Essence and the Life of all true Religion.”8 Like her predecessors—Addison, Steele,

Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith—Austen’s novels are deeply rooted in Christian morality. That she avoids obvious preaching in her plots is not antithetical to that commitment but an important part of its moral approach, which prioritizes action over words. As Irene Collins writes,

Under her father’s influence, Jane learnt to regard Christianity as a reasonable and practical

doctrine which made sense in this world as well as offering hope for the next…She was

encouraged to strengthen her faith by prayer and worship, but to make her witness in the

world through her behaviours to others rather than by preaching: in her writings, as in her

life, she was to be typically reticent with regard to religious devotion and to concentrate

instead on providing examples of good and evil in people’s conduct towards each other and

in their attitude to society at large.9

Austen was an avid and careful reader of Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith, and in some ways her novels, especially the characterization of her heroes’ actions and their conduct toward other characters, offer a synthesis of their earlier efforts to address the century’s crisis of Christian

6 Knox-Shaw, Enlightenment; Collins, Clergy; Collins, Parson’s Daughter; Christopher Brooke, Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion (New York: Palgrave, 2002), Laura Mooneyham White Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 7 Collins, Clergy, 9; Knox-Shaw, Enlightenment, 5. 8 Müller, Latitudinarianism, 72. 9 Collins, Parson’s Daughter, xviii.

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heroism.10 As the century progressed, two different responses to Steele’s crisis had emerged. First, novelists such as Richardson and Fielding imagined the Christian hero as a gentleman, a landed member of England’s elite who, after studying the classics and completing the Grand Tour, returned to his estate to exercise his benevolent Christian magnanimity on all those within his sphere of influence. The second candidate for the new heroic tradition was a member of the clergy, whom we see in Goldsmith’s Dr. Primrose, Fielding’s Parson Adams, and Sterne’s Parson Yorick.

Austen deftly brings together these two different traditions of the clergyman and the gentleman in a scene from Pride and Prejudice, when Mr. Collins unwisely decides to present himself to Mr. Darcy at the Netherfield Ball. Elizabeth vainly warns him against taking such a step, “assuring him that Mr. Darcy would consider his addressing him without introduction as an impertinent freedom” since Mr. Darcy is his “superior in consequence.”11 Mr. Collins, however, is determined to have his own way:

My dear Miss Elizabeth, I have the highest opinion in the world in your excellent judgement

in all matters within the scope of your understanding; but permit me to say, that there must

be a wide difference between the established forms of ceremony amongst the laity, and those

which regulate the clergy; for, give me leave to observe that I consider the clerical office as

equal in point of dignity with the highest rank in the kingdom—provided that a proper

humility of behaviour is at the same time maintained. You must therefore allow me to follow

the dictates of my conscience on this occasion, which leads me to perform what I look on as

a point of duty.12

10 For more on Austen’s reading and her engagement with the modern, as opposed to the ancient literary canon, see Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Isobel Grundy, “Jane Austen and Literary Traditions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 192-214. 11 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 109. 12 Ibid.

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As Elizabeth predicted, the meeting is a disaster. Mr. Collins approaches Mr. Darcy with a “solemn bow,” and she watches Darcy eye her cousin “with unrestrained wonder,” and respond to him “with an air of distant civility.”13 After Mr. Collins launches into his second long speech, Mr. Darcy’s

“contempt” only grows more apparent, and “at the end of it he only made him a slight bow, and moved another way.”14 Unphased by Mr. Darcy’s abrupt departure, Mr. Collins considers the meeting a success.

In this scene, Austen is sensitive to the system of patronage that would have governed the relationship between a clergyman such as Mr. Collins and a gentleman of Mr. Darcy’s stature.

Professionally, clergy of the Church of England often received their benefices from private landowners.15 As patrons, gentlemen were obligated to bestow livings and to provide for their clerical incumbents. As beneficiaries, clergymen were obligated to see to the lives of their parishioners and to maintain a proper sense of deference and gratitude toward their patrons. The priestly vocation, then, required social and material humility, or genteel poverty, in exchange for spiritual authority over a congregation.

We see an ideal version of this relationship between Sir Charles Grandison and Dr. Bartlett, whose complementary roles support each other in the pursuit of Christian virtue. As Richardson often reminds his readers, Sir Charles’ greatness comes from his benevolence toward those who are dependent on him. Although Dr. Bartlett is Sir Charles’s dependent, he is Sir Charles’s spiritual superior, and Sir Charles frequently acknowledges his obligations to him as a “monitor” and “his second conscience.”16 The end of Tom Jones also gestures at this ideal symbiosis when the narrator

13 Ibid., 109-110. 14 Ibid., 110. 15 For a discussion of how patronage worked in the Church of England, see Collins, Clergy, 19-34. 16 Richardson, Index in Grandison, 7:307.

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mentions that Allworthy has replaced the parasitic Thwackum with Abraham Adams, thus uniting the clerical heroism of Joseph Andrews with the gentlemanly heroism of Tom Jones.

For Austen, it is fulfilling these respective duties of patronage, or failing to do so, that reveals the strength of both the clergyman and the gentleman’s moral virtue. Here, Mr. Collins imagines himself in exalted terms, boasting of the equal dignity of the clergy with “the highest rank in the kingdom.” He is not entirely wrong to insist on the eminence of the clergyman’s profession: the priestly vocation is dignified in its role as a shepherd of souls. Yet, as he indicates in an awkward afterthought in the next clause, he confuses his spiritual authority for worldly authority, and it is this blundered distinction that leads him to violate the social decorum that would have him observe Mr.

Darcy as his social superior. Austen further emphasizes Mr. Collins’s confusion of worldly and spiritual obligations by having him comically misapply theological language—Mr. Collins speaks of the “dictates of my conscience”—to the rules governing polite society. It is Mr. Collins’s perplexed understanding of his duties as a clergyman and his failure to recognize his role in the system of patronage structuring his profession that makes him the awkward blend of “pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility,” which Austen exploits for comic effect throughout the novel.17

The conversation is as much about Mr. Collins’s failure to become a great clergyman as it is

Mr. Darcy’s failure to live up to the virtue of magnanimity that characterized the true gentleman.

Although Mr. Collins’s living comes from Lady Catherine, it is within Mr. Darcy’s power to exercise clerical patronage, as it is in Sir Charles and Mr. Allworthy’s. At the end of Pride and Prejudice, Mr.

Bennet alludes to this fact in a letter to Mr. Collins: “Elizabeth will soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy.

Console Lady Catherine as well as you can. But, if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has

17 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 78.

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more to give.”18 Mr. Darcy may have much to give, but in the conversation with Mr. Collins, he decides to withhold his respect, treating Mr. Collins’s violation of decorum with “contempt” rather than the mercy that would have distinguished a gentleman like Mr. Darcy as a great man. Because she witnesses Mr. Darcy’s uncharitable response to Mr. Collins, it is unsurprising that Elizabeth would believe Mr. Wickham’s accusation that Mr. Darcy denied him the living that Mr. Darcy’s father promised him. Like Mr. Collins, who struggles to reconcile his social inferiority with the spiritual dignity of the clerical office, Mr. Darcy wrestles with the paradoxical reality of his own position, which is that true superiority of character is measured by his generosity toward his social inferiors, no matter how ridiculous they are.19

In this brief episode, Austen brings together the two traditions of active and passive masculine heroism inaugurated in the novels of her predecessors, the magnanimous gentleman and the humble man of the church, by dramatizing the moral potential available to both through the shared institution of Church patronage. In this scene, both models of Christian activity fall short.

Unlike Dr. Bartlett, Mr. Collins is not “an excellent clergyman,” and Mr. Darcy in his mean contempt of Mr. Collins is no Sir Charles.20 Mr. Darcy, however, is given a chance at redemption. As he explains to Elizabeth at the end of the novel, his parents raised him with “good principles,” though he was “left to follow them in pride and conceit.”21 His parents, he says, “allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.”22 Darcy learns to transform his “meanness” into magnanimity and to extend his civility and generosity to those outside his immediate social circles. He learns, in other

18 Ibid., 424. 19 See also Roberts, “Austen and the Tradition of Masculine Benevolence,” 75-94. 20 Richardson, Index in Grandison, 7:307. 21 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 409. 22 Ibid., 409-10.

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words, how to cultivate the gentlemanly virtue of benevolence that allows him, as Steele described in

The Christian Hero, to extend “our Arms to embrace all Mankind,” and to reach not just our friends but our enemies too.23

Throughout the rest of the novel, the reader sees the other ways Austen responds to the two traditions she inherited from Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith. As Jocelyn Harris observes,

Austen’s mind was full of these authors, and in her fiction she “seizes” upon their details,

“combines, separates, and varies” them and, in the end, “makes [them] hers.”24 Mr. Collins is a playful parody of fictional clergymen such as Adams, Yorick, and Primrose. For example, unlike

Adams and Primrose, Mr. Collins is not learned. When the narrator comments that Mr. Collins abandons one of Mr. Bennet’s large folios that he had been “nominally engaged with” to accept an invitation to walk to Meryton, “being in fact much better fitted for a walker than a reader,” Austen’s own reader is reminded of the century’s peripatetic clerics—of Parson Adams, who muses upon “a

Passage in Aeschylus, which entertained him for three Miles together” as he walks, and Dr. Primrose, who memorably sets off to rescue his daughter equipped with his walking staff and Bible.25 Austen’s allusion to these two earlier fictional clergymen reminds the reader that Mr. Collins’s “oddity” could not be more different than the “good nature and oddity” of Primrose and Adams.26 While the qualities of honesty and simplicity make Primrose and Adams, as Tave has famously argued, loveable and laughable at the same time, Mr. Collins is laughable simply because he is ridiculous.

“Mr. Collins,” the narrator pronounces, “was not a sensible man.”27 Mr. Collins, in other words, is humorous, but he is not amiable.

23 Steele, The Christian Hero, 78, 80. 24 Harris, Memory, 84. 25 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 79-80; Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 95. 26 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 25; Tave, The Amiable Humorist, 145. 27 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 27.

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Austen casts Mr. Darcy as a new Sir Charles Grandison.28 Austen copies directly from

Harriet’s tour of Grandison Hall for Elizabeth’s dramatic visit to Pemberley. In both, the estates are read by the heroine as an extension of their owner’s character. For instance, Elizabeth’s admiration of the grounds at Pemberley as exemplifying the good taste of Mr. Darcy—“Every disposition of the ground was good; and she looked on the whole scene, the river, the trees scattered on its banks and the winding of the valley, as far as she could trace it, with delight”—combines the cadences of the King James Bible with Harriet’s observation that “The gardens and lawns seem from the windows of this spacious house to be as boundless as the mind of the owner, and as free and open as his countenance.”29 Austen, however, subtly reworks Richardson’s original scene. In Sir Charles

Grandison, the grandeur of Sir Charles’s house only confirms what Harriet knows of his goodness and greatness. The tour of Pemberley, on one hand, is a revelation for Elizabeth about Mr. Darcy’s character, and it is here where she first witnesses how he’s changed and begun to live up to the gentlemanly ideal as “As a brother, a landlord, a master,” with the “guardianship” of “many people’s happiness.”30 Elizabeth marvels, “how much of pleasure or pain was it in his power to bestow!— how much of good or evil must be done by him!”31 The narrative of Darcy’s reform is itself a response to the novel genre’s rival traditions of the good man as conceived by Fielding and

Richardson. Richardson had criticized Fielding for showing his hero “in a light too degrading” and found Tom Jones’s reform at the end of the novel unconvincing.32 He responded with a hero, whom he intended to be “good, without being unnatural” and who is “sensible of imperfections.”33 Many readers, however, considered Richardson to have run to the other extreme of Fielding, with a hero

28 For a discussion of Darcy and Sir Charles see Harris, Memory, 110-129. 29 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 272; Richardson, Grandison, 3:272. 30 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 277. 31 Ibid., 277. 32 Richardson, Grandison, 3:464, 3:466. 33 Ibid., 3:464.

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so perfect as to become boring and unbelievable.34 Austen strikes a balance between the two, creating a hero both with real imperfections and a probable reformation without making him a rake like Mr. B in Pamela or Lovelace in Clarissa.

Her synthesis of the two heroic traditions is also evident in her other novels. Emma offers a theme and variation on Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Knightley is a more consistently good gentleman than

Mr. Darcy, while Mr. Elton is a far worse clergyman than Mr. Collins. George Knightley’s name— which alludes to England’s chivalric patron saint St. George, who famously slayed a dragon that was terrifying local villagers—signals his status as a modern Christian hero. The reader witnesses firsthand more of his work as a landowner who sees to the needs of his tenants, and the very name of his estate, Donwell Abbey, playfully confirms that he has fulfilled all of his duties as a landlord and patron. On the other hand, Mr. Elton almost entirely disregards what is required of him as a clergyman. At least Mr. Collins felt conflicted about what was expected of him, comically vacillating between pride and humility. Mr. Elton feels no such qualms. At first, his pretensions to gentility seem acceptable to Emma—he seems an attractive combination of the gentleman and the clergyman. As the narrator explains, “Mr. Elton’s situation was most suitable, quite the gentleman himself, and without low connections…he was known to have some independent property; and she thought very highly of him as a good-humoured, well-meaning, respectable young man.”35 When he proposes to Emma, his hubristic violation of the expectations guiding the respective roles of the clergyman and gentleman become all too apparent. Emma exclaims, “This to me! you forget yourself.”36 Mr. Elton’s worldly desires to be a gentleman of fashion, rather than a man of the church, are not a mistake, but fully intentional. His new wife Augusta, her emblematic name worthy

34 See Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 387-400. 35 Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 35. 36 Ibid., 140.

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of a Fielding novel, becomes with her familiar addresses to Mr. Knightley, invocations of Maple

Grove, and pretentious Italian phrases a comically grotesque personification of Mr. Elton’s vain ambitions to become something he is not.

That Mr. Elton does not have “low connections” and owns property independent of the

Highbury living implies that he is the younger son of a genteel family who has had to seek out a profession since his elder brother is the heir to the family estate and fortune. Mr. Elton, like many young men, narrowly misses the opportunity, merely by virtue of his birth, to become a gentleman instead of a clergyman. The opposite of Mr. Elton, Edward Ferrars resists his fate as the eldest son, preferring the church, while his mother and sister, long “to see him distinguished” in some “smart” profession.37 To be a younger son entering the Church could be professionally advantageous if your family owned a living. Mr. Tilney in Northanger Abbey is a second son and secures a benefice from his father. Edmund Bertram planned to wait until he was old enough to be ordained and installed at the

Mansfield Park living under his father’s care, but his elder brother’s gambling debts grow so large that his father sells the living to Dr. Grant. However, as we see with Mr. Elton, there was often a fine line dividing the roles of the gentleman from the clergyman, a tension which Austen explores most explicitly in Mansfield Park. Mary Crawford expresses her disappointment that Edmund has chosen what she deems a lowly profession. “For what,” Mary asks, “is to be done in the church?

Men love to distinguish themselves, and in either of the other lines distinction may be gained, but not in the church. A clergyman is nothing.”38 Edmund challenges her narrow understanding of professional “distinction:”

37 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18, 119. 38 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. John Wiltshire, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 107.

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A clergyman cannot be high in state or fashion. He must not head mobs, or set the ton in

dress. But I cannot call that situation nothing which has the charge of all that is of the first

importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally,

which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which

result from their influence. No one here can call the office nothing. If the man who holds it is

so, it is by the neglect of his duty, by foregoing its just importance, and stepping out of his

place to appear what he ought not to appear.39

Here, Edmund articulates what Mr. Collins finds so puzzling and what Mr. Elton so adamantly resists: what makes a clergyman great is his ability to live out the unique duties and activities that define his role, rather than attempting to live according to how other professions—the soldier, the statesman—achieve distinction. A clergyman is only weak, ridiculous, or insignificant, Edmund argues, when he neglects those duties.

Sense and Sensibility is the one novel that promises the kind of ideal relationship of patronage that Richardson pictures between Sir Charles and Dr. Bartlett. Hearing of Edward Ferrars’s plight,

Colonel Brandon offers him a small living at Delaford. Though Brandon is disappointed that his

“patronage ends” with such a small offer and that his “interest is hardly more extensive,” the offer is valuable enough, especially considering there is “no connection” between Brandon and Edward, that the other characters find it difficult to believe Edward could be so “lucky.”40 At the end of the novel,

Austen celebrates how the bond of patronage contributes to marital happiness when Elinor marries

Edward and Marianne marries Colonel Brandon. In turn, by “living almost within sight of each other” at the parsonage and great house, respectively, Elinor and Marianne cement the harmonious professional relationship between their husbands.41

39 Ibid., 107-108. 40 Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 322, 335. 41 Ibid., 433.

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Finally, Persuasion features a new type of gentlemanly exemplar unexplored by her predecessors: not a landed member of the gentry, born into a noble family like Mr. Darcy and Mr.

Knightley, but a self-made naval hero. In Wentworth, the reader might see a cleaned-up version of

Tom Jones, who ascends from a low social status as a foundling to become the rightful heir to Mr.

Allworthy. Wentworth, on the other hand, has a successful naval career—in contrast with Tom’s brief flirtation with military life—and earns his social respectability through his courage, rather than simply stumbling upon his true identity as a gentleman. Next to Colonel Brandon, Captain

Wentworth is the only Austen hero who has seen war. Overall, Austen seems less squeamish than

Richardson about the role of martial virtues in the Christian life. After all, Colonel Brandon challenges Willoughby to a duel, while Richardson labors to protect Sir Charles’s honor with lengthy sermonizing about the evils of dueling. Then again, any fighting in Austen’s novels happens entirely off the page. In what could easily have been sensationalized in a novel less concerned with moral respectability, Brandon tiptoes around the event, referring to the duel euphemistically as a meeting that was “unavoidable” and left both “unwounded.”42 Similarly, the closest the reader comes to seeing Wentworth’s naval exploits is his brief recounting, at the entreaties of the Musgrove sisters, of his early “luck” aboard the Asp, “taking privateers” and falling in with French frigates.43 With both

Wentworth and Colonel Brandon, Austen leaves the reader to infer that the virtue they exhibit in their domestic lives applies to their martial lives as well, making them the kind of soldier—“a good, a generous, a brave, an humane soldier”—Sir Charles would honor.44

In other ways, however, Austen was reticent to carry the torch of Richardson, Fielding, and

Goldsmith’s efforts to respond to the era’s crisis of Christian heroism. Specifically, she resists their

42 Ibid., 239. 43 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Janet Todd and Antje Blank, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 71. 44 Richardson, Grandison, 1:14.

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interest in framing Christian morality within the broader context of the male-dominated classical tradition. In this, she shares more in common with Richardson than Fielding. Fielding, with his elite, masculine education at Eton, unabashedly challenged his classical competitors, championing his

Tom Jones against Homer’s Achilles. Richardson, on the other hand, had more success with his

Christian heroines, Pamela and Clarissa. It was only with much coaxing did he satisfy his friends’ demands for a novel about a “good man.” Even then, Sir Charles is admired only from a distance.

The reader primarily encounters him through the letters of the novel’s women, primarily his heroine

Harriet Byron. Richardson never managed to draw a hero with the same immediacy and complexity he had granted his heroines, and even his rake, Lovelace. Likewise, Mr. Darcy comes second to

Elizabeth, whose moral judgement the reader encounters more directly through the novel’s focalization of her perspective.

If Richardson relented to outside pressure to write about a Christian hero, Austen stood her ground. Austen’s attempts to dodge the issue of the classics are most explicit in her response to the

Rev. James Stanier Clarke, librarian to the Prince Regent, who asked her in 1815 to write a novel about a clergyman who would unite the classical learning of Fielding’s Parson Adams with the gentility of a Sir Charles. Austen declined:

I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a Clergyman as you gave

the sketch of in your note of Nov: 16. But I assure you I am not. The comic part of the

Character I might be equal to, but not the Good, the Enthusiastic, the Literary. Such a Man’s

Conversation must at times be on subjects of Science & Philosophy, of which I know

nothing—or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations & allusions which a Woman

who, like me, knows only her own Mother-tongue & has read very little in that, would be

totally without the power of giving.—A Classical Education, or at any rate, a very extensive

acquaintance with English Literature, Ancient & Modern, appears to me quite Indispensable

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for the person who wd do any justice to your Clergyman—And I think I may boast myself to

be, with all possible Vanity, the most unlearned & uninformed Female who ever dared to be

an Authoress.45

Mary Deforest cleverly reads Austen’s letter to Clarke as an instance of recusatio, a popular topos in ancient Rome, whereby the author, feigning humility by claiming to be “too weak, too frivolous, or too delicate” to write something arduous like an epic, opts instead to write something humbler.46 In

Horace’s Ode 1.6, for example, he demurs, “we are too delicate for such great themes” as the “grave wrath of Achilles” or “the voyages over the sea of the duplicitous Ulysses.”47 Just as Richardson criticized the ancient epic in terms that reveal his knowledge of the classics, so too does Austen slyly

“boast” of her own authorial powers by ironically claiming to be “the most unlearned & uninformed

Female who ever dared to be an Authoress.”

Austen, of course, was anything but unlearned and uninformed. Peter Knox-Shaw describes her clergyman father as a “latitudinarian by inclination.”48 “Like many other parsons of his generation,” he writes, Rev. George Austen was “‘a true son of the Enlightenment’: an avid and omnivorous reader, a keen classicist, a dabbler in science.”49 Rev. George Austen, who Henry

Austen described as “a profound scholar” with an “exquisite taste in every species of literature” that he passed on to his daughter, bought books whenever he could and amassed a library of over five hundred volumes by the time he retired.50 The young Austen would have been allowed “to instruct herself by reading as much as she wished in her father’s library.”51 In addition to her brothers, she also grew up alongside young men from the local gentry who her father took on as boarding pupils

45 Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deidre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 319. 46 Mary Deforest, “Jane Austen and the Anti-Heroic Tradition,” Persuasions 10 (1988): 11-21. Online. 47 Ibid. 48 Knox-Shaw, Enlightenment, 8. 49 Ibid. 50 Collins, Parson’s Daughter, 59. 51 Ibid.

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at the parsonage.52 George Austen’s curriculum would have focused “heavily upon the classical training needed for university.”53 Immersed in this learned environment, Irene Collins writes, Austen would have been “better educated than the majority of the gentry.”54

Nevertheless, as a young woman, Austen would have been excluded from her father’s classroom, since most “educational pundits and religious writers were at one in regarding classical languages as unnecessary for the female sex and pagan literature as unsuitable.”55 She and Cassandra instead were sent away to Oxford to board at a girl’s school.56 Indeed, Austen seems to have viewed the classics as a primarily masculine pursuit. In a letter to Cassandra in 1809, Austen wrote, “I am sorry that my verses did not bring any return from Edward, I was in high hopes they might—but I suppose he does not rate them high enough.—It might be partiality, but they seemed to me purely classical— just like Homer and Virgil, Ovid and Propria que Maribus.”57 According to Mary

Deforest, this quotation is from the Eton Latin Grammar, the textbook by William Lily that Fielding also uses to comic effect in Tom Jones: “Propria quae maribus tribuuntur, mascula dicas, which translates,

“Things which are deemed appropriate to males, you should call masculine.”58 For Austen, then, things “purely classical,” are things “appropriate to men.” Austen explicitly distanced herself from the masculine classical tradition in another instance when Clarke, writing to her again, suggested she write “an Historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg.”59 Austen claimed she

52 Ibid., 16, 23, 31-32. 53 Ibid., 32. 54 Ibid., xv. 55 Ibid., 31-32. Deforest likely overrates Austen’s classical knowledge when she writes, “it seems probable that her father, who knew classical literature thoroughly, and who taught Latin to students both inside and outside his family, would have taught her a language that we know he passionately valued.” See Deforest, “Anti- Heroic Tradition.” 56 See Collins, Parson’s Daughter, 32-44. 57 Austen, Letters, 177. 58 Deforest, “Anti-Heroic Tradition.” 59 Letters, 326.

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“could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem.”60 Instead, she wrote, “I must keep to my own style & go in my own Way.”61 When it came to the classical tradition, Austen did go her own way, committed to the latitudinarian primacy of morality but unbothered by the anxiety of influence that burdened her fellow male novelists.

60 Ibid. 61 Ibid.

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