Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780–1830

Super alta perennis Studien zur Wirkung der Klassischen Antike Band 12 Herausgegeben von Uwe Baumann, Marc Laureys und Winfried Schmitz Rolf Lessenich Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780–1830 V&R unipress Bonn University Press Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-89971-986-4 ISBN 978-3-86234-986-9 (E-Book) Veröffentlichungen der Bonn University Press erscheinen im Verlag V&R unipress GmbH 2012, V&R unipress in Göttingen / www.vr-unipress.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Printed in Germany. Druck und Bindung: CPI Buch Bücher.de GmbH, Birkach Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Power above powers, O heavenly Eloquence, That with the strong reign of commanding words, Dost manage, guide, and master th’ eminence Of men’s affections, more than all their swords; Shall we not offer to thy excellence The richest treasure that our wit affords? Samuel Daniel, Musophilus: containing a general defence of learning (1599) Rouse up, O young men of the new age! Set up your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the camp, the court and the university, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war. William Blake, Milton (MS 1800–1804) Contents Preliminary . ............................... 9 Introduction . ............................... 17 I. The Classical Tradition and the Poetics of Satire . ........ 49 II. Tory Periodicals and Anti-Jacobin Satire . ........ 95 III. William Gifford against the Della-Cruscan Poets and the Non-Classical Stage . .................. 111 IV. Lord Byron in Defence of the Classical Tradition . ........ 159 V. The Function of Criticism . .................. 179 VI. Arguments in the Debate against the Romantic School . 197 VII. The Romantic School . .................. 377 VIII. Neoclassicism, Romantic Disillusionism, Victorianism, and after . 385 Select Bibliography . .................. 411 Index . ............................... 423 Preliminary This book is based on the theoretical models and comparative studies developed between 2006 and 2010 by the interdisciplinary research group Streitkultur – The Art of Arguing at the Centre for the Classical Tradition at the University of Bonn. The group was comprised of scholars in the fields of literary and cultural studies, social studies, classical studies, medieval studies, Renaissance studies, theology, philosophy, law, history, and the fine arts, who investigated forms, spheres, and functions of public dispute in Western traditions of arguing. These were exemplified in specific times, situations, and genres from ancient Greece to the Romantic Period, encompassing further reference to Victorianism, Deca- dence, Modernism, and Postmodernism. In doing so, the group collaborated with smaller research groups in various departments at various universities, including my senior seminar on Romanticism and Neoclassicism at the Uni- versity of Bonn’s Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies (IAAK). It also corresponded with other Centres for the Classical Tradition and specialists in the field at universities all over the world and convened a major international congress as well as a number of separate minor congresses of the ten collabo- rating disciplines and internal interdisciplinary workshops. The group took for granted that the decisive element of the Western cultural tradition, which has established the coherence of occidental cultures in all their diversity over thousands of years even until now, is its double root in pagan antiquity and Christianity. In accordance with the proceedings from the group’s individual research, workshops, and international congresses convened in Bonn, the Classical Tra- dition is here understood as both the process and the result of the tradition of the cultural heritage of Greek and Latin classical and late antiquity, including its Christian forms. Christianity grew from a controversy with and adaptation of the pagan tradition of classical antiquity. The pagan and Judaeo-Christian double heritage of antiquity was thus combined, transmitted, and transformed in the occidental societies and cultures which succeeded the breakdown of the West Roman Empire. 10 Preliminary The Classical Tradition is, however, not a fixed and definable body of transmitted texts. From ancient Greece to postmodern Europe, the Classical Tradition has been highly selective, controversial, and protean. The images of classical Greek and Latin as well as of Christian antiquity have changed considerably throughout the centuries, chiefly because various authors across the ages fo- cussed on aspects relevant to their own contemporary issues. In Augustan England and France, for instance, the Classical Tradition was largely understood as the heritage of the literature of the age of Emperor Augustus, with Dryden and Boileau updating the poetics of Horace and seeing Greek literature, Homer as well as Plato, overcome by superior Latin culture and refinement. The querelle des anciens et des modernes in France and England was a debate centred around the relative value of ancient authors weighed against their modern successors and updaters of the Classical Tradition. The anciens made it easy for the later Romantics to argue polemically that the Classical Tradition was a mummified corpse without vitality and modern relevance. And the Neoclassicists of the Romantic Period would respond that the Classical Tradition was not the picking up of the ashes, but the keeping alive of the embers. Examples that demonstrate the constructed and changing notion of the Classical Tradition throughout the centuries are legion. The Enlightenment’s estimation of Plato was generally low, opposed to what its philosophers understood as the less speculative Aristotle and the more practically minded Sophists, Plato’s adversaries. Revolutionary France upheld the preference for Rome, not least for its Roman republican myth and ideology, whereas post-revolutionary Britain, to mark its opposition to France during the Twenty Years’ War and after, shifted its sympathy from Rome to Greece, with a renewed dispute over the relative merits of Athens and Sparta. Simultaneously, a dispute over the Classical Tradition of Greece was conducted among the Romantics, who had begun to undermine the hegemony of the Classical Tradition and to mix it with national and regional traditions and myths, over the relative merits of Plato (Positive Romanticism) and Pyrrho (Negative Romanticism). Moreover, the Radicals of the Hampstead and Marlow circles selected the liberal, pagan, erotic tradition of Greece, as we see in the case of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, whereas their Tory adversaries selected the patriotic, patrician, military, ascetic tradition of Greece, as we see in the case of the later Wordsworth. In the view of the Liberals and Radicals, most of them Romantics, the ancien rØgime was no less mummified a corpse than the rule- and reason-bound Classical Tradition itself, whereas, in fact, Metternich and Carlyle strove dynamically to adapt the ancien rØgime to the needs of their time. The Liberals and Radicals saw Plato and Greek democracy less as a specific product of the Classical Tradition than as one of many manifestations of the universal and ubiquitous human anamnesis of un- quenchable liberty, expressed in myths all over the world and at all times. Thus, Preliminary 11 the Classical Tradition was reinvented for every time and purpose.1 In musical composition, for instance, Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner either re- constructed or rewrote Christoph Willibald Gluck’s classical operas in polemical response to Jacques Offenbach, to suit their own very dissimilar “modern” constructions of the “shifting terrain” of Greece.2 Classical antiquity was a quarry, which various authors in various ages and for various reasons mined for resources, reassembling them to suit their needs. The Classical Tradition and the culture of public debate, which has remained the foremost characteristic of Western civilization from Greece and Rome throughout the history of Western civilization, has itself remained a matter of dispute on all levels.3 As an ontological category, the problematic nature of public dispute has also been a subject of philosophical reflection ever since classical antiquity when Heraclitus distinguished between destructive and productive dispute, also manifested in the ancient myth of the double goddess Eris. Jacob Burckhardt defined das Agonale as a conscious and declared principle of ancient Greek life. As a central medium of decision-making and finding one’s own position, the public exchange of arguments is documented at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, in the violent (and ultimately destructive) verbal dispute conducted in two pairs of speeches between the Greek leaders Agamemnon and Achilles. The result of this unwise dispute between army commanders, who insult and debase each other in public, was the Trojan War. Other disputes in other public spheres were naturally less inclined to verbal or physical injury, such as symposia and col- lations, or, later, disputations of a theological, scholastic, or academic nature, along

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