Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics Author(s): William H. Youngren Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 79, No. 3 (Feb., 1982), pp. 267-283 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/437151 Accessed: 17-09-2016 22:53 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/437151?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern Philology This content downloaded from 154.59.124.102 on Sat, 17 Sep 2016 22:53:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics William H. Youngren In an essay of several years ago' I tried to show that there is more continuity than has usually been thought between the criticism of poetry written in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and that written in the latter half of the seventeenth century. This continuity, I argued, was established by the central assumption, shared by earlier and later critics, that poetry's main job was to function as a moral teacher and that the best way it could do this was by furnishing sharp, sensuously vivid examples (or images or pictures). Such exam- ples, it was thought, could influence our conduct more directly and efficiently than either the bare precepts of the moral philosopher or the examples provided by the historian, which, unlike the poet's imagined or feigned examples, are tied to the messy (because fallen) world of fact and can thus not manifest their full moral implications as clearly as can the poet's examples. Nineteenth-century histories of English literature, as perpetuated in the course offerings of university English departments, have taught us to think of the earlier of these two periods (the "Renaissance") as radically separate in virtually all ways from the later (the "Restoration"); moreover, they have taught us to lump the later one together with the eighteenth century. There is, of course, much to be said in favor of this traditional grouping. But anyone who comes to eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetics aware of the tedious frequency with which the terms "precept" and "example" (or "image") occur in Restoration as well as in Renaissance criticism, and of the enormous importance, to Restoration as well as to Renaissance critics, of the point that they were used to make, is astonished that in the eighteenth century the terms, and the explanation of poetry's superiority as a moral teacher that they were used to provide, have quite suddenly vanished. It is true that throughout the eighteenth century (and even after) the terms still tended to crop up in informal talk about literature and morals. Pope, in a famous letter that he published in 1737 and claimed (perhaps fraudulently) to have written to Arbuthnot three years earlier, remarks that "the best Precepts, as well as the best Laws, would prove of small use, if there were no Examples to inforce them." Pope then continues: "General propositions are obscure, misty, and uncertain, compar'd with plain, full, and home examples: Precepts only apply to our Reason, which in most men is but weak: Examples are pictures, and strike the Senses, nay raise the Passions, and call in those (the strongest and most general of all motives) to the aid of reformation."'2 But all the other uses of the terms that I can recall encountering after about 1700 are more casual not only than their Restoration uses but also than the use Pope is making of them here. In Miscellaneous Reflections, Shaftesbury says of "poets even of the wanton sort": "Their example is the best of precepts, since they conceal nothing, are sincere, and speak their passion out aloud."'3 Fielding opens the first chapter of Joseph Andrews by remarking: "It is a 1/Youngren, "Generality, Science and Poetic Language in the Restoration," ELH 35 (1968): 158-87. 2/Alexander Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1956), 3:419. 3/Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. (London, 1900), 2:347. o 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/82/7903-0003$01.00 267 This content downloaded from 154.59.124.102 on Sat, 17 Sep 2016 22:53:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 268 Modern Philology (February 1982) trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts." Shortly after the beginning of the first chapter of The Decline and Fall, Gibbon speaks of the accession of Britain as the "single instance" in which "the successors of Caesar and Augustus were persuaded to follow the example of the former, rather than the precept of the latter."4 In the discussion of sentiments in the Elements of Criticism, Lord Kames promises "to place this matter in the clearest light, by adding example to precept."s In chapter 30 of Rasselas, Imlac, proposing the visit to the Pyramids, observes: "Example is always more effica- cious than precept. A soldier is formed in war, and a painter must copy pictures. In this, contemplative life has the advantage: great actions are seldom seen, but the labours of art are always at hand for those who desire to know what art has been able to perform." Finally, Reynolds seems to have the old pairing of terms in mind at a couple of points in the Discourses. In "Discourse II" he tells the students of the Royal Academy that by competing with one another and compar- ing their pictures they will come to know their deficiencies "more sensibly than by precepts, or any other means of instruction. The true principles of painting will mingle with your thoughts. Ideas thus fixed by sensible objects, will be certain and definitive; and sinking deep into the mind, will not only be more just, but more lasting than those presented to you by precepts only; which will always be fleet- ing, variable, and undetermined." And in "Discourse VIII," he says that the proper proportions for disposing masses in a picture "cannot be so well learnt by precept as by observation on pictures.''6 Clearly, I have not searched hard for these examples, and no doubt many more could easily be gathered from less obvious authors and books. But they would only enforce the point that one does not encounter the paired terms, used in the old general way, in the most serious critical and aesthetic writers of the century: Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, Hume, the Wartons, Gerard, Burke, Kames, Johnson, Reynolds, Reid, Alison, Knight, Stewart, Jeffrey--end the list where you will. Suddenly and quite dramatically, the assertion that the terms, used in the old way, were meant to advance-perhaps the central assertion of Restoration criticism of poetry--ceased to be important. Therefore both it and the terms themselves passed into the realm of cliche-"trite but true," as Fielding so aptly put it. Not very surprisingly, Addison seems to be the key figure in this change of critical terminology. At least since Basil Worsfold's The Principles of Criticism (1897), Addison has been called the founder of British (and even of modern) aesthetics so often that we should expect him to have had a hand in most of the important critical developments that took place during his lifetime. Yet his role in this particular one has, so far as I know, never been explored. The paired terms "precept" and "example" occur only a very few times in his contributions to The Spectator and not at all in his contributions to other periodicals. On the rare occasions when the terms do appear in The Spectator, they are never used in the old general way, to prove poetry's superiority as a moral teacher, but only in- cidentally and casually, as they were by the writers I have cited above-with the 4/Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London, 1896- 1900), 1:3. 5/Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (London, 1762), 2:156. 6/Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, Calif., 1959), pp. 31, 158. This content downloaded from 154.59.124.102 on Sat, 17 Sep 2016 22:53:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Youngren/Addison and Aesthetics 269 possible exception of Pope, who was, however, writing only a letter. In Spectator Number 213, Addison remarks: "When I employ my self upon a Paper of Moral- ity, I generally consider how I may recommend the particular Vertue, which I treat of, by the Precepts or Examples of the ancient Heathens." And in Number 70 he uses the two terms in close proximity to each other but not really paired and almost as if by reflex, as if to use one automatically brought the other to mind and pen.