SOURCE: “Ancients and Moderns” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume IV: The Eighteenth Century, edited by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, Cambridge University Press, pp. 32-71.

[In following essay, Patey delineates the history of the English Battle of the Books and the French Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, arguing that the intellectual debate contributed to the development of literary criticism.]

What the ancients have taught is so scanty and for the most part so lacking in credibility that I may not hope for any kind of approach toward truth except by rejecting all the paths which they have followed.

Descartes, Traité des passions de l'âme (1649)

It is the disease of the times, reigning in all places. New Sects: new religions: new philosophie: new methods: all new, till all be lost.

Meric Casaubon, Treatise concerning Enthusiasme (1656)

It has become almost a cliché among historians of our century to say that, although once dismissed by the likes of Macaulay as a trivial spat confined to literary folk (a mere Battle of the Books), the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns (as it was named by Hippolyte Rigault in his Histoire de la Querelle of 1859) was in fact a watershed—that in the Moderns' rejection of the authority of the Ancients, their texts, and the rules drawn from them, we can locate the birthplace not only of eighteenth-century criticism but of modern thought. In 1920 J. B. Bury (following the lead of French scholars) identified the seventeenth-century Quarrel, especially the works of Fontenelle, as the site where ‘the first clear assertions of a doctrine of progress in knowledge were provoked’, making possible the full-scale theories of human progress of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Turgot, and Condorcet, which Bury found characteristic of the period.¹ In parallel with Bury, Richard Foster Jones began an inquiry into the background of the English Battle of the Books, which resulted in his thesis that with their rejection of the Ancients' doctrines of authority, imitation, and degeneration, the Moderns—preeminently Bacon and his puritan followers—produced the activity we know as modern experimental science; in the process, Jones sought to establish both that the Quarrel was not solely a ‘literary’ matter, and that its origins were not in the France of Descartes and Fontenelle but in England.² For both Bury and Jones, what the seventeenth-century Moderns had to overcome was ‘humanism’—as Bury put it, ‘the intellectual yoke of the Renaissance’ (p. 78).

Other scholars soon began to undermine these large claims by showing that the Quarrel, even as applied to literature, did not begin in the seventeenth century at all—that earlier texts, once viewed only as precursors to the debate, in fact form a coherent and continuous tradition to which the well-known late seventeenth-century texts are merely a coda. Hans Baron found the Quarrel of Ancient and Modern at the heart of the the self-understanding of the Italian Renaissance, part of the humanist project itself (indeed, thoughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘Modern’ generally meant since the revival of learning). Others traced the conflict (and its attendant, the idea of progress) back into the Middle Ages and even to classical antiquity.³ Oppositions of Ancient and Modern emerge as part of the way any age constructs its identity, particularly the way it understands itself as a distinct ‘age’. For the past twenty-five or so years, then, it has become a concern to define what was really new in the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quarrel, traditionally conceived as having three phases: the French debate leading up to the works of Perrault and Fontenelle; the English Battle of the Books sparked by Sir William Temple and continued most notably by William Wotton and Jonathan Swift; and a rekindling of hostilities at the opening of the eighteenth century in the form of debates about Homer (begun in France but quickly engaging all Europe). Nearly all recent studies of the Quarrel have found its importance in fostering and diffusing a new understanding of history: one that contributed to an understanding of all human works as historical products (cultural constructions) and consequently to a relativization of taste, increased interest in non-classical cultures both past and present, and ultimately to that late eighteenth-century body of thinking we have come to call ‘historicism’.⁴ It was also the site at which the modern distinction between the arts and the sciences emerged. In what follows I shall trace the main phases of the Quarrel with an eye to the ways in which these historical concerns shape the institution of literary criticism, continuing in fact to do so long after the ‘official’ battles had concluded.

PERRAULT AND FONTENELLE: EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN DIVISION BETWEEN ‘ART’ AND ‘SCIENCE’

La belle Antiquité fut toujours vénérable,
Mais je ne crus jamais qu'elle fust adorable.
Je voy les Anciens, sans plier les genoux,
Ils sont grands, il est vray, mais hommes commes
          nous:
Et l'on peut comparer sans craindre d'estre injuste,
Le Siècle de LOUIS au beau Siècle d'Auguste.

Charles Perrault, Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (1687)

On 27 January 1687, sitting in celebration of Louis XIV's recovery from a fistula, the French Academy heard Perrault's poem celebrating the achievements of Louis's age—accomplishments so great as to rival those of antiquity. The response was an uproar: Racine thought the poem a joke; Boileau, after grumbling through the opening lines, shouted for the reading to stop—the poem ‘brought shame on the Academy’; only the intervention of his friend Huet (a convinced believer that both man and nature had degenerated since ancient times) quieted him. As the famous story makes clear, by 1687 battle lines in the French Quarrel, both intellectual and personal, were already drawn.⁵ Perrault had risen to prominence in the 1660s through Colbert, who secured for him in 1671 membership in the Academy (despite his small literary output) and in 1672 the important post of Contrôleur des Bâtiments de Sa Majesté, a source of patronage, power, and wealth; as late as 1691, though Colbert had died and Perrault fallen from royal favour, Perrault was still influential enough to help secure a seat in the Academy for his friend Bernard de Fontenelle (a seat Fontenelle had four times been refused, through the united efforts of the Ancient party, including Boileau, Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, and La Bruyère). From the start, participants in the Quarrel were aware of its political dimension: as would also be true in Temple's England, most French Moderns stood far closer to centralized power (whose greatness Perrault had celebrated) than did more independent humanists such as Boileau.⁶

Battle lines had been drawn in the years since Chapelain and Corneille, especially as critics disagreed over the use of Christian materials in the higher genres of poetry (the so-called querelle du merveilleux). Epic in particular must instruct as well as please; so, though Homer and Virgil provide no models for it, must not modern poetry make use of Christian revelation?⁷ Boileau defended the great ancients as standards for imitation in his Art poétique (1674)—to which he added attacks on some of his old enemies: Charles Perrault's brother Claude, designer of the new façade of the Louvre and physician to Boileau's recently deceased fiancée (as an ‘assassin’ in both architecture and medicine), and Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, author of the Christian epic Clovis (1657). Desmarets had already defended modern poetry, vernacular language, and le merveilleux chrétien in many works, most lengthily in a Comparaison de la langue et de la poésie françoise avec la grecque et la latine (1670); in a reply to Boileau of 1674, he called on his friend Charles Perrault to ‘defend France’ against ‘that rebel troop which prefers ancient works to our own’.

Nor were the ‘works’ in question just books: the quarrel encompassed the whole reputation of France, then reaching an apogee of self-sufficiency in its cultural nationalism. It extended for instance to the question of which language public inscriptions should use, Latin or French (to which in his Deffense de la langue françoise (1676) François Charpentier answered unequivocally: the language of the culturally superior nation—France). By 1688, the year after Perrault answered Desmarets's call, the quarrel was so familiar that François de Callières could publish an Histoire poëtique de la guerre nouvellement declarée entre les anciens et les modernes. But the most important texts of the Quarrel were to come: not from Boileau, who dealt less in the principles at issue than in personal attacks on Perrault and criticisms of his misreadings of Homer, but from the Moderns, in the four volumes of Perrault's Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1688-96) and especially in Fontenelle's Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, first published in a volume of his Poésies pastorales (1688). (This first phase of the Quarrel is often said to conclude with the publication in 1699 of Fénelon's Télémaque, an epic classically inspired but written in modern French prose.)

Perrault's Parallèle is cast in a dialogue between a pedantically learned provincial Président who has not been to Paris for twenty years, is out of touch with recent cultural developments, and believes that nothing truly great and new has been achieved since antiquity; a worldly, ironical Abbé (spokesman for Perrault), at home in philosophy and science (Perrault had called for help on his friend Huyghens), and an admirer of the age of Louis XIV; and a Chevalier, a Parisian wit supposedly undecided, but who usually sides with the Abbé. The setting is a visit to Versailles, the visible symbol of Modern accomplishment. In the course of their five dialogues, Perrault panoramically surveys ancient and modern achievement in all fields, raising nearly all the topics of the Quarrel, past and future.⁸ In all fields except sculpture—‘the simplest and most limited of all the arts’ (I, p. 183)—the Abbé finds progress: time is the parent of politeness and good taste as of natural knowledge; not only in physics and astronomy but also in poetry, eloquence, and ethics has the seventeenth century outdone the ancients, for these activities depend like the natural sciences on justness of reasoning as well as on detailed knowledge of human nature, both of which have been perfectionnés in the century of Descartes.⁹ If, as was still generally believed, it is the task of the highest poetry, especially epic, to convey wisdom in all fields, then it is absurd now to claim Homer's greatness: just as in Le Siècle Perrault had suggested that Homer would have been a better poet had he lived in Louis's age, here, in a series of disadvantageous comparisons with Virgil and later poets, he finds Homer defective not only formally—in what, according to Perrault, his untutored ‘genius’ supplied—but especially in the limitations imposed by his primitive culture. Homer was no naturalist; in manners, ‘the princes of his age resemble modern peasants’ (III, p. 98).¹⁰

In 1688 Fontenelle, a nephew of Corneille, was at the beginning of his long career as a popularizer of Cartesian science; he had already defended the Modern cause in his Dialogues des morts (1683).¹¹ His Digression presents the Modern argument in sharp relief, and with unalloyed contempt for the ancients (taken as a group, Fontenelle writes, their chief merit is in having ‘driven us to truth’ by providing a spectacle of all possible errors and follies). All human works must be understood as cultural products: nature, including human nature, has not changed since antiquity (as Fontenelle puts it, the whole Quarrel turns on the question whether ancient trees were taller than those of today); whatever differences distinguish men's minds, then, ‘must be caused by exterior circumstances, such as the historical moment, the government, and the state of things in general’ (trans. Hughes, p. 360). Fontenelle is not so sure as Perrault that modern poetry can outdo ancient: he too cites new vernacular genres, especially the novel and the fairy tale (a form Perrault practised), but he also suggests both that the great age of French literature may be over, and that poetry may have been perfected in Augustus' time (so that a Virgil can only be equalled, not surpassed).¹² Most important for the century to follow, Fontenelle in the course of considering the nature of progress in various disciplines makes explicit what Perrault only sketched, a fundamental distinction between fields which progress by slow cumulation of knowledge (such as physics, astronomy, and mathematics) and those wherein genius can reach the heights almost at once (such as poetry and eloquence). He transforms, in other words, traditional distinctions between poetry (or rhetoric) and philosophy into the seventeenth century's most fully elaborated division of what we have come to call the arts and the sciences:

However, if the moderns are to be able to improve continually on the ancients, the fields in which they are working must be of a kind which allows progress. Eloquence and poetry required only a certain number of rather narrow ideas as compared with other arts, and they depend for their effect primarily upon the liveliness of the imagination. Now mankind could easily amass in a few centuries a small number of ideas, and liveliness of imagination has no need of a long sequence of experiences nor many rules before it reaches the furthest perfection of which it is capable. But physics, medicine, mathematics, are composed of numberless ideas and depend upon precision of thought which improves with extreme slowness, yet is always improving … It is obvious that all this is endless and that the last physicists or mathematicians will naturally have to be the ablest.¹³

Neither Tassoni, Hakewill, nor even Perrault had sorted their varied examples in this way;¹⁴ after the Digression, Fontenelle's division would quickly be taken up throughout Europe, by writers on both sides of the Quarrel—as early as 1694 by such Moderns as Wotton and Charles Gildon, and later by such Ancients as Du Bos.¹⁵ These writers do not yet use the terms ‘art’ and ‘science’ to mark their divisions; to the extent that these terms were distinguished (and many conflated them), they continued to carry the senses they had had since antiquity—‘science’ still meant theoretical understanding, ‘art’ practical activity, a making done according to rules. Modern usage of these terms would not emerge fully until the nineteenth century.¹⁶ But already Perrault and Fontenelle, almost as a by-product of the Quarrel—in considering whether all fields progress in the same way—had created the division of disciplines upon which the next century would depend in formulating the new category of the ‘aesthetic’, a category that thus emerges correlatively with modern conceptions of ‘science’ in the course of the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns.¹⁷

By 1700 nearly everyone ceded superiority in science to the Moderns and in arts to the Ancients. Even for the utopian progressivist Turgot,

Time constantly brings to light new discoveries in the sciences; but poetry, painting and music have a fixed limit which the genius of languages, the imitation of nature, and the limited sensibility of an organ determine, which they obtain by slow steps, and which they cannot surpass. The great men of the Augustan Age reached it, and are still our models.¹⁸

Nearly everyone, in other words, accepted the new division of knowledge. That poetry and eloquence now took their place among the arts, in opposition to the sciences, had far-reaching implications for literary criticism, three of which in particular merit our attention here. (1) The remapping of disciplines accomplished in the Quarrel contributed to the distinctive logical structure of eighteenth-century criticism; (2) it brought on a crisis in conceptions of the sense in which any ‘art’ can have a history; and (3) it led to the construction of a new category of ‘literature’ (as literary ‘art’)—resulting ultimately in a newly pressing need for criticism to defend literature.

The Quarrel contributed first of all that redefinition of critical ‘rules’ that separates Chapelain and Pascal—for whom the rules of writing can be demonstrated in Cartesian fashion, a priori—from Pope and Du Bos, for whom criticism is a probabilistic, a posteriori, ‘experimental’ affair. For all but a few extreme (usually Cartesian) Moderns, criticism in the eighteenth century was understood as an a posteriori attempt to discover what in literary works was the source of their particular merits or effects, the means by which authors achieved their ends. Formulations of these relations between means and ends continued to be called ‘rules’, but such rules could not be known a priori or with certainty; the critic could only conjecture them with probability from the effects (ends) he had experienced—as Du Bos said, rules ‘only teach us to know the cause of an effect, which was already felt’.¹⁹ At the same time, because literary standards cannot be known a priori, the critic cannot demonstrate which are the works of commanding merit: as Boileau, Pope, and Du Bos argue fully, only the test of time (the combined weight of many probable opinions) can sort them out. Johnson makes the point: ‘To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientifick, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem.’ Criticism cannot be a ‘science’ like geometry (in the old sense of a field in which we have demonstrative knowledge of causes), because, as Addison argues in discussing ‘The pleasures of the imagination’, we simply do not and cannot know the mechanisms by which works affect us.²⁰ Thus the critic, Gibbon tells us, must be satisfied with that kind of proof his subject admits of—whether that subject is poetry or history: ‘Geometry is employed only in demonstrations peculiar to itself: criticism deliberates between the different degrees of probability.’ Eighteenth-century writers extend the point to every field in which demonstration is impossible: such fields can only be a posteriori (experimental) sciences. Thus Burke in discussing the art of government employs the same argument Addison had used of imaginative works.²¹

These arguments began to be applied to literary (and other) studies in and because of the Quarrel. Fontenelle distinguishes the two cultures not merely according to how extensive a view each requires, but also by the method and governing mental faculty of each. Poetry and eloquence depend on ‘imagination’, the sciences on ‘reason’, especially Descartes's ‘new method of reasoning’ which has so much ‘improved the way we think … in this century’ (and which he hopes will come to reign even in ‘criticism’ (pp. 362-3). Thus physics yields truths while poetry possesses only imagination's traditional status: opinion.²² Wotton makes the point, calling on the language of logic:

The Generality of the Learned have given the Ancients the Preference in those Arts and Sciences which have hitherto been considered [painting, poetry, eloquence, sculpture, and architecture]: But for the Precedency in those Parts of Learning which still remain to be enquired into, the Moderns have put in their Claim, with great Briskness. Among this Sort, I reckon Mathematical and Physical Sciences, considered in their largest Extent. These are Things which have no Dependence upon the Opinions of Men for their Truth; they will admit of fixed and undisputed Mediums of Comparison and Judgment: So that, though it may always be debated, who have been the best Orators, or who the best Poets; yet it cannot always be a Matter of Controversie, who have been the greatest Geometers, Arithmeticians, Astronomers, Musicians, Anatomists, Chymists, Botanists, or the like …²³

Thus even the Modern Wotton is content to concede the necessity that ‘The Masters of Writing, in all their several Ways, to this Day, appeal to the Ancients, as their Guides; and still fetch Rules from them, for the Art of Writing’.

Secondly, the new division of knowledge precipitated a crisis in conceptions of the ‘history’ of any art. It was implicit in the new division that science, now that a proper method was in place, progresses cumulatively; the arts do not. Eventually—in the context of the century's many debates about imitation and originality—this implication of the new division would force a rejection of the old conception of ‘art’ itself. ‘Art’ ceases to be a methodic activity (one governed by ‘rules’); this becomes the defining feature of ‘science’ (whose method becomes—simply—‘scientific method’). And when ‘art’ no longer means ‘rule-governed’, the very notion of artistic ‘progress’ becomes unintelligible. Once the meaning of ‘art’ changes, John Aikin can write: the ‘excellence of a particular artist cannot be transmitted to a successor; hence a later age does not stand on the shoulders of an earlier one with respect to [the arts]’.²⁴ Grasping the means by which great practitioners had achieved their effects—that is, grasping rules—had once been understood as the way young writers learned their art (though of course only the gifted writer—the ‘genius’—could improve on his models): rules thus supply continuity in the transmission of any art. Histories of art, in turn, took the form of histories of given genres: like Vasari's Lives of the Artists and even Johnson's Lives of the Poets, they were organized as the story of succeeding artists seeking new means the better to achieve given ends, ends which had been established by the founders of the genre. (In this way critics such as Du Bos could speak of one author as ‘successor’ to another, whom the new author ‘replaces’ or ‘substitutes’, because he has produced ‘better performances of the same kind’: Critical Reflections, II, pp. 313, 400.) For Vasari and Du Bos, every work of art forms part of a continuous tradition extending through time and space, even across national boundaries—wherever that kind is practised; thus in his Essay on Criticism Pope traces the development of criticism from Aristotle to his own time, organizing his history according to each critic's particular excellence within the universal ends of criticism itself. But the Modern notion of art spelt the rejection of such organization. This is one reason why arguments such as the following, by Voltaire, were to have such significance:

The greatest Part of the Critics have fetch'd the Rules of Epick Poetry from the Books of Homer, according to the Custom, or rather, to the Weakness of Men, who mistake commonly the beginning of an Art, for the Principles of the Art itself, and are apt to believe, that everything must be by its own Nature, what it was, when contriv'd at first.²⁵

With the end of the old understanding of art as rule-governed and of its attendant theory of genre, how the history of any art was conceived has to change. Histories of given arts, as we shall see, are assimilated to more general intellectual, cultural, or national history. If Fontenelle's distribution of disciplines by faculty stems ultimately from Bacon's account in the Advancement of Learning of memory, imagination, and reason (the faculties of history, poetry, and philosophy, respectively), he has added a theory of the progressive unfolding of the mind through the historical succession of these faculties: ‘there is an order which regulates our progress. Every science develops after a certain number of preceding sciences have developed and only then; it has to await its turn to burst its shell.’ Fontenelle's historical model is taken up along with his division of knowledge by nearly all subsequent Moderns; it provides d'Alembert, for instance—for whom imagination has become the faculty governing not merely poetry but all the fine arts (the beaux-arts and belles-lettres)—with an explanation of the development of European culture since ‘the renaissance of letters’: ‘When we consider the progress of the mind since that memorable epoch, we find that this progress was made in the sequence it should naturally have followed. It was begun with erudition, continued with belles-lettres, and completed with philosophy.’²⁶ Others will chart a progress from sense through imagination and finally reason; this is the model that guides Thomas Warton in writing the history of English poetry as an aspect of the history of England itself, and that leads Hugh Blair as he distinguishes and orders variant national traditions in rhetoric and belles-lettres.²⁷ The history of any art becomes a history of stages—periods—corresponding to, because informed by, larger movements of the national mind and institutions. Such new kinds of history—of the sort discussed for example by René Wellek in The Rise of English Literary History—were thus made necessary by the new division of knowledge (as well as the deepened sense of historical difference) that emerged in the Quarrel.

Finally, the new division led to a reconception of the category of the ‘literary’ itself, one that we can see completed in the eighteenth century when literature was brought into the ambit of the new category of the ‘aesthetic’. When Perrault and Fontenelle class poetry under the heading of ‘imagination’, they call upon a faculty whose meaning had changed since Bacon's time: imagination had lost what in the Renaissance had been its major intellective functions, especially its connection with judgement; the understanding alone now performs those tasks. Hence Fontenelle's dismissive treatment of the arts in the Digression: he contrasts the ‘tricks of eloquence’ with the dependability of la physique, ‘liveliness’ with ‘precision’; poetry and eloquence, he writes, ‘are not very important in themselves’—eloquence may once have had a political function, but ‘Poetry, on the other hand, was good for nothing, as it has always been under all kinds of governments; that failing is of the essence of poetry’.²⁸ There follows a stream of works reiterating such criticisms, from Tanneguy Lefebvre's De futilitate poetices (1697) until well into the eighteenth century.²⁹

The eighteenth-century consolidation of the category of the aesthetic, as is well known, serves even further to sharpen Fontenelle's division of mental labour: for Batteux, writing in 1746 about what constitutes the fine arts as a category—Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe—‘Taste is in the arts what intelligence is in the sciences’; ‘Truth is the object of the sciences; that of the arts is the beautiful’ (p. 56). Thus will emerge Schiller's complaint in The Aesthetic Education of Man (p. 17) that in his time the mental faculties have begun to seem ‘as separate in practice as they are distinguished by the psychologist in theory’—a point of which the most circumspect Ancients, suspicious of the Modern system of the arts, had long been aware.³⁰ The concept of literature itself, under such pressure, changes: ‘belles-lettres’, once a capacious category including all polite written learning, contracts until it comprises only ‘imaginative’ literature—the poetic, dramatic, and narrative kinds that in the next century were to form its main divisions; as Johann Bergk writes in 1799, ‘The function of polite literature is thus not to increase our knowledge, for this it would share with the sciences, but to cultivate our taste.’³¹ The result by the end of the eighteenth century is a widespread sense that though literary art may once, in another cultural context, have served a useful function, it does so no longer—that it no longer, as Hegel says of all the arts, can ‘serve our highest need’; and the defence of poetry becomes once again a major project.

THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS: THE CONFLICT OF WIT AND LEARNING

There is a difference between erudition and literature … Literature is the knowledge of letters; erudition is the knowledge of facts, places, times, and the monuments of antiquity … The erudite may or may not be a good littérateur, for exquisite discernment and a good and carefully furnished memory require more than study alone. In the same way, a littérateur may lack erudition. Should both of these qualities be present, the result is a learned and cultivated man.

Jaucourt, ‘Littérature’ (Encyclopédie)

In 1690 the retired diplomat Sir William Temple published ‘An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning’, opening a debate that was to consume the learned, provide Swift and Pope with the leading concerns of several of their greatest works, and set the terms of much of English Augustan literary debate. Having read defences of Modern learning in Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth and Fontenelle's Digression, Temple set out in a parallèle of his own to demonstrate that ‘the oldest books we have are still in their kinds the best’—books, that is, in Greek and Latin, ‘to which we owe all that we have of learning’—so that even the greatest Moderns ‘do but trace over the paths that have been beaten by the ancients … and are at best but copies of those originals’.³² As the terms of Temple's argument suggest, the English Battle, though like the French Quarrel framed as a debate about the relative merits of ancient and modern literature, was from the start more concerned with books themselves: with their production, uses and users, and especially with the rules and functions of the critic.

Temple never adopted the new division of arts and sciences. He argues against Fontenelle that there may indeed (as archaeological evidence suggested) have been literal giants in former ages, then proceeds in his parallèle through the mingled headings of ‘philosophy’, including especially astronomy and physiology (here Temple dismisses the new theories of Copernicus and Harvey as of little moment and no practical use); ‘magic’; architecture (including the applications of mathematics to architecture in ‘fortification’); navigation and geography (where even the lodestone has not led to modern superiority); painting and statuary; mechanics (in which ‘Gresham College’ has not exceeded the ancients); and poetry (works in both verse and prose, including histories).³³ In all these fields, learning since its revival ‘within these hundred and fifty years’ has failed even to equal that of the ancients; to prove oldest is best in the last category, Temple cites Phalaris' letters and Aesop's fables, which he dates—despite earlier critics' doubts—to the time of Pythagoras. Finally, Temple cites four causes of modern inferiority: the Reformation, which distracted attention too much to religion; a decline of patronage; avarice—men pursue money where they once sought ‘honour’; and a false ‘scorn of pedantry’.

The first to reply in detail to Temple was William Wotton, twenty-eight years old when his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning appeared in 1694. Unlike Temple, Wotton was an expert linguist—he had been raised like the young John Stuart Mill, starting Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at four (he entered Oxford before he was ten); in scientific matters, he confesses calling for help on members of the Royal Society such as John Craige and Edmund Halley. Wotton casts himself as mediator between Ancient and Modern, dividing the honours through his elaborate division of arts and sciences, to each of which he devotes a chapter. In fact he dispatches poetry and eloquence—the ethical fields of concern to Temple—in five short introductory chapters, devoting the bulk of the Reflections to cataloguing Modern accomplishment in the physical sciences.

Among those fields in which Wotton cites Modern superiority is one not previously central to the Quarrel: ‘philology’ (‘criticism’), a study brought to perfection since and because of the revival of learning. Through the efforts of modern editors in establishing the small details of dates and names, ‘the Old Chronology and Geography’—work too often dismissed as pedantic drudgery—we now know the shape of ancient history better than could anyone in antiquity itself. Wotton grows eloquent in celebrating such scholarship, using phrases Swift would recall when he came to write A Tale of a Tub: ‘the Annotations of Modern Criticks’, Wotton writes, ‘required more Fineness of Thought, and Happiness of Invention, than, perhaps, Twenty such Volumes as those were, upon which these very Criticisms were made’; such monumental efforts of learning ‘raise a judicious Critick very often as much above the Author upon whom he tries his Skill, as he that discerns another Man's Thoughts, is therein greater than he that thinks’ (p. 318).

Temple entered the Battle only once more, in a reply to Wotton written about 1695 but not published until after his death in the edition of his works assembled in 1701 by his longtime secretary, Jonathan Swift. Here, explaining that he writes to persuade university scholars not to give up study of the classics, Temple registers his awareness of the pedagogic side of the Quarrel: at issue is what disciplines and approaches will capture the curriculum. Here too he faces, though without understanding it, the new division of knowledge. Temple sees that the learning his opponents mean most to celebrate is not simply that which has arisen since the revival of learning, but especially those advances made possible by the ‘new philosophy’, which is only ‘fifty or sixty years’ old—i.e., the philosophy of Descartes. (Temple cites Paracelsus as Descartes's precursor and ‘Gresham’ as his successor; Bacon nowhere enters this account.) Since Wotton admits ancient superiority in fields such as poetry and eloquence, Temple finds that the dispute now rests with ‘chemistry, anatomy, natural history of minerals, plants, and animals; astronomy, and optics; music; physic; natural philosophy; philology; and theology; of all of which I shall take a short survey …’—but here his manuscript breaks off, leading Wotton to comment, ‘Just where the Pinch of the Question lay, there the Copy fails.’³⁴ Instead, Temple proceeds only to reiterate his views on ‘eloquence’ (including especially history), and to question how philology came to be dignified as a ‘science’. Critics did once perform the useful function of restoring ancient texts, but now they concern themselves only with ‘vain niceties’, dates and the ‘antiquated names of persons or places, with many such worthy trifles’. Worse yet they make ‘captious cavils about words and syllables in the judgment of style’, thus setting up as judges of their betters and becoming ‘a sort of levellers’ in the republic of learning. Throughout, Temple speaks of critics in terms that make clear they are not gentlemen (they are mere ‘brokers’ who ‘set up a trade’ in learning) and that theirs are not the concerns of gentlemen (they are ‘a race of scholars I am very little acquainted with’) (pp. 490-2).

In all this Temple was to inspire Swift's treatment of critics in his ‘Battle of the Books’ and throughout A Tale of a Tub (begun in the mid-1690s and first published in 1704). In the ‘Digression concerning Criticks’ Swift's upstart, ungenteel Modern speaker distinguishes two past critical personae—the ancient critic, concerned only to ‘Praise or Acquit’ works and expound the rules of good writing, and the Renaissance ‘Restorers of Antient Learning’—from the ‘Heroick Virtue’ of the ‘true critick’, ‘a Discoverer and Collector of Writers Faults’; ‘A True Critick is a sort of Mechanick, set up with a Stock and Tools for his Trade.’ In the ‘Battle’, a mock-parallèle in which Homer slays Perrault by ‘hurl[ing] him at Fontenelle, with the same Blow dashing out both their Brains’, modern critics are characterized by ‘Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and lll-Manners’ and seek to ‘level’ the peaks of Parnassus. And Swift, like Temple, associates modern critics with ‘method’: in his famous Aesopic episode, the humane Ancient Bee warns the vulgar, ill-spoken, mathematical Modern Spider: ‘In that Building of yours, there might, for ought I know, have been Labor and Method enough, but by woful Experience for us both, 'tis too plain, the Materials are nought, and I hope, you will henceforth take Warning, and consider Duration and matter, as well as method and Art.’³⁵ Alongside Wotton in ‘The Battle’ appears his ‘lover’ Bentley, who steals the armour of Phalaris and Aesop—a reference to the Phalaris controversy, the most important (and most acrimonious) element of the English Quarrel. Following Temple's praise of Phalaris and Aesop in 1690, an under-graduate at Christ Church, Charles Boyle (later earl of Orrery), was set the task of editing Phalaris; the edition was eventually published in 1695, though only after Richard Bentley, recently named Keeper of the King's Libraries, had refused Boyle access to some relevant manuscripts. Meanwhile Bentley, soon to emerge as the greatest classical scholar of the age, undertook to prove both Phalaris and Aesop not classical at all, but Hellenistic forgeries; his efforts appeared first in a short appendix to the second edition of Wotton's Reflections in 1697, then two years later as A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris. (In the interim Francis Atterbury and others published under Boyle's name an attack on Bentley, both on his scholarship and his manners.)

Temple, no linguist, had argued the antiquity and genuineness of Phalaris' letters wholly by reference to their content, to the moral nobility and usefulness to the statesman (by definition, a gentleman) of what they have to say; Bentley proved them late forgeries by brilliantly bringing to bear all the apparatus of philology. As Swift suggests in ‘The Battle’, Bentley had stolen only Phalaris' armour—the merely external matter of his date; the man—the great works themselves—remained. Like the spider and the bee, Ancients and Moderns in the Phalaris controversy differ over the proper approach to reading and composing texts. Temple reads ancient texts in the time-honoured humanistic way, for the useful knowledge they contain. For him, the great ancients speak directly to us, and because of their direct relevance can also serve as models for imitation, a way of assimilating past models for present use. (In this way Augustan mock forms, such as the mock epics Mac Flecknoe and The Rape of the Lock, not only imitate past models but make proper modes of imitation their explicit subject.) Temple refers to books and reading as a form of ‘conversation’, just as at the inception of humanism Petrarch not only imitated Cicero but composed familiar letters to the Roman who had died centuries before.³⁶ But soon the humanist project of recovery had proceeded so far—especially in antiquarian learning, gained not merely through texts but also material remains such as coins and medals—that those who at first appeared friends were becoming foreigners: difference between past and present rendered problematic both the direct accessibility and continuing relevance of ancient texts. For the philologist Bentley, Phalaris' letters are not a source of wisdom to be conversed with but a historical document in need of decoding; as such, they can hardly serve as models for assimilative imitation. The problem was not new; already in the Renaissance, humanism had divided on the issue of history, and the word copy shifted in meaning from copiousness to mere recapitulation; but in the seventeenth century, precisely because of the success of the humanist project in advancing historical knowledge—and through the very spread of printed materials—it reached a crisis.³⁷

The problem thus finds clearest expression, as Joseph Levine has argued, in conceptions of history, of what purposes history serves and how it should be written. In the older view, history—especially of the Greeks and Romans—was to be, in Mably's phrase, ‘a great school of morals and politics’.³⁸ Thus for Ancients such as Temple, history is still a branch of ‘eloquence’ (as Sidney had said, ‘the best of the historian is subject to the poet’); its ‘great ends’ and ‘the chief Care of all Historians’ are to ‘argue the Virtues and Vices of Princes’ and ‘serve for Example and Instruction to Posterity’, tasks to be accomplished through the construction of shapely historical narratives. But with their elaborate apparatus of footnotes, glossaries, quotations, and appendices—all subjects of Scriblerian attack as signs of triviality and disarray—antiquarian Moderns produce a different, non-narrative kind of history. Wotton likens his own History of Rome (1701) to ‘Mosaic’: ‘Affectation of Eloquence becomes History the least of anything, especially such a History as this, which like Mosaic Work must be made up and interwoven with the Thoughts and Sentences of other Men, and where to add to, or diminish from one's Authors, may be of ill consequence.’ Just as he had classed philology as a ‘science’, Wotton here conceives history not as moral guide but as scientific research.³⁹ Thus in ‘The Battle of the Books’, Swift presents Bentley, the Scriblerian epitome of index-learning rather than humane letters, in armour ‘patch'd up of a thousand different Pieces’ and has Scaliger say to him, ‘Thy Learning makes thee more Barbarous, thy Study of Humanity, more Inhuman’ (pp. 250-2). Worse was to come when critics exercised their skills in editing modern authors (as in Bentley's Milton of 1732), whereby moderns in effect became ancients—and the discipline of ‘modern philology’ was created.

In this way emerges the opposition of ‘wit’ and ‘learning’ (or gentility and pedantry), of which so many contemporaries speak—between taste and that historical and grammatical learning known especially in France as ‘érudition’. In 1699 Le Clerc mourns the absence of any modern Scaliger or Lipsius as evidence of a ‘decay of letters’, while for Pierre Bayle ‘A change in taste is all that is involved in what you call the decline of erudition … The mind is cultivated more than the memory. The desire now is to think with delicacy and to express oneself politely’; ‘certain so-called (or real) wits have made it a custom to condemn quotations from the Greeks and erudition as pedantic’.⁴⁰ In 1762, continuing the same debate, Gibbon would trace the conflict of wit and erudition specifically to ‘the famous dispute, concerning the ancients and the moderns’ and devote his Essay on Literature to their reconciliation (p. 11). In the same effort to reconcile ancient and modern, Gibbon manages in the Decline and Fall to construct a shapely and instructive narrative while also including over 8,362 specific textual references—this in a century in which Condillac could write the three volumes of his Histoire ancienne without a single citation—though a later century would condemn even Gibbon's history as not scientific enough.⁴¹

THE QUERELLE D'HOMèRE: GEOMETRY VS HISTORY

However, being extreamly sollicitous, that every accomplished Person who has got into the Taste of Wit, calculated for this present Month of August, 1697, should descend to the very bottom of all the Sublime throughout this Treatise; I hold fit to lay down this general Maxim. Whatever Reader desires to have a thorow Comprehension of an Author's Thoughts, cannot take a better Method, than by putting himself into the Circumstances and Postures of Life, that the Writer was in, upon every important Passage as it flow'd from his Pen; For this will introduce a Parity and strict Correspondence of Idea's between the Reader and the Author. Now, to assist the diligent Reader in so delicate an Affair, as far as brevity will permit, I have recollected, that the shrewdest Pieces of this Treatise, were conceived in Bed, in a Garret: At other times (for a Reason best known to myself) I thought fit to sharpen my Invention with Hunger; and in general, the whole Work was begun, continued, and ended, under a long Course of Physick, and a great want of Money. Now, I do affirm, it will be absolutely impossible for the candid Peruser to go along with me in a great many bright Passages, unless upon the several Difficulties emergent, he will please to capacitate and prepare himself by these Directions. And this I lay down as my principal Postulatum.

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704, Preface)

On 5 April, 1716, Jean-Baptiste de Valincourt held a supper party for two members of the Academy and translators of Homer, Anne Dacier and Antoine Houdar de La Motte, along with their friends and supporters. ‘We drank to the health of Homer’, one of the guests reported, ‘and all went off well’, thus ending (according to older textbooks) the querelle d'Homère which for five years had occupied first France, then all of Europe.⁴² This phase of the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns had begun in 1711 when Madame Dacier—daughter of the classical scholar Tanneguy Lefebvre, who had taught her Greek; wife since 1683 of the classicist André Dacier; and already editor of Dictys, Florus, and Callimachus, and translator of Anacreon, Sappho, Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence—published the prose translation of Homer's Iliad on which she had been working for fifteen years. To Mme Dacier Homer represented the ‘perfection’ of poetry: ‘taste is never so false and corrupted as when it leaves behind the spirit and ideas of Homer’; ‘It has ever been my Ambition’, she wrote in her preface, ‘to present our Age such a Translation of Homer as, by preserving the main Beauties of that Noble Poet, might recover the great Part of Mankind from the disadvantageous Prejudice infus'd into them by the monstrous Copies that have been made of him’.⁴³

But in 1714 the court poet Houdart de La Motte published such a monster in the form of an ‘improved’ Homer on which he had been working since 1701, in which he ‘corrects’ Homer's ‘puerilités’ and ‘inutilités’ and clarifies, modernizes, shortens, rearranges, and sometimes simply rewrites passages to form an Iliad in twelve books of hexameter couplets. The whole appeared with a Discours sur Homère, defending his procedure—‘j'ai changé sans scrupule’, he wrote—on the grounds that Homer unaltered would be as tedious to modern French readers as a romance by d'Urfé, and defending himself—he knew no Greek—on the grounds that no one knows the classical languages well enough to grasp all the details of ancient texts, and that ‘reason’ alone would reveal whatever was of value in Homer. Like geometry, ‘the art of poetry has its axioms, its theorems, its corollaries, and its demonstrations’, against which Boileau's test of time can carry no weight: ‘if the critic's reasons are evident, three thousand years of contrary opinion has no more force than one day’ (Oeuvres, II, p. 135; III, pp. 162-3).

Mme Dacier replied with her most ambitious work of criticism, Des Causes de la corruption du goût (1714), defending her approach to Homer on the traditional humanist grounds of the useful knowledge his work contains. La Motte's popularity, she argues, itself stems from a general decline in taste everywhere visible, from new, effeminate musical forms to the taste for novels; the ‘simple’, ‘direct’, and ‘original’ manners of Homer's ‘heroic age’ (a concept she did much to consolidate) will, she hopes, shame and educate falsely ‘delicate’ modern readers. For this reason her translation had made little of textual matters; her many notes explicate mainly Homer's ‘beauties’ and his wisdom. The epic is still for her a ‘corps de doctrine’—not of scientific doctrine, to be sure; the Moderns had won that battle—but in all other fields, including even religion. Mme Dacier is quick to allegorize, and even calls on the tradition of prisca theologia to argue that Homer had intimations of the Christian dispensation. If Perrault and La Motte find ‘low’ the scene in which Achilles seeks to keep flies from the body of Patroclus, Mme Dacier follows Le Bossu in finding the scene a useful lesson in hygiene. ‘Homer's faults’, she tells La Motte, ‘you have put there yourself’: properly understood, the Iliad is throughout as ‘logical’, ‘reasonable’, and ‘philosophical’ as any géomètre could wish (Corruption, pp. 110, 144).

In 1715 as well, the most extreme of all the Cartesian Moderns, the Abbé Jean Terrasson, published the two long volumes of his Dissertation critique sur l'Iliade, où, à l'occasion de ce poëme, on cherche des règles d'une poétique fondée sur la raison. When Mme Dacier heard this work announced, she cried ‘A geometer! the scourge of poetry, a geo-meter!’ Terrasson maintained that because the soul is one, not two, divisions between the arts and sciences have been overdrawn; progress occurs equally in both, as ‘a necessary effect of the human constitution’:

The exact mind discovers truth, and taste finds the way of saying it well. Such exactness is the fruit of philosophy applied to belles-lettres, just as to physical nature. For lack of this, the ancients said very elegantly so much that is false, in morals as in physics.

According to this law of progress, ‘The Greeks knew how to speak, the Romans knew how to think, but the French know how to reason.’⁴⁴ Terrasson's Dissertation is a relentless attack on Homer's ‘barbarism’, intended ‘to introduce the same Light of Reason and true Philosophy, by Help and Assistance of which there has of late been such Great and Noble Discoveries in the Study and Knowledge of Nature, into … Eloquence and Poetry, Criticism and Philology, in a word … Belles Lettres’. Even though Descartes had not yet come on the scene, Homer should through simple ‘Common Sense, and natural Morality’ have been able ‘to have corrected the false Taste of his Age’. ‘Nothing human is infallible but reason, and to reason sentiment itself must submit’; in this spirit Terrasson employed Descartes's analytic geometry to prove certain of Homer's descriptions physically impossible and constructed a definition of epic which, he said, fit all the greatest practitioners—except Homer.⁴⁵

By this time many others had joined in, the Abbé Pons (who characterized Homer as a ‘beau monstre’) on the side of La Motte, Jean Boivin in defence of Mme Dacier with an Apologie d'Homère; both André and Anne Dacier produced further pamphlets; La Motte in turn replied in Réflexions sur la critique (1715); others made fun of the quarrel or sought a reconciliation. And the quarrel had become international: in England, Alexander Pope could not but be affected by it in his own project of translating Homer (Mme Dacier found him insufficiently Ancient), and Richard Blackmore, an English La Motte, published ‘An Account of the Present Controversy concerning Homer's Iliad’ (1716); in Italy, Vico was radically recasting the whole debate. A century of intensive historical investigation into Homer and his age had begun.⁴⁶

Like the English Battle of the Books, this querelle had its roots in the era of Perrault and Fontenelle, both of whom had sought to dethrone the ‘prince of poets’ in their defences of modernity. Perrault especially, in his fourth Parallèle, had made much of Homer's coarse language, indecorous heroes, indecent gods, outdated science, and trivial and repetitious details: he wondered who was more miserable, Homer or his heroes, and made use of as yet unpublished speculations by d'Aubignac to suggest that ‘Homer’ had never existed at all.⁴⁷ André Dacier had already replied to Perrault in a new edition of his translation of Aristotle's Poetics (1692), Boileau in the critical apparatus to a new edition of his translation of Longinus (1693), which attacked Perrault especially for his ignorance of Greek; in fact it was partly his account of Homer's sublimity that had drawn Boileau to Longinus from the first. But in the years to follow, while the Modern position hardened into an extreme rationalism, the Ancients found themselves shifting ground. The seventeenth-century Quarrel had emerged from a division of what in Chapelain's time had seemed to coincide, rational principle and ancient practice; when because of scientific progress, cultural nationalism, and the claims of a new philosophy these appeared to coincide no longer, Moderns like Perrault opted for the former, while Ancients such as Boileau appealed to what had stood the test of time—to universal taste as revealed in ancient works of continuing popularity among readers of taste. What had secured ‘l'approbation de plusieurs siècles’ must represent ‘le sentiment de tous les hommes’, and so must finally be conformable with reason, even if not demonstrable scientifically.⁴⁸ Both sides thus agreed on the universality of their claims. Both stressed, whatever their views of progress, that human nature is always and everywhere the same. (Universal human nature could of course for both sides too easily collapse into the nature of man in Louis's France: when Moderns like Perrault challenged the status of ancient works in the name of universal reason, that reason usually corresponded in practice to modern French taste—for Perrault, the perfection of that of the ancients (Parallèle, I, pp. 98-9). In the same spirit an Ancient such as Bouhours can establish the ‘rational’ superiority of classical literary standards by showing modern French authors superior to any in Italy or Spain.)⁴⁹ But in the next phase of the dispute, faced by the géomètres, Ancients from Mme Dacier to Du Bos began to defend Homer on the grounds of cultural and historical difference. This nascent historicism consorted ill with their continuing claims for a universal taste; later eighteenth-century thinkers such as Herder would call upon it to dismantle those claims and so to change the structure of criticism altogether.

‘I find ancient times more beautiful’, argues Mme Dacier, ‘as they resemble ours less’; for her supporter Boivin, ‘What pleases me in the Chinese is Chinese manners … If the heroes of Homer's age do not resemble those of our own, that difference should give us pleasure.’ The poet is a representative of his time, and so interpretation must not elide difference:

In a word, the poet imitates what is, not what came into being only later. Homer could not have embodied the customs of later centuries; it is for later centuries to recapture the customs of his. It is a primary precept of poetics that manners be well marked.⁵⁰

Thus in her preface to the Iliad Mme Dacier stresses above all the other difficulties of translating such a work Homer's foreignness, and establishes the hermeneutic principle that it is the interpreter's task to place himself as far as possible in the historical position of the author. This principle, devised by the new generation of Ancients, quickly becomes commonplace: ‘we should transform ourselves, as it were, into those for whom the poem was written, if we intend to form a sound judgment of its images, figures, and sentiments’ (Du Bos); ‘to judge the beauties of Homer, one must put oneself into the Greek camp, not into a French army’ (Montesquieu); ‘reason, good sense and equity demand that in reading ancient authors one transport oneself into the time and country they speak from’ (Rollin). Gibbon, for whom ‘want of being able to place ourselves in the same point of view with the Greeks and Romans’ hides their ‘beauties’ from us, equates historical reconstruction with literary study itself, which is in turn a key component in the formation of a true ‘philosophical spirit’: ‘I conceive, however, that the Study of Literature, the habit of becoming by turns, a Greek, a Roman, the disciple of Zeno and of Epicurus, is extremely proper to exercise its powers and display its merits.’⁵¹

There could hardly be a more conspicuous reversal from the position of seventeenth-century Ancients such as Boileau—humanist readers concerned with the universally valid lessons to be drawn from texts; no ‘principal Postulatum’ for these readers such as Swift's Modern author prescribes in A Tale of a Tub, a prescription that would guarantee the uniqueness of every author, and so the uselessness of all reading. The historical position taken by eighteenth-century Ancients from Mme Dacier onward of course reflects their own tastes, as opposed to that of the géomètres: while La Motte defends his modernized Iliad on the grounds that ‘only a few savants are pleased to admire Homer in Greek, because they take a merely historical pleasure in it and in their understanding a learned language, rather than a purely poetic pleasure’, Fénelon confides to Du Bos his fears that La Motte will cheat him of that same ‘historical pleasure’.⁵² But La Motte's defence suggests as well two paradoxes in Mme Dacier's stance: with her attention to historical detail, she runs the risk of appearing less the ally of Boileau than of such other ‘savants’ as the antiquarian Modern Bentley—as she does in stressing the foreignness of Homer's age, thereby endangering humanist reading of his works for the useful knowledge they contain. La Motte himself had defended the reading of Homer for what he has to teach us, and so also his own duty in presenting Homer to the public by selecting for presentation only those parts of the text from which we can genuinely learn: as Boileau would have agreed, what is universally true in Homer will remain so in a new context. La Motte in fact called his Iliad not a translation but an ‘imitation’, and if he knew no Greek, doesn't Homer's wisdom reside in what he has to say rather than in the language in which his thoughts are dressed? Perhaps Perrault had meant to condemn the ancients when he suggested that prose is a more exact medium than poetry, but had not Mme Dacier herself defended the fidelity of her prose to Homer's verse, arguing that ‘A translator can say in prose everything that Homer said’?⁵³ La Motte like Dacier saw himself as a preserver of ancient values; he, not she, chose poetry as his vehicle. His complaints about Mme Dacier's pedantry occasionally recall Swift on Bentley; his differences with her ironically recapitulate the English conflict between wit and learning, this time with courtly Moderns such as La Motte representing the wits. Whereas England's best classicists (such as Bentley) were led by their new philological and antiquarian methods and learning to side with the Moderns, French classicists—in the face of the géomètres' claims to a monopoly on reason and method—side with erudition and ‘ancienneté’.⁵⁴

Finally, the nascent historicism of the Ancients conflicts with that other Ancient premise, universal taste. And if universal taste comes in question—if, as Batteux was to suggest, a different taste is not necessarily a bad one—so too does the premise on which taste rests: the uniformity of human nature. As Du Bos says in defending the test of time, ‘There is one only supposition admitted in this reasoning, which is, that men of all ages and countries resemble one another with respect to the heart.’⁵⁵ The problem is only implicit in Mme Dacier, given her view of Homer's heroic age as a model for moderns; it becomes acute in Du Bos, whose Réflexions critiques (1719) contain both the most thorough early eighteenth-century attack on the esprit de géometrie in criticism, and the subtlest French formulation of the Ancient position. The Réflexions are filled throughout with echoes of earlier participants in the Quarrel whose views Du Bos seeks to mediate, especially by making use of Locke and of the new doctrine of sensory beauty Du Bos had learnt from Addison.

Du Bos opens his challenge to the géomètres by posing a question: will the Iliad go the way of Ptolemy's astronomy? Must poems, like scientific theories, eventually be exploded? To deny that they must, Du Bos returns to the new division between art and science—which, as we have seen, he accepts—in order to disprove the implications the Moderns had drawn from it: that science is the realm of reason, art of opinion. He does this by substituting an extreme Lockean view of the sciences (as based on accumulated sense experience) for the Cartesianism of Fontenelle and Terrasson (science as method). No difference of ‘method’—in the sense of any supposed ‘perfection to which we have brought the art of reasoning’ in ‘the last seventy years’ (since Descartes, ‘who passes for the father of the new philosophy’)—distinguishes ‘natural science’. Thought itself has not changed; ‘tis imperceptible in practice, whether … Barbey's logic, or that of Port Royal’ makes any difference in how one thinks. ‘We do not reason better than the ancients in history, politics, or morals’ (thus Du Bos reclaims ‘reason’ for the Ancients); ‘The only cause of the perfection of natural sciences, or to speak more exactly, the only cause of these sciences being less imperfect at present than they were in former days, is our knowing more facts than they were acquainted with.’ Natural science has progressed, then, ‘not by any methodical research, but by … mere fortuitous experiment’, ‘time and chance’—a happy accumulation of sense experience in which ‘reasoning has had very little share’.⁵⁶ In natural science as in art and criticism, then, there are no a priori rules: in Du Bos's Lockean view, the impressions of sense must decide in both, and where sense does not extend we can have no more than (more or less probable) opinion. And so, finally, it is in the realm of reason, not sense, that ‘prejudice’ and ‘authority’ have their sway; and since judgements of literary merit are reports of sense impressions, ‘natural facts’ given us in experience which ‘we know without meditating’—here Du Bos makes use of Addison—it is not in the world of letters that their effects have most been felt. Instead, Du Bos claims, relishing the irony of using the Moderns' own arguments against them, they have been the attendants of science: to the extent that natural science must depend on reason, prejudice and authority will afflict it and we will ‘have fashions in sciences as well as in cloaths’.⁵⁷

Du Bos thus helps initiate in France a century of defences of erudition against what were seen as the encroachments not only of wit (as had already begun in England) but also of natural science. Especially in that haven of ancienneté, the Académie des Inscriptions, appears a succession of discourses such as the Abbé du Resnel's ‘Réflexions générales sur l'utilité des Belles-Lettres; et sur les inconvéniens du goût exclusif qui paroit s'établir en faveur des mathématiques et de la physique’ (1741):

We must be careful not to confuse the philosophical mind with the calculating mind … We will not hide the fact that our century is beginning to lose sight of this distinction; that in taking pride in geometry—or rather, in its desire to reduce everything to calculation, to apply that method everywhere, or to erect it as a universal instrument—our century has practically ceased to be philosophical … Letters are the only barrier capable of stopping the progress of false wit, of limiting the conquests of the calculating mind: the first tries to seduce us, the second to subjugate us. By maintaining the taste for truth which the Ancients gave us, letters will teach us not to mistake the tinsel of the first for gold: in the same way, they will teach us to contain the second within its limits.⁵⁸

The theme is taken up by Fréret; Juvigny traces to Fontenelle the moment when ‘Geometry was attacked by Wit's disease’, ‘to imagine that it could set the laws for poetry and eloquence’; in an essay ‘Sur la Guerre des sciences et des lettres’, Bonald predicts ‘the imminent fall of the republic of letters, and the universal domination of the exact natural sciences’.⁵⁹ It is this debate that Gibbon takes up in his Essay on the Study of Literature (in which ‘literature’ includes all learning, especially history), complaining that ‘Natural Philosophy and the Mathematics are now in possession of the throne’, tracing the conflict to Descartes and Fontenelle, and outlining a ‘philosophy’ of ‘criticism’ which will reunite erudition, wit, and geometry, science and letters, Ancient and Modern. But all these writers, having routed the géomètres, fall prey as had Du Bos to the conflicts of historicism with both humanist reading and taste.⁶⁰

Like Mme Dacier, Du Bos demands historical knowledge of readers, since ‘the poet's task is not to purge his age of its errors in physics, but to give a faithful description of the customs and manners of his country, in order to render his imitation as likely as possible’ (pp. 395-6). ‘Life and manners’ are the poet's province—not science, or even natural description, which can please only those familiar with the scenes described. (Having spent pages describing the effects of differing climates on different nations, Du Bos writes, ‘As we are indifferent in respect to delights which we never wish for, we cannot be sensibly affected by the description of them, were it drawn even by Virgil’ (pp. 378-9)). But even assuming we can, as readers, ‘become’ Greeks or Romans in manners, to what end do we do so? If we moderns find it low or eccentric to talk to horses, we must recall that ‘these discourses were very suitable in the Iliad, a poem written for a nation, among whom a horse was, as it were, a fellow-boarder with its master’; ‘Homer, in this very passage for which he has been so frequently censured, would still have pleased several nations of Asia and Afric, who have not changed their ancient method of managing their horses’ (pp. 395-6). But how is such a passage to please us—to do more than serve for us as a curious historical document? Nor, given his Addisonian account of the sensory nature of aesthetic pleasure, can knowledge of any sort finally partake of what for Du Bos is the defining nature and purpose of poetry: ‘The chief merit of history is to inrich our memory, and to form our judgment; but that of a poem consists in moving us, and ‘tis the very charm of the emotion that makes us read it’ (pp. 382-3). It is this strain in Du Bos's thought that leads him to explain poetry as a mere ‘divertissement’ from ‘ennui’, and to identify the ‘poetic’ specifically with ‘expression’.⁶¹ Siding with Mme Dacier against La Motte, Du Bos falls into the arms of Bentley; siding with Locke and Addison against Terrasson, he fails to escape Fontenelle.

NACHLEBEN OF THE QUARREL: ALTERNATIVE TRADITIONS, PERIODIZATION, AND THE NAMING OF ‘CLASSICISM’

That futile quarrel is well known which raged for half a century in France, England, and Germany, especially in the first, over the preferences of the Ancients over the Moderns. Although much was said by both parties that was good, the quarrel could nevertheless not come to an end, because it had been started without a clear perspective on the question, and because almost always it was vanity that carried the day.

Johann Gottfried Herder, Adrastea (1801)

Historians of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns from Rigault onward have made much of the ‘solution of 1717’, a reconciliation based on both sides' acceptance of a general historicist relativisim; this reconciliation would hold until the 1790s, when Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel, concerned to provide a positive account of what by then was modernity—one that would not simply judge modern culture in ancient terms—reconceive the dispute.⁶² In the process of this reconception were created the terms by which eighteenth-century literary culture has so long been known: ‘classicism’ and, later, ‘neo-classicism’. But it is hardly clear that in 1717 the Quarrel was ‘resolved’: we have seen how fragile was Du Bos's mediation; few of the géomètres were convinced. ‘Relativism’ is always unstable, threatening at any moment to revert to the absolutes that motivated it: the same Winckelmann who wrote so stirringly of the uniqueness of Greece wrote as well, ‘The only way for us to become great, and, indeed—if this is possible—inimitable, is by imitating the ancients.’⁶³ Through the rest of the century all major critics return to the Quarrel, with the result that much eighteenth-century criticism seems ‘a prolonged epilogue’ to it.⁶⁴ These recurrences can be as naive as Mark Akenside's ‘Ballance of Poets’ (1746), a parallèle which awards 167 ‘points’ to the modern poets, 105 to the ancients, or as thoughtful as Voltaire's lifelong meditation on the problem, but all major critics, especially after mid-century, display a far greater and more central interest in history than had critics a century before.⁶⁵

The Quarrel would persist as long as, and along with, debate over imitation, emulation, and originality. Thus Edward Young calls upon the arguments of Perrault and Fontenelle in championing the possibilities of Modern literature in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759): ‘knowledge physical, mathematical, moral, and divine increases; all arts and sciences are making considerable advance’; ‘the day may come’ for literature as well ‘when the moderns may proudly look back on the comparative darkness of former ages’ (p. 74). But where his French sources had cited philosophic advance as the ground of modern literary progress, Young adduces the Christian dispensation, unknown to Homer and Virgil: ‘a marvelous light, unenjoy'd of old, is pour'd on us by revelation, with larger prospects extending our Understanding, with brighter objects enriching our Imagination, with an inestimable prize setting our Passions on fire, thus strengthening every power that enables composition to shine’ (p. 72). Young in fact owed much of this argument to his friend and fellow-Modern Samuel Richardson, editor or author of much of the Conjectures.⁶⁶ In his correspondence and novels Richardson had long called upon arguments familiar from the querelle d'Homère to defend modern literature against ancient, and in particular the piety and politeness to be found in that genre long thought original with the Moderns, the novel, against the brutality and superstition of ancient epic. He writes for instance to Lady Bradshaigh in about 1749:

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 for blood.

On the basis of passages such as this, Ian Watt has suggested a conscious rejection by Defoe, Richardson, and even Fielding of classical, especially epic, models for their experiments with the novel.⁶⁷

The ‘solution of 1717’, however ambiguous, guided a century of historical literary studies: inquiries into the ‘true Homer’, most notably by Vico, the Scotsmen Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood, and the Germans C. G. Heyne and F. A. Wolf, as well as manifold inquiries into alternative (non-classical) traditions, most notably into ‘Gothic’ and other Northern European medieval traditions, but also into ‘the East’ and the pre-classical Mediterranean (where, with Homer, writers such as Pindar and others came to be associated). As Lionel Gossman has observed, eighteenth-century ‘medievalism’ was but one ‘part of a wider movement of curiosity about and sympathy for earlier and more “primitive” cultures’.⁶⁸ That all these inquiries comprise in effect one search for an alternative, non-classical literary tradition—a new ancienneté—is testified both by the facility of critics and of poets in mixing them together (for instance, in the frequent, and frequently criticized, conflation of Celtic and Scandinavian materials into a single, so-called ‘runic’ tradition), and by what for many antiquarians was the virtual interchangeability of their interests. Thomas Percy, for instance, outlines in 1762 his plans for an anthology of ‘Specimens of the ancient Poetry of different nations’ that would include:

the Erse Poetry: the Runic Poetry: and some Chinese Poetry that was published last winter at the end of a book called Hau Kiou choaan or the Pleasing History 4 vol. Besides these, I have procured a MS. translation of the celebrated Tograi Carmen from the Arabic: and have set a friend to translate Solomon's Song afresh from the Hebrew, chiefly with a view to the poetry … I have myself gleaned up specimens of East-Indian Poetry: Peruvian Poetry: Lapland Poetry: Greenland Poetry: and inclosed I send you one specimen of Saxon Poetry.⁶⁹

Study of non-classical traditions was of course a project of more than scholarly interest: it was to serve as the source of inspiration for a new poetry. Freed from classical models (from Greek and Roman mythology especially, now seen as exhausted or immoral), able to pursue a historically well-grounded marvellous, poetry was to be reinvigorated through emulation of the newly recovered alternative ancienneté. ‘Tis such pieces’, William Shenstone wrote to Percy in 1760, ‘that contain y^e true Chemical Spirit or Essence of Poetry’; Thomas Warton reveals part of his purpose in writing his long study of Spenser's precursors, the History of English Poetry (1774-81): ‘the manners of romance are better calculated to answer the purposes of true poetry, to captivate the imagination, and to produce surprise, than the fictions of classical antiquity’.⁷⁰ Poets join critics in becoming literary historians, producing over the last half of the eighteenth century hundreds of volumes of historical verse, complete with detailed, learned (or pseudo-learned) annotation. Nor, again, was the new ancienneté to be of use in understanding (and composing) poetry alone: varied lists (like Percy's) of Northern and Eastern materials loom large in the age's many inquiries into the origins of ‘romance’ specifically in the sense of prose fiction, in works from Bishop Huet's Traité de l'origine des romans (1670) and the essays of the Comte de Caylus through Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance (1785) and John Moore's ‘Upon the Original of Romances’ (1797).⁷¹

Inquiry into non-classical traditions served nationalist ends as well, especially as literary and other antiquarians joined in what Herbert Butterfield has called ‘the greatest creative achievement of historical understanding’ in all of scholarship: ‘the recovery and exposition of the medieval world’ (Historical Scholarship, p. 33). As John Aikin asked in 1773, ‘Shall we feel the fire of heroic poetry in translations from Greece and Rome, and never search for it in the native products of our own country?’ (Prose, p. 140). Elaboration of a historic national identity through examination of medieval literary remains could serve varied political purposes: in Britain (where medieval texts were often found to express English ‘liberty’) and in Germany (where they conveyed the sense of a Germanic ‘people’), scholars such as Richard Hurd and J. J. Bodmer sought to establish a national identity independent of what they saw as the cultural domination not merely of the Ancients, but of the Ancients especially as they had been interpreted in France; in France itself—with its longer tradition of scholarly interest in le genre troubadour—medievalism could serve equally well the ends either of radical critique or conservative defence of the ‘bon vieux temps de notre Monarchie’, with its ‘brave, pious, and simple chevaliers’.⁷² But in all three nations, medieval texts, which had until recently been classified as modern (i.e., post-classical), came, in order to serve as the basis of a new ancienneté, to be labelled ‘ancient’. Thus for instance the kinds of texts such as ballads that in the Spectator Joseph Addison had elevated by comparison with the great ‘ancients’ come fifty years later to take their place in collections such as Evan Evans's Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards (1764) and Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).⁷³

In the course of these inquiries was elaborated one of the most significant legacies of the long debate between Ancient and Modern: the concept of distinct historical periods. ‘It is the different Periods or Steps, naturally succeeding in the Progression of Manners’, Thomas Blackwell writes in 1735, ‘that can only account for the Succession of Wit and Literature’ (Homer, p. 77). From mid-century onward Turgot, Rousseau, Condorcet, and all the many authors of what Dugald Stewart would call ‘conjectural history’ divide history into such developmental stages. Du Bos had already in 1719 paused to explain that by ‘siècle’ he did not mean simply a century: ‘Before I enter upon my subject, I must beg leave of the reader to use the word age in a signification somewhat different from that in which it is rigorously understood. The word age, in the civil sense thereof, implies a duration of one hundred years; but sometimes I shall make it import a duration of sixty or seventy only.’⁷⁴ His example of ‘sixty or seventy’ years—the length of a human life—suggests that principle which would govern the development of the new concept: the period as a stage in the life of a people, understood as an interconnected whole—a ‘culture’, in the eighteenth century's newly weighted historical (rather than simply cultivational) sense of that word.⁷⁵

The relativist historicism implicit in such periodization becomes most apparent in the work of Herder, who like Voltaire meditated on the Quarrel throughout his life. According to his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte (1784-91), ‘every nation [Volk] is one people, having its own national form, as well as its own language’; ‘nations modify themselves, according to time, place, and their internal character: each bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others’ (pp. 7, 98). Such a view means the end of the uniformity of human nature: whereas Hobbes claimed each man to be able ‘to read in himself, not this or that particular man; but mankind’ (Leviathan, p. 6)—and from the laws of physics to develop a political analysis that would describe all men at all times in all places—for Herder, just as individuals change in the course of their lives, ‘the whole species is one continued metamorphosis’ (p. 4). Thus Herder subscribes to the hermeneutic developed by Ancients from Mme Dacier onwards: the task of the interpreter is not first of all evaluation, but to enter into the spirit of works, to understand them from inside and in their own terms—to ‘become for a while an ancient Caledonian’, as he says in his essay on Ossian (p. 157). Most of all must we read poetry this way, for it is the poet's achievement to ‘express’ the culture from which he arises—to write Volkspoesie, works that in their special literary unity mirror the unity of the cultural period that they express.

Thus in his many comments on the ‘ridiculous Quarrel’, Herder condemns the genre of the parallèle as fundamentally ahistorical—it seeks to compare incommensurables—and singles out for special abuse ‘the Perraults of France and Germany’, self-righteous ‘sycophants of their century’ who write only to celebrate the standards of their own age. Their mode of evaluation is in fact impossible; since we, like those we read, are the products of our cultures, the critic has no neutral ground on which to stand.⁷⁶ Yet despite all this, Herder does engage in parallèles of his own. In his essay on ‘Ossian’, he likens Ossian both to ancient Scandinavian and American Indian bards; in ‘Shakespeare’, having just explained that drama is a unique cultural product—‘In Greece drama developed in a way in which it could not develop in the north’, and so ‘Sophocles's drama and Shakespeare's are two things which in a certain respect have scarcely the name in common’—he proceeds to a comparison. All wrote at a similar early stage in their nations' development, and so all display in the same ways parallel historical processes: what in the Ideen Herder would call ‘laws’ of history, whose task it is to understand not merely static states, but processes of change. All wrote, too, at a moment fortunate for Volkspoesie, a moment that has been lost: ‘Our poetry does not emerge from a living world.’⁷⁷

For the conjectural historians, all cultures, in their own way, follow a similar sequence of stages, an autonomous yet analogous pattern of growth—usually in the direction of economic and political progress. One Scottish conjecturalist, James Gordon, writes in 1762:

It is agreed that Human affairs in general have proceeded from very small beginnings. I shall venture to suppose, that by attending to their progress, a certain uniform course might be discovered, which they all pursue; and that consequently by knowing to what particular stage they had in any instance advanced, the state of perfection in which they then were, might with some probability be guessed at.

(Thoughts, p. 12)

We should no doubt be grateful, as Blackwell had suggested, not to live in a time that could become the subject of an epic—an age as barbarous as Homer's. But equally often these historians testify to a sense of loss, especially in arts such as poetry. Throughout Europe can be heard such comments about the difference between past and present as: ‘What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost, is a world of fine fabling’ (Richard Hurd, 1762); ‘We lose taste, but we acquire thought’ (Voltaire, 1775); ‘Our time, the death of poetry!’ (Herder, 1764).⁷⁸ A culture which once sustained great poetry seemed to have passed. For many, the earliest period in any culture was one of savage spontaneity, the latest of rich but enervating refinement; only a middle period could sustain a Homer or a Shakespeare—a poised balance of ‘civilized superstition’, as Thomas Warton called it (History, IV, p. 328).

Historicism, then, continued to favour ‘ancient’ writing, even while opening that category to texts earlier Ancients had rejected (and if a new generation celebrated ‘runic’ or ‘Hebrew’ poetry, the Nibelungenlied, popular balladry, or Ossian, it was largely classical scholarship, especially through its development of antiquarianism and revised understanding of Homer, that had shown them how). But the widening of the historical categories of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ into stages in the development of any culture—in effect, stages or states of consciousness—led in the 1790s to a transformation of the Quarrel: Schiller's Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1796) transforms the categories into ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’, Friedrich Schlegel's Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (1796-7) into the ‘objective’ and the ‘characteristic’, ‘individual’, or ‘interessant’—terms the Schlegel brothers would soon reformulate as the ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ and which, through writers such as Madame de Staël, would gain European currency. The first historic stage and state of consciousness was characterized by harmonious unity with nature such as Winckelmann had found in the Greeks (and which Schiller found in his friend Goethe), the second by the division, alienation, and complexity of the modern self. To the extent that the poet expresses his culture, both are necessary and even justified, but it was the aim of both Schiller and Schlegel to point the way to a higher modernity that reconciles Ancient and Modern: ‘the problem of our literature’, Schlegel wrote in 1794, ‘seems to me the unification of the essentially modern with the essentially classical’ (Briefe, p. 170).

It is thus in the final eighteenth-century stage of the Quarrel, in the romantic construction of an ‘other’ against which to define itself but also to be recaptured, that our own period terminology for speaking of the eighteenth century is created. First, seventeenth-century French writers such as Corneille, Racine, and La Fontaine become ‘classic’ not in their excellence (as the term had meant since Aulus Gellius' famous formula ‘classicus scriptor, non proletarius’), canonical authority, or even antiquity, but in Schlegel's new sense. The term was quickly applied to English writers as well (long seen as dominated by the French), so that in 1800 Schlegel can refer to ‘the so-called classical [klassischen] poets of the English: Pope, Dryden and whoever else’. ‘Classicism’, a more value-laden term, is coined about 1820, slowly to make its way, given the early nineteenth century's animus against the eighteenth, amongst competing labels such as ‘classicalism’, ‘classicality’, and ‘pseudo-classicism’, until at the turn of our century an anti-romantic reaction established the term for good. (Meanwhile, mainly in Britain, to avoid the negative connotations of the neologism ‘classicism’, some nineteenth-century historians revive the label ‘Augustan’ to designate the still uncertainly labelled era in English letters that falls, in Leslie Stephen's words, ‘midway between the taste of the Renaissance and that of modern times’.)⁷⁹ Finally, to distinguish the French eighteenth century—since Voltaire, seen as inferior—from the seventeenth, literary historians from about 1900 use the initially even more pejorative ‘neo-classicism’, which again soon spreads beyond France; among American academics especially, it comes by the 1920s to designate eighteenth-century English practice as well.⁸⁰ Our terms ‘classic’ and ‘neo-classic’, then, though suggestive of antiquity, are the last, delayed contribution of eighteenth-century Moderns to the Quarrel. Most recently, following Schlegel's stated purpose in studying Greek poetry to find ‘the origin of modern poetry among the Ancients’ (II, p. 48)—that is, to trace the genesis of romanticism—the French literary historians Daniel Mornet (1909) and Paul Van Tieghem (1924) devise préromantisme, which quickly achieves international application to name eighteenth-century harbingers of the nineteenth. Though long in disfavour in Anglo-American circles because of its implication of a teleological (‘Whig’) theory of literary history, the term ‘preromanticism’ now appears even here to be reviving.⁸¹

Notes

1. Macaulay, ‘Atterbury’; Bury, Progress, p. 79. Bury's work grew from an inquiry pursued in France from Auguste Javary's De l'idée du progrès (1851) to Jules Dalvaille's Essai sur l'histoire de l'idée du progrès jusqu'à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (1910); on Bury's influence, see Wagar, ‘Origins’. Bury's views quickly penetrated eighteenth-century studies (in works such as Carl Becker's Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932)), but especially after World War II produced their negative response in the form of denials of Enlightenment ‘optimism’ such as Carlo Antoni's Die Kampf wider die Vernunft (1951), Henry Vyverberg's Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (1958), and most generally Peter Gay's The Party of Humanity (1964) and The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966-9). (We can usefully understand Judith Plotz's Ideas of Decline in English Poetry (1965) and W. J. Bate's Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970) as instances of this reaction.) Meanwhile in two vast and overlapping literatures, (1) the ‘idea’ of progress itself came under increasing scrutiny, and (2) belief in progress was traced backward, first to the Renaissance and finally to antiquity. Yet the thesis of Bury and Jones, albeit in more sophisticated form, remains very much alive: for Nannerl Keohane (1977) it is still ‘in the era of Bacon and Descartes [that] we first recognize a pattern of argument that can sensibly be labelled ‘the idea of progress’ (p. 29); the thesis receives its fullest reformulation in David Spadafora's Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1990).

2. Jones began his inquiry with The Background of the Battle of the Books (1920), and extended it in Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in 17th-Century England (1936); according to the latter, ‘our modern scientific utilitarianism is the offspring of Bacon begot upon Puritanism’ (p. 91; thus Jones opened the large and ongoing debate about the role of puritanism in the rise of modern science). Jones has been widely criticized for his insular focus (see Rattansi's review of Ancients and Moderns) as well as for his reading of seventeenth-century science (despite its Puritan background) as a fundamentally secular and secularizing activity (see especially Hutchison, ‘Supernaturalism’).

3. See among this large literature Baron, ‘The querelle’; Buck, ‘Aus der Vorgeschichte der Querelle’; Margiotta, Le Origini Italiane; Gössman, ‘Antiqui und Moderni’; and Curtius, European Literature, pp. 251-5 and passim.

4. The most important of these recent treatments are by Krauss, Kortum, Jauss, Kapitza, Lachterman, and Levine (see as well Meyer, ‘Recent German studies’).

5. Narratives of these events can be found in Rigault and Gillot; Perrault himself described his poem's reception in his Memoirs, p. 115. For Huet's belief that (pace Fontenelle) modern trees (as well as men) are actually meaner than those of antiquity, see Huetiana, pp. 26-30.

6. Thus Temple suggested that the French Moderns adopted their opinions ‘at first only to make their court, and at second hand to flatter those who flattered their king’ (Works, III, p. 473), and Jean Le Clerc wrote from Amsterdam in 1699 in an effort to explain ‘the decay of belles-lettres’ by reference to the Quarrel: ‘No one will any longer listen to those who quote antiquity and who have principles independent of the will of the sovereign’ (Parrhasiana, I, pp. 259-60). The class bases of the French Quarrel have been analysed by Kortum (Perrault und Boileau) and Niderst (Fontenelle, pp. 365-99); the same analysis has long been given of Boileau's forebears, the humanists of the Renaissance, of whom Felix Gilbert observes, ‘they hardly ever took part at a policymaking level … There remained a gap between the humanists and the ruling classes of their time’ (‘Bernardo Ruccelai’, p. 242).

7. In Britain defenders of Christian epic and marvels could of course point to the example of Milton, rapidly becoming a classic, but Modern principles were none the less felt to require defence in John Dennis's Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) and Richard Blackmore's Essay upon Epick Poetry (1716).

8. Perrault had models for this procedure of systematic comparison through assembly of long lists of ancient and modern accomplishments in Alessandro Tassoni's Pensieri diversi (1620), Book X, George Hakewill's Apologie of the Power and Providence of God (1627), and Joseph Glanvill's Plus Ultra: or, the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the Days of Aristotle (1668); the Parallèle would itself serve as a model for Wotton's Reflections (1694) and Vico's De mente heroica (1732). On the Renaissance origins of this rhetorical procedure, see Black, ‘Ancients and Moderns’.

9. ‘Pourquoy voulez-vous Mr le President que l'Eloquence & la Poësie n'ayent pas eu besoin d'autant de siecles pour se perfectionner que la Physique & l'Astronomie? Le coeur de l'homme qu'il faut connoistre pour le persuader [rhetoric] & pour luy plaire [poetry], est-il plus aisé à penetrer que les secrets de la Nature … où l'on découvre tous les jours quelque chose de nouveau [?]’ The ancients knew nature and ‘les passions de l'ame’ ‘en gros’, to which we have added a more detailed knowledge and thousands of ‘belles & curieuses découvertes’, to be found especially in the novels, tragedies, and moral treatises of our (seventeenth-century) authors (II, pp. 29-31).

10. Ancients and Moderns both agreed that the epic must be, in Le Bossu's phrase, a ‘corps de doctrine’; to Desmarets, the epic poet must know and teach ‘history, geography, astronomy, matters of nature, logic, ethics, rhetoric, fables, agriculture, architecture, painting, sculpture, perspective and music’. For Perrault, ‘Un Poëte & particulierement un Poëte épique doit parler pertinemment de toutes les matieres qu'il traite dans son poëme, ou bien il se mesle d'un métier dont il est indigne. Il faut qu'il connoisse les choses de la Nature’—from which Perrault draws the conclusion that progress since antiquity has rendered absurd the view that ‘Homere n'a rien ignoré des choses de la Nature, & qu'il est le pere de tous les Arts’ (III, pp. 93, 95). Perrault like Fontenelle borrows his criticism of Homer's formal and ethical defects in comparison with Virgil from Vida's De arte poetica (1527) and especially J. C. Scaliger's Poetices libri septem (1561); what is new in both is the detailed criticism of Homer's science.

11. Especially in Dialogue III, between Socrates and Montaigne, in which Socrates argues, ‘Est-ce que la nature s'est épuisée, et qu'elle n'a plus la force de produire ces grandes âmes? Et pourquoi se serait-elle encore épuisée en rien, hormis en hommes raisonnables?’ (Oeuvres, II, p. 190).

12. Digression, pp. 364-5, 368. By the time of his later Sur la poésie en général (published 1751), Fontenelle concluded that poetic progress remains possible: see Krauss, Fontenelle, Preface. Perrault's and Fontenelle's defences of vernacular forms continued humanist defences of modernity as these were conducted in the Renaissance phase of the quarrel: see Baron, ‘The querelle’, and Gravelle, ‘The Latin-Vernacular Question’.

13. Cependant, afin que les Modernes puissent toujours enchérir sur les Anciens, il faut que les choses soient d'une espèce à le permettre. L'Eloquence & la Poësie ne demandent qu'un certain nombre de vûes assez borné par rapport à d'autres Arts, & elles dépendent principalement de la vivacité de l'imagination. Or les hommes peuvent avoir amassé en peu de siècles un petit nombre de vûes; & la vivacité de l'imagination n'a pas besoin d'une longue suite d'expériences, ni d'une grande quantité de règles, pour avoir toute la perfection dont celle est capable. Mais la Physique, la Médecine, les Mathématiques, sont composées d'un nombre infini de vûes, & dependent de la justesse du raisonnement, qui se perfectionne toujours … Il est evident que tout cela n'a point de fin, & que les derniers Physiciens ou Mathématiciens devront naturellement être les plus habiles.

    (p. 357; trans. Hughes, p. 362, altered)

14. On the extent to which Perrault's Parallèle suggests the new division of knowledge, see Davidson, ‘Realignment of the arts’. (In his Cabinet des Beaux-Arts (1690), a catalogue of these arts as they were represented in allegorical paintings on the ceiling of a room in his house, Perrault listed together eloquence, poetry, music, architecture, painting, and sculpture, but also optics, mechanics, and the crafts (pp. 1-2)). R. S. Crane discusses Bacon's contribution to the new division, his distinction between the disciplines of ‘cultivation’ and those of ‘invention’ or ‘increase’, in The Idea of the Humanities, I, pp. 55-72; see also Levine, Humanism and History, ch. 5.

15. Wotton writes in his Reflections:

    of [kinds of knowledge] there are two sorts: One, of those wherein the gravest part of those Learned Men who have compared Ancient and Modern Performances, either give up the Cause to the Ancients quite, or think, at least, that the Moderns have not gone beyond them. The other of those, where the Advocates for the Moderns think the Case so clear on their Side, that they wonder how any Man can dispute it with them. Poesie, Oratory, Architecture, Painting, and Statuary, are of the First Sort: Natural History, Physiology, and Mathematicks, with all their Dependencies, are of the second.

    (p. 19)

    Gildon draws a similar division in his Miscellaneous Letters and Essays of the same year.

16. Spadafora surveys eighteenth-century usage of these terms in Progress, pp. 26-34. Because the term ‘art’ continued even in the early nineteenth century to suggest, in d'Alembert's words, ‘any system of knowledge which can be reduced to positive and invariable rules independent of caprice or opinion’ (‘On peut en général donner le nom Art à tout système de connoissances qu'il est possible de réduire à des regles positives’) (Preliminary Discourse, p. 40), Goethe was to deny that poetry is an ‘art’ (see Kristeller, ‘Modern system’, p. 222). By 1750 the older phrase ‘natural philosophy’ had been supplemented by ‘natural science’ and ‘exact science’; the unmodified singular ‘science’ appears first to have gained its limited modern sense of biology, chemistry, physics (and studies that model themselves on these) in England, in the context of professional societies such as the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded 1831; see Ross, ‘Scientist’).

17. The role of the Quarrel in the emergence of ‘aesthetics’—essentially a Modern category—has been examined by Kristeller, ‘The modern system’; Saisselin, ‘Critical reflections’; and Patey, ‘The canon’. Eighteenth-century architects of the ‘aesthetic’ such as Addison and Baumgarten are thus primarily engaged in theorizing distinctions which were already emerging in the previous century and were first given a rationale by Perrault and Fontenelle.

18. ‘Le temps fait sans cesse éclore de nouvelles découvertes dans les sciences; mais la poësie, la peinture, la musique, ont un point fixe, que le génie des langues, l'imitation de la nature, la sensibilité limitée de nos organes déterminent; qu'elles atteignent à pas lents et qu'elles ne peuvent passer. Les grands-hommes du siècle d'Auguste y arrivèrent et sont encore nos modèles.’ ‘Discours’, p. 78.

19. Reflections, II, p. 325 (‘ils apprendront seulement à connoître la cause d'un effet qu'on sentoit déjà’: III, p. 467). For Pope as well, ‘Rules were made but to promote their End’; where writers have succeeded in achieving their ends, rules (‘unseen, but in th'Effects’) are to be conjectured (‘Just Precepts thus from great Examples giv'n’) (Essay on Criticism, ll. 147, 79, 98). For Richard Hurd, ‘Rules themselves are indeed nothing else but an appeal to experience; conclusions drawn from wide and general observation of the aptness and efficacy of certain means to produce those impressions’; Hurd presents critical method as the analogue of inductive generalization in experimental science (Works, I, pp. 390-2).

20. Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, pp. 59-60; Addison, Spectator 413:

    Though in Yesterday's Paper we considered how every thing that is Great, New, or Beautiful, is apt to affect the Imagination with Pleasure, we must own that it is impossible for us to assign the necessary Cause of this Pleasure, because we know neither the Nature of an Idea, nor the Substance of a Human Soul, which might help us to discover the Conformity or Disagreeableness of the one to the other; and therefore, for want of such a Light, all that we can do in Speculations of this kind, is to reflect on those Operations of the Soul that are most agreeable, and to range, under their proper Heads, what is pleasing or displeasing to the Mind, without being able to trace out the several necessary and efficient Causes from whence the Pleasure or Displeasure arises.

    Hutcheson makes the same argument of the ‘sense of beauty’ in his Inquiry into … Beauty, ch. 1.

21. Gibbon, Essay, pp. 50, 51 (echoing Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.iii. 1-4); Burke, Reflections:

    The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science; because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning.

    (p. 53)

22. Fontenelle implies as much in contrasting the ‘endless’ disputes of ‘rhetoric’ with the terminable disagreements of ‘science’; not only is the former the traditional home of the merely probable (opinion), but Fontenelle describes the main ‘trick of eloquence’ as balancing opinions on both sides of a question (p. 360)—a fair description of argument in utramque partem as Academic sceptics such as Cicero understood it, and a method that yields only probabilities. (See Patey, Probability, ch. 1, and on the connection of imagination and opinion, pp. 134-6.)

23. Reflections, pp. 77-8 (Addison makes the same division in the Spectator, no. 160). In including music with arithmetic and geometry, Wotton has in mind musica theoretica—the study of ratios and other numeric relations—rather than musica practica (composition and performance).

24. ‘On Attachment to the Ancients’, in Letters, pp. 18-19 (Aikin of course calls on the famous phrase for cumulative progress achieved by building on the work of predecessors whose long history is traced in, among others, Merton's On the Shoulders of Giants and Jones's Ancients and Moderns). Hazlitt makes the same point in his ‘Why the arts are not progressive?—a fragment’ (1814); indeed, he makes it the more clearly because by his time, the terms (as well as the categories) ‘art’ and ‘science’ had very nearly taken on their modern senses:

    the complaint itself, that the arts do not attain that progressive degree of perfection which might reasonably be expected from them, proceeds on a false notion, for the analogy appealed to in support of the regular advances of art to higher degrees of excellence, totally fails; it applies to science, not to art … What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde.

    (Round Table, pp. 160, 161)

25. Essay on Epick Poetry (1727), p. 38; Voltaire goes so far as to argue that

    An Epick poem is a Discourse in Verse. Use alone has prefix'd the Name of Epick, particularly to those Poems which relate some great action' (p. 39). Swift parodies arguments like Voltaire's in A Tale of a Tub: ‘But I here think fit to lay hold on that great and honourable Privilege of being the Last Writer; I claim an absolute Authority in Right, as the freshest Modern, which gives me a Despotick Power over all Authors before me.

    (p. 130)

26. Preliminary Discourse, p. 60 (‘Quand on considère les progrès de l'esprit depuis cette époque mémorable, on trouve que ces progrès se sont faits dans l'ordre qu'ils devoient naturellement suivre. On a commencé par l'Erudition, continué par les Belles-lettres, & fini par la Philosophie’).

27. See Crane, Humanities, I, pp. 73-4, 87-8 and, on the older history these writers replace, Gombrich, ‘Artistic progress’.

28. Trans. Hughes, pp. 359-64 (‘La poésie, au contraire, n'était bonne à rien, et ça a toujours été la même chose dans toutes sortes de gouvernement: ce vice-là est bien essentiel’: p. 359).

29. See Le Clerc, Parrhasiana I, pp. 28-9; Pons, Dissertation sur le poème épique, in Oeuvres, pp. 143-4; and Cartaud de la Villate, Essai sur le goût.

30. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, p. 33. Much earlier Alexander Pope registered his awareness of the Moderns' division of labour (and made full use of the new notion, first so named by Mandeville, to castigate their reduction of learning and the arts to trades). He writes in Peri Bathous (1728): ‘our Art ought to be put upon the same foot with other Arts of this age. The vast improvement of modern manufactures ariseth from their being divided into several branches, and parcel'd out to several trades … To this œconomy we owe the perfection of our modern watches; and doubtless we also might that of our modern Poetry and Rhetoric, were the several parts branched out in the like manner’ (p. 242).

31. Bergk, Die Kunst, p. 176. It was in the old sense of belles-lettres—inclusive of all the ‘sciences’, especially historical learning—that the ‘Little Academy’, founded by Colbert in 1663, changed its name in 1716 to that of Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres; by the time of d'Alembert, the term has shrunk: ‘On a réservé le nom de science pour les connoissances qui ont plus immédiatement besoin du raisonnement & de la réflexion, telles que la Physique, les Mathématiques, &c & celui de belles-lettres pour les productions agréables de l'esprit, dans lesquelles l'imagination a plus de part, telles que l'Eloquence, la Poésie, &c.’ (Encyclopédie, s.v. ‘Erudition’).

32. ‘An Essay’ (first published in Temple's 1690 Miscellanea), in Works, III, pp. 463, 431. On Burnet's Modern argument in the Sacred Theory (published first in Latin in 1681 and 1684, then in English in 1684 and 1690), see Tuveson.

33. By ‘magic’ Temple means what since the Middle Ages was called ‘natural magic’, an applied natural philosophy crucial in the development of modern science (see Hutchison, ‘Occult qualities’, and Eaman, Science). In denying the significance of the lodestone (and later suggesting that the ancients themselves perhaps possessed explosives), Temple calls in question what for centuries had been the trinity of great modern inventions: printing, gunpowder, and the compass (see Wolper, ‘The rhetoric of gunpowder’).

34. Temple, ‘Some thoughts upon reviewing the essay of Ancient and Modern Learning’, Works, III, pp. 472, 481 (Temple does distinguish the ‘arts’ of ‘pleasure’ and of ‘use’, but this does not correspond to Wotton's division); Wotton, A Defence of the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1705; rpt in the Guthkelch and Nicol Smith edition of Swift's Tale), p. 316.

35. Swift, Tale, pp. 93-5, 246, 240, 232 (Aesop returns to the question of ‘method’: ‘Erect your Schemes with as much Method and Skill as you please’ (p. 234). The fullest explication of Swift's satire on critics remains Starkman, Swift's Satire on Learning, now supplemented by Real's edition of ‘The Battle’; a narrative of the quarrel leading up to ‘The Battle’, with full bibliography, may be found in Guthkelch's 1908 edition. Throughout the Tale, Swift ignores the new division of knowledge; later, in Gulliver, he would make it a specific target of his satire on the Moderns (see Patey, ‘Swift's satire on “science”’).

36. Temple, III, p. 461 (‘For the books we have in prose, do any of the moderns we converse with appear of such a spirit and force, as if they would live longer than the ancients have done?’); on Petrarch, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 211-17.

37. On the emergence of this split within humanism, see Grafton, ‘Renaissance readers’, and Wencelius, ‘La querelle’; G. W. Pigman argues from numerous examples, however, that for most Renaissance readers, ‘when a historical awareness of the difference between present and past threatens to subvert the exemplarity of history, the past loses some of its difference, not its exemplarity’ (‘Imitation’, p. 177). Eisenstein connects the Quarrel with the spread of print in The Printing Press, pp. 289-90; Ancients such as Swift and Pope throughout works such as A Tale and the Dunciad register their uncomfortable awareness of an explosion in the number, availability, and new composition of printed books, and Temple had already noted with concern how the numbers of ungentle ‘porers upon books’ had grown in England in the past ‘fifty years’ (‘I have had several servants far gone in divinity, others in poetry; have known, in the families of some friends, a keeper deep in the Rosycrucian principles, and a laundress firm in those of Epicurus’: ‘Of Poetry’, in Works, III, pp. 426-7).

38. Mably, Observations, prefatory epistle (‘ce seroit un grand malheur si on se lassoit d'étudier les Grecs et les Romains; l'histoire de ces deux peuples est une grande école de morale et de politique’.

39. Wotton, History, and Temple, An Introduction to the History of England (1695), quoted in Levine, Humanism, pp. 172, 166; Sidney, Defense of Poesy, quoted in Tinkler, ‘Splitting of humanism’, p. 461.

40. Le Clerc, Parrhasiana, I, pp. 223-4; Bayle, Dictionnaire, s.v. ‘Alegambe’ (note D), ‘Meziriac’ (note C). Cf. Swift in A Tale on ‘Criticks and Wits’, into ‘which two Factions, I think, all present Readers may justly be divided’ and who differ over their ‘Way of using Books’ (pp. 131-2, 145).

41. Gibbon's self-conscious attempt to reconcile Ancient and Modern is traced by Levine in Humanism and History, ch. 7, and Porter, Gibbon, ch. 1; on Ancient vs Modern theories of history in France, see Gossman, Medievalism, pp. 107-25.

42. Mlle Delaunay, quoted in Tilley, Decline, p. 349.

43. Des causes, p. 11; Homère défendu, p. 4; The Iliad, I, p. i.

44. Mme Dacier, quoted in Tilley, p. 348 (‘Un géomètre! quel fléau pour la poésie qu'un géomètre!’); Terrasson, La Philosophie, pp. 120, 21.

45. Terrasson, Critical Dissertations, I, p. xxxiii; I, p. lxi; Dissertation critique, I, p. li.

46. See the surveys by Foerster, Hepp, and Simonsuuri.

47. Written in the mid-1690s, d'Aubignac's Conjectures académiques, ou dissertation sur l'Iliade were twice suppressed by the state before appearing posthumously in 1715; they were, however, widely circulated, and were known both to Perrault and later to Bentley, who for a time planned a new edition of Homer which would reflect his acceptance of d'Aubignac's view that the Homeric poems were merely a collection assembled at the time of Pisistratus.

48. Boileau, Réflexions critiques sur quelques passages du rhéteur Longin, in Oeuvres, V, pp. 83, 97. On the uses of ‘taste’ in this context, see Moriarty, Taste and Ideology, and the introduction to this volume, pp. 14-15 above.

49. In La Manière de bien penser (1687)—a work thought by many to continue the arguments of Boileau's Art poétique—when Philanthe defends the right of each nation to its own literary taste, Bouhours gives his own spokesman Eudoxe, the defender of classical standards, a crushing reply in the name of universal ‘raison’ (p. 41). It was this work, J. G. Robinson has argued, through its parallel of historical and cultural difference and defence of classical French taste against Italian ‘tinsel’, that brought the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns to Italy (Studies in the Genesis, pp. 6-15).

50. Dacier, L'Iliade, p. xxv; Boivin, Apologie d'Homère, quoted in Lombard, p. 24; Dacier, p. xxiv. Vyverberg has recently provided a survey of Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment, though without mention of the Quarrel.

51. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, II, p. 394; Montesquieu, ‘Mes pensées’, in Oeuvres, p. 1,023; Rollin, Manière d'enseigner les belles lettres, p. 400; Gibbon, Essay on the Study of Literature, pp. 25, 91. Wellek lists further British instances in Literary History, pp. 52-4. For the development of this hermeneutic in Germany, see Reill, Historicism, esp. pp. 109-18; according to Bergk, proper reading of a text ‘places our minds in the same state as that of its creator when he brought it into being’ (Kunst, p. 200).

52. Fénelon writes to Du Bos in 1713:

    Je suis ravi de ce qu'il travaille à nous donner une édition de l'Iliade, mais s'il y change tout ce qui n'est pas accommodé aux moeurs et aux préjugés des modernes, son Iliade sera la sienne et non celle du poète grec. … Ce que je souhaite, par zèle pour le public et pour le traducteur, c'est qu'il ne diminue rien de cette simplicité originale, de ce degré de naturel, de ces caractères forts et ingénus, qui peignent les temps, qui sont historiques et qui font tant de plaisir.

    (Quoted in Lombard, pp. 24-5)

53. Perrault, Parallèle, II, pp. 5, 12; III, p. 62; Dacier, L'Iliade, I, p. xxxviii (‘Un traducteur peut dire en prose tout ce qu'Homère a dit’). La Motte elsewhere defines poetry in terms that specifically exclude metre: ‘la poésie, qui n'est autre chose que la hardiesse des pensées, la vivacité des images et l'énergie de l'expression, demeurera toujours ce qu'elle est indépendamment de toute mesure’ (Oeuvres, III, p. 31).

54. Roy Porter explains this difference by reference as well to the relatively more highly developed professionalization of historical study in early eighteenth-century France, where historical research and publication were actively sponsored not only by the Catholic Church but also through prestigious professional societies such as the Académie des Inscriptions and their subsidized learned journals; in England at the same time no such societies or journals existed, and even in the universities historical study languished (Gibbon, pp. 31-8).

55. Du Bos, Reflections, II, pp. 356-7; Batteux, Les Beaux Arts, p. 108: ‘Serons-nous assez hardis, pour préférer celui que nous avons à des autres, & pour les condamner? Ce seroit une témérité, & même une injustice parce que les Goûts en particulier peuvent être différens, ou même opposés, sans cesser d'être bons en soi.’ Dr Johnson's well-known historical scepticism (‘Why, Sir, we know very little about the Romans’; ‘That certain Kings reigned and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture’) may be explained in part as an attempt to counter the threat of human difference lurking within historicism, and so to shore up the continuing relevance of ancient literature.

56. In an extended example, Du Bos traces Galileo's, Torricelli's, and Pascal's experiments leading to the theory of the vacuum, concluding: ‘This is an uncontestable proof that the learned did not proceed from one principle to another, and in a speculative way to the discovery of this truth’ (II, p. 340). The new ‘philosophical spirit’ of the ‘geometricians’, he writes in a passage that could come from Vico (or from Swift on his Laputans), has in fact retarded progress: it has caused ‘necessary arts [to be] neglected; the most useful systems for the preservation of society abolished; and speculative reasonings preferred to practice. We behave without any regard to experience, the best director of mankind’ (p. 331).

57. II, p. 357 (prejudice), p. 355 (authority), pp. 356-8 (the judgment of taste), p. 326 (fashion). Du Bos (like other Ancients who considered the question, such as Jonathan Swift) thus comes closer to that view of science which has emerged in the late twentieth century than do Moderns such as Wotton, who speculates in the Reflections that, given the wealth of new discoveries and theorizing that had followed development of proper method, natural science may soon like poetry be complete: ‘such Swarms of Great men in every Part of Natural and Mathematical Knowledge have within these few Years appeared, that it may, perhaps, without Vanity, be believed, that … the next Age will not find very much Work of this Kind to do’ (p. 348). Cf. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and David Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1958), pp. 44-5.

58. ‘… l'esprit philosophique … il faut bien ne le confondre avec l'esprit de calcul, qui de sa nature est renfermé dans un cercle, au delà duquel on ne doit pas lui permettre de s'étendre. Nous ne dissimulerons pas que notre siècle commence à perdre de vûe cette distinction; & qu'à force de piquer d'être Géomètre, ou plustôt de vouloir tout ramener au calcul, d'en appliquer par-tout la méthode, de l'ériger en instrument universel, il cesse presque d'être Philosophe … les Lettres sont la seule barrière qui puisse arrêter les progrès du faux bel esprit, & borner les conquêtes de l'esprit de calcul: l'un cherche à nous séduire; l'autre voudroit nous subjuger. Les lettres, en maintenant le goût du vrai que les Anciens nous ont donné, nous enseigneront à ne pas prendre pour de l'or le clinquant du premier: elles nous enseigneront de même à contenir le second dans les limites …’ (pp. 23-4, 36).

59. Juvigny, Décadence, pp. 348, 385 (he adds on p. 476: ‘the more the positive sciences, geometry, algebra, and mathematics, and the rest, rise and become perfected, the more we lose in sentiment, the more taste will be lost, the more letters will waste away, and the more genius for the fine arts will die’); Bonald, Oeuvres, pp. 394-6 (‘les sciences exactes et naturelles’).

60. Gibbon, Essay, pp. 4, 11, 45-51. (We can most clearly see Gibbon falling prey to the conflicts when, having spent many pages demonstrating the use of historically informed ‘criticism’ through a reading of Virgil's Georgics, he can conclude no more than that understanding the poet's historical context shows us Virgil was not a ‘mere Writer’: p. 44.) On this debate in France see, besides Starobinski, Lorimer, ‘A neglected aspect of the “Querelle”’, and Seznec, ‘Le Singe antiquaire’; it had its German equivalent in the reaction against Wolff and his school, under whose influence, according to the great jurist Pütter, writers ‘began to neglect languages, philology, antiquities, history, experience, observations, laws, and sources of all kinds whose mastery was more difficult than just considering postulated definitions and demonstrations’ (Litterature, I, p. 445).

61. I, pp. 4-10 (ennui); II, p. 382: ‘the merit of things in poetry is almost always identified (if I be allowed the expression) with the merit of expression’, echoing Mme Dacier (‘Jamais poète ne paraîtra excellent poète, indépendamment de l'expression’: Corruption, p. 164).

62. Rigault, Histoire, ch. 7; Jauss, ‘Schiller und Schlegel’.

63. ‘Thoughts on the imitation of the painting and sculpture of the Greeks’ (1755), p. 33.

64. Nisber, German Criticism, p. 3.

65. Akenside's essay is discussed by Spadafora in Progress (pp. 67-8); on Voltaire's concern with the Quarrel over half a century, see David Williams, Voltaire. Spadafora provides ample evidence that the Quarrel occupied Britain throughout the eighteenth century (Progress, ch. 1); see Lorimer and Kapitza for France and Germany, respectively.

66. Richardson's contribution to the Conjectures was first made clear by McKillop in ‘Richardson, Young, and the Conjectures’.

67. Richardson, Correspondence, IV, p. 287, quoted in Watt, Rise of the Novel, p. 243.

68. Medievalism, p. 334. On the ‘Gothic’, see Peter Sabor's contribution in this volume; on Vico's Homeric studies as a novel reconciliation of Ancient and Modern, see Levine, ‘Vico and the Quarrel’.

69. Letter to Evan Evans, Correspondence, p. 31. On mixture and confusion of Norse and Celtic materials, see Snyder, Celtic Revival, pp. 9-12.

70. Shenstone to Percy, 10 Nov. 1760, in Letters, p. 401; Warton, History, I, p. 434. On eighteenth-century reconsiderations of Spenser, culminating in Richard Hurd's reclassification of The Faerie Queene ‘as a Gothic, not a classic poem’, see Johnston, Enchanted Ground, pp. 62-5.

71. Johnston surveys theories of the origin of romance from Huet to Walter Scott in Enchanted Ground, ch. 1.

72. The phrases are Sabathier de Castres's, from his Les trois siècles de la littérature françoise (1773), quoted in Gossman, Medievalism, pp. 340-1.

73. Addison, Spectator nos. 70, 74 (1711). Evans and Percy take the word ‘ancient’ for their titles from James Macpherson's first Ossianic volume, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760).

74. Reflections, II, p. 95 (‘Avant que d'entrer en matière, je dois demander à mon lecteur qu'il me soit permis de prendre ici le mot de siècle dans une signification un peu différente de celle qu'il doit avoir à la rigueur. Le mot de siècle pris dans son sens précis, signifie une durée de cent années, & quelquefois je l'employerai pour signifier une durée de soixante ou de soixante & dix ans’: Réflexions, II, p. 135).

75. On the emergence of periodization, see Bergner, Formalism, ch. 2, and (on the ‘four stages’ theory of the conjectural historians in particular) Meek, Social Science; on changes in the meaning of ‘culture’ (especially in Germany), see Kroeber, and Kluckhohn, Culture, pt. 1. P. H. Reill traces the emergence of German historicism in the context both of the Quarrel and of the rise of ‘aesthetics’ in Historicism.

76. Herder writes with bitter irony of one ‘Latin Perrault’, Christian Klotz, who had presumed to praise Homer: ‘Such praise has a monstrous dimension; for if Homer is indeed a supreme power and a measure, as it were, of the human mind, then it seems that the one who is able to judge and criticise him must be altogether superhuman! … In this case, I step back in order to admire the critical god’ (quoted in Menges, ‘Herder’, pp. 160-1).

77. ‘Shakespeare’, p. 162; ‘Ossian’, p. 159. Within a tradition both understanding and evaluation are possible: Herder says of Shakespeare, ‘Happy am I that, though time is running out, I still live at a time when it is possible for me to understand him’ (p. 176).

78. Blackwell, Homer, p. 28 (Hume develops the same view in ‘Of eloquence’, Gibbon in his Essay on Literature, pp. 21-3); Hurd, Letters on Chivalry, p. 120; Voltaire, letter to Frederick the Great, quoted in Williams, Voltaire, p. 111; Herder, quoted in Menges, ‘Herder’, p. 169. Judith Plotz surveys such ideas in Britain, 1700-1830, in Ideas of Decline.

79. Stephen, History of English Thought, I, p. 355. On the history of ‘Augustan’ in England and recent debate surrounding its use, see Johnson, Weinbrot, and Erskine-Hill; no similar studies exist of the term in other literatures, or in the non-literary arts (Schueller cites references to an ‘Augustan age’ of music in ‘The Quarrel’, p. 326).

80. See Howarth, ‘Neo-classicism’—who in 1978 finds that term not yet fully established in French studies—and Wellek, ‘The term and concept of classicism’ and ‘French classicist criticism’, who traces the importance of political conservatives such as Charles Maurras and Julien Benda (and in England T. S. Eliot and T. E. Hulme) in finally establishing ‘classicism’.

81. On the invention of ‘preromanticism’ see Scouten, ‘The Warton forgeries’, and for criticisms of the concept Miller, ‘Whig interpretation’, pp. 78-9, and Stone, Art of Poetry, pp. 84-97. After some twenty years of suspicion, testimony to the term's reviving popularity in English may be found in Rolf Lessenich's Aspects of English Preromanticism (1989), J. R. Watson's Pre-Romanticism in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (1989), and Marshall Brown's Preromanticism (1991).