SOURCE: Davidson, James W. “Criticism and Self-Knowledge in Shaftesbury's Soliloquy.” Enlightenment Essays 5, no. 2 (summer 1974): 50-61.

[In the essay below, Davidson examines Shaftesbury's ideas about self-examination, criticism of society, and the control of the irrational.]

In the second treatise of the Characteristics, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, Shaftesbury proposes that criticism of self and society, regulated by the standard of taste—“common sense”—be initiated through literature. If poets are “to ridicule folly, and recommend wisdom and virtue (if possibly they can) in a way of pleasantry and mirth,” then they must acquire “knowledge of our passions in their very seeds, the measuring well the growth and progress of enthusiasm, and the judging rightly of its natural force, and what command it has over our very senses” (Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed John M. Robertson with an introduction by Stanley Grean, 2 Vols. in one (New York, 1964), I, 89; I, 31. All references to the Characteristics are to this edition). They must acquire self-knowledge. And following his own advice in the Essay to utilize whatever part of the past is valuable (I, 59-61) Shaftesbury recommends that the model for self-examination be dramatic soliloquy.

The language in which the recommendation is introduced suggests an absence of seriousness. But the wit is a sign of anxiety because it is a reply to several relevant criticisms of Collier in A Defence of the Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage. When Shaftesbury writes,

For whether the practice (of soliloquy) be natural or no, in respect of common custom and usage, I take upon me to assert, that it is an honest and laudable practice; and that if already it be not natural to us, we ought however to make it so, by study and application

(I, 106),

he is replying to Collier's criticism of Congreve's use of the word “Inspiration.” (A Defence in A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage with the Several Defences of the Same, 5th Ed. (1730), p. 227. All references to Collier and Congreve in this passage are to p. 227 of A Defence.) Congreve had replied to Collier's charge of profanity by making a distinction between religious and non-religious senses of “inspiration.” But Collier denied the distinction: “all people,” he wrote, “that talk English know that inspiration, when it stands without epithets and addition, is always taken in a religious signification.” He rejects etymology and insists upon the criterion of common usage:

Thus when words are made inclosure, when they are restrain'd by common usage, and ty'd up to a particular sense: in this case to run up to etymology, and construe them by dictionary and preposition, is wretchedly ridiculous and pedantick.

Now Congreve had argued that when “inspiration” is not prefixed by “Divine,” “to inspire, is no more than to breath (sic) into; and a trumpet, etc. may be said, without profaneness, to deliver a musical sound by the help of inspiration.” Shaftesbury's reference to soliloquy as “bestowing a little breath and clear voice purely upon ourselves” (I, 106) is a defense of the etymological meaning of “inspiration” (=enthusiasm) and a rejection of Collier's position that “custom … gives law to language.”

Shaftesbury's ridicule of Collier is an instance of his comparative procedure in the Characteristics whereby use is distinguished from abuse; here, Shaftesbury's language provides a model for the language of advice, to be contrasted with the language of controversial writing. But the criticism of Collier is also integral to the argument of Soliloquy, for the purpose of soliloquy is to control “inspiration” or “enthusiams”—to ensure that inspiration is “rational” because “when the party is struck by the apparition, there follows always an itch of imparting it, and kindling the same fire in other breasts. For thus poets are fanatics too” (I, 36). Soliloquy is a necessary method of self-criticism whereby the irrational is controlled.

When Soliloquy was written contemporary drama had been recently defended as a means of social reform. Richard Flecknoe, for example, had argued in A Short Discourse of the English Stage (1664) that “its chieftest end is to render folly ridiculous, vice odious, and vertue and noblesse so amiable and lovely, as every one shu'd be delighted and enamoured with it …” (In Critical essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (1908; rpt. Bloomington, Indiana, 1957), II, 96). Temple had pointed out on Of Poetry (1690) its usefulness as a social control (Spingarn, III, 109); Farquhar in “A Discourse Upon Comedy, in Reference to the English Stage” (1702) had defined comedy as “no more at present than a well-framed tale handsomely told as an agreeable vehicle for counsel or reproff …” (In Eighteenth Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge, 2 vols. (Ithaca, New York, 1961), I, 91). And critics, also, had pointed to the need for self criticism. Roscommon, for example, had recommended in An Essay on Translated Verse (1684) that

The first great work (a Task perform'd by few)
Is that your self may to your be True:
No Masque, no Tricks, no Favour, no Reserve;
Dissect your Mind, examine ev'ry Nerve.

(Spingarn, II, 299)

What Shaftesbury does in Soliloquy is to suggest a specific way in which literature can initiate a habit of self-criticism. Literature is to serve as a means to thinking of the world as a stage (I, 109) on which everyone wishes to become, like Shaftesbury,

a worthy spectator of things so goodly to contemplate: and not only a spectator, but an actor, such as Thou wouldst have me to be in this Thy theatre. Let my entire applause accompany whatever is there produced; as knowing whence it comes, and to what perfection it contributes.

(This passage occurs in a prayer published in F. H. Heinemann, “The Philosopher of Enthusiasm, with material hitherto unpublished, “Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 6 (1952), 317.

Drama is to become the model of interior dialogue by means of which the spectator understands his relation to the whole and, therefore, pursues pleasure of a “rational” kind.

The pursuit of pleasure of the right kind is Shaftesbury's anxious concern because he believes, following Locke, that the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain motivates action. The problem has been explained by Jean Starobinski as follows:

(For the eighteenth century) nothing is more variable than our consciousness of existing, and nothing is more necessary than to try to vary our sensations and thereby to multiply our ideas. An unoccupied mind is in a sense annihilated. Fortunately, natural human impatience and uneasiness never leave us in peace: we are forever urged to escape from the anxiety of emptiness and to seek, through outside sensations and fleeting thoughts, a fullness and intensity that must be continually renewed.

… from the very beginning (of the eighteenth century) the work of art was given the psychological function of exciting the emotions through surprise and intensity … aesthetic emotion was merely one of the resources which men used excessively in order to intensify and stimulate the momentary joy of sensing their own vital existence.

(The Invention of Liberty: 1700-1789, trans. Bernard Swift [Geneva, 1964], pp. 10-11.)

Following Locke and DuBos this interpretation of the psychological function of eighteenth century art identifies precisely that kind of pleasure from which Shaftesbury wishes to free his contemporaries: “the abhorrence of an insensible state makes mere vitality and animal sensation highly cherished.” (I, 203)

That people seek pleasure does not, in itself, explain Shaftesbury's anxiety. That they live in growing cities, have leisure time, and interact in groups begins to explain it. Soliloquy, Shaftesbury argues, will prevent embarrassment in company; but this is by no means his main concern. The social problem which Shaftesbury confronts is stated by Addison in his second essay on the “Pleasures of the Imagination” (Spectator,No. 411):

There are, indeed, but very few who know how to be idle and innocent, or have a relish of any pleasures that are not criminal; every diversion they take is at the expense of some one virtue or another, and their very first step out of business is into vice or folly.

On Shaftesbury's view of the connatural idea of sympathy, company will be sought. If, as a result of pedantry and bigotry (I, 50-51) conversation is found unpleasant, pleasure will be pursued elsewhere—in “sensual delights.” This behavior is for Shaftesbury socially dangerous:

In reality has not every fancy a like privilege of passing, if any single one be admitted upon its own authority? And what must be the issue of such an economy if the whole fantastic crew be introduced, and the door refused to none? What else is it than this management which leads to the most dissolute and profligate of characters?

(I, 201-202)

Soliloquy controls the passions so that the right company will be sought at the right time. It also prevents loss of identity: disgust with a succession of “irrational” pleasures (I, 200) can cause repression and repression, as Locke pointed out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a fragmenting of self:

But if it be possible for the same man to have distinct incommunicable consciousness at different times, it is past doubt the same man would at different times make different persons …

(2.27.20)

If a person has no fixed self but turns “on a sudden” from pursuing one pleasure to pursuing another he cannot “‘be depended on in friendship, society, and the commerce of life.’”

Shaftesbury's advice to authors rests on his belief that men must be reading (I, 173). To what does he attribute this necessity? He provides two different explanations of the motivation to action—anxiety and “common sense.” The first, argued in his notebooks, is Locke's; the second, argued in Soliloquy, is his own (contra Locke). In the Regimen Shaftesbury warns himself against “false sociableness,” “familiarity, and that sympathy of a wrong kind” (The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand [London, 1900], p. 144. References to the Philosophical Regiman are followed by the abbreviation PR. References to letters in Rand are followed by L,L). Such behavior, he argues, stems from not being able to “rest out of company,” that is, from what Locke describes as the “uneasiness of desire” (see PR, p. 144). As long as a person is a “disordered false self” his desire to read is motivated not by the desire for self-knowledge but by the desire to rid himself of self-consciousness. This kind of desire is satisfied by any object of (“false”) pleasure, e.g., the eager “hunt after conversations, parties, engagements, secrecies, confidences, and friendships of this wrong kind” (I, 144). Such desire undoubtedly accounts for the appeal of the puppet show at Bartholomew's Fair, “the diversion of seeing Bedlam,” and “the extraordinary inclination we have for amphitheatrical spectacles” (I, 176). And it accounts for indiscriminate reading, reading for excitement:

We go to plays or to other shows, and frequent the theatre as the booth. We read epics and dramatics as we do satires and lampoons; for we must of necessity know what wit as well as what scandal is stirring. Read we must; let writers be ever so indifferent.

(I, 173)

Shaftesbury attributes such reading to curiosity. But curiosity is a description of the desire for “irrational” pleasure.

Now Shaftesbury is concerned about this kind of reading because it develops a character of a certain kind. He sees the same disposition in seeking diversion by observing madmen as he does in reading “scurrilous, buffooning” satire: Malevolence. This is the “passion” which is to be purged by tragedy (see II, 319) and which, no doubt, accounts for the people's admiration of contemptuous representations of great men (I, 147). And he fears the indulgence of this passion because it will lead to the uncontrollability of all passions. If malevolence is not expressed in the reading of traveller's tales, the passion which it reinforces, wonder, is dangerous, for it is a false enthusiasm which can readily lead to atheism (I, 222) and to “enthusiasm of second hand.” The author, therefore, who accommodates his writing to his readers' false taste is sowing the seeds for social disorder.

In Soliloquy, however, Shaftesbury argues that the desire to read stems from innate admiration of beauty and that curiosity is a corruption of “common sense.” Action is not motivated by desire for stimulation but by desire for beauty:

Every one is a virtuoso of a higher or lower degree. Every one pursues a Grace and courts a Venus of one kind or another. The venustum, the honestum, the decorum of things will force its way. They who refuse to give it scope in the nobler subjects of a rational and moral kind will find its prevalency elsewhere in an inferior order of things.

(I, 92)

Curiosity about particulars—e.g., scandals disclosed in scurrilous satires, references to “inns and ordinaries, passage-boats and ferries, foul and fair weather, with all the particulars of the author's diet, habit of body, his personal dangers and mischances on land and sea” (I, 223)—is a result of not having developed the ability to find pleasure in the general:

They who overlook the main springs of action, and despise the thought of numbers and proportion in a life at large, will, in the mean particulars of it, by no less taken up and engaged, as either in the study of common arts, or in the care and culture of mere mechanic beauties.

(I, 92)

Finding pleasure in literature that deals with particulars, then, is analogous to finding pleasure in “cantonising” (I, 76). These pleasures imply the absence of the direction of the “conspiring virtue” by “right reason” (I, 75). But there is no contradiction in holding the position implied in the Regimen and the position argued in Soliloquy: because Shaftesbury is arguing for the connatural idea of common sense he suppresses the first view in Soliloquy.

The direction of the “conspiring virtue” by “right reason” is the function of dialogue. The interiorization of the Socratic dialogues creates in the reader a speculative habit; he learns to apply the dialogical method to himself, seeing himself in his “natural capacity” as one of the second characters and his best self as Socrates:

Whatever we employed in, whatever we set about, if once we had acquired the habit of this mirror we should, by virtue of the double reflection, distinguish ourselves into two different parties. And in this dramatic method, the work of self-inspection would proceed with admirable success.

(I, 128-29)

An objection to this part of the theory is that Shaftesbury gives no evidence of support the claim that one does, in fact, read the dialogues as allegories. But the objection can be met on two grounds:

(1) Shaftesbury is arguing that the ancient poets, following Horace's prescription to study the dialogues, read them in this way. That they did so is plausible given Shaftesbury's interpretation of their opinion that each person is born with and committed to his “genius” (I, 112);

(2) Shaftesbury is not arguing that his contemporaries do, in fact, read dialogues allegorically, but that they ought to. His urging the reader to practice soliloquy applies as well to the method of reading dialogue: “it is an honest and laudable practice; and … if already it be not natural to us, we ought however to make it so, by study and application. (I, 106).

Everyone in his “natural capacity” ought to see himself reflected in dialogue as both what he is and what he ought to be. The “second character” ought to function as a foil by means of which one discerns “the beauty of honesty, and the reality of those charms which before we understood not to be either natural or powerful” (I, 93). That it can do so follows from the doctrine of connatural goodness. The foil should jolt the mind out of moral complacency (I, 93) or self-deception (I, 115). But if miseducation and custom alienate a person from his best self, why, one might object, should Shaftesbury suppose that the corrupt man would see himself reflected in a second character? A direct confrontation by a philosopher using dialogue may “draw sound out of our breast, and instruct us to personate ourselves in the plainest manner” (I, 114); but in direct confrontation there can be no escaping the identification of self with the second character.

Shaftesbury is aware of the difficulties involved in applying the practice to the self for he recognizes the power both of self-deception (I,6) and of the association of ideas (I, 199). Custom and education are responsible for a partial scepticism (I, 56, 221) that not only exempts the “false jest” from criticism but the “false earnest” as well. Furthermore, self-criticism requires not only a powerful understanding, the possession of few (see I, 50), but patience, which is also wanting: “men love to take party instantly. They cannot bear being kept in suspense. The examination torments them.” (II, 7). Now Shaftesbury believes that all these difficulties can be overcome in and through the practice of soliloquy. However, his explanation of why dialogue is no longer a dominant form seems to suggest that there is a degree of corruption beyond which there can be no recovery of the best self: the “thorough profligate knave” seems to be too self-alienated to soliloquize.

But even though these objections to the possibility of developing the speculative habit can be met, the theory raises a major difficulty: the explanation of appropriating a work by sympathy is inconsistent with the function of soliloquy. Since the “passions” (=emotions, desire, will, beliefs) are continuously present they must be continuously controlled (I, 207-208):

Either I work upon my fancies, or they on me. If I give quarter, they will not. There can be no truce, no suspension of arms between us … For if the fancies are left to themselves, the government must of course be theirs. And then, what difference between such a state and madness?

(I, 208)

Now for Shaftesbury meaning is communicated by sympathy. But since the combat of the fancies by reason is never to be suspended, control must be interrupted. That sympathy ought to be interrupted by soliloquy while experiencing a work of art is suggested in Soliloquy:

Every pretty fancy is disturbed by it; every pleasure interrupted by it. The course of good-humour will hardly allow it, and the pleasantry of wit almost absolutely rejects it.

(I, 122)

In the Regimen the necessity for the interruption is explicitly prescribed, the response to a play serving as the model for the response to events in the world outside the theatre:

How is it, therefore, as to other fancies?—A king appears—and what then? So in a play a king appear, also guards, courtiers, lords, attendants.—But this is but a play. And what is this other? When the tragedy chances to be overmoving, and the action strikes us, do not we say to ourselves instantly, “This is but a play?” Is not this the correcting, redressing, rectifying part? And how does this part carry itself in that other play—the serious one of life?

(PR, p. 175)

This advice is inconsistent with Shaftesbury's analysis of tragic catharsis:

And the misfortunes naturally attending such excesses being justly applied, our passions, whilst in the strongest manner engaged and moved, are in the wholesomest and most effectual manner corrected and purged.

(II, 319)

The remainder of the passage from the Regimen (p. 175) calls into question drama as a source of knowledge; for control of one's response to the sight of a real king is not dependent upon having seen a tragedy and learned that the great are beset with “disorders and misery” (I, 143) and that therefore one ought to be content with one's position. The understanding of kingship is independent of viewing the play. What Shaftesbury is arguing in the passage is that there ought to be an analogous use of reason in both art and life. Now he does regard the theatre as the most important contemporary source of moral instruction (II, 314). And he does believe that the observed relation between virtue and vice is socially useful (I, 93). But he seems to find the primary significance of drama in it habituating the spectator to soliloquy (I, 128).

Soliloquy is a method of controlling the irrational: “our thoughts have generally such an obscure implicit language, that 'tis hardest thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly” (I, 113). “By this practice they conceal half their meaning …” (I, 123. Cf. I, 202). Through the discovery and control of meaning, soliloquy produces a rational self, governed by common sense, the expression of which is an ordered whole, the opposite of “the monstrous product of … a jumbled brain” (I, 48), and by means of soliloquy the spectator, contemplating the accurate and consistent representation of character, “the sublime of sentiments and action, [the contrast between] the beautiful [and] the deformed, the amiable [and] the odious” (I, 136), begins to recover his best self.

What holds the reader's attention? What is the “principle” upon which men ought to ground their “highest pleasure”? Shaftesbury describes it as “that consummate grace, that beauty of Nature, and that perfection of numbers” (I, 214): order, symmetry, proportion, harmony, honesty, goodness, truth, beauty, virtue, mind. “Poetical truth” is an expression of moral truth (I, 216). Although the reader's attention is held by “interior numbers” he does not necessarily know the cause of his pleasure:

the rest of mankind, feeling [the perfection of inward numbers] only by the effect whilst ignorant of the cause, term [it] the je ne scay quoy, the unintelligible or the I know not what, and suppose [it] to be a kind of charm or enchantment of which the artist himself can give not account.

(I, 214)

The charm is the “force of Nature,” “moral magic” (I, 90). What the reader does is suggested by the explanation of what the “admirers of beauty in the fair sex” admire:

were the subject to be well criticised we should find, perhaps, that what we most admired, even in the turn of outward feature, was only a mysterious expression, and a kind of shadow of something inward in the temper … our imagination being busied in forming beauteous shapes and images of this rational kind, which entertained the mind and held it in admiration, whilst other passions of a lower species were employed another way.

(I, 91)

The reader is sympathetically attracted to interior numbers. The attendant pleasure, if the cause is know, is the true joy of enthusiasm.

Now attention is of degrees. What, then, for Shaftesbury, is the relation between different degrees of attention and the unity of a work? In a letter to Pierre Coste he states that in dramatic performances music ought to accompany only the soliloquies and the chorus—“the more sedately passionate parts.” (L,L, p. 398) Now since he believes that music is an expression of “the passions,” (“the proportions and features of a human mind,” [I, 90] the morals of men [cf. I, 90-91]); and since he believes that men necessarily admire “that which is purely from itself, and of its own nature” (I, 90) it would seem to follow that to maintain optimum interest music should not be restricted to certain parts of the drama but should be continuous throughout the work. But since Shaftesbury follows Longinus in holding that “to be able to move others we must first be moved ourselves, or at least seem to be so, upon some probable grounds” (I, 6), music expressing intense passion at dispassionate moments of the drama (the recitative) will not sustain interest. The recitative, therefore, ought to “go on peaceably on a plainer foot, just next to common speach.” (L,L, p. 398). But why not make the recitative as intensely passionate as the arias?

The letter to Coste concludes with Shaftesbury quoting with approval a full paragraph from French author he is criticizing, because he “can't help applying [it] to higher subjects than those he treats of”:

“Quelqefois vous entendez une tenue contre laquelle les premiers tons de la basse continue font une dissonance qui irrite l'oreille; mais la basse continuant de jouer, revient à cette tenue par de si beaux accords, qu'on voit bien que le musicien n'a fait ces premiers dissonances, que pour faire sentir, avec plus de plaisir, ses belles cordes où il ramène aussitot l'harmonie.”

(L,L, p. 399)

Shaftesbury sees the same relation between dissonance and harmony in works of art as he does in the “art” they imitate:

You know me for a great enthusiast, at least as the world goes. For to talk of the world as harmony, or of a master of the music, is on every side a mystery. The men of wit believe no such hand at all, and the bigots know not what to do with the dissonances: c'est le diable …

(L,L, p. 399)

The understanding of the relation between dissonances and harmony in the universe can be a product of the contemplation of tragedy. This principle is learned by abstracting from particular contrasts in the work. Knowledge of this principle is accompanied by the joy of enthusiasm. The final goal of contemplating tragedy, then, is an acceptance of private and public misfortune. One comes to understand all events as parts of the universal harmony conducted by a master of the music. Such understanding obviously serves the purpose of social control.

If soliloquy does not precede and accompany poesis the work, Shaftesbury argues, cannot serve its didactic purpose. Work free of self-criticism is characterized by authorial presence in “epistles dedicatory, prefaces, and addresses to the reader” (I, 131), and by incoherence—the first being a prudent attempt to disguise the second. For in the same way as soliloquy is obstructed in the lover, mystic, and conjuror (I, 116), flattery prevents rigorous criticism. Not only does flattery prevent the appropriation of whatever, if anything, is valuable in a work; in indulges the reader's pride (I, 213) and thus reinforces it. Criticism, of the self or of art, requires disinterestedness, what Shaftesbury refers to in the Regimen (following the Stoics) as a fixity of “attention.”

“Interestedness” is for Shaftesbury a moral concept. When he writes that

An author who writes in his own person has the advantage of being who or what he pleases. he is no certain man, nor has any certain or genuine character; but suits himself on every occasion to the fancy of his reader, whom, as the fashion is nowadays, he constantly caresses and cajoles.

(I, 131)

he is criticizing the authorial practice of accommodation (see, e.g., PR, p. 193). “Genuine” and “certain” do not refer to roles but to what Shaftesbury terms a “mixed character,” the “state of mind” of Socratic detachment. What Shaftesbury is criticizing is “false sociableness”—unexamined, direct discourse (PR, p. 192). It is this moral criticism of false simplicity which he levels against the practice of “winding-up” a work, in which “[the author] ends pathetically by endeavouring in the softest manner to reconcile his reader to those faults which he chooses rather to excuse than to amend.” (I, 212-213. Cf. PR, p. 183). The model of the “mixed character” is Socrates who

could treat the highest subjects and those of the commonest capacity both together, and render them explanatory of each other. So that in this genius of writing there appeared both the heroic and the simple, the tragic and the common vein.

(I, 128)

His language, motivated by “common sense,” is a product of studying “men, manners, opinions, times.”

Excuses by contemporary authors and their apologists for rejecting this knowledge are criticized in Part II of Soliloquy. Shaftesbury's argument that modern authors ought to reform their audience, not accommodate to their taste (I, 172), for example, is a reply to Granville's defense of Dryden in his “Essay Upon Unnatural Flights in Poetry” (1701). Granville had written:

Our King return'd, and banisht Peace restor'd,
The Muse ran Mad to see her exil'd Lord;
On the crackt Stage the Bedlam Heroes roar'd,
And scarce cou'd speak one reasonable word;
Dryden himself, to please a frantick Age,
Was forc'd to let his jedgment stoop to Rage;
To wild Audience he conform'd his voice,
Comply'd to Custom, but not err'd thro' Choice.
Deem then the Peoples, not the Writer's Sin,
Almanzor's Rage, and Rants of Maximin;

(Spingarn, III, 294.)

In his annotations to the last three couplets Granville defended Dryden, arguing that (1) Dryden's characters were accurate representations of contemporary types; (2) reform of drama can be expected only when the dramatist is not entirely dependent on the receipts of the third night; and (3) Dryden apologized for his characters in the dedication to the Spanish-Fryar. Now in Part II of Soliloquy Shaftesbury rejects all three excuses, his argument being that poets ought to rise above financial pressures and by submitting themselves to a regimen of self-criticism reform test. And his justification of this use of the theatre is historical—the “natural” progress of drama (I, 162-63) is that comedy follows and criticizes the “false sublime” of tragedy, and that in time, comedy “naturally” refines itself (I, 163). It is on historical grounds that Shaftesbury recommends comic criticism (I, 169), permissible differences among which are to be explained in terms of individual “character [=taste, genius] and circumstances” (I, 175-76, n. 1; See I, 166-68).

In recommending the “manner” of ancient comedy Shaftesbury is arguing for a language “to explode the false sublime” of heroic drama into which poets “on every occasion [are] ready to relapse.” (I, 160). The false sublime is characterized by “what we call sophistry in argument or bombast in style, [as having something] … of the effeminate kind or of the false tender, the pointed witticism, the disjointed thought, the crowded simile, or the mixed metaphor …” (I, 156-157):

In poetry and studied prose the astonishing part, or what commonly passes for sublime, is formed by the variety of figures, the multiplicity of metaphors, and by quitting as much as possible the natural and easy way of expression for the which is most unlike to humanity or ordinary use.

(I, 157-168)

The product of false enthusiasm, the effect of the false sublime is momentary “horror and consternation” (I, 157). This effect Shaftesbury finds socially dangerous.

Underlying his urging dramatic poets to follow Horace's advice to “look to the pattern which life presents, and there learn the language of reality” (II, 318, n. 1) is his belief that unnatural language—“metaphorical speech, multiplicity of figures and high-sounding words” (II, 243)—and improbable characters distance the spectator. John Sheffield, whose An Essay Upon Poetry (1682) Shaftesbury urges writers to read (II, 331), had criticized the “perfect character”:

Reject the vulgar error which appears
So fair, of making perfect characters;
There's no such thing in Nature, and you'l draw
A faultless Monster which the world ne're saw;
Some faults must be, that his misfortunes drew,
But such as may deserve compassion too.

(Spingarn, II, 293.)

Shaftesbury urges a plain language and probable characters because he regards the theater, like a national church (I, 14), as a means of social control. If the language of the theater is too remote to be understood, if action and character seem improbable, then sympathy is precluded. Pleasure will then be sought elsewhere:

'Tis not the possible but the probable and likely which must be the poet's guide in manners. By this he wins attention and moves the conscious reader or spectator, who judges best from within, by what he naturally feels and experiences in his own heart. The perfection of virtue is from long art and management, self-control, and, as it were, force on nature. But the common auditor or spectator, who seeks pleasure only, and loves to engage his passion by view of other passion and emotion, comprehends little of the restraints, allays, and corrections which form this new and artificial creature … And thus the completely virtuous and perfect character is unpoetical and false. Effects must not appear where causes must necessarily remain unknown and incomprehensible.

(II, 318)

It is to prevent social disorder that Shaftesbury explains that tragedy functioned as an effective method of social control in Rome when it was written in the plain style of the Greeks. It became ineffective when, as Horace explained in his epistle to Augustus, “Migravit ab aure voluptas / Omnis ad incertos oculos et gaudia vana” (II, 187-88). The Romans, Shaftesbury argues, had a genius for tragedy because they loved liberty and tragedy imitated the misfortunes and miseries of tyrants. But instead of cultivating this genius, they destroyed it by letting their tragedies run “into the marvellous, the outrageous, the extreme of things.” (L,L, p. 397). “The marvelous, the outrageous, the extreme of things” of the letter becomes “the miraculous, the pompous, or what we generally call the sublime” (I, 157) of Soliloquy. And the false sublime corresponds to the pleasure of the eye.

Since the social function of tragedy is achieved when the spectator understands the misfortunes and miseries of the great; and since the passions and morals of the great are expressed in speech—in the “places (if I may so call them) of reflection, such as soliloquies and the real parts of the chorus” (L,L, p. 398) and in the recitative—attention must not be distracted by sight:

If that be beauty which is pointed to, which every finger can show, and every eye see, why this inward search of things invisible?—Man! use thy legs. Travel up and down, run the balls, run the playhouses, the churches, parks; run whole countries and over seas, and to see sights.—See! See!—this is all. And in a child, what else? Is it not the same passion? Novelty, surprise, colours, squares, rounds, triangles, the bustle of children and the business about these things, their architecture, their models, and buildings, and their pleasure of showing this to others.—See! See!

(PR, p. 250)

The pleasures of the eye cannot reform morals and manners (I, 135). Hence, Shaftesbury urges the replacement of the “Adventitious ornaments” (II, 259) of spectacle, machinery, and rhyme (II, 320) by the true ornament of moral instruction (see II, 330; cf. II, 259-60), the product of soliloquy.

The arguments and, indeed, the language of Soliloquy should be interpreted in relation to social conflict. When Shaftesbury refers to the Glorious Revolution as

having firmly secured our hitherto precarious liberties, and removed from us the fear of civil commotions, wars and violence, wither on account of religion and worship, the prosperity of the subject, or the contending titles of the Crown

(I, 141),

he implies that the fear of civil commotions, wars and violence has not been removed on all accounts. W. A. Speck has argued that “it was about 1709 that the conflict in society reached critical proportions,” the landed interest (mostly Tory) accusing monied interest (Whigs) of protracting the war for monetary gain. (“Conflict in Society,” in Britain After the Glorious Revolution: 1689-1714, ed. Geoffrey Holmes [London, 1969], p. 148). Quoting from a letter written by Bolingbroke that reveals his program “to smash the Whigs' hold on the City completely,” Speck concludes:

St. John never got the chance to put this programme completely into action. Had he done so he might well have turned the conflict in society into civil war. The political sparks produced by the friction between the landed and monied interests, therefore, were no mere flashes in the pan. On the contrary, their rivalry generated heat so fierce that it threatened to melt the foundations of the political nation.

(Speck, p. 152.)

Shaftesbury's argument for patronage and soliloquy should be seen within this context. A disaffected group of writers supporting the Tories could inflame the public to disorder, especially during time of war; and an unstable self could easily be excited to participate in a “panic”—of the kind, say, that occurred in 1708 when the Jacobites attempted to invade the country. (See Speck, p. 151). But the “mixed self” poses no threat to public order. The meaning of this “real” self, “the judgment we are to make of interest, and the opinion we should have of advantage and good, which is what must necessarily determine us in our conduct and prove the leading principle of our lives” (I, 199) are unfolded in the fourth treatise of the Characteristics, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit.