SOURCE: Rogers, Pat. “Shaftesbury and the Aesthetics of Rhapsody.” British Journal of Aesthetics 12, no. 3 (summer 1972): 244-57.

[In this essay, Rogers explores the reasons for Shaftesbury's use of the word “rhapsody” in the subtitle of his treatise The Moralists, arguing that the philosopher was responsible for the positive association of the term in relation to aesthetics.]

One of the cheats of time is to rob us of surprise. History acts as a buffer against that sense of shock which contemporaries, lacking such insulation, must often have felt. For the literary student this attenuation of the unexpected affects—and distorts—judgement in several ways. Among the more serious results there is our failure to recognize linguistic shock tactics whenever they appear in literature of the past. Some verbal collocations which must once have produced a violent jolt in the reader's mind slip unnoticed through our consciousness. Fielding's ‘comic epic in prose’ is a good example. The constituent parts of the phrase arrive from such different directions (so far as the eighteenth-century view of things went) that it must have possessed a startling air of innovation, of paradox, of daring. We find it hard today to realize that this planned oxymoron carries with it the absurdity that would go with, say, farce larmoyante or bedroom tragedy or dark soap-opera. When Gay invented his ‘Tragi-comi-pastoral Farce’, The What d'ye call it, and solemnly set about justifying this categorization, he was embarking on a lighter undertaking than Fielding's. Yet the phrase used by Gay is scarcely more a case of literary miscegenation than the formula Fielding employed, from an Augustan viewpoint. In each case the imaginative impact derives from semantic misalliance: that is from verbal surprise.

I wish to suggest that there is a similar, though not quite identical, trick played by the Earl of Shaftesbury in the title of his treatise The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody (1711).¹ Briefly, my argument is that Shaftesbury calculates on the same unexpected effect in words as had Gay and Fielding. However, instead of a comic or critical-taxonomic point, Shaftesbury was bent on a realignment of taste. His linguistic jolt is intended to force a reappraisal of attitudes in the reader: to be more specific, he is trying to convert a pejorative or, at best, neutral term into one with highly favourable overtones. The technique is rather like planting landmines. The context forces an innocent-looking word to come up against a foreign body (here the word ‘philosophical’), which detonates it into violent activity. Really, that is to simplify the process; for Shaftesbury's achievement is to make of his entire treatise a kind of matrix in which this activating energy can come into play. By the end of the essay we have accustomed ourselves to the description ‘rhapsody’. But that is to justify the boldness, and not to negate it.

Few of Shaftesbury's critics, in my knowledge, have given much attention to this issue.² Perhaps they have felt that the label which the author conferred on his work was accurate and evocative. Now the truth is that in terms of eighteenth-century lexis it was anything but an obvious choice. To later commentators the word may have the air of a mot juste plucked neatly out of the air. That is because—it is barely hyperbole to say—Shaftesbury gave ‘rhapsody’ its modern acceptation, therefore its justesse. A large claim, but I do not believe a rash one. If proof is desired, look around the great lexical edifices, Bailey, Johnson and others: look, too, at the occurrence of this word in the writings of the age.

It is important to distinguish between the root noun and its derivatives. Leaving aside for the moment the original ‘rhapsode’ figure, we have on the one hand ‘rhapsody’ itself and against this a series of back-formations: rhapsodic, rhapsodical, rhapsodist, rhapsodize, and so on. From an early date these have acquired in English and American usage a somewhat tight lipped, unenthusiastic ring, even though they may not be downright condemnatory. They bear with them a certain impression of gushing; uncontrolled fervour; ecstatic but not very sensible admiration. The plain noun ‘rhapsody’ can on occasion preserve this connotation to some degree. But the tone is generally one of lesser asperity. Moreover there are different occasions, more numerous in all probability, where no sense of disfavour is connoted. These include the use of the word in music or, more rarely, in the visual arts; a limited but persistent usage in literary terminology (Eliot's ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, and the like); and a fitful appearance in transferred senses. In these contexts the idea of rhapsody is essentially neutral and descriptive: the word has an admittedly vague range of reference, but it is without any normative element in the bulk of its appearances.

What we forget, then, is that this disjunction between the root noun and its derivatives grew up comparatively recently. When this family of words first entered English no such separation was visible. ‘Rhapsody’ originally had two narrow technical senses; as soon as the modern overtones came to predominate (the sense, that is, from which words like ‘rhapsodic’ spun off), there was a markedly hostile aura round the noun. It was this process which Shaftesbury, by main literary force, did so much to arrest. His emphatic and influential use of ‘Rhapsody’, set conspicuously at the head of his most personal work, diverted the flow of semantic currency.

The New English Dictionary provides five subheadings for ‘Rhapsody’. The first and last of these are comparatively marginal. Sense 1 is the original meaning of an epic poem or part of one ‘suitable for recitation at one time’. Here the only point of interest concerns an alleged transferred use, exemplified by Scott's phrase ‘my rhapsodies’ in a letter quoted by Lockhart. It is arguable that this might more properly and more obviously be entered under senses 3 or 4, considered presently. Against this sense 5 is the musical application of the word. NED quotes nothing earlier than Grove's Dictionary in its 1880 edition. Certainly the term had become common, in the French and German forms of r[h]apsodie, well before this date. Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies are prominent examples, though Brahms too used the title more than once (e.g. the Alto Rhapsody, Opus 53 (1869), his own favourite among his compositions). Subsequently the label grew a highly popular one. As one writer has it, ‘some of [the so-called] rhapsodies are by analogy appropriately so called, but the title has become loosely used for a composition of imaginative and melodious character of no specific form’.³ For my immediate ends it is enough to observe that this vogue presupposed an underlying meaning of favourable intent. Composers only call their pieces ‘rhapsodies’, meaning loosely structured, when it is an approved thing to seek an apparently spontaneous organization or freedom from restraint. Naturally we find Romantic or post-Romantic composers, among them Chabrier, Delius, Ravel and Gershwin, the most fond of this word. On occasion it seems to be virtually synonymous with ‘fantasia’. The musical fortunes of ‘rhapsody’ constitute an independent issue, but they do serve to emphasize the admiring tone which the word picked up in the wake of Romanticism.

NED's second sense, though obsolete, brings us nearer to the situation as it was in Shaftesbury's day. This is ‘the stringing together of poems’. Examples are cited from the seventeenth century. Under 2 (b), ‘the recitation of epic poetry’, a quotation from Shelley is supplied. It is no long step from 2 (a) to sense 3 (a): ‘A miscellaneous collection; a medly or confused mass … a “string” (of words, sentences, tales, etc.). Likewise obsolete, this shade of meaning dominated all others for a long period of time. Of the instances quoted, Hamlet's ‘A rhapsody of words’ [III. iv. 48] is the best known. We are also given Bentley's phrase for Boyle's unlucky book, a ‘Rhapsody of Errors and Calumnies’; Addison's phrase ‘Rhapsody of Nonsense’ (Spectator No. 46); the expression ‘rhapsody of impertinence’ from The Castle of Otranto; and one example as late as Hallam. Then comes sense 3 (b), ‘a literary work consisting of miscellaneous or disconnected pieces; a written composition having no fixed form or plan. Obs.’ This definition appears to straddle two rather different uses. Most of the citations from 1602-3, 1685, 1710 and 1764 seem to mean a literary medley, an omnium gatherum, with no suggestion of evaluative intent. On the other hand certain examples come nearer the idea of ‘a (culpably) formless work’, which would move the usage into the fourth class. A minor sense 3 (c) is interesting chiefly on account of a case in point represented by Defoe's True-Born Englishman:

Which Medley canton'd in a Heptarchy,
A Rhapsody of Nations to supply …

Defoe has been itemizing the strange and heterogeneous compound which went to make the Anglo-Saxons—‘a Mongrel half-bred Race.’ NED glosses this sub-meaning: ‘A collection of persons, nations. Obs.’ It is clear that Defoe has a strong ironic tinge in his use: ‘a strange random collection of which one can't make head or tail’.

This leaves us with sense 4, the ordinary modern ‘rhapsody’:

An exalted or exaggeratedly enthusiastic expression of sentiment or feeling; an effusion (e.g. a speech, letter, poem) marked by extravagance of idea and expression, but without connected thought or sound argument.

Citations are made from 1639 onwards, including Spectator 30, by Steele; Junius; Cowper's Task; and Gladstone. This corresponds to the dictionary's entry for ‘rhapsodical’, second sense: ‘exaggeratedly enthusiastic or ecstatic in language, manner, etc.’ My own impression is that in modern usage the idea of excessively effusive speech or manner is stronger in the adjective than in the noun. Thus one can use ‘rhapsody’ as a quasi-technical term in the arts, whereas ‘rhapsodic’ inevitably brings with it pejorative overtones. The noun may, as the definition allows, convey an idea of justified exaltation; the epithet rarely does so.

The broad lines of the history of this word-group are therefore clear. There are three main semantic layers, more or less chronologically divisible. First, the classical meaning of epic recitation—this is NED's sense 1 for ‘rhapsody’, sense 2 for ‘rhapsodic’ and ‘rhapsodize’. Next, the idea of a miscellany, something pieced together without close or integral connexion. This is ‘rhapsody’, senses 2-3; ‘rhapsodist’ and ‘rhapsodize’, sense 1. It is also sense 1 for ‘rhapsodical’, where there is a nice instance from Tristram Shandy. Lastly, the idea of effusive outpouring of sentiment. NED's entry ‘rhapsody’, sense 4, is matched by ‘rhapsodical’, sense 2; ‘rhapsodist’ and ‘rhapsodize’, sense 3; and ‘rhapsodic’. The last entry appositely quotes Vicesimus Knox: ‘that rhapsodic style, which wearies by its constant efforts to elevate the mind to ecstasy’. Further examples are given from Fanny Burney and George Eliot.

However, the picture thus afforded is neither complete nor wholly accurate. A clue is provided by NED's gloss for ‘rhapsodist’, sense 3: ‘one rhapsodizes or uses rhapsodical language; in early usage, with implication of want of argument or fact’. This is the only recognition which the lexicographers betray that certain members of this word-family have gone up in the world. Something has happened since the shift from the second to the third phase of those outlined above. After ‘rhapsody’ ceased to connote principally a medley and came to mean an effusion of doubtful value (a transference in which one can easily read the Neo-Classical mind at work), its headlong descent has been to some extent arrested. As the use in various art forms, including literature, makes plain, the term can be a respectable and indeed honorific one.

How intimately this semantic process is linked with the history of taste Johnson's Dictionary helps to show. The entry for ‘rhapsody’ looks at first sight neutral enough—‘any number of parts joined together, without necessary dependence or natural connection’. However, the examples supplied—the Hamlet case, from the divine Hammond, from Locke and his disciple Isaac Watts—make it clear that disapproval is bedded deeply into that definition: to an Augustan it was too obvious to need explicit comment. The only derivative given a separate entry by Johnson is ‘rhapsodist’, which is ‘one who writes without regular dependence of one part upon another’ [my italics]. A rhapsody is then the direct antithesis of ‘a frame’, defined as a fabric made up of ‘various parts or members’ which support one another.⁴ The very notion is one in breach of ‘the basic principle of classicism in design’, defined by Sir John Summerson as ‘that the design shall be an indivisible unity, so that nothing can be altered or subtracted without destroying the whole, every part being dependent on every other part’.⁵ By Johnson's definition a rhapsody was that un-Augustan thing, a casual assemblage of a random number of parts.

The full depth of the obloquy implied by this term around 1700 can easily be guessed. Nor do the facts of linguistic life disappoint this expectation. In 1714 Defoe wrote to Robert Harley of a new book by John Dunton, a man whom he greatly despised. His comments are instructive: ‘The whole book is Such a Continued Rhapsody of Scandal and Raillery That it Seems Enough to Name it, and to Collect from it would be to Transcribe it from One End to the Other …’⁶ One might note how the old idea of an omnium gatherum hovers behind the detraction: yet the fundamental sense is ‘a huge tissue of nonsense’. Similarly when John Dennis can think of nothing else abusive to say of The Dunciad (which is all too often), he calls the poem a ‘rhapsody’. The word occurs at least six times in his fairly brief Remarks, either nakedly or suitably qualified. ‘Wonderful Rhapsody’ is found twice; ‘his whimsical Rhapsody’ in another place.⁷ The year before, Thomas Hearne had written of the compendium entitled The Chronological Historian that it was a ‘strange Rhapsody from Pamphlets’.⁸ Along with such instances as that from Locke which Johnson was to quote in the Dictionary, these give a fair indication of the standing of the term in the high Augustan period. Dennis, incidentally, had written some Reflections upon a late Rhapsody, called An Essay on Criticism in 1711.

Yet matters were soon on the turn. When Swift gave the title ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’ to a work of 1733, his aim cannot have been very flattering: at best, an ironic and give-little-away kind of usage. By 1783 things were sufficiently different to allow Thomas Tyers to put on a semantic quick-change act behind the convenient folds of ambiguity. A new ambiguity, that is, touching not merely the meaning of the word but its whole moral identity. During the course of the year Tyers brought out two laudatory volumes, An Historical Essay on Mr. Addison along with An Historical Rhapsody on Mr. Pope. With regard to the latter Tyers makes a great show of studied inconsequence. ‘Protected by the title of this Essay, which disdains method, the writer has said something of every thing that has the most distant relation to the Life and Writings of Mr. Pope.’ He does not quite say that irrelevance is a merit; but that it is good to disdain method, we can hardly doubt. Tyers draws a contrast with Joseph Warton's Essay on Pope, an avowed critique—‘This is a historical Rhapsody, the other a critical one’ (touché).⁹ Tyers is of course somewhat defensive about his choice of title. Yet he did feel bold enough to enlist the concept in the service of his undertaking. Well before the high tide of Romanticism, then, we find ‘rhapsody’ shaking off its more disreputable associations and achieving some literary standing. Partly this is the result of critical realignments, that renversement des alliances which took place in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. But the lexical displacement, like the critical shift, had begun much earlier—with Shaftesbury.

The central juncture of The Moralists occurs in the third section. Indeed it was this part of the Characteristicks which was to affect later generations most powerfully. Theocles moves abruptly into what the side-note calls ‘meditation’, that is passages of emotive utterance. The style is compounded of familiar ‘rhetorical’ motifs: its note is exclamatory, its sentence-structure tends towards a staccato pattern. Direct invocation is common (‘Ye Fields and Woods …’). Allied to the use of the archaic second-person forms, a measure of inversion and a conscious rhythmic emphasis give the writing a biblical air: ‘Thee I invoke, and Thee alone adore.’ Repetition is frequent: parallelism and listing devices abound: ‘Thy Being is boundless, unsearchable, impenetrable.’ The vocabulary is at times highly wrought; phrases such as ‘supremely Fair, and sovreignly Good!’ or ‘Thou impowering Deity, Supreme Creator!’ illustrate a fondness for a kind of unobtrusive neologism. At its best the language achieves a thoroughgoing poetic quality, to which the elevated diction and sharply cut-off syntax contribute: ‘Prodigious Orb! Bright source of vital Heat, and Spring of Day! … Supreme of the Corporeal World! Unperishing in Grace, and of undecaying Youth!’ At other times we encounter a simpler note, set off by deliberate paradox: ‘In vain we try to fathom the Abyss of Space, the Seat of thy extensive Being; of which no Place is empty, no Void which is not full.’¹⁰

Plainly, it was this mode of writing—impassioned, urgent, unconstrained—which struck contemporaries as the stable element in Shaftesbury's ‘Rhapsody’. It was passages such as these which Pope had in mind when he gave to the deistical ‘gloomy Clerk’ of The Dunciad these lines:

Or that bright Image to our fancy draw,
Which Theocles in raptur'd vision saw,
While thro' Poetic scenes the Genius roves,
Or wanders wild in Academic Groves …

[B, IV, 487-490]

Pope indeed set out as blank verse in his note some of the sections I have quoted. Rapture is often linked closely with rhapsody, perhaps through false etymology: epithets such as ‘poetic’ regularly accompany the discussion of The Moralists. Thus a modern critic, Professor R. L. Brett, observes: ‘The style in which Shaftesbury wrote The Moralists, as the title would suggest, is a rhapsodical one. In prose which comes near to being poetry, Theocles (who represents Shaftesbury) apostrophizes nature in a series of hymns of a most romantic sort.’ Professor Brett goes on to invoke such words as ‘visionary’, ‘lyrical’ and ‘Wordsworthian’. He further quotes an apposite section of Horace Walpole's Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors.¹¹ Similarly, Professor A. D. McKillop discusses Shaftesbury's influence on the enthusiasm of James Thomson and his readers. He cites a writer of 1738, heavily indebted to Thomson, who ‘rhapsodizes on rural philosophy’.¹² Because of the great currency of these interpolated hymns, and their observable impact on other writers, we have come to see them as the ‘rhapsodic’ portions of The Moralists—as the parts which justify Shaftesbury's subtitle.

But this is unhistorical. As we have seen, the term was primarily a derogatory one around 1700. If ‘rhapsody’ were to be invoked in a non-opprobious sense, then the meaning of ‘literary medley’ or ‘string, loose assemblage’ would be the likeliest.¹³ The point is that Shaftesbury, when he chose the word, was not hiding behind its implications in quite the same way as Tyers was to do. He was not simply creating a chance for himself to indulge in ‘rhapsodic’ (modern sense) writing. He was in fact carrying over the associations of miscellaneity, lack of connexion—but at the same time he was suggesting that a looser, more disjunctive mode of composition was fitted to some branches of literature. The Moralists is rhapsodic, in the only approbatory sense available to Shaftesbury, by reason of its loose-knit manner of proceeding and by its far from rigorous layout. (Another hidden oxymoron: philosophy connoted science, method, logic: a ‘philosophical rhapsody’ was pretty well a contradiction in terms.) In short, The Moralist does not suddenly become rhapsodic when the apostrophes occur: that is its vein throughout.

Consequently, in order to understand the structural and stylistic properties fitting to literature in this vein, we need to examine the content of Shaftesbury's thought. We have to see why he wished to adopt a different method of presentation from that approved by the age for philosophical writing. An answer to this question is bound to be speculative. But I think that an intelligible account can be given, which makes aesthetic, as well as historical and lexical, sense.

Shaftesbury is among the first important upholders of an organicist approach to the world. When he wants an emblem of unity, in an effort to comprehend by analogy the oneness of the universe, he lights on a significant example:

For to instance in what we see before us; I know you look upon the Trees of this vast Wood to be different from one another: And this tall Oak, the noblest of the Company, as it is by itself a different thing from all its Fellows of the Wood, so with its own Wood of numerous spreading Branches (which seem so many different TREES) 'tis still, I suppose, one and the self-same TREE. … If you question'd me fairly, and desir'd I shou'd satisfy you what I thought it was which made this Oneness or Sameness in the Tree or any other Plant; or by what it differ'd from [a] waxen Figure [of the same size and shape], or from any such Figure accidentally made, either in the Clouds, or on the Sand by the Sea-shore; I shou'd tell you, that neither the Wax, nor Sand, nor Cloud thus piec'd together by our Hand or Fancy, had any real relation within themselves, or had any Nature by which they corresponded any more in that near Situation of Parts, than if scatter'd ever so far asunder. But this I shou'd affirm, ‘That wherever there was such a Sympathizing of Parts, as we saw here, in our real TREE; Wherever there was such a plain Concurrence in one common End, and to the Support, Nourishment, and Propagation of so fair a Form; we cou'd not be mistaken in saying there was a peculiar Nature belonging to this Form, and common to it with others of the same kind.’ By virtue of this, our Tree is a real Tree; lives, flourishes, and is still One and the same; even when by Vegetation and Change of Substance, not one Particle of it remains the same.¹⁴

No more representative analogy could have been chosen. The ‘model of reality’, as we might say nowadays, is a living organism, set moreover against a contrivance ‘pieced together … by our Hand’. The great archetype of Augustan thinking had been the interlocking frame, which appeared to fit the cosmos as revealed by Newton so exquisitely. The definition offered by Johnson in the Dictionary for the word ‘mechanism’ is to the point: sense 2 is that of a ‘construction of parts depending on each other in any complicated fabrick’. This metaphysical or ontological notion could be translated into aesthetic terms. We then find what Paul Fussell has described as ‘the rhetorical and Horatian concept of art’, which assumes ‘a purposeful procedure, in which the end is foreseen from the beginning, part is fitted to part, and the whole is adapted to the anticipated effect on the reader’.¹⁵ Against this we have here the Shaftesburian version of reality, which might be broadly described as Platonic or organicist.

The phraseology of Theocles's contribution to the dialogue is highly indicative of this bias of mind. We hear of ‘particular Forms, who share this simple Principle, by which they are really One, live, act, and have a Nature or Genius peculiar to themselves. …’ Or again ‘a uniting Principle in Nature’. And ‘every particular Nature certainly and constantly produces what is good to itself; unless something foreign disturbs or hinders it …’ And: ‘If … every particular Nature be thus constantly and unerringly true to itself, and conducting to its own right State. …¹⁶ Typically the first-person interlocutor, Philocles, had used the image of machines, ‘their Order, Management and Motions’, to point up his own metaphysical speculations. He had used terms such as ‘Breach of Laws, Variation and Unsteddiness of Order … no Controul … tumultuous System … Chaos and Atoms’ to depict the errors of atheists, atomists, materialists and other unregenerate men. His positives were ‘Order, Uniformity, and Constancy’. Theocles, on the other hand, seeks a different principle:

And when you, reply'd he, with your newly-espous'd System, have brought All things to be as uniform, plain, regular and simple, as you cou'd wish; I suppose you will send your Disciple to seek for Deity in Mechanism; that is to say, in some exquisite System of self-govern'd Matter. For what else is it you Naturalists make of the World, than a mere Machine?

Theocles's insinuating, gently ironic manner undoubtedly has Shaftesbury behind it.¹⁷

One aim of the Characteristicks is to promote imaginative liberty at the same time as enthusiasm is discountenanced. In the Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit the writer had stressed the consequences of sensitivity to the grandeur of the world: ‘For 'tis impossible that such a Divine Order shou'd be contemplated without Extasy and Rapture; since in the common Subjects of Science, and the liberal Arts, whatever is according to just Harmony and Proportion, is so transporting to those who have any Knowledge or Practice in the kind.’¹⁸ The submerged musical metaphor here is taken up in The Moralists, where Theocles speaks of ‘rising in [his] Transports’, and needing the assistance of a lyre to sustain his flights. However, Theocles rejects in the second part of the same treatise a view uttered by Philocles: namely, that it was profane to reason calmly and unconcernedly about religion. Earlier still in The Moralists we find Philocles using the defensive word ‘Rant’ in connexion with one passage, a speech attributed to his friend Palemon. At this point Philocles finds himself required to ‘ask Succour of the Muses, as Poetical as I am oblig'd to shew my-self in this Enterprize’.¹⁹

Now all these concerns fit together. Theocles's use of an organic model and the sustained organicist imagery which goes with that: the adumbration of poetic and even musical concepts to explain the undertaking; the cultivation of a tone that avoids the extremes of ‘rant’ and overly prosaic, unimaginative literalism: all these call for a flexible literary medium. The work needs to be organized along less analytic and systematic lines than those of the conventional philosophical treatise; the idiom needs to be more poetic, that is more varied, intense and emotive in its use of language; and the overall rhetorical character of the discourse must be one of heightened (though not exorbitant) feeling that overrides the categories of literary decorum to prescribe its own formal and stylistic bounds. There was no such vehicle ready to hand. Shaftesbury evolved his own, and he called it a philosophical rhapsody.

To surprise by a fine excess was, of course, the ambition of many writers who remained content with the Augustan forms as given. Recent studies have shown that the grace beyond the reach of art²⁰ was an element fully covered in the Neo-Classical theory of art. However, it should not be supposed that Shaftesbury's undertaking was of its nature quite unique. In fact certain historical analogues can be discerned. The point is that other attempts were less successfully mounted, less clear-minded, less influential. Moreover the effort to forge a new set of artistic principles was often carried out on unsuitable occasions, in an unsuitable literary venue. Notably, the ambition was evident in the development of the pindaric form; and the process was in all likelihood retarded by this historical accident.

The misunderstanding which surrounded the pindaric are too numerous to examine here. When the revival of the form was being mounted in 1656, Abraham Cowley wrote in the preface to his Poems:

They [pindarics] are, or at least were meant to be, of that kinde of Style which Dion [yssius] Halicarnasseus … attributes to Alcaeus—the digressions are many, and sudden, and sometimes long, according to the fashion of all Lyriques, and of Pindar above all men living. The Figures are unusual and bold even to Temeritie, and such as I dare not have to do withal in any other kind of Poetry: the Numbers are various and irregular, and sometimes (especially some of the long ones) seem harsh and uncouth, if the just measures and cadencies be not observed in the Pronunciation. So that almost all their Sweetness and Numerosity (which is to be found, if I mistake not, in the roughest, if rightly repeated) lies in a manner wholly at the Mercy of the Reader.²¹

The confusion rife here can be traced in a large volume of unreadable pindarics written in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Among the writers involved was Swift, whose reaction to his early, rather awful attempts in the kind was marked by his ‘familiar’ low ode to Congreve. And it was Congreve who in his Discourse on the Pindarique Ode (1706) did most to dispel the fog.

The Character of these late Pindariques, is, a Bundle of rambling incoherent Thoughts, express'd in a like Parcel of irregular Stanza's, which also consist of such another Compliment of disproportion'd, uncertain and perplex'd Verse and Rhimes.²²

True pindaric, Congreve argued, was regular and highly disciplined. However, the view that ‘Nonsense is the essence of an ode’²³ died hard. Fifty years later Gray with his learning was very uncertain of the reaction likely to be accorded his own odes; ‘The Progress of Poesy’, he wrote to Horace Walpole, was ‘a high Pindaric upon stilts’—Dodsley accordingly would be sure not to understand it.²⁴

Inevitably the debate about the pindaric form was bedevilled by pseudo-archeological considerations. Not everyone agreed about the terms of debate; the historical facts were in dispute; and much of the energy expended had more to do with Pindar's reputation than the immediate cultural situation.²⁵ So with other attempts to subvert the hierarchy of Augustan forms. Shaftesbury's departure from orthodoxy, though as radical as any, was better calculated. He did more than pitch his style a degree or two higher; he did more than lard his text with ‘many and sudden Digressions’ (a digression, after all, honours systematic narrative in the breach); he did more than violate decorum with ‘unusual’ and ‘irregular’ locutions. His strategy was a positive one. Seeking a vehicle for a whole new regime of taste, he evolved a new rhetoric. The artist, and specifically the poet, was to be the model figure—the Promethean creator who most nearly approximated to the Great Maker, and who responded most directly to the universe in its concrete, plastic, palpable forms. The philosopher was to learn this true Promethean fire from ‘Lovers either of the Muses or the Graces’. It follows that the mechanical operation of the philosophic spirit, as exemplified in the level prose and consecutive argument of a Locke or a Spinoza, was ill-fitted to the new task. The last part of The Moralists considers the search for beauty ‘as it relates to us, and makes our highest Good, in its sincere and natural Enjoyment’. The quest for wisdom and self-knowledge is paraphrased in the formula, ‘O Philocles! may we improve and become Artists in the kind.’ Philocles recognizes that this way of reasoning could hardly be more ‘odd, or dissonant from the common Voice of the World’, and Theocles accepts this. Likewise Shaftesbury did not blench at the necessity of restructuring aesthetic norms duly.²⁶

His great stroke was to couch what he had to say in the guise of ‘a philosophical rhapsody’. The phrase is arresting, as holding within its own semantic compass that very breaking-down of categories, that precise style of rhetorical innovation, which his undertaking involved. The oxymoron implies the nature of the breakthrough. In addition ‘rhapsody’ was happily invoked because of its associations. It meant, respectably, a literary medley: NED's sense 3 (b). More idiomatically, and therefore more prominently, it meant a farrago or gallimaufry. Shaftesbury dignifies this shop-soiled word with the prestigious epithet ‘philosophic’; he means to imply that a discontinuous series of scenes or reflections may be imaginatively potent—philosophy is capable of being written in ways other than the point-by-point demonstration. Even more important, the modern sense (No. 4 in NED) had already developed. Shaftesbury shows in the course of his treatise that ‘an exalted … expression … of feeling’ need not be ‘exaggeratedly enthusiastic’. He developed an idiom which would permit the inclusion of such intense ‘rhapsodic’ sections as the apostrophes in Part III of The Moralists, without damage to its argument or artistic fabric.

It was not an overnight revolution which he initiated. The history of ideas rarely allows so sudden a coup. Yet his influence gradually permeated English culture. In 1738 Thomas Cooke, a dunce best known for his classical translations, brought out A Rhapsody on Virtue and Pleasure—an amalgam of leading terms from the Characteristicks. Fitly in a work so titled, the personages invoked at the start are Virgil, Horace, Cicero and—Shaftesbury.²⁷ The triad who went so far to form Augustanism, supplemented by the man who went far to herald its dislodgement. When we consider Shaftesbury's total achievement, it seems a tiny thing to have helped to rescue for future aesthetic use the word ‘rhapsody’. Yet the two are not wholly unconnected.

Notes

1. Published in vol. II of Characteristicks of Men, Manner, Opinions, Times (2nd ed. 1714). All references are to this edition, using the cue-title Char.

2. Valuable recent commentaries are those of Ernest Tuveson, ‘The Importance of Shaftesbury’, ELH, XX (1953), pp. 267-99; R. L. Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1951); and Robert W. Uphaus, ‘Shaftesbury on Art: the Rhapsodic Aesthetic’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXVII (1968), pp. 341-48.

3. Robert Illing, A Dictionary of Music (1950), p. 231.

4. Cf. Martin Kallich, Heav'n's First Law: Rhetoric and Order in Pope's Essay on Man (De Kalb, Ill., 1967), p. 47.

5. John Summerson, Sir Christopher Wren (1965), p. 106.

6. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. G. H. Healey (1955), p. 438. In Mist's Weekly Journal for 21st June 1718, an attack on George Ridpath, very possibly the work of Defoe, includes the phrase ‘a villainous Rapsody of Scandal against the Person of Mr. Mist …’

7. John Dennis, Remarks upon several Passages in the Dunciad (1729), pp. 6-50. The most interesting of these passages is the comment, ‘There is no such Thing as Action in his whimsical Rhapsody’ (p. 17). According to Dennis's neoclassic principles, or indeed to those of Aristotelians in any age, the putative lack of a continuous narrative in The Dunciad means the loss of any principle of intellectual order—hence ‘rhapsodic’ qualities. Dennis called The Rape of the Lock ‘a Rhapsody written for the Amusement of Boys …’ and Windsor Forest ‘a mere Rhapsody’ without beginning or end. Pope used the same term in a counterattack on Dennis: see his Prose Works, ed. N. Ault (1936), I, 9, 17.

8. Quoted by G. V. Bennett, White Kennett 1660-1728 Bishop of Peterborough (1957), p. 177.

9. [Thomas Tyers], An Historical Rhapsody on Mr. Pope (1783), pp. vi-xi.

10. Char., II, 344-6, 366-74.

11. Brett, p. 63.

12. A. D. McKillop, The Background of Thomson's Seasons (Minneapolis, 1942), p. 26.

13. Shaftesbury speaks elsewhere of a nation's ‘Poets, Rhapsoders, Historiographers, Antiquarys …’ (Char., I, 224). Here the word means a literary collector, a miscellanist—the sense it bears in Donne and Thomas Browne also.

14. Char., II, 347-9.

15. Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965), pp. 192-4. Fussell's phrase, ‘Augustan accumulative or aggregative methods of organisation’ (p. 194), summarizes what might be called anti-rhapsodic principles of ordonnance.

16. Char., II, 352, 359-60.

17. Char., II, 355-7.

18. Char., II, 75-6.

19. Char., II, 192-3, 375.

20. For the implications of this phrase, see S. H. Monk's article in Journal of the History of Ideas, V (1944), pp. 131-50.

21. Abraham Cowley, Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (1906), p. 11. Cf. the views of Christopher Smart in 1746: ‘There is in them both [St. Cecilia odes by Dryden and Pope] an exact unity of design, which though in compositions of another nature a beauty, is an impropriety in the Pindaric, which should consist in the vehemence of sudden and unlook'd for transitions: hence chiefly it derives that enthusiastic fire and wildness, which greatly distinguish it from other species of Poesy.’ Quoted by Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart Scholar of the University (East Lansing, 1967), p. 49.

22. William Congreve: Letters and Documents, ed. J. C. Hodges (1964), p. 214.

23. Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, ed. J. M. Osborn (1966), I, 359.

24. Quoted by Morris Golden, Thomas Gray (1964), p. 28.

25. I have discussed some of the implications of this situation in ‘Swift's Anti-Rhetoric’, Cambridge Review, LXXXXIX^A (1968), 336-8.

26. Char., II, 394, 426-8. Irving Babbitt wrote that Shaftesbury ‘undermines insidiously decorum, the central doctrine of the classicist, at the very time that he seems to be defending it’—Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), p. 45. I believe that in many ways Shaftesbury's technique was more daring and frontal than Babbitt seems to allow.

27. Thomas Cooke, Original Poems (1742), pp. 49-61. Some other later uses of the word were satirical, as in The Inspector's Rhapsody on the Loss of his Wig (1752), an attack on Dr. John Hill; theatrical, as in the Haymarket show of 1760, A Rhapsody on the Death of a late Noble Commander; or unclassifiable, if not indescribable, such as Colley Cibber's, A Rhapsody upon the Marvellous (1751), and ‘A Bachanalian Rhapsody’, which appeared in Dodsley's Museum (1746).