SOURCE: Wolf, Richard B. “Shaftesbury's Just Measure of Irony.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 33, no. 3 (summer 1993): 565-85.

[In this essay, Wolf examines Shaftesbury's use of satiric wit and discusses how his distinctive use of raillery is influenced by his philosophical beliefs and classical background.]

John Hayman has justly linked the third earl of Shaftesbury to Augustan satiric reformers such as Addison and Steele, who were intent on curbing the malice of contemporary raillery and providing a proper model of good humored mental disposition.¹ These writers reacted against the cynical and predatory image of humankind associated with Hobbes and the Restoration wits, as well as against the kind of vitriolic satire written by contemporaries such as Jonathan Swift. They sought to promote both a more optimistic vision of individual and social potential, and a more refined ironic mode. But Shaftesbury's satiric practice was strikingly different from that found in the Spectator. While Addison and Steele's guiding principle of Christian charity resulted in a genial corrective banter that reaffirmed traditional values, Shaftesbury's loyalty to Stoic thought—despite creating strong misgivings on his part about the satirist's enterprise—ultimately produced satire with a sharper edge, designed to unsettle rather than to affirm conventional perspectives. Shaftesbury's attempt at satiric reform sought to refine and redirect—rather than wholly to subvert—the destructive impulses of the genre.

A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) and Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709) brought Shaftesbury notoriety as a champion of raillery in the discussion of serious subjects such as religion. At the same time, these works brought him considerable praise as a witty practitioner of the railler's art. Even the hostile author of Reflections upon “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” who found its wit “full of Wind, and much Froth,” conceded the Letter its “sparkling Air, nice Turns, and clever sorts of Fancy, or lively Allusions.” Yet, as Hayman has noted, Shaftesbury had strong reservations about his advocacy and use of satiric wit.² These reservations are seen clearly in his reply to Leibnitz's critique of Characteristics (1711), a work in which Shaftesbury coupled previously published pieces with a volume of Miscellaneous Reflections. Early in his reply, Shaftesbury voiced agreement with Leibnitz's complaints about “the too great Concessions … in favour of Raillery and the way of Humor” in his book. “Does not the Author himself secretly confess as much, in his Work?” Shaftesbury wrote:

And does he not seem to despise himself in his Third and last Volume of Miscellanys, at the very entrance, when after having pass'd his principal and main philosophical Work of the Middle Volume [An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and The Moralists], he returns again to his mix'd Satyrical Way of Raillery and Irony, so fashionable in our Nation, which can be hardly brought to attend to any writing, or consider any thing as witty, able or ingenious which has not strongly this Turn?³

Hayman usefully connects Shaftesbury's reservations about raillery to the concern with coherence in personal identity that the author shared with his contemporaries. But to appreciate Shaftesbury's satiric achievement fully and to distinguish his approach from that of writers such as Addison and Steele, it is also important to understand the role of his individual values and inclinations in shaping the mode of raillery that the author first employed in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. Shaftesbury's distinctive satiric style emerged from a conflict between deeply held philosophic beliefs and contrary natural talents and inclinations. Characteristically both Shaftesbury's reservations about raillery and his ultimate manner of harnessing wit and humor to the service of philosophy were strongly influenced by his devotion to certain strands of classical thought and to classical models.

Three of Shaftesbury's primary objections to raillery were rooted in his allegiance to Stoicism. One of these is suggested by his extraordinary reluctance to be identified with his early literary works. According to Horst Meyer, Shaftesbury's refusal to acknowledge his authorship of The Sociable Enthusiast (an early form of The Moralists) and A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, even in private letters of dedication to his friend Lord John Somers, was due not only to misgivings about his abilities but also to his embarrassment in failing to maintain a proper philosophical attitude toward writing. The aspiring Stoic should value writing as a means of acquiring self-knowledge and self-mastery, not as a performance to impress others. In a passage cited by Meyer from the author's Stoic Exercises (the so-called Philosophical Notebooks or Regimen), Shaftesbury advocated writing “Not for Shew: but for Exercise, Practice, Improvement.”⁴ Such a view demanded that he condemn the railler's employment of wit and humor as pointless, distracting verbal display.

A second reason for Shaftesbury's rejection of raillery was even more fundamental to his philosophical beliefs. As a student of Stoicism, Shaftesbury necessarily objected to the mental disruption produced by those passions that the railler indulged in himself and raised in his audience. Robert Voitle quotes a passage from the Exercises in which Shaftesbury condemned, among other passions, “extravagant Mirth, Airy-ness, Humour, Fantasticallness, Buffoonery, [and] Drollery”: “when once any of these are let loose, when once they have broke their Boundaryes & forc'd a passage, what ravage & destruction is sure to follow? and what must it cost ere all be calm agin within?”⁵ Once raised, Shaftesbury believed, such passions hurry the mind away from reason and the pursuit of truth; the individual loses control of his thoughts. Thus in the “Maxims” section in his Exercises, Shaftesbury decried the “Itching” of wit and humor: “New Fancyes starting bubbling. … Froth, Vapour, Scum, Witt, Story … a laugh raisd. … One Foolery drawing on another: one Levity making way for another.”⁶ At its worst, such an inclination could become habitual, permanently precluding rational thought. The disciplined Stoic should be able to direct any idea, using his highly developed faculty of reason, to the service of truth and virtue. But, noted Shaftesbury,

This is just the Revers of what happens to those who are grown into the thorow-buffooning Habit. Every thing y^t they see, be it ever so grave or seriouse, has a ridiculouse appearance, & whether they will or no, becomes Burlesque. every thing is travested so as to make Divertion out of it: and, whatever be the Face y^t offers, there are Glasses ready, y^t make it to be seen after a thousand rediculouse ways, & y^t instead of that one reall Face, present a thousand Masks of a Grotesque & Fantastick kind.

(pp. 128-29)

Finally, Shaftesbury as aspiring Stoic was troubled by the nature of the distorting medium of laughter. Quoting Epictetus's injunction “Let not your laughter be excessive” in his Maxims, he asserted: “Consider the Thing itself: in the Bottom, what? … ′Επιχαιρεκακι [malevolence]. Nothing else. … Gall, Venom; but of a different kind, more hid.” Such laughter he associated with the malicious and sadistic, with bloody tyrants and common criminals. Where is the laugh heartier, he asked, than among soldiers engaged in acts of brutality (pp. 372-73)? Urging himself to avoid “all that w^ch in any degree borders upon Mimickry, Buffoonery [and] Drollery,” he declared elsewhere in his Exercises:

Consider what a mean & contemptible state, y^e mind is in, at that instant when it gos about any thing of this kind: what it aims at: what its End & Scope is … and what sort of Minds those are w^ch partake with it in this way, & are the ablest in this Art: what Morralls, Manners, Life this brings along with it.

(pp. 68-69)

The vigor of his denunciation of wit and humor in these and other passages in the Exercises verifies Voitle's observation that in Shaftesbury the Stoic's “longing to be free from the despotism of passion” was coupled with “a very powerful sense of sin which seems to have carried over from his early religious training” (p. 152). But at the same time, the strength of Shaftesbury's abhorrence suggests the tremendous power of this particular temptation. His repeated exhortations to himself in the Exercises to renounce the jester's role illustrate a point that Voitle makes in discussing the discrepancy between Shaftesbury's renunciation of politics in the Exercises and his actual political involvement: “the intensity of his distaste for an action is often directly proportional to the ability of an action to preoccupy him and all of his energies. As a result, frequently the meditations better reflect what he does well or naturally rather than what he dislikes doing” (p. 205). Shaftesbury's inclination to play the role of a wit and humorist was to him embarrassingly strong.

The tension resulting from this inclination and his philosophical objections to it is illustrated by a letter that Shaftesbury penned less than six months before his death. Writing from Naples on 1 September 1712 N.S., he instructed his protégé Thomas Micklethwayte to insist that their mutual friend Sir John Cropley take proper measures to protect a painting that the author had commissioned for Cropley in Italy. Shaftesbury not only urged that Cropley enclose the work with a frame and glass but also strongly suggested that such pictures should be displayed as “Cabinet-pieces,” not hung in “the Dining-Room or Parlour; to be left to a House-Maid to dust out, and clean, with the Stools, Stands, and other light Furniture.” The danger of failing to take such precautions he demonstrated with his own example, “having had a tight Maid who with a Sponge and Soap wip'd me out the best Features of half a dozen Family-faces in one morning: the Pictures having been of the little Size, fit for handling and rattling about.”⁷

At this point Shaftesbury had probably said all that he needed to say to persuade Cropley to take proper care of the picture. But he was not done. The itch of wit and humor carried him into a delightfully cranky, comic account of the indignities to which a small, unprotected painting is exposed in a philistine world:

Great Pieces are indeed more out of Danger. They can't be made Toys or Play-things. They are hung at least chair-high (I mean above the top of the Chairs) and by the Frame-Work too, they are defended from the Beau's Perukes and Lady's Fanns. A little Picture is indeed a mere Play-Thing. Be it in the Drawing-Room, or in the Closet 'tis seldom plac'd above Chin-high. It must be as often handled as it is look'd upon and admir'd. Seldom it fails of being taken down, and dandled. 'Tis set hastily on the Table, or in the Window; or taken in Lapp. 'Tis forgot, or set aside in hast. It gets a Knock, or a Fall or two. The Tea is spilt upon it, or any other Slop—“There's no harm!”—Nobody minds it. 'Tis taken up again, wip'd, and hung up, in its place. Nurse comes in, and drumms upon it with her fingers. Young Master or Miss must have their turn with it: and the Picture must begin a new Dance; else a Blubber is set up; Nurse pouts; and the Company is disturb'd. Now a most soverain Security against all these ill adventures and Mischances, is, a good stout Glass, which is not only defensive but offensive; and makes the Picture an Edge-tool, too dangerous for young Master, and as much respected as a Piece of China or costly Ware; which if broken is thought to be of some moment. And a Christal-Glass every one knows is worth something. But for the Picture, 'tis a Virtuoso Crochet.

(pp. 280-81)

Shaftesbury returned to a more sober vein in discussing the frame proper in the next paragraph. But in closing he felt compelled to comment on his act of comic indulgence: “I find I have dictated a very comical Letter to You. I wish it may, as well as the Picture, be entertaining to S^r. John and You” (p. 281). This self-conscious, almost apologetic assessment of his instructions as a humorous performance suggests Shaftesbury's embarrassment in the face of a momentary aberration in the direction of laughter.

An earlier and fuller testament to Shaftesbury's inclination to indulge his itch of wit and humor is provided by The Adept Ladys or The Angelick Sect. Being the Matters of fact of certain Adventures Spiritual, Philosophical, Political, and Gallant. In a letter to a Brother (1702).⁸ The 10,000 word “letter” is an account of its narrator's encounters with old acquaintances and their new mentor, a Quaker lady who claims to hobnob with angels and to be able to make gold from excrement. Not published during Shaftesbury's lifetime, The Adept Ladys is described by A. O. Aldridge as a satire on pantheistic materialism, specifically the doctrines of the Rosicrucians.⁹ Voitle's speculations concerning the identities of the “Brother” and others mentioned in the piece suggest that Shaftesbury's audience for this performance was probably at most a few intimate friends (p. 198).

Voitle labels The Adept Ladys “a hasty jeu d'esprit and not a very witty one” (p. 199)—a generally accurate assessment. Among other defects, the work suffers from an inconsistent narrative voice. Shaftesbury's narrator not only repeatedly abandons his ironic tone for straightforward diatribes against the folly of the superstition that he encounters, but he also inexplicably shifts from the deferential host in the body of the work to the bantering gallant of the lengthy Post-Script. Despite its considerable shortcomings, however, the Ladys offers clear indications of Shaftesbury's satiric abilities as well as his predilection for wit and humor.

The most successful part of Shaftesbury's performance is his opening account of the visit of old Chrysogenes, his wife, and the Quaker lady. Despite tone lapses and prolixity, Shaftesbury reveals a talent for farce. He presents his narrator, the host, as a rational, sensitive soul whose dilemma results from his unwillingness to offend his guests and his revulsion at their religious enthusiasm. Upon the arrival of his guests, the host receives Chrysogenes and the two ladies “with all Possible Civility” (p. 380). Later, having lapsed into a morose silence in response to their ravings, he notes their discomposure and immediately forces himself to return to a cheerful manner. But his efforts to be polite and gracious only encourage his guests' increasingly annoying spiritual confidences. And his repeated attempts to steer the conversation away from their occult obsessions inevitably backfire.

When the host responds to Chrysogenes' prophetic cant at the beginning of the visit by “understanding it in the Best Sence I could; and accomodating it, all that I was able, to Piety & sound Religion” (p. 382), his pious words only lead Chrysogenes to claim that the Quaker lady is miraculously privy to what passes in the host's own soul. When, with “no other Refuge” from the supernatural tales of his guests, the host directs the conversation “with might and main towards Publick affairs” (p. 398), he is treated to an elaborate account of the Quaker lady's communication with generals and statesmen through intermediary spirits. When he cites his ill health in an attempt to cut short prophecies of his future political greatness, he discovers that he has merely returned the conversation to the excremental mysteries previously broached by the enthusiasts. The contents of his chamber pot, he is assured by the Quaker lady, can repair his constitution as well as his fortune. Overwhelmed at one point by “such Discours and Entertainment of down-right Filth, and such a Mess of villanouse Imposture and Enthousiastick Cant as was wors to me than all the Naturall Ordure in the World” (pp. 394-96), the host calls for wine to revive his spirits. Naturally it restores him less than it inspires his guests to even more fulsome displays of zeal.

The humor produced by the host's mental suffering in The Adept Ladys is enhanced by his comic physical suffering. His intellectual fastidiousness—so grossly offended at every turn by his guests' credulous fanaticism—has its counterpart in his revulsion at the bodily dross that the Quaker woman repeatedly celebrates. Here again, the host is comically forced to endure his aversion, unwilling to offend his guests and unable to find a way to stop or divert the torrent of their enthusiasm. The high point of this element of the farce comes near the beginning, when the Quaker lady first reveals her grand secret:

The Q:Woman having open'd the Bundle in which there were Papers that seem'd to contain certain Druggs, which they call'd (as I perceiv'd) the Subjects, presented one of them to me ready open'd, & bid me observe that well: which I did with great Gravity, holding the Paper in my hand: and after I had remain'd a little in this Pause, looking still on what was in the Paper; one of them ask'd me Smilingly, & in a very familiar way, what I thought of it? I told them with great Submission (as to Persons deeper sighted than my self.) that I thought I saw a Powder of an Earthy Colour. What Tast it had, I did not care truly to try: nor as yet had I offer'd to Smell to it, or so much as feell it with my fingers. The Q:Woman at last applying to me; asked me if I knew a certain Thing which was so vile that we gave money to have it rid out of our houses? This being a pretty odd Question; I sate mute for a while, till she had ask'd this over again two or three severall ways, and began, as I thought, to reproach me for being a little Dull. On this I offer'd to smell to it; making (I Believe) at the Same time some kind of Face not very agreable: and finding, that this had Spread a sort of grum Smile over my Assembly; I ventur'd to Smile a little aukardly my Self too, and told them, I now thought I had gott the Matter right: this being perhaps the Thing which we were glad to get our Bodyes rid of, in the first place, and then our Houses: and from this time I kept the Paper a little further from my Nose; till I had conveniently shifted it from me.

(pp. 388-90)

Tormented but unable to escape from his guests without giving offense, the host vents his frustrations in intermittent sardonic remarks that read like a farceur's asides. One instance occurs when the Quaker lady tells him that her great discovery of the powers of bodily waste came when she made an inspired connection between biblical verses advising her to look into herself and the fact that the newborn Christ was laid in a manger: “It came into her Mind, that She ought to take up with what was under the Manger.” Disgusted, the host parenthetically notes that therein she displaid “a greater Humility it should seem than Hers who sought only for what was under the Table” (p. 394). Later he remarks in passing that the “dull and heavy” prose of the prophetic letters which the Quaker lady boasts of sending to various men of affairs by angels “ill-answer'd the Sprightlyness of their Sublime Aeriall Messengers” (p. 398). Finally, at the close of the visit, when the prophetess attributes his weak lungs to the quantity of sulfur in his constitution and assures him that the sulfur is “a Token of my being to become a great Philosopher,” the host explodes to his correspondent: “truly (I thought with my Self) I was become allready in a proper Sence; having Philosophy enough courageously to endure this Assault of the most raging Enthousiasme that ever yet surely broke out into the World” (p. 404).

Shaftesbury's Post-Script to The Adept Ladys is awkwardly disjointed and incongruous with the body of the work, but its presentation of the narrator as aggressive railler and rake introduces another comic element in its recurring bawdiness. Characteristic is its final lewd sally, in which the narrator recalls the Quaker lady's account of the solar fire as “it was first Discover'd to her and experimented on her Self by one of her first Masters, a Grand Adept.” Her account leads the narrator to speculate about how the Quaker lady might have “melted” (along with the windows of the room where the experiment took place) and about what became of her clothes, since, in the case of her body, “thither (she confess'd) the Fire had penetrated, and made Impression on the Parts.” The story, he coyly concludes, “had like to have caus'd a Digression, by the odd Fancyes it occasion'd in me” (p. 428).

More than any other surviving writing by Shaftesbury, The Adept Ladys illustrates the sort of jester's performance for which he castigated himself in his Stoic Exercises. As such, it helps clarify significant differences in the satiric approach that Shaftesbury was to employ in the works composing volume 1 of Characteristics; for, despite his endorsement of Leibnitz's censure, his satiric performance in this volume does not represent a similar departure from Stoic principles. When Shaftesbury justified his practice to Leibnitz on the basis of a corrupt public taste, he was acknowledging the regrettable gulf between men like himself and the German philosopher, and the typical “airy” English gentleman who was averse to serious thought—a gulf that he sought to bridge by means of a refined and redirected form of raillery quite unlike that displayed in the Ladys. Shaftesbury's famous defense of the use of wit and humor in opposing grave imposture derived from his acceptance of their value as a correcting device for preparing the unthinking reader for a philosophical disposition. Although there is “nothing more unsafe, or more difficult of management” than laughter, Shaftesbury observed in his Exercises, he judged that it could serve as a valuable counter to the pleasures and diversions of the world and to “the Pomp & rediculouse solemnity of human affaires” for one who “was yet unfix'd, & only in a way towards improvement” (p. 82). The challenge which Shaftesbury set for himself for the first time in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm was that of managing his dangerous talents as a railler in order to improve rather than impede the growth of reason and virtue in his reader.

As his response to Leibnitz also suggests, Shaftesbury found this challenge all the more compelling in light of the abuses of wit and humor that he found rampant in English writing at the time. In Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author (1710), he characterized contemporary satire as “scurrilous, buffooning, and without Morals or Instruction; which is the Majesty and Life of this kind of writing.”¹⁰ For him the epitome of such writing was Swift's Tale of a Tub, which he cited to Leibnitz as proof of the undiscriminating taste of his countrymen for “the mix'd Satyrical Way of Raillery and Irony”: “Witness the prevalency and first Success of that detestable Writing of that most detestable Author of the Tale of a Tub; whose Manners, Life and prostitute Pen and Tongue are indeed exactly answerable to the Irregularity, Obscenity, Profaneness and fulsomeness of his false Wit and scurrilouse Style and Humor.”¹¹ Thus Shaftesbury's aim in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm and the satiric pieces that followed was to harness wit and humor to the service of reason and virtue, and in doing so to offer an alternative to the degraded practice of Swift and other satirists of the period. In this attempt he sought to shape his approach both by avoiding the abuses that he discerned in works such as the Tale and by looking to classical models—especially those of Socrates, Xenophon, and Horace—for a form of humor more akin to that “very different kind … suitable with one who understands himself” (Exercises, p. 82).¹²

The Socratic model most admired by Shaftesbury was that presented by Xenophon. Both in his accounts of the teaching of Socrates and elsewhere in his writings, Shaftesbury found in Xenophon an author who “was as distant, on the one hand, from the sonorous, high, and pompous Strain; as, on the other hand, from the ludicrous, mimical, or satirick.”¹³ To the “Gall” or “Venom” of common laughter, Shaftesbury opposed the type produced by Socrates and Xenophon: “that more reservd, gentle kind, w^ch hardly is to be calld Laughter, or w^ch at least is of another Species” (Exercises, pp. 372-74). Shaftesbury conveys something of this concept of benevolent laughter in the term Good Humour.

Essential to Shaftesbury's approach in the Letter is a Socratic persona that is on the whole very different from the exasperated, humorously victimized host of The Adept Ladys, the rake of the Post-Script, or the comically indignant crank of the letter to Micklethwayte. Aside from the opening and closing of the work, he offers his exploration of enthusiasm with very little apology. He elicits his reader's assent as he raises and conducts a kind of internal dialogue, signaling his control of the situation by addressing questions likely to arise in the mind of his reader. For example, after presenting his witty “new Arcadia” conceit comparing the folly of attempting to repress religious enthusiasm to that of attempting to repress love poetry in the classical mode, Shaftesbury's speaker forestalls an obvious objection with the following prelude to his explanation: “BUT, my Lord, you may perhaps wonder, that having been drawn into such a serious Subject as Religion, I shou'd forget my self so far as to give way to Raillery and Humour. I must own to you, my Lord, it is not thro Chance merely, that it has thus happen'd.”¹⁴ Shaftesbury's persona establishes his moral authority both through the appearance of good-humored objectivity and through the element of unassuming modesty characteristic of Socrates. Deferentially he acknowledges his “ordinary Humanity” (p. 13), not only in relation to his noble correspondent but also in relation to others who may find his reasoning “odd” (p. 61) or his philosophy “home-spun” (p. 66). After exploring the topic of religious enthusiasm, he modestly submits that “THE only thing I wou'd infer from all this is, that Enthusiasm is wonderfully powerful and extensive; that it is a matter of nice Judgment, and the hardest thing in the world to know fully and distinctly” (pp. 80-81). Shaftesbury's modest persona provides an appropriate contrast to those dogmatists whose pretensions to truth are humorously exposed in the Letter.

To gain the ear of an audience addicted to the “mix'd Satyrical Way of Raillery and Irony,” however, Shaftesbury is careful to establish his authority as wit as well as moralist. In doing so, he appears especially to follow the lead of Horace (the most frequently cited author in Characteristics). In Horace, Shaftesbury saw a fellow aspirant to Stoic wisdom who had succeeded in adapting his comic gifts to the service of philosophy while addressing an audience predisposed to wit and humor rather than severe virtue. In the second of two letters that Shaftesbury wrote to Pierre Coste in 1706 on the subject of Horace, he argued that, in writing for men such as the corrupt Maecenas, the Roman poet was forced to cover his Stoicism “artfully” with “an Air of Rallery.” Shaftesbury noted, however, that Horace at his best employed a refined form of humor, observing a “just Measure” of irony that could be distinguished from the scurrility of his Epicurean period. Shaftesbury associated this superior form of irony with the Socratic way: not “offensive, Injurouse, Hypocriticall, Bitter, and contrary to all true simplicity, Honesty or good Manners.” In Soliloquy he was to call Horace “the politest” and “most Gentleman-like of Roman Poets.”¹⁵

Shaftesbury sought to establish his authority as a wit in part by exhibiting his mastery of fashionable forms such as the literary letter, attempting that graceful “Concealment of Order and Method” that he held to be “the chief Beauty” of Horace.¹⁶ Thus, for example, he subtly introduces the topic of religious enthusiasm in the discussion of poetic inspiration that serves as an opening compliment to his correspondent in the Letter.¹⁷ But Shaftesbury also lays claim to the wit and urbanity demanded by his audience through displaying his skill in raillery. And it is perhaps above all else the attempt to attain a just measure of irony in employing his talents as satirist that characterizes Shaftesbury's approach as a wit and humorist in the work. It is the concept of fair, decorous, and proportionally appropriate raillery that makes his approach very different from that found in the The Adept Ladys and in works such as Swift's Tale of a Tub.

In A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm Shaftesbury appears to follow the Socratic model that he discerned in Xenophon: “not to appear positive or deciding (excepting in ye great questions of Vertue ag[ains]t the vitiouse).”¹⁸ Consequently, he both exemplifies and induces a more skeptical, dispassionate assessment of religious enthusiasm than is seen in The Adept Ladys and in Swift. In part he does so by directing his raillery towards both the French Prophets and their zealous orthodox opponents. In part he does so by pointing up paradoxes in the behavior and views of each group, rather than by employing direct censure or overt irony. Shaftesbury's speaker presents real or apparent inconsistencies (the unchristian practices of orthodox churchmen, the enthusiast's pleasure in suffering), but he does not manufacture irony in the manner of the rakish persona of the Ladys, who praises the adepts for freeing themselves from “the Burden of fals Shame and modesty, such as attends the Unsanctifyed” (pp. 420-22), or Swift's speaker, who heaps praise on the trivial and venal performances of the moderns or lauds the rogueries of Peter and Jack. When Shaftesbury's speaker celebrates the “hard-hearted” tolerance with which the English baffle the Prophets' attempt to achieve martyrdom (p. 42), it is the Prophets' behavior—not the speaker's inversion of the satiric norm—that generates the irony. The joke is justly in the thing itself, not in the telling. Shaftesbury's technique aims more at stimulating a skeptical appraisal than provoking a scornful dismissal in the manner of Swift. It serves to unsettle prejudices, not confirm them. To describe tolerance as “hard-hearted” and persecution as “kind Blows” is to force a reevaluation of commonly held views, inviting analysis of the real or apparent contradictions embodied in the thought and behavior of both religious enthusiasts and their opponents.

Shaftesbury's general reliance on explicit comparison also produces a less scurrilous treatment of fanaticism than that found in the Ladys and in Swift. If, as Aldridge speculates, the Ladys is less autobiography than satiric invention, then Shaftesbury's deflating embodiment of his target in the character of the Quaker lady—a vain, deluded, sour-visaged bawd—is analogous to Swift's depiction of various sectarian practices in section 11 of the Tale as the “pranks” of the knavish Jack. By contrast, in the Letter the French Prophets are exposed by simile or analogy, not metaphor or allegory. Rather than endowing them with garlands or wires, for example, Shaftesbury explicitly presents the Prophets as being like ludicrous pastoralists or spasmodic puppets.¹⁹ The difference is slight, but it results in the appearance of a more scrupulously fair treatment of the work's satiric objects.

Nor does Shaftesbury engage in assaults on individuals by name in the manner of Swift, whose explicit depiction of William Wotton and Richard Bentley (“William W-tt-n, B.D.” and “Dr. B-tl-y”) as arrogant, stupid rogues in The Battle of the Books reads like a culmination of similar assaults in the Tale itself. A complaint in one of the early replies to the Letter merely points up Shaftesbury's comparative delicacy. The author of Remarks upon the Letter to a Lord Concerning Enthusiasm objected to the “cruel [Chastisement] in the dark”²⁰ provided by Shaftesbury's reference to “an Eminent, Learned, and truly Christian Prelate you once knew, who cou'd have given you a full account of his Belief in Fairys” (pp. 9-10). In a postscript to his private letter to Somers accompanying the published work, however, Shaftesbury noted that he had changed the manuscript at this very point for the sake of his victim, Bishop Edward Fowler: “The change of a Tense has put him out of y^e way of Reflection & a good Epethite or two bestow'd on him, saves the breach of Charity in one who would willingly say all the Good of him that he cou'd, & conceal the rest.” What Shaftesbury apparently meant by “the rest” makes his gentle treatment of Fowler even more remarkable, for he had observed to Somers in a previous letter that the prelate “was once a professd Informer from the Roof & Board (one might say Service too) of [the author's] Ancestour.”²¹ Admittedly, many readers may have had little trouble identifying “A GENTLEMAN who has writ lately in defence of reviv'd Prophecy, and has since fallen himself into the prophetick Extasys” (p. 70) as John Lacy, a prominent English proselyte of the French Prophets. But Shaftesbury's veiled reference at least maintains the appearance of civility.

Equally indicative of Shaftesbury's attempt to eliminate the scurrilous from his satiric treatment of religious enthusiasm in the Letter is his handling of potentially prurient material. Compared to the bawdy suggestions of the Post-Script of the Adept Ladys, his approach in the Letter is extremely oblique. His analogies between enthusiasm and love studiously keep to the Petrarchan or pastoral plane, as when he notes how “by a little Affectation in Love-Matters, and with the help of a Romance or Novel, a Boy of Fifteen, or a grave Man of Fifty, may be sure to grow a very natural Coxcomb, and feel the Belle Passion in good earnest” (p. 9) or when he develops his new Arcadia conceit. The closest that Shaftesbury comes to pruriency is his coy refusal to continue his account of Bacchic practices (as detailed by Livy) beyond references to the participants' convulsions: “The detestable Things that follow, I would not willingly transcribe” (p. 73). By raising the issue of these unmentionable practices (including, of course, sexual orgies) while addressing the claims of the unnamed Lacy, Shaftesbury may be alluding to rumors of the Prophets' sexual misconduct that were to surface in print about a month after he composed the Letter, in the first part of Richard Kingston's Enthusiastick Impostors, No Divinely Inspired Prophets.²² If such is the case, however, Shaftesbury's approach is extraordinarily delicate—especially when compared with Swift's handling of sex and the Saints in the Tale and in the accompanying Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.

Scatological humor is also conspicuously absent from the Letter. In one of the poems appended to The Adept Ladys, Shaftesbury plays upon the adepts' alchemical claims to produce gold from the contents of the chamber pot by celebrating—as surpassing that of Jove—the “Golden Shower” of one Chrysinda (p. 434). In the couplets of another poem, which satirizes the Quaker lady's account of discovering the key to alchemy, the sleeping Ophiria dreams of “a sprightly youth of heav'nly Meen” who reveals to her the wealth flowing within her own body. As the vision ends,

By Luck her thought was hitt.
She wak'd, and found She had herself Be———.

(p. 436)

Shaftesbury's avoidance of scatology in the Letter. is especially noteworthy in a work that shares one of the primary sources for Swift's account of the Aeolists and of Louis XIV. Henry More's linking of enthusiasm and flatulence in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus finds no echo in Shaftesbury's polite wit in the Letter.

Shaftesbury's concept of a just measure of irony is also evident in his pruning of the kind of humorous luxuriance (or buffoonery) found in his letter to Micklethwayte. The speaker of A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm never, for example, indulges in the kind of comic extravagance seen in Shaftesbury's account of the abuses to which a small, unprotected picture is subjected or seen in the glorious excesses of A Tale of a Tub. His wit is restrained and directed to the point. Swift repeatedly unleashes a richly comic profusion of examples, analogies, or details, whether in his accounts of the “hieroglyphics” employed by ancient writers to comment on True Critics (sec. 3), of the projects, discoveries, and inventions of Peter (sec. 4), of the justification of learning by indexes (sec. 7), or of the tricks of Jack (sec. 11). But three is the limit for Shaftesbury's examples, be they of men's “Faculty of deceiving themselves” (pp. 8-10), of times “when the Spirits of men are low” (p. 25), or of the failures of persecution to suppress Protestantism and primitive Christianity (pp. 44-46).

The author's restraint is equally apparent in his handling of fully developed comparisons. Shaftesbury may expand a conceit to include a range of satiric targets. That of the new Arcadia, for instance, includes gibes at pastoral affectations, at the repressive policies of the Roman Catholic church and of Puritan authorities during the Interregnum, and at the extravagances of enthusiasts such as the French Prophets.²³ But we never lose track of the first term of the comparison; the conceit never becomes a fiction. A glance at Swift's handling of the Aeolists makes this point clear. In Swift's description a wide variety of damaging points of comparison between this imaginary sect and the English dissenters emerges. But Swift's exuberant development of his wind conceit to encompass a complete body of doctrines and rituals extends far beyond bare correspondences. His account of the sect not only achieves the detailed richness of allegorical fiction but also incorporates inventions such as the Aeolists' demons (the chameleon and the windmill) that contemporaries had trouble connecting to his satiric targets. While Swift's mode, to use Edward W. Rosenheim's phrase, is that of a creator of “satiric fictions,”²⁴ Shaftesbury's is that of a satiric essayist who clearly subordinates his wit to his arguments and observations.

In view of Shaftesbury's apparent efforts to create an alternative to the satiric practice of writers such as Swift, he must have been chagrined to learn that a number of early readers ascribed A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to the author of A Tale of a Tub. The primary reason for this mortifying mistake seems to have been Shaftesbury's handling of religion in his work. Reporting the dinner-table discussion that first informed him of the false attribution, Shaftesbury recounted to Somers that the Tale had been described as written “pretendedly for [religion]: but in so Burlesque a Manner as over threw It more effectually.” Similarly, the Letter had been described as “a comical Piece … concerning Prophesy,” which the author treated with marked irreverence, “in a very familiar way of Wit & Rallery.”²⁵ The notoriety of Shaftesbury's work as an attack on religion even secured it a place among books produced at the Sacheverell trial to prove that the defendant's “church in danger” cry was far from a groundless libel.

Voitle notes the author's bitter complaints about the charges of blasphemy that were leveled at the piece, as well as Shaftesbury's greater caution in dealing with religion in later works such as Sensus Communis and Soliloquy. But he contends that the writer “certainly knew what to expect” in publishing the Letter. and he theorizes that Shaftesbury was willing to risk “his reputation for piety” in order to present new ideas in the piece as groundwork for The Moralists (pp. 327-29). There is evidence in the Letter, however, to suggest that Shaftesbury, seeking his just measure of irony, had to some extent tried to forestall charges of profaneness by suggesting much more explicitly than Swift had done in the Tale that the work's quarrel was with abuses of religion, not religion itself. In several passages he introduces pious disclaimers to qualify his raillery. For example, he notes that the Romans pursued an “ill Purpose” in attempting to suppress Christianity and that ridicule would have proved a more effective weapon “had the Truth of the Gospel been any way surmountable” (p. 45).

That such disclaimers did little to avert charges of blasphemy is hardly surprising. To the extent that Shaftesbury employed his wit to promote a rethinking of received truths, his treatment of religion was bound to offend many readers. And it is this very element of skepticism that provides one of Shaftesbury's most notable satiric resources. His references—albeit veiled—to specific targets such as John Lacy may partly account for his satire's having a sharper edge than that of such writers as Addison and Steele, whose adherence to tenets of Christian charity precluded attacks on individuals.²⁶ But Shaftesbury's satiric approach differs from theirs more fundamentally in its tendency to transgress against orthodoxy in religion and other areas by attempting to lead its reader from unthinking faith to philosophical engagement. Shaftesbury's characteristic use of paradox, for example, derives from a freedom and inclination to turn accepted wisdom on its head, as when the Letter writer suggests that the persecutions of Nero were highly advantageous to the early church or when he presents the inducement to religious faith provided by Pascal's wager as an affront to God.

Freedom from orthodox religious perspectives translates in the Letter into shifts and reversals of conventional attitudes that offer the witty jolt of the unexpected. Extending the theatrical conceit provided by his puppet-show mockery of the French Prophets, Shaftesbury subverts traditional reverence for early church martyrs by having his speaker flippantly note that the Romans might have succeeded better in opposing Christianity “if they had chose to bring our primative Founders upon the Stage in a pleasanter way than that of Bear-Skins and Pitch-Barrels” (p. 45). Similarly he provides a novel perspective on the Apostle Paul, presenting him wittily defending Christianity to the Athenians and Romans as a courtly gentleman who “accommodates himself to the Apprehensions and Temper of those politer People” (p. 47). Shaftesbury even introduces a saucy Job, who “makes bold enough with God, and takes his Providence roundly to task” (p. 52).

As this last example indicates, Shaftesbury's witty treatment of conventional ideas and attitudes is frequently pointed by freedoms in diction unthinkable in the prose of more orthodox works such as The Spectator. Shaftesbury produces numerous tiny shocks of wit by juxtaposing language appropriated by Christianity with that normally restricted to very different contexts. The opening of the Letter exploits such a discrepancy by linking Christian and pagan, as in the case of the Christian believer who can “extend his Faith so largely, as to comprehend in it not only all Scriptural and Traditional Miracles, but a solid System of old Wives Storys” (p. 9). Similarly the failure of a pagan to believe in the Muses is styled “Profane and Atheistical” (p. 11). Elsewhere Shaftesbury creates witty incongruities from unexpected combinations of the sacred and the wholly secular. Refurbishing Butler's “Errant Saints” (Hudibras), Shaftesbury's speaker labels religious persecution “Saint-Errantry” (p. 31). He contends that freedom of raillery will protect the Church of England from false “Venders of Prophecy or Miracles” (p. 44). Wit and humor, he argues, need not be precluded from the discussion of sacred matters “as long as we treat Religion with good Manners” (p. 49).

A final source of unorthodox wit is Shaftesbury's ironic heightening of his paradoxes and conceits by juxtaposing formal religious language and the idiom of informal speech. The freedom of raillery represented by puppet-show presentations of the French Prophets, his speaker says, will spare “our National Church” the task of “trying her Strength with” such sects (p. 44). Nor will we offend “the God of Truth” if we refuse “to put the lye upon our Understandings” by accepting Pascal's wager (p. 53). The “Spirit of Prophecy,” says Shaftesbury's speaker, “prov'd so catching amongst the antient Prophets, that even the Profane Saul was taken by it” (pp. 69-70). This last example of the author's skeptical wit was a particular bugbear for orthodox critics, who took great offense at the word “catching” in connection with biblical prophecy.²⁷ For such readers, the irreverence of Shaftesbury's wit—and his arguments for employing it with sacred subjects—tended to overshadow the range of satiric refinements embodied in his performance.

In A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm Shaftesbury sought to offer an alternative to contemporary satiric practice—an alternative that obviated his Stoic objections to the display of wit and humor that came naturally to him. Its carefully controlled use of raillery in the service of exposition sought to limit the disruptive potential of wit. Its use of paradox in lieu of more scurrilous ironic techniques sought to further the Stoic ideal of detachment from the passions and to avoid a humor of malice. Finally, to the extent that it encouraged a critical assessment of emotionally charged topics such as religious enthusiasm—unsettling unexamined beliefs and leading the airy reader towards a philosophic disposition—Shaftesbury's just measure of raillery provided an outlet for his talents that could not easily be dismissed as self-indulgence or vain display.

The author's satisfaction with his satiric achievement in the Letter appears evident from his use of a similar ironic mode in Sensus Communis and Soliloquy, the other pieces collected in volume 1 of Characteristics The primary difference between these later works and the Letter is a marked toning down of the wit directed at religion. In Miscellaneous Reflections, however, Shaftesbury's approach underwent a significant change. Although the miscellanist persona's presence there is felt in a relatively small part of the work, his ironic celebration of the modern art of patchwork wit and his other manufactured ironies recall Swift's satiric ploys in A Tale of a Tub and the rakish narrator's celebration of the shamelessness of the enthusiasts in The Adept Ladys. An equally significant difference is the speaker's more direct and less moderate approach to satiric targets ranging from religious priesthoods in general to Tory High Churchmen in particular.²⁸ Whether these changes represent a shift in tactics dictated by the overall structure of Characteristics or result from other factors, they mark Shaftesbury's partial abandonment of one of the most interesting satiric experiments of the early eighteenth century.²⁹

Unlike his ideas about ridicule, however, the satiric model that Shaftesbury provided in works such as the Letter apparently exerted little direct influence, even on admirers such as Antony Collins. The rhapsodic style of The Moralists had a much greater impact on later writers. Yet Shaftesbury's attempt to achieve a just measure of irony may in fact have played a significant role in the future of English culture. The author of Bart'lemy Fair; or, an Enquiry after Wit showed a prescient anxiety about the skeptical aspects of the Letter in complaining that the work was

industriously spread in the Nation; put, by way of ABC, into the hands of every young Fellow, who begins to speak great swelling Words, against what he Will not Understand, because he is Resolv'd not to Practice: And sent, by way of Mission, into Foreign Parts, upon that hopeful Project! which is now the Heroick Passion of exalted Spirits, the saving of Men's Sense, by the Damning of their Souls!³⁰

Admired—if often grudgingly—for their wit, and frequently republished during the first half of the eighteenth century as part of Characteristics, Shaftesbury's Letter and his other satiric works achieved a respectability and sustained hearing rarely granted the literature of free thinking in the period. Their contribution to the spread of Enlightenment thought in England as well as on the Continent should not be underestimated.³¹

Notes

1. John Hayman, “Raillery in Restoration Satire,” Huntington Library Quarterly 31, 2 (1968): 107-22, 116-22.

2. Reflections upon “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (London, 1709), p. 24; John G. Hayman, “Shaftesbury and the Search for a Persona,” Studies in English Literature 10, 3 (Summer 1970): 491-504, 501-502.

3. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 25 July 1712 N.S., Public Record Office, Shaftesbury Papers, PRO 30/24/23/9/pp. 248-49. The passage in Characteristics that Shaftesbury cites is one where his persona (a commentator offering his Miscellaneous Reflections on the first two volumes) offers to employ his skills as a miscellany writer to counteract the author's unfashionable seriousness in An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and The Moralists:

   According to this Method, whilst I serve as Critick or Interpreter to this new Writer, I may the better correct his Flegm, and give him more of the fashionable Air and Manner of the World, especially in what relates to the Subject and Manner of his two last Pieces, which are contain'd in his second Volume. For these being of the more regular and formal kind, may easily be oppressive to the airy Reader; and may therefore with the same assurance as Tragedy claim the necessary Relief of the Little Piece or Farce.

   (Characteristicks, 2nd edn., 3 vols. [London, 1714], 3:7-8)

4. Horst Meyer, Limae labor: Untersuchungen zur Textgenese und Druckgeschichte von Shaftesburys “The Moralists,” European Univ. Papers, Ser. 14, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature 63 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1978), pp. 37-39.

5. Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671-1713 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984), p. 152; hereafter cited in the text.

6. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Exercises [ΑΣΚΗΜΑΤΑ], PRO 30/24/27/10/p. 370; hereafter cited in the text.

7. Shaftesbury to Thomas Micklethwayte, 1 September 1712 N.S., PRO 30/24/23/9/pp. 279-80; hereafter cited in the text.

8. Dated 19 January 1701/02, and surviving in two copies in the Public Record Office, this work has been published in full in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, ed. and trans. Gerd Hemmerich and Wolfram Benda (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzbog, 1981), 1:376-443. All citations refer to this edition.

9. A. O. Aldridge, “Shaftesbury's Rosicrucian Ladies,” Anglia 103, 3/4 (1985): 297-319.

10. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, 1:266.

11. PRO 30/24/23/9/p. 249. Shaftesbury had spoken with distaste of A Tale of a Tub well before his response to Leibnitz. Explaining his decision to omit his own and his dedicatee's names from an early version of The Moralists, Shaftesbury sarcastically observed to Somers: “You have had a Tale of a Tub dedicated to you before now: but a Tale of Philosophy wou'd be a coarser Present to come publickly upon you, as y^t did” (Shaftesbury to Lord Somers, 20 October 1705, PRO 30/24/22/4/p. 13). In a letter concerning the manuscript of A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, Shaftesbury referred to the author of the Tale as Somers's “pretended good Friend” (Shaftesbury to Lord Somers, March 1707/8, PRO 30/24/22/4/p. 69).

12. Shaftesbury's sending Swift's dedicatee his own satiric essay focusing on religious enthusiasm—one of Swift's primary topics—suggests that Shaftesbury may have expected Somers (and anyone to whom Somers chose to show the manuscript) to compare A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm with A Tale of a Tub. No doubt Shaftesbury would have expected such a comparison to reveal the superiority of his own performance to that of the “coarser” Swift.

13. Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, 1:255. In his notes for a life of Socrates, Shaftesbury complained that Plato's version of his master was sometimes too buffooning (Design of a Socratick History, PRO 30/24/27/14/p. 53).

14. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (London, 1708), pp. 33-34; hereafter cited in the text. My choice of editions of Shaftesbury's satiric works predating Characteristics for literary analysis is explained in my “Shaftesbury's Wit in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” Modern Philology 86, 1 (August 1988): 46-53, n. 3.

15. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 1 October 1706, PRO 30/24/45/iii/48v, 44; Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, 1:258, 328.

16. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous Reflections, in Characteristicks, 3:21.

17. See Hayman, pp. 494-95.

18. Design of a Socratick History, PRO 30/24/27/14/p. 76.

19. Given Shaftesbury's new Arcadia conceit, it is interesting to note Hillel Schwartz's discussion of the pastoral as an element of the French Prophets' appeal to Londoners (The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980], pp. 222-29).

20. [Edward Fowler?], Remarks upon the Letter to a Lord Concerning Enthusiasm (London, 1708), p. 4.

21. Shaftesbury to Lord Somers, 12 July 1708, PRO 30/24/22/4/p. 87 (the postscript is crossed out in this copybook version); PRO 30/24/22/4/p. 69.

22. Richard Kingston, Enthusiastick Impostors, No Divinely Inspired Prophets (London, 1707), p. 33. An advertisement on the verso of Kingston's final page indicates that his book was published on 22 October 1707. On the September 1707 dating of the manuscript Letter, see my “The Publication of Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 236-41, 236-37.

23. For a fuller discussion of Shaftesbury's skillful use of conceits (including this one) and paradoxes, see my “Shaftesbury's Wit in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm.”

24. Edward W. Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist's Art (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), chap. 3.

25. PRO 30/24/22/4/p. 68.

26. Steele, it is true, presents a case for personal satire in Tatler 61, where his speaker justifies its use to combat abuses ignored by the law (e.g., gross ingratitude). But his and Addison's general satiric practice in the Tatler and the Spectator—as well as the bulk of their commentary on the subject—rejects attacks on individuals.

27. See, for example, Remarks upon the Letter to a Lord Concerning Enthusiasm, pp. 62-63; Reflections upon “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” pp. 8, 44-47.

28. Jack Prostko uses the example of Shaftesbury's provoked gentleman (who concludes a lengthy diatribe at the end of Miscellaneous Reflections without permitting his High Church antagonists to offer a rebuttal) to argue that Shaftesbury employs a form of writing which precludes the free debate that he advocates (“Shaftesbury and Moral Speech,” Eigteenth-Century Studies 23, 1 [Fall 1989]: 42-61, 59-60). Prostko's generalizations have validity even for the works composing volume 1 of Characteristics, but they tend to blur essential distinctions between volumes 1 and 3.

29. For Hayman, the buffoonish miscellanist serves as a negative example, embodying a “faulty” mental disposition and thus serving as a foil to earlier personae in Characteristics (pp. 498-99). Shaftesbury's more direct and less moderate form of satiric attack in Miscellaneous Reflections can also be explained in terms of the overall design of Characteristics, but it may reflect his willingness to sacrifice philosophical propriety for propagandistic power in the face of his alarm at the outcome of the Sacheverell trial and the fall of the Godolphin-Marlborough ministry. In a letter to Somers accompanying Miscellaneous Reflections, Shaftesbury expressed the hope, “perhaps too advantageouse and savouring of the Fatherly Love of an Author towards his own offspring,” that, should his attack on Tory principles “grow credible, & take either with our growing Youth, or their grown Parents; those endow'd [Tory] Semenarys might chance to make a much worse figure & the October-Club prove less considerable than at present.” In lines crossed out in his copy of the letter, he even ventured to suggest that the work's influence might before long be seen in the results of parliamentary elections (Shaftesbury to Lord Somers, 30 March 1711 N.S., PRO 30/24/22/4/pp. 155-56).

30. [Mary Astell], Bart'lemy Fair; or, an Enquiry after Wit (London, 1709), p. 23.

31. Although she distorts Shaftesbury's thought in Characteristics by reducing his primary intent to an attack on revealed religion, Dorothy B. Schlegel makes a similar point about the importance of Shaftesbury for the French Enlightenment in her Shaftesbury and the French Deists, Univ. of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature 15 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1956).