SOURCE: Markley, Robert. “Style as Philosophical Structure: The Contexts of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.” In The Philosopher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century, edited by Robert Ginsberg, pp. 140-54. Selinsgrove, Pa: Susquehanna University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Markley argues that Shaftesbury's work is important not only for its ideas but because it shows the interaction of philosophical and stylistic concerns.]

Shaftesbury has traditionally proved a difficult writer for both literary critics and philosophers. Most of his commentators have taken his self-proclaimed status as a “philosopher” as both the beginning and logical conclusion of their attempts to interpret his work: Shaftesbury is located within the historical traditions of philosophic thought and his “ideas” examined and explicated as disinterested contributions to the history of knowledge. These efforts, however, have led most of his critics to neglect a good portion of his writing, concentrating (albeit understandably) on the Inquiry Concerning Virtue and the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. They ignore or dismiss the stylistic and literary traditions which influenced Shaftesbury, and, by emphasizing the timeless, “philosophical” aspects of his work, neglect its social, political, and ideological assumptions and values.¹ Their concerns, in this regard, pay homage to the success of one important aspect of Shaftesbury's program as a writer: the championing of a disinterested philosophic language that is both morally instructive and aesthetically pleasing.

There are however, problems with this traditional, ahistorical perception of Shaftesbury's thought—and, as John Richetti has argued, with the ways in which we approach much late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosophy.² Shaftesbury's concern with the realm of ideas cannot—by his own account—legitimately be divorced from the stylistic and historical contexts of his work. Repeatedly in The Characteristicks, Shaftesbury calls attention to the historical situation of his writing: he satirizes his detractors, develops elaborate defenses of his previous work, footnotes his classical authorities, offers his opinions on contemporary developments in art, politics, and religion, and does what he can to advance his aristocratic social, aesthetic, and philosophical judgments. Seen in this light, his very “disinterestedness,” his appeals to—and for—the ahistorical realms of beauty and truth are themselves ideological constructs, the products of a complex interaction of social, philosophical, and stylistic traditions. Shaftesbury often seems as concerned with his literary strategies, his “style,” as he is with his “ideas.” Unlike many of his critics, he sees “philosophy” as a strategic and polemical discourse designed to inculcate in his readers a decidedly aristocratic sense of virtue. In this respect, the pretext that his language follows “The Simple Manner … endeavouring only to express the effect of Art, under the appearance of the greatest Ease and Negligence” (1:257)³ is crucial to his self-perception as both a writer and philosopher. The “natural,” disinterested mode of philosophical discourse that Shaftesbury advocates, then, is an end as well as a means. For our purposes, a study of the relationships between Shaftesbury's style and his thought becomes an examination of the interests—historical, social, literary, and critical—that the author uses to promote philosophic disinterest.

I

Underlying the diverse literary forms of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks are two major seventeenth-century stylistic traditions: Jonsonian “humour” and Fletcherian “wit” or, as other critics have termed them, the “self-consuming” and the “self-satisfying,” the Senecan and the “scientific,” or the two plain styles.⁴ The Jonsonian tradition (derived from the example of Ben Jonson's poems and prose comedies)⁵ is essentially Horatian and satiric; it emphasizes the moral utility of language, taking as its model the classical ideal of instruction and delight. It acknowledges the ideal possibility of an objective language which embodies moral truth, but concentrates most of its energy on anatomizing the seemingly irrevocable corruptions of human speech, or probing, through the author's often tortuous progress toward self-knowledge, the moral complexities of the individual consciousness. In contrast, the Fletcherian tradition (an outgrowth of the Cavalier aesthetic of the 1620s and 1630s) reifies aristocratic speech—what Dryden calls “the language of gentlemen”⁶—into both a stylistic and social ideal. Language embodies a code of gentlemanly behavior and values that makes the creation of an “objective” or “natural” discourse both a means and an end. Style, in short, becomes a measure of social worth, a badge of aristocratic self-definition.

Theoretically, then, Jonsonian humour and Fletcherian wit offers writers of the late seventeenth century two seemingly distinct stylistic opinions, two different philosophical traditions on which to draw. In practice, however, these traditions interact dialectically to produce a Cavalier, or Royalist, or aristocratic, prose style that conflates moral virtue and the external manifestations of “good breeding”—a key phrase for writers from Fletcher and James Shirley in the seventeenth century to Shaftesbury and Pope in the eighteenth. The result, for writers of the Restoration period, is a nearly fanatic concern with stylistic propriety, with making one's writing conform to aristocratic standards of verbal decorum.⁷ As Brian Corman has shown, even a self-professed Jonsonian like the playwright Thomas Shadwell subordinates his satiric concerns to the stylistic prerogatives of Fletcherian wit comedy.⁸ In trying to reconcile the often contradictory demands of “wit” and “humour,” late seventeenth-century writers frequently blur the distinctions between them; in Shaftesbury's writings, for example, the terms often become interchangeable. William Congreve (to take only one example from among Shaftesbury's contemporaries) in the “Prologue” to his comedy Love for Love (1695) asserts his claims as both a satirist and a gentleman:

Since The Plain Dealer's scenes of manly rage,
Not one has dared to lash this crying age.
This time the poet owns the bold essay,
Yet hopes there's no ill-manners in his play:(9)

The falling off in these lines from the satiric “rage” of William Wycherley's play to Congreve's worries about “ill-manners” suggests something of the dilemma that confronts late seventeenth-century writers who must try to reconcile morality and stylistic decorum. As Jonson's prose comedies had demonstrated early in the century, the language of satire is inherently unstable; it inevitably participates in the corruption it condemns.¹⁰ Or, to define the problem in Augustinian terms, the language of moral reflection must always be inadequate to the celebration of a deity who, by definition, cannot be understood or encompassed linguistically: this is the dilemma that confronts the anti-Ciceronian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Montaigne and Bacon to Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.¹¹ Almost by definition, the languages of satire and moral reflection work against the linguistic stability sought by an aristocratic discourse that prides itself on what Shaftesbury, Congreve, and Dryden refer to—unabashedly—as its own “perfection.”

In one respect, Shaftesbury's Characteristicks may be read as an eighteenth-century attempt to resolve the crises of seventeenth-century prose style, to unite the languages of satiric morality and aristocratic manners. In practice, however, Shaftesbury's championing of “The Simple Manner” as “the strictest Imitation of Nature” (1:257) assumes stylistic values that emphasize aristocratic authority and verbal grace rather than the kind of epistemological inquiry which characterizes the writings of his seventeenth-century predecessors, notably Bacon. In the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, Shaftesbury insists, “Justness of Thought and Stile, Refinement in Manners, good Breeding, and Politeness of every kind” (1:10) are “naturally” and irrevocably related; and he reiterates this point throughout his writings. This assumption prevents him from acknowledging the instability of classical or Jonsonian satire, its tendency to call into question even those values it seeks to affirm. In Shaftesbury's writings, the “self-consuming artifacts” of epistemological questioning give way to the reification of moral values—virtue, truth, and even aesthetic beauty—as idealized, ahistorical absolutes.¹² This process, the appropriation of traditional moral categories by a language of aristocratic authority, defines the stylistic construction of Shaftesbury's thought.

II

Throughout the Characteristicks Shaftesbury describes his prose style as “simple,” straightforward, and unambiguous. This description suggests an almost Lockean conception of language as a transparent, utilitarian medium; and, to be sure, language, for Shaftesbury, always reflects what he sees as stable social values and timeless moral and aesthetic truths. Yet, at the same time, the act of writing—the dramatic presentation of self—fascinates Shaftesbury in a way that puzzled Locke. Style in The Characteristicks is part revelation, part complex game. It does not simply convey or passively reflect objective ideas but demonstrates, even embodies, the values it upholds.

Shaftesbury's prose style usually assumes one of three basic forms: the satiric, the self-consciously philosophical or analytic, and, in The Moralists, the rhapsodic. In defending his “variety of STILE,” Shaftesbury calls these modes the “Comick, Rhetorical, and … the Poetick or Sublime; such as is the aptest to run into Enthusiasm and Extravagance” (3:285). Although diction and syntax vary widely among these styles, they are different strategies to the same or similar ends—demonstrating that good writing and “Good Breeding” are inseparable. Part of this demonstration is the idealizing of gentlemanly discourse as it appears in his texts. For Shaftesbury, “the appearance of the greatest Ease and Negligence” (1:257) defines a conscious stylistic program that attempts to bring philosophic discourse within the realm of polite conversation. Shaftesbury refers casually to his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm as “a sort of idle Thoughts, such as pretend only to Amusement, and have no relation to Business or Affairs” (1:3); but, in the first of his Miscellanies, he takes pains to defend his “Concealment of Order”: “the Art was to destroy every … Token or Appearance [of order], give an extemporary Air to what was writ, and make the Effect of Art be felt, without discovering the Artifice” (3:21-22). Style, realized as its own ideal, becomes ironically self-effacing. In defending himself against charges that his writing is unsystematic, Shaftesbury claims that he has been “sufficiently grave and serious, in defense of what is directly contrary to Seriousness and Gravity. I have very solemnly pleaded for Gaiety and GOOD-HUMOUR: I have declaim'd against Pedantry in learned Language, and oppos'd Formality in Form” (3:129). This kind of irony, a deliberate dissociation of content from form, emphasizes that language can be manipulated in various ways to produce different kinds of self-presentation. In this respect, Shaftesbury sees style (to borrow Dryden's metaphor) not as the man but as his clothing.

The studied artlessness of Shaftesbury's prose, though, is consciously crafted, drawing on diverse stylistic traditions and assuming diverse syntactical forms. In much of his writing, his stylistic models are the Roman satirists, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. All three are quoted throughout his work; Horace is cited more than twice as often as all other writers—ancient and modern—combined. Shaftesbury frequently strives for a Horatian ideal of conversational ease and pointed wit. His language often tries to create its own sense of satiric authority:

We may defend Villany, or cry up Folly, before the World: But to appear Fools, Mad-men, or Varlets, to our-selves; and prove it to our own faces, that we are really such, is insupportable. For so true a Reverence has every-one for himself, when he comes clearly to appear before his close Companion, that he had rather profess the vilest things of himself in open Company, then hear his Character privately from his own Mouth. So that we may readily from hence conclude, That the chief Interest of Ambition, Avarice, Corruption, and every sly insinuating Vice, is to prevent this Interview and Familiarity of Discourse which is consequent upon close Retirement and inward Recess.

(1:173-74)

Shaftesbury's target in this passage is a staple of much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satire: the kind of monstrous hypocrisy that deludes the individual even as he or she tries to dupe “the World.” Stylistically, his prose is closer to, say, Jonson's than to Swift's in its subtle but significant disruptions of balanced rhetorical structures. The syntax of this passage is deliberately fragmented; what could be read as one leisurely sentence breaks into three. The emphasis is less on the logical development of the author's thought than on the cumulative rhetorical force of a series of aphoristic clauses structured around strong, unambiguous verbs. The intransitive verbs—“is”—in the first and third sentences carry the weight of universal decrees. In essence, Shaftesbury creates an authoritative satiric voice by his refusal to particularize. The generalizing tendency of his imagination transforms personal observation into what he calls elsewhere “a simple, clear, and united View,” unbroken “by the Expression of any thing peculiar, or distinct” (1:143). In this respect, then, Shaftesbury presses the idiosyncratic language of satire into the service of promoting universal “truths.” Its assertions about human “Villany” and “Folly” describe a satiric world distinct from the author's ideal realm of philosophical self-examination and self-knowledge.

Elsewhere, however, Shaftesbury assumes different stylistic strategies. In the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, his language becomes more self-consciously “philosophical,” his syntax more complex and periodic, than in his other writings. The satiric, Horatian mode of Jonson and the English satirists is replaced by the stylistic model of Locke's philosophical writings. Citations of classical authorities largely disappear; atypically, Shaftesbury becomes less ironic than descriptive:

Thus the several Motions, Inclinations, Passions, Dispositions, and consequent Carriage and Behaviour of Creatures in the various Parts of Life, being several Views or Perspectives represented to the Mind, which readily discerns the Good and Ill towards the Species or Publick; there arises a new Trial or Exercise of the Heart: which must either rightly and soundly affect what is just and right, and disaffect what is contrary; or, corruptly affect what is ill, and disaffect what is worthy and good.

(2:30)

This sentence is carefully constructed around a central antithesis: “Good” versus “Ill.” Clauses and phrases precisely balance or oppose each other; the verbs “affect” and “disaffect” are contrasted to achieve a logical as well as rhetorical closure. The syntax is relaxed, almost leisurely; Shaftesbury avoids the terse, epigrammatic statements that characterize his prose in other essays. In this passage, as throughout the Inquiry, he is rhetorically persuasive rather than satirically assertive.

In The Moralists, Shaftesbury attempts to articulate straightforwardly a coherent, idealistic philosophy in the person of Theocles. The dialogue form in which this essay is cast allows the author the opportunity to juxtapose the languages of wit and analytic philosophy. In turn, these modes are set against the “enthusiastic” language of Theocles' “Meditations,” set pieces best described as deliberately rhapsodic excursions into Vergilian hyperbole. Theocles' first “Fit” (his own term) is a cross between what he calls “a sensible kind of Madness, like those Transports … permitted to our Poets” and “downright Raving” (2:346-47):

Ye Fields and Woods, my Refuge from the toilsom World of Business, receive me in your quiet Sanctuarys, and favour my Retreat and thoughtful Solitude.—Ye verdant Plains, how gladly I salute ye!—Hail ye blissful Mansions! Known Seats! Delightful Prospects!! Majestick Beautys of this Earth, and all ye Rural Powers and Grace!—Bless'd be ye chaste Abodes of happiest Mortals, who here in peaceful Innocence enjoy a Life unenvy'd, tho Divine; whilst with its bless'd Tranquility it affords a happy Leisure and Retreat for Man; who, made for Contemplation, and to search his own and other Natures, may here best meditate the Cause of Things; and plac'd amidst the various Scenes of Nature, may nearer view her Works.

(2:344)

As Theocles' comments suggest, this passage verges on self-parody; it both takes itself seriously and draws our attention to its excessive rhetoric. Its diction, tone, and subject set it apart from the language that Shaftesbury employs to characterize his more rational (and imaginatively limited) “dialogist,” Philocles. It is, in short, very much a set speech or, to borrow one of Shaftesbury's favorite terms, a “Performance.”

This passage marks itself, then, as the stylistic equivalent of Shaftesbury's “Enthusiasm,” the dialectical opposite of the author's satire. Near the end of The Moralists, after several more rhapsodies, Theocles reaches the climax of this hyperbolic mode: “all sound Love and Admiration is ENTHUSIASM: the Transports of Poets, the Sublime of Orators, the Rapture of Musicians, the high Strains of the Virtuosi; all mere ENTHUSIASM! Even Learning it-self, the Love of Arts and Curiositys, the Spirit of Travellers and Adventurers; Gallantry, War, Heroism; All, all ENTHUSIASM!” (2:400). “ENTHUSIASM” here, as Stanley Grean notes,¹³ exemplifies the joy and idealism of Shaftesbury's philosophy. His style in this case reaches an extreme of authorial assertion. The range of eighteenth-century arts and sciences are comprehended by a single word: the capitalized abstraction—part cry of joy, part expression of awe, part command—becomes the linguistic representation of what Shaftesbury calls “the Good and Perfection of the UNIVERSE, [the deity's] all-good and perfect Work” (2:374). Language here yearns to transcend itself, to transcend the social conditions of its mundane existence and ascend to the realm of a mystical perfection.

III

Throughout his writings, Shaftesbury insists on the power of forms to affect the reader, viewer, or beholder, whether for good or ill: “beautiful forms beautify; polite polish. On the contrary, gothic gothicize, barbarous barbarize.”¹⁴ Style, then, is an affective process as well as a reflection of a writer's values; it polishes the reader's manners as it incites the reader to virtuous actions. In his defense of Advice to an Author, Shaftesbury maintains that although “his pretence has been to advise Authors, and polish Stiles … his Aim has been to correct Manners, and regulate Lives” (3:187). This “pretence” is less a deception than an unambiguous strategy. Shaftesbury's “literary” advice becomes a means of correction and regulation; the plural “Lives” suggests that he has more in mind than self-improvement. Language, in other words, embodies and deploys a system of values; it does not passively reflect a moral or aesthetic order but attempts to define and shape what “order” itself may be.

Shaftesbury appropriates the languages of satire, analytical philosophy, and rhapsodic praise as part of a larger, and at times explicit, effort to make the language of philosophy an active social force rather than merely a vehicle of scholastic definition and debate. His stylistic practice is often frankly polemical. He has, as he says, little interest in the “Magnificent Pretension” of trying to define “material and immaterial Substances” and distinguish “their Propertys and Modes” (1:289); in an important passage, he describes the purpose of his efforts as an appeal to “the grown Youth of our polite World … whose Relish is retrievable, and whose Taste may yet be form'd in Morals; as it seems to be, already, in exteriour Manners and Behaviour” (3:179). The significance that Shaftesbury places on this ideological aspect of his writing is implicit in his general definition of philosophy: “To philosophize, in a just Signification, is but To carry Good-Breeding a step higher. For the Accomplishment of Breeding is, To learn whatever is decent in Company, or beautiful in Arts: and the Sum of Philosophy is, To learn what is just in Society, and beautiful in Nature, and the Order of the World” (3:161). Polished language, “Good Breeding,” “Manners,” social grace, aesthetic perfection, natural harmony, and universal order form a natural progression in Shaftesbury's mind. Stylistically, the transition from one to the next is as smooth as the unfolding of his syntax.

The ease with which Shaftesbury equates stylistic decorum and aristocratic virtue reflects the insistent idealism which characterizes his perception of writing. Again and again in The Characteristicks, Shaftesbury emphasizes that the true artist, “tho his Intention be to please the World … must nevertheless be, in a manner, above it; and fix his Eye upon that consummate Grace, that Beauty of Nature, and that Perfection of Numbers” which allows him to maintain “at least the Idea of PERFECTION” (2:332) in his work. This ideal perfection, if unattainable, still guides “those Artists who … study the Graces and Perfections of Minds” and become “real Masters” who are “themselves improv'd, and amended in their better Part” (2:206) by their own endeavors. The “Moral Artist” who “can describe both Men and Manners … is indeed a second Maker: a just PROMETHEUS, under JOVE”; his art demonstrates “the Harmony of a Mind” (2:207). This kind of idealistic outburst goes beyond the often defensive rhetoric that characterizes many conventional Restoration apologies for “modern” literature. Shaftesbury's concern with “the Idea of PERFECTION,” his idealizing of the poet as “a second Maker,” translates historical literary opinion into a system of absolute aesthetic and moral values that finds its ultimate expression in the bold statement that “all Beauty is TRUTH” (1:142).

This equation, however, is more problematic than it first seems. Shaftesbury's idealization of the artist, his celebration of the “study of the Graces and Perfections of Minds,” reflects an ideological bias against writers who do not fit his conception of what art and literary style should be. His comments on two significant figures in his literary past, Shakespeare and Seneca, are suggestive of both his indebtedness to the conventional critical prejudices of his era and his more radical attempts to define language as an ideological construct.

IV

In general, Shaftesbury's criticism of English poets reveals his resistance to much of his literary heritage. His tastes are often narrowly conservative, if not downright derivative; he tends to repeat familiar charges rather than analyze specific texts or writers. The “stammering Tongues” of his forerunners, he says, “have hitherto spoken in wretched Pun and Quibble. Our Dramatick SHAKESPEAR, our FLETCHER, JOHNSON, and our Epick MILTON preserve this Stile. And even a latter Race, scarce free of this Infirmity, and aiming at a false Sublime, with crouded Simile, and mix'd Metaphor, (The Hobby-Horse, and Rattle of the MUSES) entertain our raw Fancy, and unpractis'd Ear” (1:217). This criticism, if extreme, is nonetheless characteristic of much seventeenth-century literary thought; William Cartwright, Dryden, and Thomas Rymer, among others, had earlier made similar arguments.¹⁵ Like these critics, Shaftesbury sees Shakespeare's achievement as a triumph of natural wit over the primitive, nearly barbaric nature of his dramatic language: “Notwithstanding his natural Rudeness, his unpolish'd Stile, his antiquated Phrase and Wit, his want of Method and Coherence, and his Deficiency in almost all the Graces and Ornaments of [dramatic] Writing; yet by the justness of his MORAL, the Aptness of many of his Descriptions, and the plain and natural Turn of several of his Characters, he pleases his Audience, and often gains their Ear; without a single Bribe from Luxury or Vice” (1:275). Shaftesbury's criticism of Shakespeare's “natural Rudeness” and “antiquated” language reveals both social and aesthetic prejudices that turn the dramatist into an intuitively virtuous country bumpkin. Shaftesbury's easy dismissal of his predecessor's dramatic language is largely a function of his own rhetoric of aristocratic exclusion. This is criticism by snob appeal. Yet, at the same time, Shaftesbury's praise of Shakespeare's moral authority suggests that the example of natural virtue can be instructive for eighteenth-century readers and audiences. Shakespeare and his contemporaries have “broken the Ice for those who are to follow 'em”; their eighteenth-century successors will “polish our Language, lead our Ear to finer Pleasure, and find out the true Rhythms, and harmonious Numbers, which alone can satisfy a just Judgment, and Muse-like Apprehension” (1:218). The implication in Shaftesbury's criticism of Shakespeare is that although morality and virtue remain the same in every era, the languages in which they are cast can be consciously and deliberately improved.

Language, for Shaftesbury, is therefore a social and political as well as a cultural artifact; it necessarily reflects the ideological conditions under which it is produced. At several points in his writings, he contrasts the literary products of “English liberty” (post-1688) with those of French, Italian, or ancient Roman “tyranny.” He is particularly severe on Seneca. He prefaces his attack on “the random way of Miscellaneous Writing” (3:24) with an account of Seneca's influence as a writer: “We own the Patriot, and good Minister: But we reject the Writer. He was the first of any Note or Worth who gave credit to that false Stile and Manner [of miscellaneous writing]. He might, on this account, be call'd in reality The Corrupter of ROMAN Eloquence” (3:22). Yet given the “horrid Luxury and Effeminacy of the Roman Court … there was no more possibility of making a Stand for Language, than for Liberty” (3:23). Seneca, the honest statesman, is corrupted by the court in style rather than in personal morality. Though noble and patriotic, he writes “with infinite Wit, but with little or no Coherence; without a Shape or Body to his Work; without a real Beginning, a Middle, or an End” (3:24-25). Seneca, then, becomes both the victim of an artistically stifling and morally repressive society and the perpetrator of a kind of linguistic corruption that reaches down to modern times. In this manner, his “false Stile” reflects the tyranny of the Roman Empire's aggression; “by their unjust Attempts upon the Liberty of the World,” says Shaftesbury, the Romans “justly lost their own. With their Liberty they lost not only their Force of Eloquence, but even their Stile and Language it-self” (1:219). Literary style in this passage is perceived as historically determined, the product not of an individual consciousness but of a politically corrupt ideology. The aesthetic shortcomings of Seneca's miscellaneous writing, in short, reflect the disorder and irrationality which Shaftesbury sees as the inevitable result of tyranny.

As his remarks on Shakespeare and Seneca indicate, Shaftesbury, as critic, combines an acute sensitivity to the ideological nature of writing with an almost naïve belief in idealistic, ahistorical standards of literary value. His discussions of the history of language and style, whether Roman, British, or Greek (see 3:138-41), are, even by early eighteenth-century standards, fanciful, less attempts at historical reconstruction than assertions of his faith in the near-sanctity of classical tradition. If Shaftesbury is less hostile to received knowledge than Locke, he is also inclined to judge historical figures solely by the standards of contemporary aristocratic “breeding.” He praises Menander, for example, by observing that “he join'd what was deepest and most solid in Philosophy, with what was easiest and most refin'd in Breeding, and in the Character and Manner of a Gentleman” (1:255). The vocabulary Shaftesbury employs to describe a comic playwright of the fourth century b.c. is reminiscent of the language that he uses throughout the Characteristicks to discuss his aesthetic and social ideals of writing and behavior. Menander is, in effect, imaginatively re-created as an English gentleman of the eighteenth century, an historical embodiment of values that Shaftesbury finds congenial. The implication is that the standards of art and breeding—like virtue itself—remain unchanged from era to era; what differ are merely the forms of corruption or barbarism that lead Seneca and Shakespeare to fall short of the stylistic ideals of polished wit, verbal grace, and aesthetic unity.

Shaftesbury's remarks on Shakespeare and Seneca, then, are less significant as original evaluations of his literary past than as demonstrations of the moral and aesthetic bases of his thought. Criticism, in his mind, is no mere parasitic commentary on primary texts but a dialectical attempt to distinguish between true and false standards of language, art, and morality. As a form of original discourse it mediates between the languages of poetry and philosophy; it complements—even rivals—creative art. Shaftesbury defends the critic's prerogatives to judge and improve the language—and manners—of his age. He “condemn[s] the fashionable and prevailing Custom of inveighing against CRITICKS, as the common Enemys, the Pests, and Incendiarys of the Commonwealth of Wit and Letters … on the contrary, they are the Props and Pillars of this Building; and without the Encouragement and Propagation of such a Race, we shou'd remain as GOTHICK Architects as ever” (1:235-36). For Shaftesbury, critics as well as poets must be the legislators of any civilized race; they are the guardians of a classical learning which prevents one from falling prey to the trap of cultural relativism. In distinguishing between “Criticks by Fashion” and “just Naturalist[s] or Humanist[s],” Shaftesbury offers his own attack on literary fashion-mongering: “They who have no Help from Learning to observe the wider Periods or Revolutions of Human Kind, the Alterations which happen in Manners, and the Flux and Reflux of Politeness, Wit, and Art; are apt at every turn to make the present Age their standard, and imagine nothing barbarous or savage, but what is contrary to the Manners of their own Time” (1:271-72). Criticism offers a defense against novelty by promoting a cyclical view of literary history as the ongoing struggle of “Learning” against mere fashion. In this respect, Shaftesbury's praise of the ancients, like Ben Jonson's a century earlier, is an attempt to return to—and revitalize—what he sees as broadly Horatian standards of instruction and delight.

V

Shaftesbury's defense of criticism and the role of the critic is, at heart, a justification of his ambitions to perfect the English language as a medium for an aristocratic discourse of liberty and culture. The number of pages he devotes to a metacritical commentary on his previous work indicates how crucial the designation “critic” is to his self-perception as a writer. He sees the critic's task as an almost heroic undertaking, distinct from the kind of carping that, in his mind, characterizes his detractors: “To censure merely what another Person writes; to twitch, snap, snub up, or banter; to torture Sentences and Phrases, turn a few Expressions into Ridicule, or write what is now-a-days call'd an Answer to any Piece, is not sufficient to constitute what is properly esteem'd a WRITER, or AUTHOR in due form. For this reason, tho there are many ANSWERERS seen abroad, there are few or no CRITICKS or SATIRISTS” (3:271). Shaftesbury's linking of “CRITICKS” and “SATIRISTS” virtually erases traditional generic distinctions between critical and creative writing, between secondary and primary forms of discourse. Like satire, criticism participates in the radical, creative activity of trying to generate its own linguistic authority. The critical act, in this sense, becomes an attempt to establish one's authority and to reassert the “authority” of aristocratic and neoclassical values. For Shaftesbury, then, to write is to create an authoritative discourse, to redefine the traditional “authority” of language itself.

Like John Wilkins a generation earlier, Shaftesbury is intent on creating an authoritative, “natural” discourse that remains distinct from biblical tradition. Language, in his mind, imitates nature itself; it is not, as it is for Boyle, an imperfect refraction of a perfect biblical Logos.¹⁶ Throughout the Characteristicks, Shaftesbury argues implicitly and explicitly that literary language is always historically mediated; it has no metaphysical existence beyond the limits of the printed page. His theistic enthusiasm—the direct contemplation of nature—therefore takes precedence over the written authority of the Bible. “The best Christian in the World,” he states, “who being destitute of the means of Certainty, depends only on History and Tradition for his Belief in these Particulars [i.e., miracles], is at best but a Sceptick-Christian. He has no more than a nicely critical Historical Faith, subject to various Speculations, and a thousand different Criticisms of Languages and Literatures” (3:72). Biblical language, in this respect, cannot be distinguished from the “Criticisms” it inspires. It is a literary, and therefore historical, work; it can lay no real claim to being the mystical origin of language, the divine Logos. By inserting the Bible into the tradition of “a thousand different Criticisms of Languages and Literatures,” Shaftesbury effectively rejects the logocentric assumptions that underlie Western linguistic theory from Augustine through the anti-Ciceronian prose stylists of the seventeenth century. One task Shaftesbury sets for himself is to relocate the origins—the authority—of critical or philosophical language.

In an important passage in the Advice to an Author, Shaftesbury contemplates what he perceives as the similarities between the origins of poetry and philosophy.

'Tis pleasant enough to consider how exact the resemblance was between the Lineage of Philosophy and that of Poetry; as deriv'd from their two chief Founders, or Patriarchs; in whose Loins the several Races lay as it were inclos'd. For as the grand poetick SIRE was … allow'd to have furnish'd Subject both to the Tragick, the Comick, and every other kind of genuine Poetry; so the Philosophical PATRIARCH, in the same manner, containing within himself the several Genius's of Philosophy, gave rise to all those several Manners in which that Science was deliver'd.

(1:253-54)

The imagery in this passage—patriarchal and deliberately sexual—parodies the biblical rhetoric of both creation and procreation. Homer and Aristotle become nearly mythic, rather than merely historical, figures, containing “inclos'd” within themselves all of their subsequent poetic and philosophical progeny. These “Patriarchs” are truly originary; they stand at the beginning—or before—literary-historical time. The “several Manners” of poetic and philosophical discourse are similarly original. They are not redefined or invented by subsequent generations of writers but exist embryonically within the works of Homer and Aristotle. For Shaftesbury, then, the role of the poet or philosopher is to develop, explicate, or (as Pope said of poets who must follow in the footsteps of Homer) paraphrase an authoritative discourse which already exists.

Philosophy, criticism, and poetry are, for Shaftesbury, languages of regeneration. They assert the timeless truths of order and harmony that structure both the natural and social worlds. To write is to enter into a dialectical relationship with literary or philosophical tradition, to revitalize classical authority, even as that authority justifies one's own writing. Shaftesbury's Characteristicks, in this respect, is less the articulation of a self-consciously original system than a celebration of what the author sees as his position within the classical tradition of his “Patriarchs.” The literary dimensions of Shaftesbury's work are ultimately defined by the goals of his “performance” as an author—to demonstrate the values of an aristocratic culture that, in itself, remains essentially unchanged by the stylistic forms in which it is described.

Notes

1. One important exception has appeared since this chapter was written, Lawrence Klein, “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1984-85): 186-214. Klein demonstrates that in The Characteristicks, “Shaftesbury was self-consciously engaged in ‘polite’ literary performance, a phenomenon he construed in many” ideologically determined ways (p. 208). Klein's reading of Shaftesbury might be set against John Andrew Bernstein in Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant: An Introduction to the Conflict between Aesthetic and Moral Values in Modern Thought (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980). Robert Voitle's recent biography, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671-1713 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), though generally disappointing in its treatment of Shaftesbury's thought, raises valuable points about the relationship between his published work and his private philosophical “exercises” (see especially pp. 160-62). For representative views of Shaftesbury's aesthetic theories see Ernest Tuveson, “The Significance of Shaftesbury,” ELH 20 (1953): 267-99; A. Owen Aldridge, “Lord Shaftesbury's Literary Theories,” Philological Quarterly 24 (1945): 45-64; Robert Marsh, Four Dialectical Theories of Poetry: An Aspect of English Neoclassical Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 18-47; R. L. Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1951); Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967); Robert W. Uphaus, “Shaftesbury on Art: The Rhapsodic Aesthetic,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 27 (1969): 341-48; Pat Rogers, “Shaftesbury and the Aesthetics of Rhapsody,” British Journal of Aesthetics 12 (1972): 244-57; Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961): 131-43; Dabney Townsend, “Shaftesbury's Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (1982): 206-13.

2. John Richetti, Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

3. All quotations, cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page, are from the sixth edition of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vol. (London, 1737-38). This edition, which follows the authoritative second edition closely, includes the late, but significant, “Letter Concerning Design.”

4. On seventeenth-century literary style see especially Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); “Attic” and Baroque Prose: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); and, for a critique of traditional categories of stylistic description, Paul Arakelian, “The Myth of a Restoration Style Shift,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 20 (1979): 227-45.

5. On the structure and historical significance of Jonson's prose see Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

6. The phrase occurs repeatedly throughout his work; see, for example, his reference to the comic style of Beaumont and Fletcher in W. P. Ker, ed., The Essays of John Dryden (Rpt., New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 1:80-81.

7. See, for example, Dryden's remark in “Defense of the Epilogue,” Essays 1:167-73. On Shaftesbury's aristocratic ideology, see Bernstein, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant, pp. 13, 55.

8. Brian Corman, “Thomas Shadwell and Jonsonian Comedy,” in Robert Markley and Laurie Finke, eds., From Renaissance to Restoration: Metamorphoses of the Drama (Cleveland, Ohio: Bellflower Press, Case Western Reserve University, 1984), pp. 126-52.

9. Herbert Davis, ed., The Complete Plays of William Congreve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 214.

10. See Barish, Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, passim.

11. On Boyle and Newton, see Robert Markley, “Objectivity as Ideology: Boyle, Newton, and the Language of Science,” Genre 16 (1983): 335-72.

12. On Shaftesbury's aesthetic theory, see Rogers, “Shaftesbury and the Aesthetics of Rhapsody,” pp. 244-57; Uphaus, “Shaftesbury on Art,” pp. 341-48; Townsend, “Shaftesbury's Aesthetic Theory,” pp. 206-13.

13. See Grean, Shaftesbury's Philosophy, especially pp. 19-36.

14. Benjamin Rand, ed., Second Characters, or the Language of Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), p. 123.

15. See Cartwright's commendatory verses in John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1647), Sig. d4r-d4v; Dryden, Essays 1:79-83; and Rymer, “Tragedies of the Last Age,” in Curt Zimansky, ed., The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), especially pp. 38-39.

16. See Boyle's Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (London, 1661). On the significance of Boyle's influence on the language theories of Locke and other philosophers, see Hans Aarsleff, “Leibniz on Locke on Language,” rpt. in From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 42-83.