‘ILL EFFECTS FROM GOOD’: THE RHETORIC OF AUGUSTAN MOCKERY

(WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM POPE AND FIELDING)

This essay explores a habit of thought that is widely in evidence in early eighteenth-century aesthetic debate, and which I believe can be shown to be importantly instrumental in literary practice of the period. It is probably too diffuse in its application to be called an ‘idea’, but it provided a formula in which different ideas could be stated. It is, in brief, that attributes (as moral attributes or qualities of literary achievement) which might seem diametrically opposite can invariably be traced to a common source: that is, are cognate with one another. The good and the bad, the successful and the feckless, are not different in origin or in essence but merely different in expression, and such different expressions may emerge from nothing more than fluke or serendipity. This essay will try to make a case for the prevalence and versatility of this concept, but my aim is to proceed eventually to argue a specifically literary point: this is, that the Augustans’ sensitivity to the slim and chance-ridden line between good and bad outcomes had an especial relevance to an age that produced so many forms of mock-writing. The prolific output of parodies and mock-forms represented an avid exploitation of this perceived adjacency of the good and bad.

I want to begin with the most familiar incidence of this formula: in Pope’s theory of the ruling passion. Pope formally propounds his view of the role of the passions in ‘Epistle 11’ of An Essaj~ on Man (1733-34), but the topic also occurs, though more fitfully treated, in poems like his Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) and Epistle to a Lady (1735) . It is worth my giving a sample of what he has to say:

Two Principles in human nature reign; Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain; Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call, Each works its end, to move or govern all: And to their proper operation still, Ascribe all Good; to their improper, Ill.

Extremes in Nature equal ends produce, In Man they join to some mysterious use; Tho’ each by turns the other’s bound invade, As, in some well-wrought picture, light and shade, And oft so mix, the diff rence is too nice Where ends the Virtue, or begins the Vice.

Essay on Man, 11. 53-58’

Essay on Man, 11, 205-10

The poem as a whole holds a balance between the rigorist view that passions are turbulent and selfish and the idea that the passions, when tempered by reason, can be conducive to ‘virtue’.z The first passage finds Pope replacing a

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motivational theory of morality with the argument that virtue should be seen in terms of outcomes: good and bad are only a matter of proper and improper ‘operation’. One repercussion of what Pope is claiming is that it allows God to create virtue, so to speak, in human affairs simply by arranging for good outcomes that may not in fact have been intended. To trace the genesis of any individual act would be, for Pope, to understand the passional force engendering it, one which could issue in either a characteristic virtue or a characteristic vice. Like many others, he believed that virtues and vices were symmetrical to one another, so that, for example, generosity would be seen to be negated symmetrically by the vice of dissipation and, likewise, thrift by the vice of miserliness. The cynical viewpoint that virtues are only vices in disguise had already been part of the witty amoralism of thinkers like La Rochefoucauld, and Pope was preserving the shell of their perception, while giving it a different moral content, when he claimed to be instead trying ‘to prove all vices to be disguised virtues’.3

Pope’s theory of the passions, then, contains two ideas relevant to my essay: that what is good or bad has to be defined by ‘operation’ rather than intention, and that every virtue has a counterpart vice which borders on it. Both the perceived adjacency of good and bad attributes, and the conviction that any virtue, when stretched to excess, will be likely to tip over into its neighbouring vice, were sufficiently engrained ideas as to be truistical. Another major couplet poem that demonstrates their cogency is Samuel Johnson’s The Vaniry of Human Wishes (1749). Take the following lines, near the poem’s beginning, on how human wishes habitually turn awry:

Fate wings with ev’ry Wish th’afflictive Dart, Each Gift of Nature, and each Grace of Art, With fatal Heat impetuous Courage glows, With fatal Sweetness Elocution flows [...I

Vaniry of Human Wishes, I 5- I 84

Johnson’s poem is a satire on the folly, as witnessed by their miscarriage, of human ambitions, and the quoted lines describe the implacability with which Fate can upset even the most noble-minded aspirations. The specific affliction visited by Fate, moreover, is portrayed in terms of the conversion of laudable character qualities into their ignoble opposites: ‘Courage’ transmutes to ‘Heat’ (an enflamed bravado) and ‘Elocution’ into ‘Sweetness’ (a rhetorician’s silver persuasion). So what most undoes the vain wisher of the poem’s title is the volatile relation in which his virtuous impulses stand to ones that are adjacent but corrupted.

The humanist tendency to rationalize all human activity in terms of vice and virtue (however difficult it was to draw a firm line between them) had one literary critical repercussion in a tendency to reduce the constituent parts of literary works to ‘beauties’ and ‘faults’. Addison’s influential Spectator essays on Paradise Lost, for example, though their exposition of the poem is conducted under a variety of heads, include two papers of this beauties and faults variety, simply assembling and dissecting the poem’s supposed strengths and weak- nesses.5 The instinctive judgementalism of much eighteenth-century criticism made it important for critics to ponder just how the good and bad ought to be

‘Ill eflects from good’: the rhetoric of Augustan mockery 127

weighed against each other in the process of fair adjudication of a work. One standard of critical equability had been provided by Horace in his assertion, in the Ars Poetica, that ‘in a Poem elegantly writ, / I will not quarrel with a slight mistake’; and this proved an inceptive statement for Augustan critics both for its even temper and for the critical notation it expounded.6 It also lent support to the pervasive idea that most prone to slips were the writers who elsewhere exhibited the greatest force of genius: a form of inattention being genius’s stock- in-trade. The need to combine critical magnanimity with a vigilant eye to a writer’s shortcomings, and to their possibly injurious influence, gave scope for much knotty debate, as this in John Dennis’s dialogue The Impartial Critic

Beaumont: But methinks the very faults of a Grcat Man ought to be rejected upon the account of his Excellencies. Freeman: The very contrary of which is true: Upon that account they ought to be rather expos’d. His Faults are the more dangerous on the account of his Excellencies. For young Writers, before they have Judgement to distinguish, are sometimes so far mistaken as to copy the very Faults of famous Poets for Beauties. One thing I will easily grant you, that to expose a Great Man’s Faults, without owning his Excellencies, is altogether unjust and unworthy of an honest Man.’

The matter may seem pure pedantry, but the point a t issue had some import. Both critics seem unanimous on the last point raised, that to revile a great writer’s blunders without acknowledging his successes is unjust. The argument between them, then, concerns whether the faults of great writers are the more pardonable because of their greatness or the more pernicious because of the larger influence such writers would be likely to have. Irrespective of the cogency of either position, Dennis’s very formulation of the dilemma suggests his conversancy with new thinking about the genesis and role of authorial short- comings that had arisen from the vogue, in the early eighteenth century, of Longinus’s rhetorical treatise On the Sublime.

The rise of sublimity, during the Augustan era, as the most modish amongst literary accomplishments saw it also become a locus for debate about the perils to be incurred by the deliberate pursuit of any literary ‘merit’. Leonard Welsted, who translated the work in I 724, rendered one key passage as follows: I t is certain, in matter of Eloquence, there is nothing mwe difficult to be avoided than Bombast; for as in all things we naturally affect the Grand or Sublime, and do not seem to fear any thing so much as the Imputation of Insipidness, or want of Spirit; it so happens, I know not how, that most Writers fall into the Vice founded upon this common Maxim [. . .]

And what, after all, is this same Puerility we are speaking of? ’Tis evidently no other than the Thought of a School-Boy, which, by being too far fetch’d, becomes cold and starv’d; The Fault for the most part of those, who are perpetually aiming to say something Bright and Extraordinary. or who take abundance of Pains to be Pleasant and Agreeable; Their too eager Endeavours after a Figurative Style, always betray them into the grossest Affectation.8

The passage contains a dour prognosis about the likelihood that any writer’s best intents will come unstuck in the process of their execution. Moreover, a pronounced feature of the extract is that it describes a writer’s task as the

( 1693):

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studied ascertainment of desirable effects and the careful avoidance of bad ones. So the sublime writer attempts the greatest possible distance from the ‘Imputation of Insipidness’, yet, by doing so, he risks missing his true mark and expending his energy merely on sublimity’s hapless self-parody: ‘Bombast’. The seminal idea here is one that was broadly influential: that any attempt at the best literary effects carried a corresponding risk of achieving the worst ones, that the good is always ringed elusively by the bad. This notion that every meritorious effect is dogged by an unhappy shadow or counter-effect is unsur- prisingly evident in the writings of Longinus’s most famous disciples, Joseph Addison and John Dennis, while Joseph Trapp also anatomized sublimity in the same Longinian formula:

It is distinguish’d, on the one hand, from the turgid, rumbling Bombast, which is much affected by those who are possess’d with a false Spirit of Poetry [...I (and) on the other Hand, is distinguished from the Humble; which has its Elegance as it is used in its proper Place.9

Trapp keeps faith with Longinus’s conception of the two distinctions necessary to mark off each literary merit. First, i t would have to be distinguished from what would be its diametrical opposite in the spectrum of literary effects: so the sublime, in this regard, is distinguished antithetically from the ‘Humble’, Second, it would have to be marked off from its correlative vice, the impairment that mirrors it but which is also its perversion: on this account, sublimity is set against the ‘turgid, rumbling Bombast’.

For several reasons, sublimity is an auspicious example of a literary pheno- menon exhibiting my general thesis about the interrelation of the artistic good and bad. It was in the Augustan period a sharply emergent rather than an indigenous aesthetic category, so the progress of its theorization is relatively easy to document. The sublime was also understood to be one of the more plaguishly difficult effects to pull off, and was seen as an outer extreme in the broad spectrum of artistic possibilities. Part of the peril of trying for sublimity was that it was an effect ringed by specifiable potentialities for failure. Rene Rapin, for example, in his Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie (1674), remarked that the ‘sublime stile is the Rock to the mean Wits’, for ‘this haughty and pompous kind of speech becomes vain and cold, if not supported with great thoughts’; and, nearly a century later, Lord Kames can be found exhibiting the properties of ‘Grandeur and Sublimity’ by drawing attention to the ruins of imperfect execution: ‘false sublime is a rock that writers of more than judgement generally split on’.’O

What I have so far said of Longinus has concerned the topography of literary success and failure: the close and formulaic relation in which the good and bad stand to each other. But there is another influential turn in his thought which is even more closely linked to my central argument:

ALL Affectations of this kind, which are in themselves so trivial and low, proceed from the same Cause, viz. too great a Desire of finding out such Thoughts as are new and unobvious: And this is the common Mischief of most Writers to this Day; for ill Effects are frequently derived from the same Source with good ones; and those very Things, which, on some Occasions, contribute most to the Embelishment of our Works, and

‘Ill efsects f rom good’: the rhetoric of Augustan mockery 129

constitute the Beauty, Spirit and Grace of Writing, have at other times quite different Effects. ‘ ‘ The passage offers a more expansive aetiology of literary failure, suggesting that maladriotness often sets in when writers overstrain for the most illustrious effects: ‘viz. too great a Desire of finding out such Thoughts as are new and unobvious’. The gap between success and failure is accordingly reduced not to a difference of motivation but to a quirk of outcome. Good and bad, indeed, arise from the same origin: ‘ill Effects [. . .I from the same Source with good ones’.

The shape of this argument, especially its opposition to a motivational account of artistic success, is identical to Pope’s theory of the ruling passion, revealing an interesting consensus between matters psychological and aesthetic. The analogy between moral and aesthetic attributes, moreover, was well under- stood by Pope for, nearly twenty years previous to the Essay on Man, he had analyzed the enigma of literary achievement in terms of the slim, perforated line which preserves each literary merit from its corresponding de-merit:

But after all, it is with great Parts as with great Virtues, they naturally border on some Imperfection; and it is often hard to distinguish exactly where the Virtue ends. or the Fault begins. As Prudence may sometimes sink to Suspicion, so may a great Judgement decline to Coldness; and as Magnanimity may run up to Profusion or Extravagance, so may a great Invention to Redundancy or Wildness. If we look upon Homer in this View, we shall perceive the chief Objections against him to proceed from so noble a Cause as the Excess of this Faculty.”

The context of this passage is Pope’s defence of Homer against certain accu- sations to which, as Pope saw it, the nature of Homer’s very achievement left him open. Pope’s view of Homer is consistent with his own general principle that ‘No Author or Man ever excell’d all the World in more than one Faculty’, in accordance with which he takes Homer to excel in ‘Invention’ - as opposed to Virgil’s excelling in ‘Judgement’. As well as justifying the merely partial nature of Homer’s excellence, Pope takes on himself to defend his author against some other entrenched criticisms: that the Zliuds story is improbable and its extended comparisons tail off into circumstantiality. The maneuvre by which he tries to discredit these arguments is to claim that Homer’s supposed vices are actually inevitable off-shoots of his weighty attributes, for it has to be expected that such an extremely innovative writer should occasionally be guilty of being over-profuse in imagination and expression. The central point is, as ever, to know at what point a virtue shades into a vice, and the passage quoted demonstrates the unnerving facility with which a good attribute can tip over into its adjacent shortcoming: as ‘Prudence’ turning to ‘Suspicion’, ‘Judgement’ to ‘Coldness’, ‘Magnanimity’ to ‘Extravagence’ and ‘Invention’ to ‘Wildness’. As I mentioned earlier, the dilemma being posed to himself by Pope has affinities with an earlier tradition of ethical scepticism, witnessed by Samuel Butler’s pithy remark that ‘Virtues and vices are very neare of Kin and like the Austrian family beget one Another’.‘4 But the riffling of nouns, ‘Prudence [...I Suspicion [. . .] Judgement [. . .] Coldness’, suggests that the issue is not simply one of moral fogginess but has also to do, more narrowly, with verbal slippage: with the

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inability of a culture’s words to define unambiguously the distinction between virtue and vice.

I will return to this point later, but it is as well that I should now draw out some specifically literary ramifications of my argument. A cumulative implication of what I have said is that, during the age of Pope, literary accomplishment was invariably viewed dyadically: as the conscious bringing about of a good effect and the conscious avoidance of an opposite or bad one. Furthermore, the separation between good and bad tended to be seen as tenuous, such that the very pursuit of the best results necessarily incurred the risk of the worst ones. One effect of this habit of thought was to put creative writers on their mettle, to impose on them all the more graphically the stakes that they were playing for; but another consequence was curiously to reify, even to raise to generic status, the forms of perversion or negative outcome that could be produced. The Augustans were at ease with the principle (most famously elaborated in Pope’s EssajJ on Criticism) that there could be such a thing as a ‘happy error’: a grace snatched from ‘beyond the Reach of Art’.’5 Some forms of artistic gaffe, associated with the flawed realization of an objective, appropriately became seen as positive achievements in their own right. One such form was the mock-heroic, which was seen as a serendipitous by-product of a failed attempt at epic. Mock-heroic or burlesque became, in fact, the negative standard against which the true epic could be judged, in the same way that bombast represented a shortfall from the true sublime. When Addison criticized improprieties in Homer, for example, he observed that as a result of them Homer had ‘lapsedinto the Burlesque Character’ (my emphasis).16 Pope stated to similar effect that, The use of pompous expression for low actions or thoughts is the true Sublime of Don Quixote. How far unfit it is for Epic poetry, appears in its being the perfection of the Mock-Epic. It is so far from being the Sublime of Tragedy, that it is the cause of all Bombaste.‘7

Pope’s terminology is distracting in its unusual assumption that the sublime, rather than being one category of effects, can be realized differently in conjunc- tion with different genres. The main point, though, is clear enough, that epic and mock-heroic stand in an opposition to each other that is so pure that the perfection of one would be the nadir of the other. The use of mock-heroic as a litmus test for where the true mark of epic was being missed was also remarked by Voltaire: ‘the true Criterion for discerning what is really ridiculous in an Epick Poem, is to examine if the same Thing would not fit exactly the Mock Heroick’.Is As late as William Cowper’s translation of Homer ( I 79 I ) , the same point is being iterated: the epic practitioner must everywhere accommodate proper words to proper subject-matter, for ‘Big words on small matters may serve as a pretty exact definition of the burle~que.’~9

Although the exact attitude in which mock-heroic poems stood towards their epic antecedents is too subtle and variable to be easily stated, mock-heroic poems grew out of an essentially antithetical impulse. Of course, this is a commonplace, but it is striking how, even when the mock-epic had come of age as a literary kind in its own right, it was still held up as a de-merit of epic, as a bogey that every prospective epic practitioner had to lay. It never ceased to

‘Ill eflects from good’: the rhetoric of Augustan mockery I 3 I

stand to epic in the same fazed relation as the bombastic style stood to the sublime. The plight of the mock-epic shows how engrained the manner of thinking was in which literary endeavours were broken down into good and bad potentialities, each existing in dialectical relation to the other. The poet to whom this way of thinking was most transparently second nature was Pope, for two of his works are born directly out of this binary view of artistic accomplishment: Peri Bathous (1727) and The Dunciad ( I 728). Both works dramatize how desirable literary qualities are shadowed by negative simulacra: sublimity by the ‘profound’ (in Peri Bathous) and wit by ‘dulness’ (in The Dunciad). Both works also enumerate all the sub-categories of deviance em- braced by the over-arching anti-principle and taxonomize all its misguided adherents.

Dulness and wit are not neighbouring attributes but diametrical opposites. However, Pope also exploited for satiric purposes a version of the idea that appears in his theory of the passions, that every attribute is capable of mani- festing itself equally as a vice or a virtue. He touches on it in Chapter XIV of Peri Bathous in connection with panegyric: The,first and chief Rule is the Golden Rule of Transformation, which consists in converting Vices into their bordering Virtues. A Man who is a Spendthrift and will not pay a just Debt, may have his Injustice transform’d into Liberality; Cowardice may be metamor- phos’d into Prudence; Intemperance into good Nature and good Fellowship. Corruption into Patriotism, and Lewdness into Tenderness and Facility.*’

The ‘may have’ and ‘may be’ enforce the sense of verbal ruse, as if the potential for panegyric, as equally for satire, were held out by a chicane in the words themselves. The satiric vantage-point that Pope accords himself naturally per- mits him to know where the truth sits, but the passage also shows his familiarity with the lore of our own culture’s spin doctors: that no event is immune to interpretation from opposite points of view. In this instance, a single attribute is shown dovetailing with rival constructions of it: you can as well cry ‘Coward- ice’ as ‘Prudence’.

Elsewhere, Pope had an eye for where disputes over merit or de-merit could collapse into a single word: a pun. Early in his controversialist career, he attacked Ambrose Philips’s quaintly bucolic pastorals through penning a heavily ironic ‘appreciation’ of them, published as Guardiun 40 (1713) . Central to the irony was a sustained tease on the word ‘simplicity’: ‘As Simplicity is the distinguishing Characteristick of Pastoral [. . .] So easie as Pastoral Writing may seem, (in the Simplicity we have described it) [. . . I With what Simplicity [Philips] introduces two Shepherds [. ..]’.” The pun on ‘simplicity’ shackles together two rival constructions of the term, both as ‘innocence’ and as an idiotic vacancy of mind. And the potentiality for the word being read in two different ways allowed Pope’s Guardian essay to maintain a tone of honest approbation towards Philips’s pastorals while stealthily reviling them. Pope’s satiric technique is an exploitation of the cardinal aesthetic principle that all good artistic attributes border on bad ones that represent their perversion. A similar ironic tactic appears in his Peri Bathous, which puns relentlessly on words like ‘weight’, ‘depth’, ‘profundity’ and ‘value’.22 Perhaps, amongst these, the key term is ‘profundity’, which appears in several chapter-heads: ‘That there is an Art of

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the Bathos, or Profound [...I Of the true Genius for the Profound [...I Of the Profound, when it consists in the Th0ught’.~3 ‘Profundity’, then, is another word that splits apart on the anvil of Pope’s humour; in his lexicon of dulness, it denotes the perdition of wit, yet still clinging to it is the remnant of its traditional sense of mental depth. Pope’s use of the term is reminiscent of Longinus’s sad observation that to attempt the highest effects is to risk, instead, bringing off the lowest: in this case, to achieve Popean ‘profundity’ through trying to be profound.

These observations on Pope conform to my general case, that the Augustans perceived the world as divided ethically and aesthetically between positive and negative terms. This syndrome, moreover, is a fact both of moral sensibility and of linguistic refinement: for it is ultimately language that yields the possi- bility, not simply of acknowledging the bad, but of conceptualizing bad qualities as precise corruptions, negations or perverted simulacra of good ones. It might be expected that any writer with a vivid image of a world given up to the sparring of symmetrical good and bad potentialities would probably have an accentuated sense of the chicaneries of language. One who bears this out is Fielding, whose larger mock-structures, as has often been noted, have a habit of breaking down into more devolved techniques of verbal polarization, nowhere more obviously so than in his satiric novel, Jonathan WiEd (1743).

Fielding’s mock-ironies, like Pope’s, are built primarily on the idea that the moral good and bad stand in an exploitably neat and formulaic relation to each other, and secondarily on the idea that this represents not so much a moral dilemma as an inevitable factor in the relation between words and their users. His writing is persistently alert to the way that the fragile bond between words and their referents can be dissolved, and reconstituted, by ignorance or design. In a preamble to ‘A Modern Glossary’, an early paper in the Covent Garden Journal (no. 4, January 14, I 752), he launched a satiric assault on the contempor- ary ‘abuse of words’, seeing at the root of it a confusion as to the proper ideas that should be ‘annexed’ to important moral and religious t e rm~.~4 That language is invariably subject to strategic acts of appropriation by its users is raised to a sophisticated level of artistic exploitation in the repetitive verbal binaries employed in Jonathan Wild. The novel’s principal polarization is between the ‘great’ and ‘good’, which terms, while admitting the synthetic median of the state of being ‘great-and-good’, are seen as being mutually antagonistic: ‘no two things can possibly be more distinct from each other, for greatness consists in bringing all manner of mischief on mankind, and goodness in removing it from them’2* From the core binary are exfoliated a host of similarly dyadic terms: as wise vs foolish, weak vs heroic, villainy vs greatness and so on. As Claude Rawson has noted, the drumming verbal insistence of these binaries is such that they beat out a message of their own that is actually at odds with what is dictated by the novel’s plot: for example, the monotonous iteration of Wild’s ‘greatness’ conflicts with a sequence of plot incidents in which he ends up being worsted by characters whom he is attempting to manipulate or ruin.z6

This interplay of mutually antagonistic terms provides a general satiric framework for the novel, but more important for the generation of local

‘Ill effects from good’: the rhetoric of Augustan mockery 1 3 3

ironies are instances where a morally connotative term is supplied with a gloss, translating it either into or out of the skewed and corrupted moral lexicon used by Wild. In one case, Fielding refers to the character Heartfree’s ‘good (or foolish) disposition’, where ‘good’ and ‘foolish’ are not mutually exclusive opposites (like ‘good’ and ‘great’) but identical concepts, only expressed in antithetical moral c0des.~7 The parenthesis ‘(or foolish)’ makes the gloss seem automatic and pedantic, its tone suggestive of whimsical acknowledgement of the vagaries of language - the casual substitutability of moral terms ~ rather than any deep reproach to the linguistic deceits perpetrated by Wild. However, other comparable passages are more satirically edged, though the satire still depends on the translation of moral terms from customary usage to Wildean usage. Take the passage where Fielding details those great arts which the vulgar call treachery, dissembling, lying, falsehood, etc., but which are by great men summed up in the collective name of policy, or politics, or rather poIlitrics.28

‘Pollitrics’, a term that denotes an ethically neutral concept but that hints at ‘trickery’, complicates the strict playing-off of favourable words against others which represent a critical response to the same concept. The impact of the passage, though, is to reinforce the reality of Wild’s activities to be, indeed, ‘treachery, dissembling, lying, falsehood’, and therefore to discredit Wild’s own nomenclature as a piece of euphemism and imposture.

It is worth my clarifying the relevance of these observations to those made earlier about Pope and to my general argument. Jonathan Wild seems to me to be based on an assumption, common in Augustan aesthetic and moral debate, that good and bad qualities are closely annexed to each other. This broad concept Fielding shares with Pope, though his allegiance to it differs from Pope’s perception that the good and bad are contiguous with each other because they can stem alike from the same motivational impulse. As I have suggested, Fielding’s sense of the adjacency of good and bad grows out of an awareness of the pliability of language, its vulnerability to the (sometimes corrupt) impo- sitions of users. This is best exemplified in the ‘modern Glossary’, his most overt satire on the moral and linguistic anomalies of ‘modern’ parlance. For example:

FOOL. A complex Idea, compounded by Poverty, Honesty, Piety, and Simplicity. PROMISE. Nothing. WORTH. Power, Rank, Wealth.*Y

‘A Modern Glossary’ can be read as a systematic codification of the warped speech habits that proliferate around the character of Wild, the individualized monstrosities of Wild’s behaviour being broadened into a general picture of a society under moral and lexical sabotage. ‘A modern Glossary’ consists of two opposing views of the world (the orthodoxly moral and the criminally pragmatic) being positioned against each other; but the lexical play central to Jonathan Wild admits not one but two echelons of conceptual demarcation. This, indeed, is exactly consistent with the two tiers of distinction mentioned earlier, that were central to the proper definition of the literary sublime: its needing to be distinguished from its pure antithesis (the ‘humble’) and from its adjacent vice (the ‘bombastic’ style). So, in Jonathan Wild, ‘goodness’ is schematically set

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against ‘foolishness’ (its neighbouring vice) and against its antipodal term in the spectrum of moral categories, ‘greatness’.

Both Pope and Johnson formulate complex accounts of the interrelation of good and bad. For example, Pope’s persuasion that good and bad outcomes can arise from the same originating motivation tends to be dovetailed with the essentially Mandevillian belief, especially apparent in the Epistle to Bathurst, that a watchful providence is capable of reconciling individual appetites with some overall public good.3O Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes predicates an equally complex relation between good and bad in its concept of the over- reacher, the person (epitomized in the poem by Charles XI1 of Sweden) whose strong attributes, when indulged to excess, become the agency of his own corruption and fallibility. The figure of Wild, both in real life and in Fielding’s novel, is ringed around with similar ambiguities of moral categorization. These ambiguities, indeed, are inseparable from the nature of Wild’s self-created occupation, which consisted of organizing criminal activities while periodically shopping to the authorities those misfortunates he prevailed on actually to carry them out. I t was a professional existence devoted at the same time to the upholding and flouting of the law.3’ Wild, in fact, sought to exculpate himself during his trial by listing for the court’s approval sixty-five criminals whom over the years he had successfully had apprehended and hanged; and his misplaced assumption that the court would think this laudatory rather than heinous suggests the same collision of different codes of ethical sensibility so zealously exploited in Fielding’s Jonathan Wild.32

Wild could only be seen as an over-reacher in the limited sense, say, of Marlowe’s Barabas: he over-extends himself in as much as a thrusting audacity of criminal intent ultimately accounts for his downfall, but Fielding conveys no suggestion that Wild was ever anything other than commitedly immoral. The character who presents one sort of image of the mutation of goodness into badness, or, at least, of a goodness that proves uphappily self-enfeebling, is Heartfree. The narrator describes him as ‘possessed of several great weaknesses of mind, being good-natured, friendly, and generous to a great efcess’; and, though the remark is part of the book’s piquant tone of amorality, its gist would be hard to deny.33 However, what makes Fielding so exemplary of my general thesis is that his schematic formulation of the relation between the moral good and bad is based on an aesthetic antithesis I discussed earlier. In the ‘Preface’ to Jonathan Wild, Fielding defines the condition of ‘good-and-great’ as the apex of human accomplishment, ‘the true sublime in human nature’.34 He terms its opposite, the condition of moral retardation exemplified by Wild, the :false sublime’:

Now as to that greatness which is totally devoid of goodness, it seems to me in Nature to resemble the.fulse sublime in poetry; whose bombast is, by the ignorant and ill-judging vulgar, often mistaken for solid wit and eloquence, whilst it is in effect the very reverse.’’

This distinction between true and false sublimity was probably the most influen- tial statement of the idea that each literary accomplishment is closely annexed to a corresponding mode of failure: moreoever, a mode of failure that will appear as an inverted image (or a parody) of the accomplishment being aimed

‘Ill effectsjrom good’: the rhetoric of Augustan mockery I 35

at. This idea seems originally to have taken hold within literary criticism as a means of theorizing the morphology of literary successes and failures. However, Fielding’s application of the concept in a comic novel which derives most of its humour from heavily schematic binary contrasts between morally reputable and disreputable conduct suggests a much broader currency and versatility.

It seems to me fundamental to neo-classical literary culture that writers and critics had the mental habit of conceptualizing an appropriate mode of failure for each potential literary accomplishment or moral trait. For one thing, this practice legitimated the rigid judgementalism prevalent in much Augustan criticism: the fact that works could be seen as either hitting or missing what they were putatively aiming at simplified the critic’s task, and certainly lies behind the distinctively Augustan ‘beauties and faults’ school of criticism. But more important than its impact on criticism is perhaps its relevance to the early eighteenth-century flowering of mock-and parodic forms of writing. The idea that each aesthetic accomplishment had a parallel mode of failure clearly paved the satiric way for writers of an ironic or parodic bent. For, to parody a writer, all you had to do was to take his strengths (if he had any) and exaggerate them, or place them in a new context, so that they spilled over into examples of an adjacent literary vice. So Pope’s Guardian 40 rams home the point that Philips’s virtue of ‘simplicity’ (an absence of affectation) has really taken him into the realms of poetic vulgarity and stupidity. Similarly Pope’s Peri Bathous exploits the relation between what is ‘deep’ and what is merely a ‘let-down’.

The crucial point arising from this discussion is that the dominant model for Augustan parodic or mock-writing was not distortion or exaggeration so much as reversal; and it is enough to finish with one more pertinent example of this fact, which also shows how one celebrated parodic work is structured around two tiers of conceptual distinction. I noted earlier that Jonathan Wild exploits two key distinctions: good vs great (mutually opposed concepts) and good vs foolish (the same concept viewed from opposite points). Two years earlier, Fielding had published his first riposte to Richardson’s (in his mind) irksomely successful Pamela. Fielding’s parody did two things. First, it replaced Pamela’s tremulous and plaintive delicacy about her virtue with a diametrically opposed character trait: a brazen and worldly promotion of individual self-interest, both marital and sexual. Second, by retaining the lineaments of Richardson’s story, culminating in the heroine’s self-advantageous marriage to Mr B., Fielding subtly gave out that Pamela’s devotion to her ‘virtue’ and Shamela’s devotion to her self-interest are not true opposites, so much as a single behavioural pattern viewed from opposite angles. If morality is to be measured against outcome rather than motivation, then the moral distinction between the two eponymous heroines loses itself in a blur. Vice and virtue are so closely annexed as to be indistinguishable.

Richard Terry University of Newcastle

136 Richard Terry

I .

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

Cited from The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. by J . Butt et a/., I I vols (London, 1939-69), 11, i, ed. by M. Mack (1950). Maynard Mack has useful introductory material on Pope’s theory of the passions. More recent treatments are A. D. Nuttall, Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ (London, 1984) and Rebecca Ferguson, The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion (Brighton, 1986). Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of‘ Books and Men, 2 vols, ed. by J. Osborn (Oxford, 1966). I, no. 517. Samuel Johnson: The Complete English Poems, ed. by J . Fleeman (Middlesex, 197I), p.83 The two papers are no. 297 (February 9, 1712) and 303 (February 16, 1712). Paper 291 is also of interest as a study of the critic’s responsibility to be scrupulous in weighing beauties and faults. Horaces Art of Poetry. Made English by the Right Honourable the Earl of Roscommon. (1684), facs. repr. (Scolar Press. 1971), p.24. John Dennis, Critical Works, ed. by E. N. Hooker, 2 vols (Baltimore, 1939-43), I , 28. Epistles, Odes, &c. Written on Several Subjects, with a Translation of Longinus’s Treatise on the Sublime. By Mr Welsted. (1724). pp.146-47. Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry, trans. by W . Bowyer and W. Clarke (1742). pp.86-87. See also Spectator 279 (Jan. 19, 1712) and Dennis, Remarks on [. ..] Prince Arthur, An Heroic Poem (1696), in Critical Works, I, 47. Rene Rapin, ReJections on Aristotlek Treati.re of Poesie, p.47; [Henry Home] Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, third edn, 2 vols (Edinburgh, I 765), I , 230. On the Sublime, p.152 ’Preface’ to Pope’s translation of The Iliad of Homer, in Poems, VII, 12-13 Ibid., p.12. Prose Observations, ed. by Hugh de Quehen (Oxford, 1979), p.278. Line 155, in Poems I, 258. Spectator 277 (Jan. 19, 1712), in The Spectator, ed. by D. F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford, 1965), 11, 589. ‘Postscript’ to the Odyssey, in Poems, XI, 388. Cited from Paradise Lost, ed. by A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1969), p.89 n. ‘Preface to the First Edition (1791) of the Translation of Homer’, in The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. by J. King and C. Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford, 1979-86), V, 64. Cited from The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, 2 vols, 11, ed. by R. Cowler (Oxford, 1986), p.227. Cited from The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, 2 vols, I , ed. by N. Ault (Oxford, 1936), pp.98, 99. 100.

This point is made in D. L. Nokes, A Study of the Scriblerus Club, 1712-1728, unpublished Ph.D thesis (University of Cambridge, I974), p.132. Cowler, ed., pp.190, 191, 197 See The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Ofice, ed. by Bertrand A. Goldgar (Oxford, 1988). pp.33-35. Because the novel is not yet available in the authoritative Wesleyan edition, I cite a reliable, easily available edition, Jonathan Wild, ed. by David Nokes (Harrnondsworth, 1986). Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p.104. Jonathan Wild, p.85. Ibid., p.102. Covent Garden Journal, pp.36, 37, 38. Mandevillian aspects of the poem are discussed in John Barrel1 and Harriet Guest, ‘On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem’, in

‘Ill effects from good’: the rhetoric of Augustan mockery I 37

The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York, 1987), pp.121-43. Useful background data on Wild’s exploits and the early reporting of them is given in W. R. Irwin, The Making ofJonathan Wild: A Study in the Literary Method of Henry Fielding (New York, 1981).

See Jonathan Wild, ‘Appendix’, pp.259-60

31.

32. 33. Ibid., p.84. 34. Ibid., p.32. 35. h id .