The Government of the Tongue

As the Preacher saith, “There is no new thing under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9). It seems that one of these things that is not new is episodes of contention and unbrotherly relations between preachers and congregants. In Spectator No. 468 (16 July 1714), Joseph Addison related the following amusing anecdote:

“I remember an empty pragmatical Fellow in the Country, who upon reading over the whole Duty of Man, had written the Names of several Persons in the Village at the Side of every Sin which is mentioned by that excellent Author; so that he had converted one of the best Books in the World into a Libel against the ‘Squire, Church-wardens, Overseers of the Poor, and all other the most considerable Persons in the Parish. This Book with these extraordinary marginal Notes fell accidentally into the Hands of one who had never seen it before; upon which there arose a current Report that Some body had written a book against the ‘Squire and the whole Parish. The Minister of the Place having at that Time a Controversy with some of his Congregation upon the Account of his Tythes, was under the Suspicion of being the Author…”

It is generally accepted that the “excellent Author” of the anonymously published work that Addison refers to, The Whole Duty of Man (1658), was Richard Allestree (1621/22-1681), a 17^th-century Anglican clergyman. Though it may come as a surprise now, The Whole Duty of Man vied with The Pilgrim’s Progress as the most popular English devotional work of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. It went through countless editions. In my opinion, Whole Duty is much more deserving of that popularity than Bunyan’s tedious work. But it now goes largely unread.

I happen to have in my possession a 1675 edition of another work of Allestree’s entitled The Government of the Tongue. Curiously, the inscription of a former owner on the flyleaf reads as follows: 

Presented to the Pastor

of Zion Tabernacle

Hamilton Ontario, with

a request that he will

read, mark, learn, and

inwardly digest the

contents

                  March 1879

 

Ouch. Indeed, there is no new thing under the sun. Parish politics "hath been already of old time."

 

Notes & Queries: Amicable Collisions

Occasionally, upon reading a work of literature, one comes across a phrase, a sentence, or a thought that is particularly well-expressed, and gets echoed down the years in the works of other authors with whom it resonates. Sometimes it’s just that – an echo, so faint it might have come from somewhere else. Sometimes it’s clear as a bell, though even then the writer might not be fully conscious of its origin.

And sometimes, because the thought behind the phrase is commonplace – though perhaps never so well-turned – one is apt to wonder whether it was the original invention of that author, or whether he had cribbed it from someone else (again, perhaps unconsciously).

There is a line in Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), which struck me the first time (of many) that I read it:

“All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision” (Vol. I, p. 64).

I would not go out of my way to argue that the thought is original to Shaftesbury. But one finds it in many later writers, expressed in words so similar, that there can be no mistaking the provenance. Here are a few examples:

“I like the description of your pic-nic, where I take it for granted, that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle, and your Symposion intended more to promote conversation than drinking. Such an amicable collision, as Lord Shaftesbury very prettily calls it, rubs off and smooths those rough corners, which mere nature has given to the smoothest of us.” Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son (29 October 1748).

(No mistaking that one; it’s a direct citation.)

“The genius of a people where nothing but the monarchy is salique, having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally to the women – by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and sizes from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles shook long together in a bag, by amicable collisions, they have worn down their asperities and sharp angles…” Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), p. 54.

“It was those Meetings in particular [i.e. of the Select Society], That Rub’d off all Corners as we call it, by Collison [sic.], and made the Literati of Edin^r. Less Captious and Pedantick than they were Elsewhere.” Alexander Carlyle (1722-1805), Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, p. 150n.

From the above fairly obvious allusions, we descend to the less obvious. Here, they tend to fall into two classes: a) they either borrow Shaftesbury’s idea and express it in different words, or b) they borrow Shaftesbury’s imagery to express a thought somewhat different. The next example is Samuel Johnson’s verbose but elegant expansion of (what I believe to be) his source in Shaftesbury:

“In cities, and yet more in courts, the minute discriminations which distinguish one from another are for the most part effaced, the peculiarities of temper and opinion are gradually worn away by promiscuous converse, as angular bodies and uneven surfaces lose their point and asperities by frequent attrition against one another, and approach by degrees to uniform rotundity.” Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 138 (13 July 1751).

Although the wording is quite different from Shaftesbury’s, the thought is very similar. Except that here, Johnson puts his own typically pessimistic spin on it: Yes, liberty enables us to rub off our rough corners in a sort of amicable collision, but we get polished down to a sameness in the process; there is a loss of individuality and variety. Politeness leaves little room for eccentricity.

In the next example, from Herder (1744-1803), Shaftesbury’s idea is extended from individuals to polities:

“[S]o many edges had first to be worn down with force before that round, smooth, well-behaved thing which we are could appear!… Behold how these great state-bodies, within which mankind is no doubt best cared for, are now rubbing against one another without destroying each other, and cannot ever destroy each other!” Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (1774), §2

The next two examples are of interest for their authors’ genealogical proximity to Shaftesbury. In a very Shaftesburean philosophical dialogue, his nephew James Harris (1709-1780) offered up this line:

“My Reproaches produced a sort of amicable Controversy.” Three Treatises (1744), in The Works of James Harris, Esq. (1801), Vol. I, pp. 25-26:

One cannot help but think that Shaftesbury’s more famous descendent, the 7^th Earl, had this passage of his ancestor’s in mind when, in the preface to his a collection of his speeches, speaking of the mental life of the agricultural labourer, as contrasted with the urban industrial labourer, he wrote:

“He has not, of course, the acquirements and acuteness of the urban operative; his labour is passed in comparative solitude, and he returns to his home at night, in a remote cottage or a small village, without the resource of clubs, mechanics’ institutes, and the friction of his fellow-men” [italics added]. Speeches… upon Subjects Having Relation Chiefly to the Claims and Interests of the Labouring Class, (1868), p. viii.

I assuming throughout here that the third Earl’s phrasing was original (corners and rough sides, amicable collision, etc.), if not the idea itself.

QUERY: Was it? Is there a predecessor whom Shaftesbury was imitating, much like the above authors imitated him?

Though not identical, here is a candidate:

“Moreover, thanks to the prizes which a republic offers, an orator’s intellectual gifts are whetted by practice, burnished, so to speak, by friction, and share, as is only natural, the light of freedom which illuminates the state.” Longinus, On the Sublime, 44.3.

*          *          *          *          *

Bibliography

CHESTERFIELD, Philip Dormer, 4^th Earl of. Selected Letters of Lord Chesterfield. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.

HARRIS, James. The Works of James Harris, Esq. (2 vols.). London: F. Wingrave, 1801 (facsimile, Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003).

HERDER, Johann Gottfried. Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

JOHNSON, Samuel. Works (12 vols.). London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1823.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3^rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 volumes). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001. 

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7^th Earl of. Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G. upon Subjects Having Relation Chiefly to the Claims and Interests of the Labouring Class. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868. 

STERNE, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, to which are added The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance. Ian Jack (ed.). London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

 

Before Collier

William Congreve

In 1698, a clergyman named Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) published a pamphlet entitled A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. It was one of those little works that, while almost completely unread now, had an outsize effect in its day, in this case on English theatre. In it, Collier denounced the English stage for its perceived propagation of every kind of vice: profanity, blasphemy, sexual license, irreligion, you name it. Theatre had become a threat to public morals.

It would be easy to write Collier off as yet another Puritan killjoy. However, he is worth taking seriously for a few reasons. For one thing, he was not a Puritan or dissenting “fanatic”; he was a High Church Tory. In other words, he was a representative of The Establishment, and therefore could not be written off so easily by the beau monde. Second, his work touched a nerve, even with the playwrights whose works he attacked. Collier marks a turning point.
For the English stage, and for English comedy in particular, the period up to 1698 “BC” (“Before Collier”), is broadly spoken of as the period of “Restoration Comedy”. It is marked by all the excesses one associates with the stereotyped culture of the Restoration, its debauchery, sexual license, and general indifference towards received moral and religious norms. The language of Restoration Comedy was bawdy and demotic. Its stock characters were the prostitute, the pimp or procurer, the young rake, the rich and horny widow, the young and horny wife (and her cuckolded husband). What is now rightly considered “sexual assault” was a very frequent plot device in the comedies (!) of the age. Bill Cosby could have plied women with drugs in one of these plays to great comic effect if he were living in London in the 1670s. All of which is to say that, rather than being just another dour crank, Collier had a point.“AC” or after Collier, the language of comedy becomes more subdued. The plots are less “rapey”. Attempted seduction or adultery is less often successful, and unhappily married couples are reconciled at the end. There are happy endings for the virtuous – or for the repentant – and vice comes to a bad end. In short, playwrights started writing plays differently, or like William Congreve (1670-1729), left off writing plays altogether.

Congreve is actually my reason for writing this. I had read The Way of the World (1700) many years ago and remembered little of it. In my mind, Congreve represented the polite, neoclassical – “after Collier” – generation of writers I associate with the likes of Addison and Pope. There is no real reason for this other than my general ignorance of his works, and the mental image I have of that Kit-Kat Club portrait of him by Sir Godfrey Kneller. I was disabused of this assumption after recently reading all his comedies and finding them to be firmly in the Restoration tradition.

Besides having all the louche elements of Restoration Comedy abovementioned, I was also very alert to a number of Rochesterian references in these plays. By “Rochesterian” I mean references to the writings of the naughty Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), a poet almost synonymous with the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of Restoration libertinism. And although Rochester died when Congreve was about 10 years old, there would have been a direct link between the two men through the person of Elizabeth Barry (1658-1713).

Barry was an actress who had roles in all four of Congreve’s comedies, though by this late stage of her career she was relegated to playing older parts. For our purposes, what matters is that Elizabeth had been the mistress of Rochester, to whom she bore a daughter. Tradition has it that Elizabeth’s inaugural appearance on the stage was a complete disaster, but that Rochester took her under his wing and coached her. She went on to become one of the most celebrated actresses of the age. She also dumped Rochester.

The first Rochesterian reference I came across in Congreve’s plays was actually not penned by Congreve himself. Rather, it was written by Thomas Southerne in some commendatory verses prefixed to Congreve’s The Old Batchelour (1693):

     She yields, she yields, surrenders all her Charms,
     Do you but force her gently to your arms
     (“To Mr. Congreve”, ll. 14-15)

Aside from its rapiness, it is also reminiscent of Rochester’s lines:

     Shee yields, she yields, Pale Envy said Amen
     The first of woemen to the Last of men.
     (“Sab: Lost”, ll. 1-2)

In the same play, Belinda admonishes Araminta (Act II, scene ii):

"Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in Commendation of that filthy, awkard, two leg’d Creature, Man."

In sentiment and phrasing it brings to mind the opening lines to Rochester’s “A Satire against Mankind”:
 
     Were I (who to my cost already am
     One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man)
     A Spirit free, to choose for my own Share,
     What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas’d to weare,
     I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear,
     Or any thing but that vain Animal,
     Who is so proud of being rational.

In Love for Love (1695), the free-speaking Scandal gives his opinion of women’s virtue (Act III, scene i):

"Yes, Faith. I believe some Women are Virtuous too; but ‘tis as I believe some Men are Valiant, thro’ fear."

The line illustrates a very prominent notion in Restoration libertinism, namely that it is our very vices that underpin and motivate our supposed “virtues”. It is the received depth psychology of Restoration moral cynicism, made popular and borrowed wholesale from Rochefoucauld. The idea that valor is at bottom sublimated cowardice appears several times in Rochefoucauld’s work, as in the following instance:

"Perfect Valour and perfect Cowardice are Extremes Men seldom arrive at…. Some are not at all Times equally exempt from Fear: Others give occasionally into general Panics: Others advance to the Charge because they dare not stay in their Posts."

However, when Congreve has Scandal say that some men are valiant through fear, he more likely has Rochester in mind, who in the same “Satire against Mankind” (ll. 158-159) famously wrote:

     For all Men, wou’d be Cowards if they durst:
     And honesty’s against all common Sense.

It was a well-known line, and also appears in Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Vol. I, p. 119:

"And all Men (says a witty Poet) wou’d be Cowards if they durst."

Congreve’s last and most well-known comedy, The Way of the World (1700), is the only one to appear after Jeremy Collier’s attack. Indeed there are a couple of half-hearted jabs at Collier and his ilk, to little effect. After this play, Congreve gave up writing plays. Although not strictly true, it is tempting to consider The Way of the World as the last Restoration comedy. In any case, at one point (Act IV, scene i), Millimant is walking around, distractedly reciting lines to herself from the Cavalier poet, Sir John Suckling. The scattered lines she repeats here and there, taken out of context, can clearly be given a sexual meaning:

     prithee spare me gentle Boy,
     Press me no more for that slight Toy.

and

     I swear it will not do its part,
     Though thou do’st thine, employ’st the Power and Art.

After these last two lines, Millimant interrupts herself:

     Natural, easy Suckling!

It is a paraphrase of a line from Rochester’s “Timon, A Satyr” (ll. 108-108):

     Falkland, she prais’d, and Sucklings, easie Pen
     And seem’d to taste their former parts again.

Here the sexual meaning is less subtle: “suckling” of “pens” and “tasting” of “parts”. It is typical of Rochester, whose mind dwelled in a universe almost metaphysically constituted by sex, where even the trees in St. James’ Park “fuck’d the very Skies”.

The metaphysics of the post-Collier theatrical universe would be structured more politely.


Bibliography

CONGREVE, William. The Comedies of William Congreve. Anthony G. Henderson (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

ROCHEFOUCAULD, François, Duc de La. Moral Maxims by the Duke de la Roche Foucault. Translated from the French. With Notes. London: A. Millar, 1749.

ROCHESTER, John Wilmot, Earl of. The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Keith Walker (ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 vols.). Douglas Den Uyl (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.

A Lifeless Load, a Nameless Thing

The death of King Priam

I am currently reading Joseph Spence’s (1699-1768) Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (Oxford, 1966, “Anecdotes” for short). It is a large collection of table talk and backstairs gossip, harvested mostly from conversations Spence had with Alexander Pope and his circle. It contains some very funny anecdotes, one of my favourites being a story about the Duke of Marlborough’s legendary love of money. Shortly before his death, the old Duke was playing cards with Dean Jones one evening at Bath, and when they finished, he was up on his opponent by about sixpence. This obscenely wealthy magnate, the builder of that monstrous pile, Blenheim Palace, pestered Jones for that sixpence all evening. He claimed that he would be needing it to pay for a chair to take him home that night. Poor Jones told him he had no silver on his person, but he eventually broke down under Marlborough’s incessant nagging and somehow managed to make change from a guinea and thus paid the glorious Duke his sixpence. However, later that night it was observed that Marlborough opted to walk home instead, to save the cost of a chair (see Anecdotes #369).

Besides these entertaining biographical tidbits, much of Spence’s Anecdotes is filled up with conversations in which Spence and Pope nerd out over the technical and critical aspects of the poetical arts. At some point in early May, 1744 there occurred the following exchange between the two men:

“‘I did not use to like a verse in the Iliad,’ [said Spence,] ‘perhaps from its having a liquid in almost every word in it:

          He lies, a lifeless Load, along the Land.’

Aye [said Pope,] but that does not make it run on like a river-verse; it only weakens it. ‘Tis as the thing described, nerveless and yet stiff” (Anecdotes #399).

Now, the line that so bothered Spence was Book XV, line 507 in Pope’s translation of the Iliad, describing the dead Lycophron, slain by Ajax. As consummate an artist and critic as Pope was, I am nevertheless compelled to side with Spence here, though perhaps for other reasons than his.

First, despite Pope’s protestation to the contrary, the line does seem to run on in a slow meandering fashion. Indeed, the preponderance of “liquids” – the lack of hard consonants – does not merely “weaken” the line; it downright kills it. If Pope’s intent was to illustrate by sound the image of a “lifeless load”, he succeeded, though to ill effect in my opinion.

Second, the problem is not merely that there is a preponderance of liquids; rather, there is a preponderance of the same liquid. The alliteration of “L” is overdone, and the overall effect is to give the line the grating sing-song quality of Middle English alliterative verse, thereby destroying whatever sense of loftiness the line was meant to convey. The line’s subject matter should make it point to the reader and say “This terrible thing has happened: laugh if you can.” Instead, the line is practically a burlesque and is more apt to invoke laughter than suppress it.

Third, perhaps less importantly, the choice of “along” as a preposition is somewhat jarring. There seems to me to be an active quality to it that is out of keeping with something dead. One more often comes across the preposition “along” in tandem with an active verb, as in the following other examples from Pope’s works:

        “On which a mimic Serpent creeps along”
                                                      (Iliad, XI.50)

         “Flies o'er th' unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.”
                                                     (An Essay on Criticism, l. 373)

         “A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
          That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow Length along.”
                                                                          (Ibid. ll. 356-357)

A dead body neither creeps along, skims along, nor drags itself along. It just lies. And although I suppose it’s not grammatically incorrect to say a dead body may lie along something, it more typically lies upon it, as would a rock, a bag of sand, or some other weighty but lifeless object. These are passive things for which the default motivating force, if they can be said to have one at all, is the downward pull of gravity.

Ironically, the last example – “That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow Length along” – has a similar lazy dulling effect as the “lifeless load” line that disgusted Spence, except that here the effect is intentional; it makes a point.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about Pope’s lifeless line of lolling “liquids” is that in writing it, he knew of and was probably imitating a much better example. I refer to Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Æneid, II.560-561, describing the dead body of King Priam:

         “On the bleak Shoar now lies th’ abandon’d King,
          A headless Carcass, and a nameless thing.”
                                          (Dryden’s Æneid, II.762-763)

It is a haunting end to a great man, and my only quibble with the versification is that in the first line I would remove “now”, which really does no work, and expand the contracted second definite article, as in

         “On the bleak shore lies the abandoned King”

But this is a mere bagatelle. As they stand, the lines approach perfection, insofar as they most effectively evoke the terrible image of a great leader of men, whom “Monarchs like Domestick Slaves obey’d,” reduced to pointless carrion. The entire passage from which they are plucked raises up a sublime terror in the reflecting reader, who is left enveloped in a void silence.

Curiously, as Pope (unsuccessfully) imitated his hero Dryden’s lines, Dryden was himself imitating Sir John Denham (1614-1669). “Imitating” is putting it charitably. In 1656, Denham published The Destruction of Troy, his translation of the first 561 lines of Book II of the Æneid. In it, we find the following couplet (ll. 547-548):

         “On the cold earth lyes this neglected King,
          A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.”

If I may be allowed to end on a note of pettiness, mark that the King here lies on the cold earth, not along it.

Actually, I will not quite end there. As far as I can make out (for the geography is not entirely clear), in Dryden’s Æneid, Priam was killed by Pyrrhus upon an altar, presumably somewhere in his palace. Now, how did his body get from there to “the bleak shore” upon which it lay? I don’t have an answer, but I can’t help thinking that a reader of Dryden’s day might have thought, perhaps subliminally, of a different sense of the word “shore” here, for at that time it was also a slang term for a sewer, as in the following obscene lines from Lord Rochester, writing about a notorious London prostitute of his day:

         “Bawdy in thoughts, precise in Words,
          Ill natur'd though a Whore,
          Her belly is a Bagg of Turds,
          And her C--t a Common shore.”
                          (“On Mistress Willis,” ll. 17-20)

The thought of great Priam’s corpse lying in such circumstances would make his death seem even more pathetic. Against this interpretation, however, is the fact that a body would normally lie in a sewer, not on it.

So here lieth the lesson: As I discovered when trying to learn German many years ago, those little prepositions can mean everything. Indeed, to paraphrase Wittgenstein (or was it Lichtenberg?), an entire metaphysics might be drawn from them.