Ideas about poetry changed almost completely during his time, Sainte-Beuve wrote in 1866: the poetic ideal of a ‘most finished and beautiful work, the most clear and pleasant to read’ had given way to the desire for a poetry offering ‘the greatest latitude to [its] reader to imagine and to dream’. Quoting him Margaret Gilman noted that between the beginning of the eighteenth century and Sainte-Beuve's time ‘the conception of poetry changed from that of embellished statement to “suggestive magic”, to use Baudelaire's phrase’. ‘Merely decorative allegorization’, as Paul de Man pointed out, using the terms of Wordsworth's reproach to Pope, came at the end of the eighteenth century to be seen as inferior to the ‘imaginative use of figural diction. Meanwhile the term imagination steadily [grew] in importance and complexity in the critical as well as in the poetic texts of the period’. A ‘profound change in the texture of poetic diction’, often taking the form of greater concreteness, was paradoxically accompanied by the increasingly metaphorical structure of poetic language and ‘the image – be it under the name of symbol or even of myth – [came] to be considered as the most prominent dimension of the style’.

French literary criticism of the second half of the eighteenth century manifests a tension between, on the one hand, an uncompromising neoclassicism in its most characteristic dogmas and, on the other, frequent expressions of opinion that sound very unclassical. Some of the most original literature of the period is ‘pre-romantic’ in both subject and manner.

Whilst recognizing the need to avoid crude evolutionary formulas, a volume of this kind must chart broad patterns and large-scale movements of thought. It is therefore a useful simplification, rather than a savage caricature, to describe the development of theorizing about literary style in this period as following a fairly steady progression. At the end of the seventeenth century, the prime centre of influence in European criticism remained France. Equally, the main attention still concentrated on epic and, to a slightly lesser extent, tragedy. Stylistic issues were derivative from broader moral questions about the import and bearing of a text, conceived as an exemplary and instructive (if not always precisely didactic) statement. In this phase of critical history, poetic language was not the heart of poetics – rather an instrument of a higher ordonnance which privileged doctrine and form.

All this is true despite the fact that the greatest practising critic of the later seventeenth century was an Englishman, John Dryden, who was himself a great master of language and a thinker about literature with no excessive reverence for neo-Aristotelian pieties. It is also true despite the fact that the famous quarrel of Ancients and Moderns dominated the last decade of the century, and here the Moderns seemed ready to overturn those traditional pieties which included a ranking of elocutio well beneath inventio and even dispositio. It is true despite the fact that Boileau himself had translated Longinus in 1674 and begun the meteoric ascent of ‘sublimity’ as a critical watchword.

French: to 1700

With one of those left-handed compliments that are often directed across the English Channel Dryden in his Dedication of the Aeneid, 1697, candidly concedes that, ‘impartially speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English, as they are worse poets’; he calls Le Bossu ‘the best of modern critics’, allows the critical writings of Boileau and Rapin to be ‘the greatest of this age’, and speaks respectfully of Bouhours and Saint-Évremond (Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, I, pp. 2.46, 199, II, pp. 56-8).

The Traité du poème éepique (1675) of René Le Bossu (1631-89) provided for its period the most authoritative modern treatise on what, it was generally agreed, was the highest genre of poetry. Le Bossu shares the neo-classical view that poetry was brought to perfection by the ancients, ‘therefore they who practise afterwards the same art are obliged to tread in their footsteps, and to search in their writings the foundation of them; for it is not just that new rules should destroy the authority of the old’ (Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, I, p. 246). Le Bossu's moderate tone, more judicious than judicial, appealed to the scientific temper of his age. The anonymous English translator of the Traité in 1695 said of him:

Writers in the eighteenth century had much to say about the relative status of the general and the particular, but if one were simply to summarize their views on this topic, the complications and contradictions would seem exasperating if not inexplicable. To make sense of what is going on, one has to recognize that in this instance a literary-critical question is inseparable from a philosophical one, and also that discussions of it usually carry a polemical charge.

Modern accounts of the topic have until recently been shaped by the assumptions of mid-twentieth-century poetics. Reneé Wellek wrote in 1955:

In this formulation, a critic like Samuel Johnson (whose words Wellek is quoting) is understood to be a devotee of ‘the neoclassical ideal’, in which the universal is equated with the abstract, and is opposed to the concrete and visual which ‘we’, together with certain ‘preromantic’ critics, prefer.

Such an account seriously misrepresents Johnson in a way that is symptomatic of the New Critical recension of Romantic aesthetics, and that continues to colour accounts of the eighteenth century. Now that New Critical assumptions are fading into the past, however, it is possible to address the question more dispassionately.

The natural point at which to begin a discussion of eighteenth-century theories of language is John Locke's 1690 Essay concerning Human Understanding. Virtually every theorist of language and literature over the next century owed something to Book 3 in Locke's Essay, ‘Of Words’. Locke's influence was not, however, to popularize any single doctrine. There were, in fact, two major interpretations of Locke's theory of language, each leading to a quite different conception of its nature and history. The first interpretation looked no deeper than Locke's explicit statements that words were merely arbitrary ‘signs’ of ideas. The second interpretation took inspiration from Locke's unclear but challenging suggestions that words were much more than outward signs, but had a fundamental role in the formation of ideas and their organization in rational thought. These provocative insights into the mental function of language led to the theories of Vico, Condillac, Rousseau, Herder and other philosophers of the mid- and late eighteenth century. These authors would argue that the history of literature had been closely connected with the joint evolution of language and reason.

The ‘arbitrary sign’ and its literary implications

Locke's name is now closely associated with the doctrine that words ‘signify only Men's peculiar Ideas, and that by a perfectly arbitrary Imposition’. Impelled by their natural sociability, argued Locke, the first humans invented ‘external sensible Signs’ to communicate their ‘invisible Ideas’ to others. Locke's insistence that words refer only to ideas in the mind of the speaker, and not to ‘things’ in the world, corrected the habit of many seventeenth-century grammarians and philosophers of using the terms ‘idea’ and ‘thing’ almost interchangeably: Locke's admirers were more careful to specify that words referred only to thoughts in the mind of the speaker, and not to physical objects.

The debate in the classical era: roman and nouvelle

Introduction

Fictional prose narratives of several types were popular in France throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Some have always been called rotnans, the standard word for the English term ‘novel’. The history of the French novel therefore begins in the early medieval period; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the genre achieved new prominence and stature. A serious critical discourse on the novel existed in France well before 1670. Romans - especially those of d'Urfé, Gomberville, La Calprenède, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry - were discussed in the salons, in authors' prefaces, and even in writings by scholars and academicians like Chapelain, Ménage, Segrais, Boileau, Furetière, and Huet.

A different but equally significant concern for the theory and practice of fiction appears in French imitations of Cervantes's Don Quixote (translated in 1614) by writers such as Charles Sorel and Paul Scarron. Spain also introduced France to the novela, a shorter and less exotic genre than the heroic rotnans. Early translations and imitations emphasized the verisimilitude of the new form; Segrais's Nouvelles françoises (1656) stated succinctly a key problem for theorists of the novel: ‘the difference between the Roman and the Nouvelle [is] that the Roman writes things as propriety wishes them and in the manner of a poet; but the Nouvelle must take a bit more from History, and try rather to give the images of things as we ordinarily see them happen, than as our imagination figures them’ (I, p. 146).

After nearly five decades of writing for the theatre, Arthur Miller continues to have new plays produced on New York and London stages, and the number of revivals of his plays increases annually in professional and academic theatres where they reinvigorate American audiences and enthrall international ones. “No other American dramatist,” writes C. W. E. Bigsby, “has so directly engaged the anxieties and fears, the myths and dreams, of a people desperate to believe in a freedom for which they see ever less evidence. No other American writer has so successfully touched a nerve of the national consciousness” (A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, vol. n [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], p. 248). Best known for his stage plays, Miller has also made important contributions to dramatic theory and criticism, and he has written radio and television plays, film scripts, novels, and travel journals. In addition, Miller continues to extend his political activities beyond the stage as he fights for the freedom of artists worldwide. His work still provokes scholarly debate.

Primitivism may be defined as the idealization of a way of life that differs from our own in being less complicated, less polished, and less self-aware. It may be found in an abstract state of nature, in the countryside where the influence of the city and the court has not been felt, in some land distant from the corruptions of western Europe, or in the historical past. The most important critical debates associated with primitivism during the period between 1660 and 1800 involved a spectrum of positions which were intimately connected with political and social attitudes, and isolating the aesthetic from these contexts is neither possible nor useful. In England, the return of Charles II entailed a rejection of the past – literary as well as political – as a time of barbarism. In some ways, the defacing of the bodies of Oliver Cromwell and the regicides had its counterpart in the criticism of Thomas Rymer, who treated Shakespeare and his contemporaries as writers who knew nothing about art or decorum. The ‘last age’ was to make way for a time of order, control, and polish in both politics and poetry.

Despite some notable exceptions, primitivism, when presented as an unmitigated ideal, functioned in the realm of criticism the same way as it operated in politics. It was invoked by those offering views of art and life that appealed to innovation and freedom. Although the main focus of this discussion will be upon critical debates over what might be considered primitive art forms, poetic figures, and language, none of this is intelligible without a brief discussion of the phenomenon of primitivism itself and its appearance in contemporary literature.

Thus, in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood criticizes the man who has been courting her sister. He lacks ‘sensibility’, a faculty of which the novel is famously suspicious, and this lack is shown in the way that he reads. ‘Sensibility’, in this example, is made explicitly a matter of literary discrimination and performance. When Marianne has her first conversation with Willoughby, she seems to be discovering a shared ‘sensibility’ in their shared tastes in reading:

Austen's dry joke on the word ‘insensible’ only emphasizes the point: sensibility is regarded by these characters as best tested and displayed in the exercise of literary taste. Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811 but begun in the late 1790s, shows sensibility to be a dangerous indulgence rather than a natural sensitivity, and satirizes the effusive professions of ‘taste’ supposed to mark that indulgence. Significantly, the most famous critic of sensibility chooses to identify it with a fashionable vocabulary of literary appreciation.

In general, during this period of the drama, critical theory moved from a formal analysis of dramatic structure based on what critics thought to be rationalist principles to an affective theory in which the feelingful response of the audience was the crucial test of a play. In short, it changed from the prescriptive theories of François Hédelin, Abbé D'Aubignac, to those of the Abbé Du Bos with their rejection of mechanical principles of taste. The practical question of audience response to a medium such as the drama, however, was crucial. What the court or the city audience liked often had to be rationalized into a theoretical position. Few critics went so far as George Farquhar, who dismissed Aristotle as an amateur without any practical grasp of the real structure of a play, but so practical a matter as how many days a play was performed might exert a not so subtle pressure on current dramatic theory.

Somewhat more complicated but still significant were the ways in which national power and contemporary fashions fascinated audience and critic alike. The period here under consideration saw the hegemony of French taste and French literature throughout Europe. Spain, which had dominated Europe militarily during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, still had some influence over European taste; but just as the battle of the ambassadors in 1661 settled once and for all the relative status of these two nations, so French dramatic theory and practice was to triumph over the less regular forms of the Spanish theatre.

There is, of course, no essential reason why our playwrights should also be our novelists, or vice versa. Certainly many of our finest writers - from Henry Fielding and Aphra Behn to Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, from Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov to Samuel Beckett and Max Frisch - have made fine use of the double traffic, stepping from page to stage as the occasion demanded, the artistic stimulation prompted, the theatrical opportunity came. Some of our best novelists have been among our very best playwrights; some of our finest dramatists have excellently exploited the loose baggy monsterdom of the novel. Equally there have been a good number of major writers who failed with the alliance. A notable example was Henry James, whose unfortunate adventures in theatre at the start of the 1890s, when disillusionment with the novel led him to write various plays, including the costume-drama Guy Domville (promptly booed off the stage), cost us several important late fictional works from the Master - or so we like to believe.

For practical reasons, the developments in the critical debate about prose fiction in two separate languages are here placed under a single chapter heading. In fact, the differences and resemblances between German and Dutch criticism are no greater or smaller than those between English and French. In all four there is much common ground, originally based on the classical heritage of the European Renaissance, with Latin as its shared language, but subsequently continued through an ever increasing intertraffic of translations between the vernacular languages. Ultimately, it was very much a European debate, with regional, yet sometimes quite significant, differences. The first section will deal with the German-speaking world, the second with the Dutch Republic.

German theory and criticism

In general it can be said that German theorizing about prose fiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries showed greater sophistication than that in England. There are also more treatises written independently of particular specimens of the genre. But until the latter part of the eighteenth century the terms of the debate were similar to those elsewhere. German criticism in the second half of the seventeenth century, then, just like its French and English counterparts, ignored lower and popular forms of contemporary prose fiction and concerned itself with the pastoral and the heroic romance, as practised in Italy, Spain, France and England and reaching Germany in translation. Until the 1680s criticism was aimed at legitimizing these works, and integrating them into a hierarchy of existing genres. In the field of terminology there was to be less confusion than in English, since, as in France, the term Roman was accepted from the beginning and hardly ever questioned as the proper overall generic term.

Introduction

Criticism involves the selection, restoration, and evaluation of works retrieved from the past and the assessment, however tentatively offered, of works produced in the present. No doubt some societies can settle these tasks by an appeal to precedent, but where cultural production increases and audiences become less homogeneous – certainly the conditions that applied in Europe between 1660 and 1800 – more complex arrangements will become necessary for the estimation of cultural value and the provision of rational or plausible criteria of evaluation. In accomplishing both these tasks, a canon of some kind will prove useful.

For a long time the word canon had a restricted range of application. The most common usage referred to the collection of sacred writings accepted as authoritative by various Christian denominations. (Although Hebraic culture possessed its collection of sacred books, it did not call this catalogue a canon; however, European writers in the eighteenth century frequently did so.) Students of antiquity and sculpture were also familiar with the canon described by Pliny, whose discussion of the work of ancient sculptor Polycletus refers to ‘a Canon, or Model Statue’ that set the standard for subsequent representations of the human body in that art. Polycletus also wrote a lost treatise Canon, which set out the theoretical basis for representing the human body adequately, and the high status this treatise once enjoyed may partly explain the long-standing usage that links canons to general principles, accepted rules and axioms.

The importance of rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries results, in the first place, from the attention given it in formal education, beginning in grammar schools for students at the age of about ten and continuing into studies at universities. Late medieval scholasticism had much reduced the emphasis on rhetoric in higher education, but the humanists brought it back, first in Italy, by 1500 in France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Britain. Most of the hundreds of books on rhetoric published and republished throughout the Early Modern period were intended as school texts, from elementary to advanced levels, or represent lectures given in universities. Though rhetoric was always intended to teach composition (often including verse composition) and public speaking, its teachers regularly engaged in rhetorical analyses of literary texts, including the poets, and required their students to do so as well. Directly or indirectly, the study of rhetoric provided the general literate public with a theoretical basis for reading, interpreting, and evaluating texts, including theories of the nature and uses of language, a formidable technical vocabulary, and concepts of style and genre, and it constantly coloured the writings of critics whose major interests were in poetry and drama. In approaching the literature of the Renaissance and Early Modern period, we need to remember that for most readers of the time the most important literary genre was oratory, specifically Christian preaching: thousands of sermons were not only heard but published and subjected to intensive criticism, both theological and aesthetic.

Science and literary criticism are generally considered to stand so far apart that one cannot analyse their mutual relations without clear definitions of both.

If we assume, as did Ezra Pound, that ‘literature is news that stays news’, we can consider writers as agents in the transformation of the world-picture of their age. They therefore have something in common with scientists, who keep modifying received ideas by the testing of new paradigms. But their quest for modernity does not always elicit an immediate response on the part of the critics: Thomson's Seasons popularized a form of natural sublimity which received its critical status in Burke's Enquiry almost thirty years later. Thus, if we wish to consider literary criticism in both its incipient and developed forms, we must include in our corpus the stray remarks, sometimes off the cuff, made by the authors themselves.

The same applies to science. The term must be used in a broad sense, i.e., science as understood by the interested layman. Innovations, whether a writer rejects or favours them, will attract his attention and develop his creative powers, but science, as he apprehends it, is often mediated by philosophy. To use the example of Thomson again, he and Swift held different views about the Royal Society, but the ‘new science’ was central to their preoccupations. Neither of them had done any work in a laboratory, but both knew about the Boyle Lectures and about the controversies caused by the Essay concerning Human Understanding, which relies on the corpuscular theory of matter.

Starting in the late seventeenth century, observers throughout Europe agree that never before had the world seen so many critics. ‘[T]ill of late years England was as free from Criticks, as it is from Wolves’, Thomas Rymer attests in his Preface to Rapin (1674) - the work that launched the word's popularity in England - though ‘our Neighbour Nations have got far the start of us’. ‘Criticism’ had entered the vernacular languages from Latin around 1600, first in France and later in England, where Dryden was the first to use it; it arrived in Germany only about 1700, but by 1781 we have the testimony of Kant's first Critique, testimony as well to the term's extraordinary breadth of meaning for the period: ‘Our age is in every sense of the word the age of criticism [Kritik], and everything must submit to it.’

The eighteenth century inherited from the seventeenth a primary meaning of ‘criticism’ as a range of activities including grammar, rhetoric, history, geography, and such newly named studies as ‘palaeography’ - the whole range of textually based learning pursued by Renaissance humanists; as Bayle said, ‘le règne de la critique’ began with the revival of letters. This is how the term is defined from Bacon to Jean Le Clerc's great Ars critica, first published in 1697 and much reprinted. In this sense ‘criticism’ appears as a synonym for ‘grammar’, ‘philology’, ‘erudition’, and even ‘literature’, as it still does for instance in Marmontel's entry ‘Critique, s.f.’ in the Encyclopédie; in the Dictionary of 1755, Johnson defines ‘Philology’ simply as ‘Criticism; grammatical learning’. Eighteenth-century writers both refine and extend this definition.

Philosophical writing was uniquely accessible in the eighteenth century: in 1711 Joseph Addison declared himself ‘ambitious to have it said … that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses’ (Spectator, I, p. 44, no. 10). The philosophers of the mid-century followed him in their mutual confidence in themselves and their readers; philosophy did not become an irreversibly specialist profession until the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. For the bulk of the eighteenth century language had not divaricated into the specialized and mutually exclusive (if not incomprehensible) jargons which characterize the different disciplines in the modern age: scientists (natural philosophers), epistemological and ethical philosophers, theologians and literary critics all in an important sense described human experience in similar ways, and their language was, in the full contemporary sense of the word, a literary one. In his posthumously published autobiographical sketch, David Hume wrote ‘a passion for literature … has been the ruling passion of my life’ (‘My Own Life’, in Dialogues, pp. 233 ff.)

But this communicable synthesis did not come automatically or without effort; Hume engaged throughout his writing career with the problems of marrying expression and embodiment, form and content, which are central to the philosophy, literature and criticism of the period as a whole.

The psychology of literary creation is clearly, concisely, and sturdily summarized in Thomas Hobbes's Answer to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert (1650):

The images in the memory upon which judgement and fancy work are decaying sense-impressions retained in the mind after the object producing them is removed. Images run naturally into sequences within the mind, according to the contiguity in time and space of those sense-impressions of which they are the decaying residue. Such sequences, ‘the train of imagination’ or ‘train of thought’, may be unguided, as in dreams, or guided by the will, ‘as one would sweep a room, to find a jewel; or as a spaniel ranges the field, till he finds a scent’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 22).