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).

In 1990 Arthur Miller was seventy-five years old. He might have been forgiven for settling into a cosy retirement. Henrik Ibsen wrote his last play at seventy-one while Samuel Beckett produced little after he was sixty. His public career had already lasted forty-six years, longer than those of Chekhov, Strindberg, Brecht, O'Neill, or Williams. Yet the 1990s proved his most prolific period since the 1960s. By the middle of the decade he had written three new plays, a film script for The Crucible, which began shooting in late 1995, and a novella published as Homely Girl, in the United States, and Plain Girl, in the United Kingdom. He continued to monitor the political situation, writing articles to The New York Times, supporting censored and imprisoned writers and traveling widely. He was, in other words, what he had been for the previous five decades, an active participant in theatrical, political, and social life.

Francisco Robortello published the editio princeps of Longinus' first-century treatise, Peri Hypsous, in 1554. Although it was followed by the editions of Manuzio (1555) and Porta (1569), this remarkable work of criticism made no impression – that is to say, there was no attempt to assign the sublime more than a stylistic significance – until Boileau translated it into French, over a century later (1674). Despite three translations into English between 1652 and 1698, it was not until Welsted's in 1712 (reprinted in 1724) and Smith's popular Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime (1739) that Longinus and the sublime became thoroughly current in Britain. The long fallow period between the rediscovery of the Paris manuscript and the exploitation of the sublime in criticism and aesthetics can be accounted for in terms of a confidence among neoclassical critics that was interrupted in France, and terminated in Britain, by the quarrel over the Ancients and Moderns. When the pre-eminence of classical literature, together with the critical precepts it justifies, came under the hostile scrutiny of modernist writers the sublime simultaneously became an urgent issue; and Longinus was used by both sides as a champion, alternately playing the part of ancient exemplar and of modern usurper. The passage between these two points – between the sublime conceived to be the coincidence of rule and practice and the sublime in its more revolutionary aspect as an unprecedented event – will be traced in the following essay.

If we think of Arthur Miller's career as essentially beginning in 1944, with the disastrous Broadway production of The Man Who Had All the Luck, we ignore nearly a decade of playwriting, a decade in which he was shaping his ideas and experimenting with form. Writing as a student at the University of Michigan, he won two prestigious Hopwood Awards and was a runner-up with his third play. He wrote his first, No Villain, in 1936, and followed it with a series of plays in which he tested his skills and explored his response to private and public issues. Not all of them were by any means five-finger exercises. They Too Arise, a version of No Villain, was produced by both a local group and the Chicago division of the Federal Theatre. Even Honors at Dawn and The Great Disobedience, more obviously apprentice work, compare not unfavorably with the products of 1930s radical theatre whose own melodrama frequently matched that of the period. A further play, written in 1939-40, though lost for many years, did finally receive both a radio and television production nearly fifty years later and was warmly received. The Golden Years, a play which takes place during the conquest of Mexico by Cortes, is a work of considerable subtlety and power which was written in response to the growing power of Hitler.

Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, on 17 October 1915, a long way from the Connecticut hills where he has lived for nearly half a century, though not quite as far as it may seem. Harlem, then, was an elegant and mixed neighborhood, partly German, partly Italian, Jewish, and black. There was open space. His mother could watch him walk to a school which she herself had attended, down unthreatening streets. The family was wealthy. His father, an all but illiterate immigrant from Poland, had built up a clothing business which employed a thousand workers. That all ended with the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The houses grew smaller, family life more tense. They moved to Brooklyn. At thirteen he wanted to be a soldier and go to West Point. Three years later, with the Depression biting hard, he “wanted to be anything that was going.” The “anything” extended to being a crooner. For a brief while he had a radio programme of his own: “I sang the latest hits and had a blind pianist with lots of dandruff.”

Ut pictura poesis

David Marshall

In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke argued that the effect of words ‘does not arise by forming pictures of the several things they would represent in the imagination’. Insisting that ‘on a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that once in twenty times any such picture is formed’, Burke asserts: ‘Indeed, so little does poetry depend for its effect on the power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced it would lose a very considerable part of its energy, if this were the necessary result of all description.’ As Burke's appeal to empiricism suggests, however, it was not at all uncommon in 1757 (the year the Enquiry was published) to assume that words, especially words in poems, could represent and even present pictures. Nine years later, in 1766, when Lessing set out to delineate the effects of painting and poetry in his Laocoön, he announced his intention to counteract the ‘false taste’ and ‘unfounded judgements’ that had converted Simonides' assertion that paintings were silent poems and poems were speaking pictures into a set of rules for artists and critics.

Both Lessing and Burke sought to refute different aspects of the tradition known as ut pictura poesis–those famous words that were taken out of context from Horace's Art of Poetry to stand for the belief that poetry and painting were or should be alike. Eventually arguments that disputed the power of description to produce images and the analogies between poetry and painting would lead to the undoing of this tradition; but Burke and Lessing were responding to views that had become pervasive by the second half of the eighteenth century.

In some ways Miller seemed out of synch with the sixties. Rather than writing about Vietnam or civil rights, he chose to look back to the Depression in The Price, the Holocaust in After the Fall and Incident at Vichy, McCarthyism and the Depression in After the Fall. Yet all three plays also explore the problem of denial, and to Miller this was the central issue of the moment. Denial, after all, lay behind the American attitude toward race, and it facilitated the waging of an immoral war in south-east Asia. There is certainly no evidence that he abstracted himself from the political realities of the decade. Quite the contrary. He became actively involved in the anti-war movement. Yale, the University of Michigan, and even West Point invited him to speak about the war. He had not, however, forgotten about McCarthyism, warning students, at a University of Michigan teach-in, that the FBI, who, he claimed, was sitting among them, would hold them accountable for their actions and even ask them to condemn their present passions in the future. He nevertheless applauded the student protest, calling it “the essential risk of living.”

Death of a Salesman is a deceptively simple play. Its plot revolves around the last twenty-four hours in the life of Willy Loman, the hard-working sixty-three-year-old traveling salesman whose ideas of professional, public success jar with the realities of his private desires and modest accomplishments. Subtitled “Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem,” the play has a narrative which unwinds largely through Willy Loman's daydreams, private conversations revealing past family hopes and betrayals, and how those past experiences, commingled with entropic present circumstances, culminate in Willy's death. Realizing that in death he may provide for his family in ways he never could during his lifetime, Willy commits suicide, hoping that his insurance will grant Biff a “twenty-thousand-dollar”deliverance, an extended period of grace. He hopes the insurance money will somehow expiate, or at least minimize, the guilt which he feels for his affair at the Standish Arms Hotel a lifetime ago. The simplicity of the play, however, quickly dissolves into filial ambiguity, civic paradox, and philosophic complexity.