Klara Bicanova - From Rhetoric to Aesthetics: Wit and Esprit in the English and French Theoretical Writings of the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

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MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA2 0 1 3

From RhetoRic to Aesthetics:

Wit and espRit IN ThE ENglISh ANd FRENch ThEORETIcAl WRITINgS

OF ThE lATE SEVENTEENTh ANd EARlY EIghTEENTh cENTURIES


MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA2 0 1 3

KláRA BIcANOVá

From RhetoRic to Aesthetics:

Wit and espRit IN ThE ENglISh ANd FRENch ThEORETIcAl WRITINgS



© 2013 Klára Bicanová

© 2012 Masarykova univerzita

ISBN 978-80-210-???

ISSN 1211-3034


Table of contents

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 9

1 THE THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL PROLEGOMENA .......................................... 191.1 Wit Theorized: Summary of Twentieth-Century Approaches ...................................... 191.2 Wit as Aesthetic Concept ................................................................................................ 311.3 The Culture of the Late Seventeenth Century England and France: Political, Philosophical and Literary-historical Setting ............................................................... 44

2 OffICIAL AND ALTERNATIvE CLASSICAL AESTHETICS ......................................... 552.1 Dominique Bouhours and Poetic Ideologies of the Bel Esprit .................................... 562.2 Chevalier de Méré: Esprit as Light of Nature ................................................................. 692.3 Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux and the Ideal of Neoclassical Esprit .................................. 75

3 TRUE AND fALSE WIT: DRYDEN, POPE, AND ADDISON ......................................... 873.1 John Dryden and Vagaries of Restoration Wit .............................................................. 883.2 Alexander Pope: Wit as Meta-criticism .......................................................................... 983.3 Joseph Addison and Aesthetics of Neoclassical Wit .................................................... 1093.4 Wit and Esprit: Points of Accord and Dissonance ...................................................... 118

CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................ 129

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 133

ENDNOTES ............................................................................................................................ 143

INDEX ..................................................................................................................................... 151



For my Grandmother who had appreciation for wit



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introduction

This study began as a comparative analysis of wit and humour in the Restoration drama and dramatic theory. Drawing on my B.A. thesis on English comic theories in the late seventeenth century I intended to explore the literary and aesthetic implica-tions of the two terms as they contested for the audiences’, authors’ and critics’ favour in the early modern England. Furthermore, I included the French literary scene of the corresponding period and its employment of and theorizing about esprit which sig-nificantly widened the scope of both considered issues and analyzed texts. Therefore, I decided to focus exclusively on the wit/esprit aspect of the project and consider it primarily from the point of view of the literary and aesthetic ideas articulated in the critical texts of the period, i.e. 1660s to 1710s. While I occasionally mention a piece of contemporary creative writing, be it a poem or a play, I do so to illustrate a point or contrast a statement made in a preface, theoretical treatise, essay, a letter etc., and my focus is on the relatively new genre of literary and dramatic criticism as well as aesthet-ics and the interactions of these disciplines with the questions pertaining to the terms of wit and esprit, respectively.

While a relatively large amount of studies concerning wit has been carried out in the past six decades, in my research I have not come across a single piece of critical writing which would have a comparative aspect. I have come across a number of comparative studies dealing with various aspects of English and French literature during my research; however, the theme of wit and esprit respectively never came up as a key topic. The ques-tion of influence is, of course, too vital to be ignored completely and I will be making occasional brief comments concerning the individual authors influencing one another. However, my intention in this study is not to present a coherent argument concerning wit based on an idea of the influence of one national literature on the other but rather to look at some of the key texts of the period in their cultural contexts. These texts il-lustrate the background of the influence and provide a comparative reading of the two concepts which will hopefully yield new interpretive approaches to the nearly neglected area of wit.

The aim of this study is twofold: First to review a fairly dated but so far unchallenged view of wit as an outmoded and irrelevant term belonging to the critical vocabulary of literary past. Seen as a rather obscure item of a vague historical significance at best, wit has ceased to be considered relevant enough to be included among the canon of literary


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critical terms covered by the renowned “Critical Idiom” series published by Methuen during the1970s and early 1980s which included terms such as metaphor, comedy of manners, conceit, irony, absurd, etc. On the other hand, it did find its way into numer-ous dictionaries of literary terms, where – with few exceptions – it has been presented as a literary device operating exclusively in the sphere of verbality. Part of my attempt to rehabilitate wit lies in presenting the term as a complex concept relevant to many art-related areas – not only literature, but also visual arts, theatre studies, and theory of games. This approach should result in a more comprehensive nd multi-faceted notion of the term and, consequently, it should allow the fundamental features of the term be-come clear. By demonstrating that wit is not an exclusive property of verbal expression, I argue that it is more beneficial to regard it as aesthetic term whose applicability is much more extensive than modern research has shown so far.

The second aim of this study is literary historical. By focusing on the English and French literature of the second half of the seventeenth century, i.e. the period when wit received much (both positive and negative) attention, I wish to trace the term’s gradual shift from the realm of rhetoric to the newly established field of literary aesthetics. The claim concerning the move from rhetoric to aesthetic has been both contested and en-dorsed by various scholars. In his study The Classical Sublime: The French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature Nicholas Cronk argues that articulating new theoretical terms in the second half of the seventeenth century, be it the sublime, wit, or the je-ne-sais-quoi, rises from the “the struggle to break free from an inherited rhetorical tradition and to forge a new aesthetic doctrine” but the literary tradition out of which this need rises from must be taken into account as well (Cronk 82-3). He contends that to speak of a shift from rhetoric to aesthetic could be said to be tautology in the context of seventeenth-century critical thought. The term ‘rhetoric’ seems appropriate to the period; however, the problem – especially for a twenty-first century reader – is how to understand it. Also, poetics at this time was not considered separately from rhetoric, but rather as a part of that wider discipline; manuals of rhetoric frequently drew on poets for their examples. Neoclassical poetics lost its autonomy in the process of rhetorisation. Therefore, Cronk concludes, to speak of “severing a literary-critical terms from its rhetorical origins is not meaningful in the context of French neoclassicism” (83). Opposing this claim is a short but terse text by Jeane Goldin “Jeux de l’esprit et de la parole. D’une rhétorique à un art de la pointe.” In her defence of ‘la pointe’ (conceit), Goldin claims that it cannot be treated as a rhetorical figure, as it “manifests […] a specific mental dynamism,” stressing “the ambiguity of an epoch which gave birth to the modern thought”1 (136). Perhaps more convincing than Goldin’s argument, focused too narrowly on a single poetic device to encompass the field of rhetoric and aesthetic in its entirety, is the evidence of the shift which can be found in writings of one of the most prominent seventeenth-century French author. In the Preface to his translation of the ancient treatise On the Sublime, Nicolas Boileau writes with respect to the ancient author’s intentions:

It must be observed then that by the sublime he [Longinus] does not mean what the orators call the sublime style, but something extraordinary and marvelous that strikes us in a discourse


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and makes it elevate, ravish, and transport us. The sublime style requires always great words, but the sublime may be found in a thought only, or in a figure or turn of expression. A thing may be in the sublime style, and yet not be sublime, that is, have nothing extraordinary nor surprising in it […]. (The Continental Model 272)

In addition to the above-mentioned arguments in favour of the shift from rhetoric to aesthetic, I believe that Cronk is confusing the gradual shift from rhetoric to aesthetic with a much more radical and contestable severing or dissociating of the two spheres. I have no intention to claim that in order to understand how wit was employed and theorized during the period of English and French literature in question it should be severed from its rhetorical origins. On the contrary, I believe that these origins have to be kept in mind and stressed. Nevertheless, I believe that to deny the gradual shift of the theoretical paradigms in which wit and related terms were organized from the rhetorical to the aesthetic is to deny the legitimacy of the terms themselves.

In summary, this thesis aims at a more complex, if not exhausting, look at an aesthetic concept whose vitality is indisputable in its timelessness, while concentrating on the theories surrounding it during the period of its busiest currency. It details the early modern shift from the concept of wit as a rhetoric device to a more inter-disciplinary ap-proach which I believe is necessary to employ in order not to regard the term as an item from an outdated critical vocabulary. In addition, this thesis emphasizes the comparative potential of the concept outside of English discourse by putting the term side by side with its French equivalent, a perspective which to my knowledge has been absent from the studies on wit I have encountered during my research.

Apart from the project history and thesis statement, this Introduction shall provide a preliminary account of history of the so-called vogue words – a category into which wit and esprit are often pigeonholed – and their connection to literary criticism from the historical point of view. My argument here is that while a fairly useful prolegomenary label, it cannot be the only or main denotation of wit. The historical aspect of both terms is further explored in a brief introduction of the words from etymological perspective, concentrating on the period immediately preceding the seventeenth century, that is the Renaissance. I will continue to discuss the historical context of the terms in more special-ized details in the first chapter of the thesis. After I have demarcated the historical terri-tory of the thesis I move on to present an outline of its structure, briefly introducing the individual chapters and subchapters and delineating my interest in each part of the text.

The vogue words and their place in literary criticism

Although today wit is often regarded by critics as “a quaint category of verbal clever-ness”, it was a major “analytic mode as well as one of stylistic sophistication” in the Eng-lish literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Sitter 5). Wimsatt and Brooks see wit is a “kind of genteel slang word” in the early eighteenth century


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(Literary Criticism 241). To state that wit is beyond precise definition may at first appear like a trivial tautology. Delving deeper into the term’s layers – etymological as well as contextual – it appears that not only there might have been a reason for the difficulty in formulating a stable definition but also that other terms – or ‘vogue words’ – shared same destiny. This particular feature of these terms is what has divided critics and schol-ars in two camps – the former suggesting that the instability of the term is a sign of its shadiness, and the latter claiming that wit “is one of those words too useful ever to be exactly defined” (The Norton Anthology of English Literature 2571). T. S. Eliot’s ideas penned in his 1921 essay on Andrew Marvell testify to the extraordinary amount of ap-prehension of the complexities of the term:

You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth; you cannot find more than an echo of it in Landor; still less in Tennyson or Browning; and among contemporaries Mr. Yeats is an Irishman and Mr. Hardy is a modern Englishman – that is to say, Mr. Hardy is without it and Mr. Yeats is outside of the tradition altogether. On the other hand, as it certainly exists in Lafontaine, there is a large part of it in Gautier. And of the magniloquence, the deliberate exploitation of the possibilities of magnificence in language which Milton used and abused, there is also use and even abuse in the poetry of Baudelaire. Wit is not a quality that we are ac-customed to associate with ‘Puritan’ literature, with Milton or with Marvell. (‘Andrew Marvell’ in Times Literary Supplement 31 March1921)

Wit has been labelled a modish word, a linguistic fashion item of the Restoration England. Its equivalent in this sense can be the bel esprit, but – as I suggest in the second chapter – only when it is complemented by another, equally if not more, fashionable word in the French history – the je-ne-sais-quoi. The quintessentially indefinable critical keyword whose heyday came around the 1660s represented a way of articulating experi-ence of a powerful and seemingly inexplicable force. Today it is regarded as a mannered archaism in both French and English, yet it still offers to speakers of both languages a way of articulating their experience of a powerful and seemingly inexplicable force. To label wit as a mere vogue word is hardly acceptable or serious scholarly approach to literary history. Thus, Gunar Sorelius contends that “‘[w]it’ is often an ambiguous word in Restoration criticism”, yet “of great currency and importance” (Sorelius 96). Similarly, Paul Hammond recognizes it as “the hallmark of an intelligent, confident culture” and suggests that “[i]mplicitly, in Dryden’s lines and elsewhere, it defines the gap between Restoration culture and the preceding decades” (Restoration Literature. An Anthology xv). In attempt to avoid an overly simple labelling, I propose that it is necessary to look into when and how the accretion of semantical layers started and what it implies for the con-temporary understanding of the term.


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Pre-history of the terms

Although I will devote a part of the first chapter to describing how etymology of wit changed throughout its existence, I will not go into too much detail regarding its Renais-sance history (apart from its relationship with Renaissance rhetoric, which is one of the topics of the last subchapter of the following chapter). For this reason, I wish to present a brief summary of what wit came to denote during this period in the English context; this summary will be followed by a similar account of esprit.

During the reign of Elizabeth I the meaning of words in general was shifting perhaps even more than usual, as William Crane suggests, reminding that Erasmus’s caution that every definition is misfortune will be repeating during this period (Crane, Wit and Rhetoric 6). In Gabriel Harvey’s Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597) wit’s formal definition runs as follows: “[Wit is] an affluent Spirit, yielding inuention to praise or dispraise, or anie ways to discourse (with judgment) of euerie subiecte” (quot. in Crane 9-10). Here, wit’s association with rhetoric is apparent, as invention was one of the five elements of rhetoric. Wit was often paired up with qualifying adjectives: ‘true,’ ‘false,’ ‘biting,’ or ‘quick.’ Even though the controversy over what constitutes wit as such became acute only after 1700, it was inherent in the subject from very early times. For example wit’s frequent association with unruliness or rebelliousness was not a feature peculiar to the Renaissance period. In all ages mental acumen “has displayed a tendency to run away with its possessor” (Crane 11). This ambivalence has been commented on by the ancient rhetoricians and Cicero would praise wit in some of his treatises while growing highly suspicious of it in others.

As literary fashions were changing in the quarter century from 1590 to 1615 with a rapidity that has never been equalled before, new conceptions of wit achieved cur-rency. About 1590 the word began to be associated with ability to write plays and gain a living by the pen. The near relation between wit and rhetoric which had marked the preceding years of Elizabeth’s reign persisted to a considerable extent. Plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, writings of Greene and Lodge provide evidence of this close connection. Soon after publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), son-net came into vogue, followed by satire and epigram. The emphasis which these forms placed on neatly turned thought tended to swing wit in the direction of play upon words.

In the nearly three decades following 1615 wit mutated more and more toward associa-tion with anagrams, acrostics, quips and other poetic forms favoured by the Metaphysical poets while still retaining many of its older meanings. In the view of this fact, Abraham Cowley observed in his “Ode: of Wit” (1660) that “A thousand different shapes it bears, / Comely in thousand shapes appears” while providing a list of things wit is not: “‘Tis not a Tale, ‘tis not a Jest / Admir’d with Laughter at a feast, / Nor florid Talk which can that Title gain ; / The Proofs of Wit for ever must remain. /’Tis not to force some lifeless Verses meet / With their five gouty feet” (The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse 693). Nor is wit adornment and gilding, puns, anagrams, acrostics, bawdy jokes, lines that almost crack the stage, tall metaphors (i.e. conceits) or odd similitudes. This


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critical analysis of aesthetic theory, emphasizing the poet’s capacity to create order out of disparate elements, brings into play the problem of definition which will be a recurring topic of this thesis. Also, all the poetic devices mentioned by Cowley are important to take note of as they will be referred to by John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Joseph Ad-dison some thirty to sixty years later in their respective attempts to provide a satisfying definition of the troublesome word.

Unlike wit, esprit does not seem to have ever acquired the vogue word status – this was reserved for other terms, such as the je-ne-sais-quoi and others. It, however, shared wit’s similarly complex etymology. Esprit is a term, as Alian Pons suggests, “whose se-mantical range is extremely wide, [and] it was employed for an equivalent of the Latin expression ingenium at the expense of great ambiguity, rendering the French word very vague”2 (Pons 2003). Giambattista Vico, in his La Méthode des études de notre temps (1709) remarks that

the French, when they wish to express a certain mental faculty which allows to connect sepa-rate things in a manner which is fast, propriate and fortunate, and which we call ingegno, use the word esprit (spiritus), and this mental faculty which manifests itself in the synthesis they regard as something completely simple, as their exaggeradly subtle intellects excel in the finest reasoning more than in synthesis.3 (quot. in Pons 2003)

The variant of the term, the bel esprit, became prominent during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Taking on new layers of meanings and contexts it reflected the turbulent changes of the French society which will be explored in the last part of the first chapter.

Outline of structure

The structure of the present thesis reflects the multi-perspectival and reflexive man-ner in which I wish to present the term in question. Apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion, the thesis consists of three main chapters, one of them focusing on theoretical and literary historical issues and two other on textual analyses. The Intro-duction is followed by Chapter 1 titled “Theoretical and Historical Prolegomena.” In this chapter I deal with the present state of research on wit and the historical frame of the concept. Subchapter 1.1 provides a summary of twentieth-century approaches to wit – the main approaches, developments and points of dissension in the field of wit studies are presented and critically evaluated. Tracing the revival of interest in wit to the first decades of the twentieth century, I pay attention to the ideas of J. E. Spingarn, J. W. Courthope and T. S. Eliot as the pioneers representing the initial stage of the modern day research in wit. These were followed by William Empson and C. S. Lewis who contested over the term in the atmosphere of new developments of the post-war literary criticism. From the ample stream of the structuralist and psychoanalytic liter-


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ary scholarship of the more recent decades I chose to present the views of Jonathan Culler, John Sitter and Richard W. F. Kroll as they represent important theoretical approaches to wit based on post-structuralist literary criticism. While Jonathan Culler uses the term to present the post-structuralist theory of language, John Sitter brings together the seventeenth-century ideas on language and its ability to represent reality and the post-structuralist theories to show that wit can be used as a bridging element between these two historical periods. Finally, Richard Kroll uses the post-structuralist premises to present wit as closely linked to the matters of power and control (linguistic or otherwise) as they were represented in Restoration comedy. All three approaches testify to wit’s vitality and usefulness for the modern literary criticism as they show the plurality and versatileness of the term and thus refute some of the older, more scepti-cal views on this matter. In a direct rebuttal of C. S. Lewis’s opinion of wit as a sub-versive, morally dubious concept, John Sitter’s work is particularly beneficial, which is also the reason why I devote so much attention to his theories. Drawing on the ques-tions raised by this part of the chapter, I move on to subchapter 1.2 where I present four contexts of wit: its definition as a literary and aesthetic concept, its relation to the questions of humour, the sublime and the beautiful respectively and finally, wit’s employment in the current artistic endeavours outside the literary area – I present wit as an agent in semiotic theory of theatre of a Czech semiotician Ivo Osolsobě, and in the form of meta-wit in the theory of games. These several possible interpretations of wit are all united my intention to present it as aesthetic term, using theories and no-tions from different artistic disciplines. Introducing the notion of sprezzatura, a term characteristic for the painting and life at court in the Italian Renaissance, I suggest that it shares similar features with wit – this also anticipates my readings of the French authors whose writings are analyzed in the second chapter. Their ideas on esprit are very much part of a system of aesthetics which is partly based on the concept of sprez-zatura.

The last subchapter of the introductory chapter (1.3) continues to explore the his-torical aspect of wit, focusing on the Rennaisance period and in particular on the sixteenth century rhetoric and its role in shaping the concept of wit. Starting with clarification of the relationship of rhetoric and poetry, I move to presenting some basic rhetorical devices and demonstrate how they influenced the division of different types of wit. Special attention is devoted to epigram, a genre which in a way sums up the intrinsic tensions lying at wit’s centre – the problem of verbal representation versus conceptual truth, and its appreciation by the seventeenth-century as well as modern critics. These tensions can be said to stand for the cultural environment of both France and England of the latter half of the seventeenth century which is a topic of the sec-ond and third part of the last subchapter. I briefly present the cultural, political and philosophical backgrounds of France and England, covering roughly the whole of the seventeenth century, but fo cusing mainly on the period between 1660 and 1700. The purpose of these two subchapters is make the reader familiar with some terms – sprez-zatura, préciosité, honnêteté – as well as ideas and historical settings, that will be used in the next two chapters.


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After identifying the main historical and theoretical areas in Chapter 1 I move on to presenting textual analyses of the three selected French authors. Chapter 2, titled “Esprit and the je-ne-sais-quoi: Bouhours, Méré, and Boileau” comprises three subchap-ters concentrating on the theories of esprit and related terms, such as the je-ne-sais-quoi, délicatesse and the sublime, deployed in the texts of Dominique Bouhours, chevalier de Méré and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. In subchapter 2.1 I deal with two texts of Dominique Bouhours, Les Entretiens d’Artiste et d’Eugène and La Maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit as representatives of the genre of literary and social criticism which became a partial inspiration for the work of Joseph Addison whose theories of wit are the subject of my textual analyses in the third chapter. Bouhours’s ideas on esprit, the je-ne-sais-quoi and other concepts form a system of thought which was unique to the seventeenth century gradual forming of aesthetics. The bel esprit, Bouhours’s own version of the ideal of poetic and social achievement is analyzed in contrast to the je-ne-sais-quoi to show how these terms’ vagueness was a strategically employed device meant to keep the elite circles of French society closed to intruders from the newly establishing merchant classes. Keeping in the same sphere of social literature and literary criticism, subchapter 2.2 examines the rarely analyzed text of Antoine Gom-bauld, chevalier de Méré, Discours de l’Esprit. I explore Méré’s text mostly with regard to the accessibility of esprit to women who were often seen as the founders of the new sensibility associated with préciosité. Being regarded as one of the chief theorists of honnêteté, Méré continues the tradition of the polite writer such as Bouhours, linking the genres of literature and its appreciation and the rules of etiquette and apprecia-tion of conduct. The last subchapter of Chapter 2 (2.3) focuses on different meanings of esprit in the theories concerning poetry and its appreciation in the work of Nicolas Boileau. I focus on the author’s masterpiece of neoclassical criticism L’Art poétique, and I also look into his ideas on the sublime expressed in his preface to the translation of the Le Traité du sublime. Here I am specifically interested in how Boileau used Longi-nus’s text for conveying his own ideas on esprit which he later extended in the critical chefs-d’oeuvre. Unlike my textual analysis of Pope’s Essay on Criticism (3.2), where I use a number of relatively recent critical studies to either support or contrast my opinion, I analyze the employment of esprit in Boileau’s L’Art poétique using very few secondary sources. While all the foreign-language quotations, both from primary and secondary sources, appearing in the first and second chapter are translated into English in the main body of the thesis and the original text can be found in the Endnotes at the end of the thesis, I opted for a different approach in the subchapter 2.3. The quotations from Boileau’s L’Art poétique which I use in my textual analysis in this subchapter are quoted in French directly in the text and followed by (mostly my own) English transla-tion. That way I can explore several meanings of esprit used by Boileau and trace their connections to other terms of his theories of literature as well as the use of esprit in the texts of other French authors, especially Méré. Boileau’s understanding of the term also anticipates the employment of the word in theories of the English authors mostly in terms of its duality and emphasis on the link between the aesthetic and ethical di-mension of artistic creation.


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After looking at the ways in which esprit was employed in the works of the French authors, I move to presenting textual analysis of works of three English authors. These readings are the subject of Chapter 3, named “True and False Wit: Dryden, Pope, and Addison.” While all the three authors and the analyzed texts (Essay on Dramatick Poesy, Essay on Criticism, and the Spectator papers respectively) are considered a stable part of the canon, they have been seriously understudied. The main purpose of the chapter is to trace wit’s change from the rhetoric device used by the previous generations of the Metaphysical poets to the concept of creative powers combined with ethical awareness favoured by the newer neo-classicism-influenced authors.

Subchapter 3.1 explores John Dryden’s theories of wit in the context of his critical oeuvre. A pioneer of the English dramatic criticism, Dryden never expressed his theories of wit systematically in one text. Instead, they appear spread over a number of critical writings – essays, prefaces, letters etc. I traced those texts and attempted to follow the writer’s changing ideas on the subject as his ideas on the role and function of literary criticism developed throughout his career. For Dryden, wit seems to fulfil the role of a measuring device in the contest of literary and cultural achievement of the present and the previous generations of authors. I demonstrate that while many of his critical precepts and theories were inherited either from precisely those generations he rebelled against or foreign authors, he managed to shape the concept of wit so that it became an indispensible item of the latter seventeenth-century criticism.

Subchapter 3.2 focuses on Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism which has often been regarded as a riposte to Boileau’s L’Art poétique. In this subchapter I continue to explore the interconnection between the development of literary criticism and the concept of wit. I demonstrate that Pope’s concept of wit is a morally engaged faculty, and as such is crucial for the ideal critic Pope is describing in his text. Here, good conduct and cultivat-ed artistic sensibilities again seem to blur the boundaries between the social and the ar-tistic as in the case of Bouhours and Méré. Here, a similarity emerges between Boileau’s and Pope’s ideas on how wit must include the concern for both the artistic achievement and moral integrity. A similar concern can be seen as linking Pope’s text with ideas on wit analyzed in the last subchapter of the third chapter which concludes the analytical part of the thesis. In subchapter 3.3 I come back to the genre of social literature in the form of the early modern social journal The Spectator, collaborative work of Joseph Ad-dison and Richard Steele. I concentrate on the ideas on wit Addison expressed in the series of five entries (numbers 58-63) and some of his earlier, much less known texts, namely ‘Notes on Some of the Foregoing Stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, ‘Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals, especially in Relation to the Latin and Greek Poets’ and the Essay on the Georgics. While Addison’s ideas on wit continue the line of aesthetic experience curbed with moral concern, they also demonstrate interest in clar-ity as a feature of non-fiction literature, at the same time allowing for some degree of equivocality of fiction, a difference often disregarded by scholars.

In subchapter 3.4 I present the final comparison of the ways in which the terms of wit and esprit were employed and treated by the six chosen authors. While the present study is a comparative one, I am more interested in the differences than similarities of


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the deployment of the term by the English and the French authors of the period in ques-tion. One of the aims of the thesis is to identify and describe the differences which grew out of the two cultures whose intellectual, cultural, and political concerns and problems were at that point of history very alike in certain areas. Also, the multi-semantic nature of the two terms could suggest similar treatment on both sides of the channel. For all this, the ways in which wit and esprit were employed by the French and English authors can hardly be expected to be identical.

Finally, in the conclusion to the whole study, I review the results of my research, fo-cusing on the various parallels and differences between the concepts of wit and esprit as they appear in my textual analyses. I also suggest some possible reasons for the findings of my thesis. I summarize the history of the concept with respect to the modern literary criticism, once again highlighting the difference between its assessment of wit and my position on the matter. Furthermore, I discuss how, in today’s culture wit bridges the artistic and social spheres as a term of appreciation, proving to be a vigorous, if not un-equivocal, concept. Rounding off the whole thesis, I point out several possible directions the research into wit might be headed into.


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1 theoretical and historical prolegomena

Les lois de nos désirs sont des dés sans loisir.

R. Desnos, Corps et biens (1930)

1.1 Wit Theorized: Summary of Twentieth-century Approaches

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, wit has become the subject of several stud-ies of literary history and theory. It has been approached from a number of different perspectives and has also been subject to various methods of theoretical examination, usually in the vein of the current stream of literary theory. This chapter presents the key literary studies dealing with wit which were published during the last century or so in order to summarize the achievement of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ literary scholarship in relation to the term. It is organized chronologically, concentrat-ing on those studies which reflected a contemporary literary critical approach to the term, starting with historical and positivist, linguistic, to formalist, post-structuralist and psychoanalytical perspective in order to present the term’s interaction with the major literary theories of the past century.

1.1.1 Beginnings of critical Interest in Wit: courthope, Spingarn, Eliot

Throughout the history of English literature wit has primarily been associated with Metaphysical poetry and Restoration comedy. During the first three decades of the twen-tieth century, the discussions involving the term were exclusively related to the former as Restoration comedy had to wait for its critical re-assessment till the second half of the century.

The first major mention of wit appears in J. W. Courthope’s History of English Poetry in 1903. In the third volume entitled The Intellectual Conflict of the Seventeenth Century. Decadent Influence of the Feudal Monarchy. Growth of the National Genius Courthope uses the term to characterize the historical development of English poetry of the above said period. ‘Poetical “wit”’ branches into three distinctive ‘schools’ under the reign of Eliza-beth and James I. – that of ‘theological wit’, ‘Metaphysical wit’ and ‘court wit’ (Chapters VII-XI) and schools of theological and court wit under the reign of Charles I (Chapter X). Before describing the poetry of these periods in detail, he attempts to define and


1 Theoretical and historical Prolegomena

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characterize ‘poetical wit’. He does so mainly on positivist and historical grounds, pos-iting Johnson’s definition of wit in his Life of Cowley as the best one so far. However, Courthope also notes that the great biographer never attempted to explain the nature and evolutionary circumstances of the term and so he takes upon himself to correct this omission. He begins by discussing the social and historical background of the Renais-sance, questioning the view that explains wit’s “appearance in European literature on purely aesthetic principle” (Courthope, History of English Poetry 104). Dismissing theories about the gradual spreading of wit, which claim that the popularity of the term first started in Spain, and travelled through Italy and France to England, Courthope sug-gests that a greater cause had to be at work, as the term became “to be fashionable in almost every European country” at the same time, retaining “the identity of essence” while exhibiting “great variety of form” (History of English Poetry 105). Locating this pan-European outbreak of ‘poetical wit’ after the Council of Trent (1545-1563), he holds that “the […] causes of these phenomena are to be found in the decay of the scholastic philosophy and of the feudal system, […], and in the revival, […] of the civic standards of antiquity operating on the genius of many rising nations and languages” (History of English Poetry 105-6).

He then proceeds to define the leading features of wit with regard to the Metaphysi-cal poets. He finds them in paradox, hyperbole, and excess of metaphor which he calls the signs of “the efflorescence of decay” (Courthope, History of English Poetry 106). Con-necting the use of hyperbole with concetti (conceits) in sonnets and chivalric and trou-badour poetry, Courthope contends that the original “warlike” incentive of the knights to panegyrize the lady was gradually replaced by the poets’ efforts “to outdo each other in mere ingenuity” (Courthope, History of English Poetry 110). This creative impulse was then taken ad absurdum by John Donne and other Metaphysical poets. Their liking for excessive metaphor is accounted for by “the decay of allegory as a natural mode of po-etic expression” (ibid.). Unlike Dante, whose use of innovative metaphors sprang out of necessity, the Spanish and Italian baroque poets, like Luis de Góngora and Giambattista Marino, used “allegorical language merely to disguise the essential commonplace of [their] subject-matter” and out of “desire for novelty in expression” (Courthope, History of English Poetry 112). Agreeing with Johnson, Courthope regards wit in the hands of the Metaphysical poets as a means to exercise their imagination and “unrestrained liberty”, not to express things of “vital importance” [...] such as “the nature of the unseen world”, as it is with Dante (History of English Poetry 116, 112).

As outdated as Courthope’s approach appears today, it must be acknowledged that it managed to hint at a significant feature of wit that will be continually re-appearing in all its forms and stages of development that will be traced in this chapter – the crav-ing after novelty and intellectual pleasure of creating brand new images. On the whole, however, Courthope’s assessment of wit does appear anachronistic even in comparison with its contemporary study by J. E. Spingarn in his magisterial three-volume collection Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (1908-9). Offering no systematic analysis of wit’s significance for the period, Spingarn does use the term to contextualize the interests and interactions of the contemporary literary critical scene. The starting point for the


1.1 Wit theorized: Summary of twentieth-Century approaches

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discussion of wit for him is the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Wit is a significant ele-ment of the philosopher’s mechanical theory of poetry, as laid out in his correspond-ence with William Davenant: “Time and Education [...] begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory begets Judgement and fancy; Judgement begets the strength and structure, and fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem” (Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century I xxviii). Fancy, a seventeenth-century synonym for wit, is in this description opposed to judgment and Hobbes is credited by Spingarn with the clearest formulation of this antithesis which had been recognized by the French and the Italians in the sixteenth century (Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century I xxviii).

Spingarn provides brief semantic background of the term in the Renaissance but he does not explore the circumstances of the semantic shift from thought to witty thought. Wit is “the English equivalent for the French esprit, which in its turn owed its connota-tion to the Italian ingegno and the Spanish ingenio. In the Elizabethan age ‘wit’ denoted the intellect in general, in opposition to ‘will’, the faculty of volition” (xxx). Phrases as ‘ingenious and conceited’, ‘sharpness of ingenuity’ occur incessantly in the literature of the day, and are the Elizabethan equivalents of the Italian bell ingegno. Gradually, even before the waning of the Italian influence, the native word ‘wit’ had been acquiring the signification of ‘ingenuity’ (xxx). From this time on wit was associated “with the imagina-tive or rather fanciful element in poetry, and more or less important as this element was more or less valued by succeeding schools” (xxx). Discussion of Hobbes and Davenant was initiated by the latter’s dedication of the lengthy preface of the epic poem Gondibert (1650) to the influential philosopher. The preface and Hobbes’s riposte Answer to Dav-enant (1650) mark a crucial point in the history of English literary criticism, anticipating the themes and forms of the many theoretical debates whose sum creates the bulk of the early modern literary criticism. One of these topics was the opposition of wit and judgment which became the testing ground of most significant philosophers, writers and critics of the period. Spingarn does not analyze the texts in great detail but rather notes the context in which they were produced and received:

Hobbes [...] clearly distinguished wit from judgement, and what is more, insisted on the neces-sity of both in poetry. Davenant’s preface and Hobbes’s answer were written in Paris, and both learnt in France that jugement is as essential to poetry as esprit. As early as 1650 there are signs that wit is under suspicion. So strong became the feeling that by itself it was insufficient form of poetic creation, that gradually its original imaginative signification became subordinate, and Dennis employs it to denote ‘a just mixture of Reason and Extravagance, that is such a mixture as reason may always be sure to predominate’. (xxx)

Spingarn goes on to adumbrate the gradual mutations of the term’s denotation, nam-ing rationalism as the main source of the pressure. His concluding statement is acknowl-edged even by the modern literary historians of wit: “These variations in the meaning of a single term parallel the general changes of literary taste in the nation. Each succeeding school of poetry gives its own content to the critical terms which it inherits no less than to those it invents” (xxxi).



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T.S. Eliot was the first among the 20th century literary critics whose interest in wit was motivated by personal ideological agenda. As his opinion on literature and matters of spirituality and religion gradually changed and radicalized, his appreciation of wit be-came more and more dismissive. Anonymously reviewing H. J. C. Grierson’s anthology of Metaphysical poems in the 1921 issue of Times Literary Supplement, Eliot identifies two main features of the Metaphysical poets (Smith, John Donne: The Critical Heritage 442). They are the agile management of figures of speech, “especially those figures which call for the rapid association of unlike objects” and the other is “the peculiarly close associa-tion, if not actual fusion, of feeling and thought, sensuous experience and intelligence, sensation and idea” (quot. in Smith, Metaphysical Wit 4). This favourable view is revised in the article ‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’ in Nouvelle revue française five years later, where, not dissimilarly to Courthope, witty metaphors of Donne are differentiated from the philosophically bolstered wit of Dante and consequently disregarded (Metaphysical Wit 6). In his series of lectures on the conceit in Donne and Crashaw (1926 and 1936) Eliot again tries to come to terms with his own ambivalent fascination with Metaphysical poetry. Donne is “an indisputable master of certain secondary modes, he is a mind of the trecento in disorder, mind in chaos, not in order” (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933 133).

It is important to keep in mind that even if Eliot’s mentions of wit appear to be made en passant only, they are now considered crucial for the revival of the interest of literary critics in the term (and more broadly speaking in Metaphysical poetry) that arrived in the second half of the twentieth century. Eliot very astutely observes that “[w]hen we speak of the wit of Donne, the wit of Dryden, the wit of Swift, and our own precious wit, we are not speaking of the same thing, and we are not speaking of different things, but of a gradual development and different stages of the same thing”, shrewdly hinting at that particular quality of the term that will become the reason for interest of William Empson, J. C. Ransom, C. S. Lewis and other critics from the 1960s onwards (25).

1.1.2 Formalist and linguistic Approach: Empson and lewis

The years after the hiatus of academic writing caused by World War II saw a remark-able growth of interest in wit as a part of the general boom of literary studies. The first post-war decade spawned at least four important studies related to wit: three of them specifically dealing with Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, regarded as one of the most crucial works of the early Augustan literary criticism. William Empson’s article ‘Wit in the Essay on Criticism’ in the influential The Hudson Review (1950) represents a landmark in the critical approach not only to the word but to a historical text as well. Empson’s close reading of Alexander Pope’s poem focuses on the complexity of its key word’s meanings, emphasising the prominence of what Empson calls “almost a slang word” which the term acquired after the Restoration. He connects this prominence to the current meaning of the word – i.e. “power to make ingenious (and critical) jokes”,


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claiming this meaning was already the most prominent one in the early Augustan period (‘Wit in the Essay on Criticism’ 84-5). The word’s complexity and multi-layered nature did not pose a threat of confusion to Pope’s (educated enough) contemporar-ies; “the performance inside the word [...] was intended to be quite obvious and in the sunlight” but for a modern reader the word is opaque and the poem is dull (85).

A riposte to William Empson’s 1950 article came in the form of C. S. Lewis’s account of wit in his Studies in Words (1960). The study is not confined to a single author or a lit-erary text and there is clearly no interest on the part of the author in setting the word in the contemporary literary-historical context. Lewis starts with a thorough overview of the word’s etymological history and development of its semantics, identifying three sens-es of wit: old sense of wit, wit-ingenium and what he terms the dangerous sense of wit. In the Old and Middle English old sense of wit designated “mind, reason, intelligence” (Lewis, The Studies in Words 86). For example, in Beowulf the hero warns his adversary Unferth against “þæs þu in helle scealt werhðo dreogan / þeah þin wit duge” – in Michael Alex-ander’s versification: “you’re a clever man, Unferth / but you’ll endure hell’s damnation for that” (Alexander, Beowulf 23). The second, wit-ingenium sense, developed from the first sense when different kinds of wit started to be distinguished: “Each man’s wit has its own cast bent, or temper; one quick and another plodding, one solid and another showy, one ingenious to invent and another accurate to retain.[...] Thus in Chaucer we have ‘For tender wittes wenen al be wyle / Theras they can pleynly understande’ people of ‘tender’ mind” (Lewis, The Studies in Words 88) or in John Lyly’s Euphues the eponymous hero is described as someone whose “witte [is] lyke waxe apte to receiuve any impression” (The Complete Works of John Lyly 185). This change, as Lewis correctly observes, was crucial for the future development of the word. Wit became to be distinguished in terms of its qual-ity and consequently used as an evaluative term. This kind of wit exercised its power in the art of verbal expression, i.e. rhetoric, and was associated with the ability of imagina-tive thinking. As such, it is no longer a term of cognitive psychology and philosophy but operates in a different sphere – that of artistic creation and criticism.

The reason why Lewis devised the third, dangerous sense of wit is that the word’s vari-ous senses did not come and go, so that we could safely say that during the Renaissance period the word no longer held its original sense, but only the second, more appreciative one, while in the Restoration texts we only encounter wit in its further sense. Instead, it retained all its senses and thus could be used in all the three of them within one utter-ance. Hence Dryden can say of Achitophel that “He sought the Storms; but for a Calm unfit, / Would Steer too nigh the Sands, to boast his Wit. / Great Wits are sure to Mad-ness near ally’d;” (The Works of John Dryden II 10). Wit of the second line means natural intelligence; ‘great wits’ of the third line means men of genius, a superior intellectual capacity.

The nature of the shift between these two usages – i.e. from a descriptive to an evalu-ative term – is something C.S. Lewis seems rather uneasy about. For him, the pure evaluative character of words means that they have actually become “useless synonyms for good and bad” (Studies in Words 7-8). This displeasure at the devaluation of words is very much present in his treatment of the ‘dangerous sense’ of wit which is defined by



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Lewis rather obscurely as “that sort of mental agility or gymnastic which uses language as the principal equipment of its gymnasium” (Studies in Words 97). Dangerous sense is usually the current sense of the word, one which we reach for when trying to figure out what the word means in an unfamiliar – usually old – context. If the current sense seems to work in the unfamiliar context, we are very likely to be deceived and “lured into misreading” because the “now dangerous sense may have existed then but it may not yet have been at all dominant” (13). Therefore Lewis advises caution: “If we once allow more familiar, though not necessarily later, meanings to colour our reading of the word wit wherever the neoclassical writers use it, we shall get into hopeless confusion” (92-3). That is why Empson was wrong in his analysis of wit claiming that “there is not a single use of the word in the whole poem in which the idea of a joke is quite of sight” (quot. in Lewis 93). Lewis on the other hand finds “plenty of passages where it is simply wit-ingenium with no idea of a joke, however far in the background” (93). This can be so thanks to the insulating power of the context which protects the word wit (or in general any word) from ambiguity, a concept which was important in both Empson’s and New Critics’ literary theories. However, I believe that Lewis’s argument is built on a misap-prehension of Empson’s claims. When he disagrees with literary theories of Empson, Lewis is not primarily concerned with literature and the specific way in which it employs words and meanings, but with the everyday communication we conduct in order to make ourselves understood and convey our thoughts: “If ambiguity (in Professor Empson’s sense) were not balanced by [the power of context], communication would become al-most impossible. [...] What seems to me certain is that in ordinary language the sense of a word is governed by the context and this sense normally excludes all others from the mind” (Studies in Words 11).

Lewis then tries to come up with a method to designate what the word meant in the time of its Restoration boom but encounters another obstacle – the contemporary definitions: “It is the greatest simplicity in the world to suppose that when, say, Dryden defines wit or Arnold defines poetry, we can use their definition as evidence of what the word really meant when they wrote. The fact that they define it at all is itself a ground for scepticism” (18). We do not feel the need to define a word, unless we tend to deflect from its regular sense. This is specially the case of negative definitions. Once we feel the need to emphasize that deprecate does not mean depreciate, it is a sign that the word is beginning to mean exactly that. Lewis admits that by doing this we in fact resist “the growth of a new sense” but immediately produces a reason for justifying this strategy: “We may be quite right to do so, for it may be one [sense] that will make English a less useful means of communication” (18). Consequently, the many definitions the Restora-tion authors and critics attempted are for Lewis mere tactical definitions, weapons in “war of positions”, in which the sides are fighting for a potent word. The critic’s motivation is to appropriate an attractive word: “The pretty word has to be narrowed ad hoc so as to exclude something he dislikes. The ugly word has to be extended ad hoc [...], so as to bespatter some enemy” (19).

Lewis’s account does not pretend to a literary study – its concern is clearly with the semantics of the word and not its specific usages at specific times. Conceived thus, I see



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a crucial problem in using contemporary literary texts – essays, prefaces, prologues etc. – for purposes of non-literary analysis. This method may work with other words analyzed in the book but becomes rather problematic in the case of wit. Lewis’s approach stands in a strict contrast to that of Formalism and New Criticism – the word itself is mistrusted while the context is given the power to stabilize its potential for semantic ambiguity. With a word as volatile as wit, Lewis can only be satisfied with the present situation, where “the happy ending” involves the word’s stripping of the layers of meaning and settling to one useful meaning. This “happy condition” is most clearly realized when the word is used safely in non-literary contexts, e.g. in the surviving saying ‘God give you wit’ (Studies in Words 110).

These idealizing and mythifying tendencies on Lewis’s part are criticized by John Sitter in his study The Arguments of Augustan Wit (1991). He rebuffs Lewis’s effort to dignify wit by means of abstracting it from actual expression and the attempt to identify one “foremost” meaning of the word (essential gift of the poet, his creativity) which begins to be threatened by the “dangerous” sense of jocularity and witty lan-guage growing stronger in the Restoration and early eighteenth century (John Sitter, The Arguments of Augustan Wit 85). According to Sitter, Lewis charts the transformation of the word as a narrative of heretical deviation and nearly tragic loss of the original, pure meaning while those meanings most strongly objected to are “those that put him unquestionably in the social and material world of language: jokes and witty remarks as well as Dryden’s “propriety of thoughts and words”” (The Arguments of Augustan Wit 85). However, as Sitter asserts, Dryden’s definition, albeit tentative and unstable (in Dryden, just as in Pope and others, “wit” sometimes meant mind, ingenuity or im-agination), perpetuates wit as closely related to conversation and firmly linked to the material and the living.

1.1.3 Structuralist, Post-structuralist and Psychoanalytic Angle: culler, Sitter, Kroll

As has been mentioned above, the formalist literary criticism helped to revive interest in wit during the first decades of the twentieth century. The successive streams of liter-ary theory have appropriated the term in ways and contexts which will be the topic of this section and the following subchapter. Given the scope of this work, it is impossible for me to present all of the studies, books and articles published on wit in its various contexts and meanings during the last sixty years. I am confined to mention briefly a number of these that in my opinion stand out and I chose to give a more detailed ac-count of three that I find most pertaining to my purpose of this chapter.

Although wit is not a central notion of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, it is significant to follow the ways in which the term becomes part of his post-structuralist discourse. According to Culler, pun, which can be seen in its extreme as “a sin against reason”, tends to accentuate the signifier – the linguistic sign which arrests our gaze and by interposing its material form it affects



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or infects the thought. To minimize the truth-endangering powers of the pun, the signifier must be suppressed by displacing into the realm of joke. In philosophy, the rejection of signifier equals the rejection of writing. In literature of the Restoration period, the rejection of pun took form of the rejection of levity which was associated especially with comedy. More importantly however, it manifested itself as rejection of the imaginative forces which lie at the basis of metaphor, which is in turn regarded by many scholars to be the cornerstone of literature (Culler, Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism 91). Here, pun represents all kinds of verbal creativity and novelty which, as we will see in the subsequent chapters, was associated with the so called ‘false’ wit. Culler contends that in pun, the “accidental” or “external relation-ship between signifiers is treated as a conceptual relationship, identifying “history” as “his story” or connecting meaning (sens) and absence (sans)” (Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism 91-2). In order not to “infect thought,” verbal wit has to be treated as a joke.

Developing Culler’s exposition further, I propose to contrast false wit’s external re-lationship between signifiers with ‘true’ wit as consisting in the conceptual relationship between the signified. To make this claim, I am turning to Aristotle’s theory of wit as ex-pressed in his Rhetoric. Aristotle associated wit with the ability to make apt comparisons between different categories of being, thus making it the fundamental principle behind the type of metaphor, which was termed the conceptual (cognitive) by the twentieth-cen-tury linguistics. In Organon Aristotle identified ten basic categories of being: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, date, posture, possession, action and passion. Although they have been since rejected by the modern day philosophy, the concept as such is still helpful. The conceptual metaphor is based on the understanding of one idea in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of action (e.g. “gold prices are soaring”). Thus, according to Aristotle, wit is based on comparison between ideas of two different categories, and not merely on physical similarities of their verbal representa-tions. As we will see, this type of wit was hailed as the valuable one during the Restora-tion period, as it did not depend on the instability of language.

Another study which must be presented in a greater detail here the already mentioned John Sitter’s study The Arguments of Augustan Wit (1991). I would like to present it as a relatively unique example of a well-informed, insightful and unorthodox piece of criti-cal writing on wit that enriches both our knowledge of the literature it deals with (late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English poetry) as well as of ways of employ-ing wit of this literature in thinking about contemporary literary theory. As Sitter him-self claims, he wishes to approach the subject of wit from various angles in order to bring “Augustan works to bear on contemporary literary theory” (The Arguments of Augustan Wit 2). Although his attention focuses on the major poets of the period – John Dryden, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Matthew Prior, Lord Rochester – he devotes some space to the theories of John Locke and the analysis of Swift’s Gulliver Travels. In the second chap-ter Sitter presents his principal three-step argument of the materiality of the Augustan writing as opposed to the abstraction which has dominated the literary discourse since Romanticism. The argument is based on the study of Locke’s epistemological troubles



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with language and its access to truth and knowledge in general and relates to the subject of wit in an original and compelling fashion.

Starting from the philosopher’s notorious elevation of judgment above wit as pro-pounded in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Sitter refutes Locke’s distrustful disregard of language as a transmitter of truth in the sense of “things as they are”. In Locke’s scheme of ideas wit is a harmful thing, leading our attention astray mainly be-cause of its association with rhetoric. Locke’s linguistic scepticism and his aversion to the “arts of fallacy” are contrasted with the attitudes of Joseph Addison and Matthew Prior. In his Dialogue between Mr. John Locke and Seigneur de Montaigne Prior attacks Locke’s naivety about language as being suitable and useful means of reaching Truth (affined with reason, knowledge and judgment) only if cleansed of the hampering figurativeness of rhetoric. While acquiescing in Locke’s core argument that judgment is essentially an analytic faculty while wit a synthetic one, Prior questions the possibility of separating the mental acts of making similitudes and making distinctions as the process of differentiat-ing is always already dependant on the pre-act of comparing and vice versa (The Argu-ments of Augustan Wit 70). Similarly, one of Addison’s Spectator essays on wit (No. 62, to be precise) demolishes Locke’s anxious opposition of wit and judgment by simple, com-mon sense-based arguments. Addison makes alterations in Locke’s definition of wit by stating that not only resemblance but the opposition of ideas produces wit. Therefore, if wit discerns differences as well as similarities, the dichotomy between the two collapses. As Sitter suggests, “common sense [...] houses with Locke one moment and with Prior’s [argument] the next” and goes on to observe that the real problem “dividing Locke from Addison and Prior can be seen as a question with particular pertinence to our own era and criticism: does it make more sense to think of “things as they are” as represented (perhaps badly) by language or as constituted by language?” (70) Not wishing to present either of the former writers as “proto-Nietschean or proto-Derridean rhetoricians of con-tradiction”, Sitter nevertheless stresses their counter-position to Locke’s “nostalgia for things and ideas untouched by words or for truths too tacit to enter the shared figures and allusions of language” (70).

To make the untenability of the Lockean hostile view of wit (as the proxy of the figu-rative mode of language) even more obvious, Sitter parallels the philosopher’s judge-ment-wit opposition with the famous opposition of metaphor and metonymy of Roman Jakobson. While admitting the opposition is “neither exact nor proportional”, Sitter nevertheless proposes that it is useful by suggesting it can make a revealing statement “about the inconclusiveness of the Augustan argument and about historical continuity” (71). Based on Jakobson’s opposition of metaphor (created through process of selec-tion or substitution) and metonymy (process of combination or contexture), Sitter ap-proximately associates wit with metaphor and similarity principle on the one hand and judgement, metonymy and contiguity principle on the other. For Jakobson, the poetic function of language draws on both selective (i.e. metaphoric) and combinative (i.e. metonymic) modes as a means for the promotion of equivalence. In the post-Romanti-cism poetry-centred literary discourse the supremacy of metaphor (as opposed to the metonymically based realistic novels) has been widely acknowledged just as – according



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to critics like Jonathan Culler and Paul de Man – it has become common to regard it as the “revelation of essences and imaginative truth” (Culler, Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction 198). Culler’s provocative account of metaphor suggests that “[t]o maintain the primacy of metaphor is to treat language as a device for the expres-sion of thoughts, perceptions, truth. To posit the dependence of metaphor on metony-my is to treat what language expresses as the effect of contingent conventional relations and a system of mechanical processes. Metaphor and metonymy thus become in turn not only figures for figurality but figures for language in general” (Pursuit of Signs 201-2). However, according to Sitter, Jakobson’s account favours metonymy over metaphor, the former mode being based not on “contingency” but contiguity. Culler’s ascribing “contingent” relations to metonymy means seeing its relations as accidental rather than essential, superficial rather than profound and so is not equivalent with Jakobson’s “con-tiguity” which “includes things that are next to each other” not only in linguistic but also existential terms (Sitter 75). Sitter believes that in this respect “Jakobson’s opposition shares the important common feature with Locke’s of providing a claim on “things as they are that is otherwise difficult to make” by recognizing the general correspondence between Locke’s characterization of wit as the assertion of likeness and Jakobson’s loca-tion of poetry in the realm of equivalences (76).

As with the first analogy, Sitter warns against too literal juxtaposition of Locke’s and Jakobson’s dichotomy. Instead he suggests that the basic oppositions are the most in-structive ones: “for Locke primarily operations of mind and for Jakobson primarily the operations of language: Locke’s discrimination (or “discerning”) and assemblage (“putting together”) and Jakobson’s selection and combination” (ibid.). The tension be-tween the two operations is not characteristic only of the two main literary modes “but also in different “personalities” or “personal predilections”, where we can discern “the strong desire to make characterological if not moral diagnoses” (ibid.). This brings Sitter back to what he calls the “local debate over the status of wit” and it allows him to explain that although the significance of such discussion seems lost to us in the centuries of changing literary paradigms, it could “cause excitement” for the Augustans. Moreover, the tropes of literary criticism may not be as far-apart as it is often suggested by literary historians. Comparing lines of Alexander Pope’s (in his Essay in Criticism of 1711) to those of A. R. Ammons’s (in Essay on Poetics of 1972), Sitter proposes affinity of poetical concerns spanning over two centuries of English criticism: “‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill / Appear in Writing or in Judging ill ...” ... “it’s hard to say whether the distinguishers or the resemblancers are sillier”.

Pope’s opening couplet juxtaposing “writing” – creative activity governed by wit – and criticism (intellectual activity governed by judgment) introduces us to the third and final step of Sitter’s argument in his attempt to reconnect the subject of wit with the issues of contemporary literary theory. Reminding us that the Augustan quarrel over the prov-ince of wit is in part one transformation of the longer battle between “philosophy” and “rhetoric” alluded to in the earlier stage of the argument, Sitter attacks the view of wit as dematerialized, abstracted entity of the literary poetics. Dryden’s first definition of wit appears in Annus Mirabilis (1667) and is based on a similar dichotomy. Unlike Pope,



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he is able to merge the twofold transformation into a threefold description of “imagina-tion”:

The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit, and wit in the poet, or wit writing, […] is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after; or, without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas which it designs to rep-resent. Wit written is that which is well defined the happy result of thought, or product of that imagination. (Dryden Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I. 97-8)

Using the implied analogy of natura naturans, Sitter contends that here, wit writing is the active process, “wit witting”, while the final product – wit written – might be considered as “wit witted” analogous to natura naturata (Sitter, The Arguments of Augustan Wit 79). Wit written is the wit of most of Dryden’s discussions, where it becomes “propriety of thoughts and words”, wit which is not epigram, antithesis, or pun but the “delightful imaging of persons, actions, or things ... some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech that it sets before your eyes the absent object as perfectly and more delightfully than nature.” As Dryden’s argument unfolds, wit written moves toward wit writing:

So then, the first happiness of the poet’s imagination is properly invention, or finding of the thought; the second is fancy or the variation, driving or moulding of that thought, as the judgement represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or that art of clothing and adorning that thought so found and varied, in apt, significant, and sounding words: the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression. (Dryden Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I 98)

By appropriating judgment to imagination Dryden manages to transcend the Lockean opposition: judgment seems to be so simultaneous with “fancy” it becomes its synonym. But this rescue action also nearly transcends language, separating expression in words from the intellectual discovery and construction, relegating it to the last place in time as well as in importance. Sitter notes that most of the late seventeenth- and eighteenth century attempts to ennoble wit involve a move similar to Dryden’s and lead to the same problem: judgment is appropriated to wit, which is then implicitly redefined in broader terms as “imagination” or “genius,” but which in its loftier identity finally has no visible connections with the process of writing itself (Sitter, The Arguments of Augustan Wit 81). These difficulties were propelled by the vastly influential definition of wit expressed in Johnson’s Life of Cowley (1779):

If wit be well described by Pope, as being “that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed,” they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeav-oured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope’s account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous; he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.



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If by a more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, [...] is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the Metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; [...].But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophi-cally considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ran-sacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. (83)

As the twentieth-century criticism came first to appreciate Metaphysical poetry, most of its attention (from John Courthope, T. S. Eliot etc.) was focused on the third para-graph with the term of discordia concors allowing either reprobation or appreciation. In the two preceding – and far less quoted – paragraphs, Johnson’s alliance with the Au-gustan discussion is much clearer. Johnson’s own preference seems to be for the “more adequate” definition of wit as “that which is at once natural and new,” and “not obvious is [...] acknowledged to be just”. Still, Johnson seems to be suggesting that Pope’s ac-count of wit is wrong as he “depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language” – in other words isolates expression from thinking.

Sitter’s explanation is that Pope describes wit from the reader’s perspective: the poet’s “happiness of language” occasions the reader’s “strength of thought”. In John-son’s first two paragraphs we can detect the assertion that the “natural dignity” of wit requires it abstracting it “from its effects upon the hearer” (Sitter, The Arguments of Augustan Wit 83). This effort to dignify wit by means of abstracting it from actual expression resonates in some of the twentieth-century criticism, namely C. S. Lewis’s previously mentioned account of wit in his Studies in Words. Its idealizing and mythify-ing tendencies are manifested in Lewis’s attempt to identify one “foremost” meaning of the word (essential gift of the poet, his creativity) which begins to be threatened by the “dangerous” sense of jocularity and witty language growing stronger in the Resto-ration and early eighteenth century (Sitter, The Arguments of Augustan Wit 83-4). Lewis charts the transformation of the word as a narrative of heretical deviation and nearly tragic loss of the original, pure meaning. Those meanings most strongly objected to by Lewis are “those that put him unquestionably in the social and material world of lan-guage: jokes and witty remarks as well as Dryden’s “propriety of thoughts and words”” (The Arguments of Augustan Wit 85).

This particular quality of wit is explored in Richard W. F. Kroll’s article ‘Discourse and Power in The Way of the World’ as well. Analyzing the most famous play of William Congreve, Kroll billuminates the intricate relations between language, and the social and political realities in which it is used. Wit is “not only […] a feature of discourse but […] a judgment of discourse that signals apt judgments about the world and entails a proper



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view of language in relation to persons, things, events, and ideas” (Kroll, ‘Discourse and Power in The Way of the World’ 728). Kroll thus rejects attempts of previous critics (e.g. T. H. Fujimura’s classification of characters based on whether they belong to the class of ‘Truewit’, ‘Witwoud’ or ‘Witless’) and suggests that “‘character’ is itself constituted as a feature of discourse” (‘Discourse and Power in The Way of the World’ 728).

Kroll identifies three planes of discourse in the play: natural, legal and social. These realms of interpretation must be controlled by the characters of the play in order to be successful in achieving their respective goals. The purely natural realm “includes the hidden drive for love, money, or power, which we cannot hope to purge but must at all events socialize” (‘Discourse and Power in The Way of the World’ 738). This is the funda-mental level of human communication and there is zero possibility of manipulation of language. The legal discourse is a level of contractual realm, where certain words and expressions are bound by a general social agreement and therefore can be trusted. The final level of discourse is the social one, in which only the most verbally skilled, creative, and at the same time self-disciplined characters can operate successfully. This level of discourse allows to bargain for the matters of love (finding a lover, starting a family) and power (inheritance settlement, pre-nuptial agreement, marriage etc.) using a language that is not only acceptable by the society but even admired by it.

Associating each of the three levels of discourse with a certain group of the play’s characters, Kroll shows that the most despicable and ultimately defeated characters are those who cannot operate beyond the levels of the natural or legal discourse. Meanwhile, the heroine and hero of the play are represented as the victorious couple who achieve all they wished (and worked hard) for: mutual love, marriage, as well as a large dowry. Their ability to manipulate language and to navigate it through the murky waters of the Restoration milieu of epistemological scepticism is unmatched and highly appreciated. Kroll proposes to view wit as an ability to creatively manipulate language (through meta-phors, comparisons, quick repartees and other means), and through it the social reality in which our lives are set.

1.2 Wit as Aesthetic concept

1.2.1 The Problem of definition: ‘Wit’ in dictionaries

While most of the definitions of wit found in the dictionaries of literary and critical terms are bent on providing an extensive account of the term’s complicated histori-cal development, and/or stressing the changes it went through during the process (Beckson’s and Ganz’s Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory), others at-tempt to formulate a general principle of wit’s function and to evaluate its position in the contemporary literary production and criticism. For example, Babette Deut-sch’s 1965 Poetry Handbook claims that wit is the “faculty that makes for metaphor by the perception of likeness in unlike things” (169). Quoting T. S. Eliot’s definition of



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wit in some of seventeenth-century poets as it appeared in the Andrew Marvell essay (“a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace”), she contends that wit “is now admired as a sign of the poet’s power to relate incongruities and so give a fresh understanding of complexities [...]” (Poetry Handbook 170). Recalling Eliot’s remark that wit can also be found in the work of certain twentieth-century poets, Deutsch focuses primarily on wit’s function in poetry. However, it is significant that Eliot was able to discern the poetic wit in the contemporary prosaic texts as well, praising for example the wit of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, a cult modernist novel written in dense, gothic language.

Unlike Deutsch’s narrow but systematic focus on (modern) poetic wit, A Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms by Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz states that “[i]n modern times, wit is limited to intellectually amusing utterances calculated to delight and surprise” (240). In an attempt to cover all aspects of the term’s agency, the brief entry emphasizes the peri-odic changes wit underwent, “so that its meanings, overlapping from period to period, have at any one time been numerous” (A Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms, 239). In the Renaissance, the word [...] meant “intelligence” or “wisdom”:

During the seventeenth century, the term wit meant “fancy” [...] implying such nimbleness of thought and such originality of figures of speech as was found in the Metaphysical poetry [...] of John Donne and others. In the latter half of the century, the meaning of wit changed. For Hobbes (in the Leviathan, 1651) judgment rather than fancy was the principal element of wit, and, in fact, he felt that wit could be achieved by judgment alone. The excess of fancy, he re-marked later, resulted in a loss of delight in wit. As a poetic faculty, true wit was the poet’s abil-ity to see similarities in apparently dissimilar things. False wit, as later described by Addison, involved the association of words rather than ideas; such linguistic devices as puns, anagrams, acrostics, etc., he listed as types of such wit. (Beckson and Ganz 239-40)

Attempting to squeeze the complex question of Hobbes’s opinion of wit into a short paragraph, this definition of the term is bound to confuse rather than enlighten a pros-pect student of early modern English critical vocabulary.

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory provides a rather succinct but serried chronological survey of the term’s development. Associating wit with the Old English witan – ‘to know’, the entry starts by observing that the “word has acquired a number of accretions in meaning since the Middle Ages, and in critical and general use has changed a good deal”( The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory 985). Referring to Roger Ascham, John Lyly or Sir Philip Sidney as the Renaissance ex-ponents of the term, it then assumes the usual trajectory of names, associated with the most pregnant definitions of wit produced at various stages of its development: Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley and Alexander Pope in the Restoration and early Augustan periods, as well as those who are regarded as spokesmen of the pre-Ro-mantic and Victorian periods’ displeasure at wit: dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century, and William Hazlitt and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth. The entry closes with T. S. Eliot’s rediscovery of John Donne and Andrew Marvell which is based on rehabilitation


1.2 Wit as aesthetic Concept

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of wit, stating that in the current usage “[...] wit [...] suggests intellectual brilliance and ingenuity; verbal deftness, as in the epigram” (985-6).

Probably the most inclusive account of wit is provided by Princeton Encyclopedia of Po-etry and Poetics edited by Alex Preminger. Two editions in particular (the enlarged 1974 edition and 1993 The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics) offer a very detailed chronological summary of wit’s journey through history. Though both of the editions’ entries follow the same chronological pattern and refer to the identical canon of authori-ties on wit (Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, T. S. Eliot), either of them contain places not present in the other one. Starting with ancient Greece and ending with the twentieth-century literary critics, the entries provide comparative accounts of wit’s equivalents in other languages (French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian) as well as assessment of the current status of the word as critical term which takes into account its varied and convoluted history. A short summary of both entries is worth presenting here as they represent a succinct yet rarely complex account of wit’s gradual transformation of meaning.

Wit’s equivalent in the ancient Greece is the term euphuia, mentioned in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics – in these texts the word occurs in senses ranging from “shapeliness” to “cleverness”. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric wit is associated with the ability to make apt compari-sons – i.e. the fundamental principle behind metaphor, or “well-bred insolence.” For the Roman rhetoricians – e.g. Cicero and Quintilian – the equivalent was ingenium (“clever-ness”, “ingenuity”) – senses which “would seem to generate the whole historical range of the meanings of wit in English” (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 1374). During Renaissance the term is used in senses similar to the classical meaning, “with per-haps more emphasis on ingenuity and the ability to create the bizarre, the extraordinary, and the unique” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 897). Renaissance treatises on invention – one of the five parts of the art of rhetoric – tend to identify wit with the ability to discover and amplify new subjects. In the seventeenth century wit becomes increasingly present in discussions of style which use it to identify the ability to discover brilliant, para-doxical, and far-fetched figures, especially metaphor, irony, paradox, pun antithesis etc.

Literary Baroque with its national varieties of styles – marinism in Italy, gongorism in Spain, Metaphysical poetry in England and préciosité in France – gave rise to wit as one of key concepts of the seventeenth-century literature and culture in general and the treatises of Spanish and Italian theoreticians – e.g. Baltasar Gracián’s Agudezza y arte de ingenio (1642) and Emmanuele Tesauro’s Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (1654) – are the first examples of early modern texts of literary criticism to document this. In its heyday, wit referred to the inventive or imaginative faculty and, in particular to the ability to see similarity in disparates (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 1375). In general, the authors believed it was essential quality of poetry. Emmanuele Tesauro, Ital-ian rhetorician and playwright, claimed that the process of divine creation is the defin-ing principle of wit and the more wit an author reveals, the more godlike he becomes. This Metaphysical theory of poetic creation was later replaced by rationalist theories of e.g. Thomas Hobbes, who – under the influence of René Descartes and Blaise Pas-cal – regarded wit in more psychological terms. As the latter part of the seventeenth



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century progressed, the discussions of wit became numerous so that it is impossible now to reduce the mass of material produced on the topic to any simple form. “Wit was sometimes contrasted to fancy or judgment; sometimes identified with one or the other. At times it was contrasted with humor, raillery, satire, and ridicule; at times compared to them” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 897). Naturally, the vagueness and elasticity of the term eventually led critics to suspect its validity and the last decade of the seventeenth century saw a growing disregard for the term, enhanced by the changing social climate as well.

A type of dichotomy developed in the critical texts related to wit, dividing it up into “true wit” – the ideal of all poetic striving, and “false wit” – writing which dazzles without appealing to the understanding. The climax in the discussion of wit was represented by Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) – a poem which sums up in its context the cen-tral sense of wit to be found in poet-critics from John Dryden to Samuel Johnson and in-dicates a rejection of the “false wit” as mere cleverness of the previous age. The somewhat confusing situation in which the term found itself between approximately 1650 and 1720 is explained by the encyclopaedia as following: “This polysemy is not unusual, nor should be seen as distracting as long as we recognize the use of wit in a technical aesthetic sense to mean the imaginative or striking figure, the flash of verbal intuition, the marmoreal phrase, the pointed dictum” (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 1375).

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a fairly close correspondence of meaning develops among the English wit and the French esprit, the Spanish agudeza and gracia, the Italian ingegno, acutezza and argutezza, the German Schärfe and Witz, and the Russian um and ostroumie, even though all these terms underwent historical semantic changes and have different stories in general. In French, the word esprit is polyvalent in many of the same ways; indeed Boileau’s Art poétique (1674) was clearly a prime model for Pope. Esprit is a more unstable or modish word than wit, yet it survived in its focused mean-ing at least through Voltaire (1694 - 1778). In Italy acutezza (argutezza, arguzia) and in Spain agudeza were generally treated as the rhetorical ornament enhancing the thought (concetto, concepto).

While the key words in Italian, Spanish, and Russian have survived in contemporary speech, though bereft of their literary specificity, English “wit” entered quite a new realm of meaning parallel to that other historically complex word “humour” (see the discus-sion of C. S. Lewis). Samuel Johnson in his Life of Cowley dubbed the wit of Metaphysical poetry as the “heterogenous ideas ... yoked together by violence together” thus stressing the term’s unnaturalness which was taken up by the romantic poets who transformed its meaning so that the word became to be associated with levity and its former sense was attributed to imagination. For example, William Hazlitt in his essay Wit and Humour (1819) distinguished wit as the artificial element and imagination as the valid one, and Matthew Arnold rejected Chaucer and Pope from his list of the greatest poets because of their wittiness: they lacked what he called “high seriousness” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 898). This reduction of the term’s meaning became widespread and was shifted only in the first two decades of the twentieth century thanks to a revived interest in the Metaphysical poets.



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Eliot’s revaluation of Metaphysical wit, discussed above, is only one of this revival’s tracks. No less important (especially from the point of view of the feminist readings of wit in the Restoration comedies) was Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of witz, or C. Brooks’s emphasis on irony and paradox as the principal devices of literary complexity and structure, and a persistent strain of parody as a means to what might be called intertextual wit, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947). Eliot’s assessment found sympathizers in Brooks and I.A. Richards and modern poets insist on allowing wit a place in their conceptions of the nature of po-etry. Thus the meaning of wit has in the 20th century regained some critical force and, through its literarily serious connection with irony and parody, begun to approach again its old kinship with imagination. The meaning of the term, however, seems not to have come quite full circle: it is not commonly associated with imagination or conceptual power; on the other hand, it is associated with irony, and irony is associated with imagi-nation and conceptual power.

To conclude this section, I wish to include an example of French and German defini-tions of wit as they appeared in recent dictionaries of aesthetic terms. While there are overlaps in some of the meanings of the word, it is significant to acknowledge the cultur-ally specific features which helped differentiating the word’s overall meaning as well as status in all three cultures.

‘Esprit’ and ‘spirituel’

In Vocabulaire d’esthétique (2004), Anne Souriau divides the entry on ‘esprit’ into four categories: “1. Wit as mind, as opposite to body 2. Wit as more than average degree of creative mental faculty 3. Wit as a particular turn of phrase and 4. Wit as aesthetic category”4 (686-7).

The first two semantic spheres do not differ radically from some of the English mean-ings of the word. With regard to the first meaning of the term, Souriau writes that

Wit means the whole of human psyche; sometimes in a more specific sense the faculties of intellect (“wit” as intelligence as opposed to “heart” as emotions) or the faculties of invention (sometimes opposed to reason). It is this sense of the word which we have in mind when we describe works of literature or arts as “works of wit”: we do not refer to them as to physical objects only, but also and more importantly as the resulting products of the mind’s activity.5 (Vocabulaire d’esthétique 686)

Describing the second sense of ‘esprit’, we can hear echoes of C. S. Lewis’s ‘danger-ous’ meaning. It also approximately follows the chronological trajectory of the English wit in its gradual demise and replacement with other meanings of the word:

This sense of the word is rather old, but it is important to be familiar with it order to avoid possible misinterpretation. It was used especially in the 17th century [...] to say that a writer



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has wit; modern day equivalent would be talent or genius. Thus Louis XIV said to Mme de Sévigné about Racine’s tragedy Esther that the playwright “has much wit.” This sense started to disappear in the 18th century: Voltaire, author of the entry on Wit (Philosophie et Belles-Lettres) in l’Encyclopédie, dispensed of this particular sense in favour of the following ones.6 (686-7)

Thus, in the eighteenth century, the French ‘esprit’ loses the appreciative charge and has to be accompanied by a positive adjective to regain it:

According to Voltaire “it is a generic word which nowadays must be used with another word to determine it … Sublime wit of Corneille is not the same thing as wit of Boileau, or naïve wit of de la Fontaine,” etc. Here, wit is used in the sense of a particular character of the author, his specific type of thinking, his world view, his style. In this sense, wit was used in the 18th and early 19th centuries as a part of the expression “Wit of …” to describe a summary of an author’s work accompanied by a few extracts from his work. This sense of the word is lost today, in its own time it had, as a part of a title, a certain commercial value. (687)7

“Wit in this sense is a stimulating sharpness of thought, which determines aesthetic category of ‘wittiness’”8 (ibid.).*

Souriau divides the latter term’s entry into two main semantic spheres: the first, origi-nal one is a religious notion; its English equivalent is the ‘spiritual’. The second one, however, is more complex. As Souriau suggests, “even if it is easily connected with the comic and the satiric, it should not be confused with either”9 (1307). She provides a number of examples that set the comical apart from the witty, stating that “[a] mistake can be comical, but it is not witty, a mispronunciation can amuse, […], it causes laughter, but it is not wit”10 (ibid.). In wit of this sense there is nothing risible, comical, or satiric: wit does not make us laugh, it makes us smile. Souriau proposes four features which – when combined – can be regarded as a definition of wit: 1. Ingeniousness of unexpected connections, 2. Suitability of connections thus brought together, 3. The impression of ease and facility, and 4. Signification11 (1307-8).

The first condition is concerned, it can produce two slightly differing effects. In a po-etic context, the contrasting elements (lively rhyme and elevated vocabulary or colour-ful and dreamlike description of an everyday reality) cause delightful surprise, while in a ‘lighter’ context of a joke, the delight comes from a sudden change of direction of the narrative: “Mirabeau was capable of virtually anything for money – even a good deed”12 (1307). Souriau concludes by calling wit “liberation from […] the banal, the expected; a play of creative force, liberated soul”13 (ibid.).

Another feature of wit is its conciseness. Although this feature does not reduce wit to jokes only, a certain economy of form is necessary – one-act comedies, short novels,

*) In order to emphasize difference between “l’esprit” and “le spirituel” in this particular instance, I choose to translate it as “wit” and “wittiness.” As will become presently clear, however, “le spirituel” can be also translated as “wit.”



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songs or poems with terse structure and quick-paced tempo are most likely to be labelled as having wit. This logically results in wit’s association with ease and facility of expres-sion. The surprise we experience when reading/watching/listening to something witty has to be accompanied by the impression of effortlessness. The last condition proposed by Souriau is that wit has to have a deeper meaning: even though appearing as a mere play, it offers a piercing look at reality. In the 18th century wit was often associated with the quality of sharpness and perceptiveness. This last condition recalls Freud’s concep-tion of wit, as expressed in his 1905 study Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten (usually translated as Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports avec l’inconscient into French). As we will see, the entry on ‘witz’ in Wolfhart Henckmann and Konrad Lotter’s Lexikon der Ästhetik draws heavily on this conception.

‘Witz’

Although etymologically closer to the English ‘wit’ than the French ‘esprit’ at first sight, ‘witz’ is – according to Henckmann and Lotter – a result of predominantly French his-torical influences. The original meaning was, however, similar to the English ‘wit’:

[Wit] means natural cleverness or resourcefulness. The modern meaning of the term was nar-rowed down under the influence of the French “esprit” in the 18th century. Related to satire and caricature, wit is one of the forms of the comic shaped by reason. It stands against the sentimental, warm-hearted, “sensible” humour.14 (Lexikon der Ästhetik 399)

While some of the term’s fundamental features in the entry are identical to the previ-ous descriptions, they are of course associated with different authorities:

Its important structural feature is brevity (Jean Paul). As a “simple form” of narration (Jolles) it usually consists of two parts – the story and the punch line (?). In principle though we have to distinguish among verbal wit, wit of situation (gag), and wit of action. Wit’s effect is produced by revelation of the hidden similarities of two otherwise unrelated things or ideas or dissolving of the “high expectations” into nothingness (Kant, Visher).15 (399)

The brief remark concerning wit’s other possible means of manifestation (apart from the verbal one) are not pursued any further by the authors. Instead, the main part of the entry is dedicated to description of the mechanics of Freudian wit and its qualities. In this, part wit is the driving force behind jokes, losing all its artistic – and aesthetic – associations:

Its default mood is aggressive. The laughter that it provokes is directed against ethnic minori-ties (jokes at the expense of Jews or blacks), against socially marginalized groups (jokes at the expense of the disabled, mentally ill), against certain professional groups (jokes at the expense of the doctors, teachers, priests, judges), against establishment (political jokes) etc.16 (399-400)



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The concluding part of the entry dissociates wit from all the possible literary or artis-tic manifestations, reducing it to the ‘witz-joke’ aspect of the term:

Wit is disrespectful, it does not succumb to cultural norms, it breaks down taboos and thus enables the (indirect) gratification of the forbidden or displaced wishes. Its pleasure is the re-sult of the sudden removal of the obstacle which guards off the forbidden emotions, thoughts or instincts.17 (400)

Similar to the missing question of the various forms of aesthetic employment of wit, there is a striking absence of a historical survey of the term’s usage by German authors – both in theory and practice.* The result is somewhat reduced description of a term that in the context of German contemporary culture seems to be associated exclusively with the sphere of jocularity.

1.2.2 Wit and humour and the Sublime and the Beautiful: comparative Approach

Towards the close of the seventeenth century, wit was getting increasingly compared to and contrasted with humour. Before proceeding to comparing wit’s and humour’s characteristics, I want to suggest that it is possible to view this dichotomy as parallel to one of the chief dichotomies of the aesthetics – that of the sublime and the beautiful.

While wit was often contrasted with humour in the literary and dramatic criticism of Restoration the sublime was set against the beautiful by Edmund Burke in his Philo-sophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). As these two latter concepts have been frequently held in opposition as a point of theoretical contrast, we may wish to compare them with the wit-humour dichotomy. Philip Shaw compiles in his study of sublime a list of contrastive adjectives, characterising the relationship between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime is “greater than the beautiful; the sublime is dark, profound, and overwhelming and implicitly masculine, whereas the beautiful is light, fleeting, and charming and implicitly feminine (Shaw 9). Unlike the sublime, which is “a divisive force, encouraging feelings of difference and deference,” the beautiful encourages a spirit of harmony and unity (ibid.). Translated into political terms, the sublime is associated with the individualistic, even dictatorial, while the beautiful is connected to the social and democratic. The gendered nature of the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful also has a history: Longinus says that sublime speech ‘ravishes’ or rapes the listener; in Burke, the sublime is a virile masculine power, one that is contrasted with its passive feminine counterpart, the con-cept of the beautiful. Even more explicit in the early Kant is the distinction between

*) German Romantics in particular were interested in wit from aesthetic point of view. For example Friedrich Schlegel called wit “logical sociability”, “absolute social feeling, or fragmentary genius”, and “an explosion of confined spirit” (Harrison, Art in Theory 899-902).



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the depth and profundity of the masculine sublime and the shallow, slight nature of the feminine beautiful (10).

The gendered nature of the relationship between wit and humour becomes increas-ingly apparent during the eighteenth century which preferred the gentleness of humour to the keenness of wit. In his Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Rail-lery, Satire, and Ridicule. To Which Is Added, an Analysis of the Characters of an Humourist, Sir John Falstaff, Sir Roger de Coverly, and Don Quixote Corbyn Morris, a Whig politician and economist, provides an exhaustive catalogue of the superior virtues of humour over wit. Firstly, humour is associated with nature, while wit with art and artificiality. Secondly, humour “frequently exhibits very generous benevolent Sentiments of Heart,” while wit is the expression of the cold, intellectual activity of the mind (Tave 119). Humour excites the feelings of harmony and solidarity, while wit encourages the atmosphere of aggres-sive competition and emulation. In political terms, the impulse of humour is egalitarian, and middle-class while that of wit elitist and aristocratic.

Wit and the sublime, then, are often associated with the masculine, while humour and the beautiful with the feminine. As we will see in the following chapters, the questions connecting the terms of wit and the sublime and gender categories – either as metaphor-ical expressions or as qualities ascribed to one or the other gender - run through many a text that bridges the literary and the social world. For some of the French authors, the question whether esprit – one of the characteristic features of members of the polite circles – could be possessed by both genders was one of the most crucial ones in relation to the term. For others, esprit’s linking with qualities associated traditionally with one or the other gender seems to represent an aid in attempt at defining the term.

1.2.3 Wit as Aesthetic Principle: Visual Arts, Theatre Studies, game Theories

Wit as easy grace: Sprezzatura

If jouissance can be seen as a late twentieth-century equivalent to wit in the sphere of literary criticism, its Renaissance equivalent in the area of visual arts can be found in sprezzatura. There are many features these two terms share – a fact that is rarely com-mented on. In this brief account, I would like to emphasize these features to manifest the similarities and connections. Sprezzatura is most frequently associated with the period of Italian High Renaissance, when it was used to describe either the ideal of courtly behaviour or a highly appreciated artistic achievement (mainly in painting but also in music). While it was not a new term (its roots go back as long as classical times), sprezzatura was the main topic of The Book of the Courtier by Baldesar Castiglione (‘Il libro del cortegiano,’ 1528). Having ascribed both negative and positive connotations to the term, Castiglione defined it as paradoxical in nature as it “conceals art, and presents what is done and said as if it was done without effort and virtually without thought” (I.26). In his study Harry Berger defines the term as “the ability to show that



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one is not showing all the effort one obviously put into learning how to show that one is not showing effort” (The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Courtesy Books 296).

Both wit and sprezzatura manipulate the reality (of language, artistic production etc.) to give the impression of ease and gracefulness with which the effect (a witty repartee, a sublime portrait) is achieved. The impression of effortlessness is a vital condition of both these concepts and will re-appear again in the analytical parts of this work where it will constitute the difference between what was termed ‘true’ and ‘false’ wit in the early modern English aesthetics. Furthermore, they also both function as “social mask”; sprezzatura’s nonchalant ease and wit’s adroit twisting of language both dissimulate reality: the artist never reveals the amount of hard work he or she invested in the final creation while the author of the witty repartee can go unpunished when insulting a co-conversationalist.

Wit as meta-communication: Semiotic model

In the work of the Czech theatre semiotician Ivo Osolsobě wit becomes the general or-ganizing pattern of the dramatic aesthetic. In his study Divadlo, které mluví, zpívá a tančí: Teorie jedné komunikační formy (1974, ‘Theatre That Speaks, Sings, and Dances: A Theory of a Form of Human Communication’) Osolsobě puts forward a convincing – and witty – theory which bridges Aristotle’s concept of metaphor and wit as aesthetic principle which governs the modern theatre. He sets out with his own reading of the definition of metaphor, contending that:

[…] wit is in its principle identical with metaphor, i.e. it is an image that precipitates and facili-tates apprehension of something which would have to be otherwise explained in a long and complicated manner and thus it gives us pleasure.18 (Osolsobě 82)

He continues by relegating wit’s structural features from rhetoric to both the realm of everyday activities (where it is possible to use the expression “resourcefulness” instead of wit to describe the quality) and the realm of arts, formulating the general working definition:

Wit is then – if we translate this principle to the realm of other than rhetoric tasks of explicat-ing something to someone – a solution of a certain rather complicated task; a solution which sur-prises by its ease and simplicity. […] this solution is more surprising (and hence more effective), if we do not have to spend too much energy, time etc., if we can utilize what is readily available and at the same time what nobody else thought of.19 (ibid.)

Testing the presumption in both realms, Osolsobě produces several examples, rang-ing from sport, mathematics, an utterance set in a neutral context, joke, music and literature:



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Witty, then, is such a chess-player (or a football or a volleyball player), who is able to turn to his advantage a situation which was created by his adversary; witty is such an answer which uses a word or an expression, which has just been used by a partner in conversation; witty is a such solution of an equation which contextualizes previous solution procedures; witty is such a musical composition which successfully utilizes a seemingly barren music theme or which can [...] change the whole nature of the piece; witty is a such piece of writing which does not strain to create a new plot function, but will use a character originally meant for a different function, and will combine both functions.20 (ibid.)

Osolsobě then goes on to pronounce the final definition of his conception of wit as “any detour, which turns out to be a shortcut and the shortest way to reaching a goal” (ibid.).21 Coming back to Aristotle, Osolsobě reveals ingenious connection between met-aphor, wit and model:

[…] Aristotle associated wit with metaphor: metaphor is nothing else than a model, or a model “of a higher level”: what modelling does with objects (i.e. substituting them for other objects), metaphor does with their names. Why not […] associate wit not only with metaphor but also with a model? The invention of model is in itself a classical witty solution: it does not toil and moil searching for what is not available, but instead utilizes what is available here and, in a fi-nal, victorious step, now and presents this inadequacy as its asset.22 (83)

Finally, Osolsobě applies his theory of wit to theatre, claiming that “[…] theatre (in the sense of the dramatic work) creates a model of communication using communication, and, using what is at hand, creates a model of the communication which is not available at the moment”23 (ibid.). Wit thus becomes an aestheticized model of communication about communication.

Witticism and meta-wit

In his article “Contingency, Games, and Wit” Gary Morson presents wit as the ability to resist the fundamental state of the world which is entropy. Suggesting that “[e]xperience teaches us that left to themselves, things tend to a ‘muddle,’ as Gregory Bateson put it,” Morson identifies the lack of order, i.e. contingency as the ruling principle of our lives. One of environments designed to banish contingency (apart from e.g. the social institu-tions such as insurance companies etc.) is art. He sees art as a sort of game, quoting Roger Caillois, French theoretician of aesthetics and, who claims that “[p]lay […] is an attempt to substitute perfect situations for the normal confusion of contemporary life” (quot. in Morson, 133).

For Morson witticism is a form of play: “As a genre, it vindicates the superiority of mind, even in extremities of difficulty where mental presence must overcome a disad-vantage” (144). It resembles the sort of game of improvisation in which one must handle an unexpected challenge and to come up with an appropriate response without hesita-



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tion: “The harder the challenge, the faster and less predictable the reply, the greater the wit’s mastery of social circumstances, and the cleverer his facility with verbal resources – the better the witticism and the more surely the game has been won” (145). Like the game of improvisation, the witticism dramatizes the mind’s encounter with contingency. Both depend on presentness: “The successful witticism expresses the triumph of mind and its adequacy to any social situation” (147). In a short moment, the wit masters all the complexities of a set of social circumstances and formulates a perfectly apropos remark that illuminates them. Witticism thrives in socially challenging situations when speed and verbal and mental adroitness are of the utmost importance. Witticism, unlike wise saying or aphorism, involves story. For Morson, this does not mean the narrative that constitutes the witticism, but another story or context which envelops the witticism. As an example he provides the relationship between Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell. Boswell’s function was to tell amusing little stories showcasing Johnson’s wit. He could feature as the narrator, insultee, provocateur or any combination of these three. Thus in the context of Johnson’s witty insult regarding Boswell’s origin narrated by the latter, the biographer assumes the third role – that of the provocateur which is, at the same time, his second role within the story (148):

BOSWELL: I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.JOHNSON: That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countryman cannot help.

Here, Boswell does not only narrate to perfection his own diminishment but has also had the wit to foresee exactly what would inspire Johnson to diminish him so quotable thus ensuring the suitable form for witticism.

Morson suggests that “certain locales, especially salons, serve as conventional settings for witticisms” (149). The salon becomes the playground – “a marked off space and time for an occasion governed by rules for verbal and nonverbal behaviour. So much are sa-lons the favoured locale for wit that witticisms themselves may retrospectively character-ize a locale or social situation as a sort of salon. The less like a salon a situation may be, the wittier it is to make it into one” (ibid.). One of such unexpected locales is the place of execution where gallows humour or wit hails from.

Gallows wit or ‘wit of the last words’ presents a challenge in that it treats execution or generally something that would evoke terror in others as no more than an inconven-ience. For the wit it however presents an opportunity to play, to engage in mental agility. Morson asserts that “here is another way such wit impresses: it demonstrates supreme courage. Both wit and courage demand mental presence when most difficult. Not every-one can make sport of his or her own imminent dismemberment” (153). He also suggest that the ‘truly witty and courageous’ can even use martyrdom as the playground for their wit and he provides the following examples of Saint Lawrence, who, being burned alive on a gridiron, said at one moment that he might be turned over, since he was done enough on that side, and Thomas More, who, mounting the scaffold, urged the chief ex-ecutioner: “I pray you, master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and [as for] my coming down, let me shift for myself [and] drawing his beard aside before placing his head on the block



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he remarked: This has not offended the king.’” (quot. in Morson, 153). More’s pun on “shift” makes the place of execution into another salon. More importantly though, the last joke concerning the guilt of his head reminds us of head as the seat of mind, the centre of wit. According to Morson, “the game of wit on the scaffold assimilates what is most alien to human life – death itself – into the mind-made game world” (154). Witti-cism then ultimately shows that mind triumphs over nature, political power or physical force.

In these brief encounters with wit in three different areas of contemporary and histori-cal theories of art my goal was to draw attention to the term’s omnipresent and universal structural features. Although the following parts of this study will mainly be concerned with wit as a term of literary criticism and aesthetics, it will be possible to recognize some of the above features in the texts analyzed in the following chapters. It is however important to keep in mind that, while some of the accounts describing these features are fairly recent, they have been in existence for a considerable amount of time. For example the concept of meta-wit – i.e. being witty about wit – is wit’s specific feature which can be traced at least as far as Shakespeare’s comedies. Rupert D. V. Glasgow shows how the complex network of associations between sex, archery, and wit in probably the wittiest of Shakespeare’s comedies Love’s Labour’s Lost manifests that not only is wit inherently sexual in nature, but it is also a courtly pastime (like archery). Applauding a bout of wit exchanged between Rosaline and Boyet, Maria responds to it using the metaphor of the ‘mark,’ meaning a shot at target. Boyet warns her to be cautious, as ‘mark’ can also mean pudendum, and he himself plays on the double meaning of ‘prick’:

MARIA. A mark marvellous well shot, for they both did hit it.BOYET. A mark! O, mark but that mark! A mark, says my lady! Let the mark have a prick in’t, to mete at, if it may be.MARIA. Wide o’ the bow hand! I’ faith, your hand is out.COSTARD. Indeed, a’ must shoot nearer, or he’ll ne’er hit the clout.BOYET. An if my hand be out, then belike your hand is in.COSTARD. Then will she get the upshoot by cleaving the pin.MARIA. Come, come, you talk greasily; your lips grow foul. COSTARD. She’s too hard for you at pricks, sir: challenge her to bowl.BOYET. I fear too much rubbing. Good night, my good owl. (Love Labour’s Lost, IV. 1)

Wit, as Glasgow points out, is a matter of “hitting a target with a timely prick” (232) and this particular instance is moreover a witty comment about wit.

Meta-wit, however, is not an exclusive feature of wit in English literature. In his novel Siebenkäs, the German Romantic writer Jean Paul presents marriage as meta-wit: in his Preschool of Aesthetics, he defines wit as “the disguised priest who marries every couple” (quot. in Flemming The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor 126). As Paul Flemming comments: “Wit gladly combines disparate and heterogeneous ideas that otherwise wouldn’t be associated with each other. In wit, as in marriage, every couple is



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potentially an odd-couple” (ibid.). In Siebenkäs, the newlywed couple – the eponymous hero and his fiancée Lenette – could not be more heterogeneous themselves: which is all the better for wit, but all the worse for the newlyweds.

As will become evident in the works of the Restoration and early modern English writers analyzed in the second part of this study, meta-wit belonged among their reper-toire as well. It gets most attention from Alexander Pope, who employs it in his Essay on Criticism written in heroic couplets when merging the critical contents and poetical form creating perfect environment for meta-wit to thrive in.

1.3 The literature and culture of the late Seventeenth century: Political, Philosophical and literary-historical Background

1.3.1 Rhetoric and the Renaissance Poetic

Aristotle distinguished between the style of rhetoric and that of poetry. Rhetoric, most of which pertained to style, contained more verbal devices than poetics. Since verbal devices always tend to usurp all other means of expression and since writing tech-niques tend to subsume oral ones, the once dominant study of rhetoric was slowly rel-egated to a division of poetics under the general category of style. The actual fusion of theories of oratory and poetry is generally attributed to Cicero. His aims in De oratore combined the qualities of poetry (to delight) with the aim of oratory (to persuade). He discussed wit (ingenium) as a means of developing a full, ornate style through imi-tation of the Greek orators and pointed out parallels between ingenium as he used it and Plato’s comments on εύφυϊα (wit) in The Republic (VII, 535), and εύφυής (witty) in The Phaedrus (Sections 269d-270a). Aristotle was also familiar with Plato’s idea, stated in The Laws, that a person who is εύφυής (witty, i.e. having excellent natural endow-ments) may do more harm to the state than an ignorant citizen if such a witty person has evil intentions.

Despite the early fusion of theories, rhetoric still retained its classical meaning of ef-fective oral expression during the Middle Ages and was (possibly except grammar) the most important study in the trivium (i.e. the three lower Artes Liberales which included grammar, rhetoric and logic). Classical rhetoric consisted of five traditional parts or canons: inventio (invention or discovery), disposition (arrangement), elocutio (style), me-moria (memory), and pronuntio (delivery). By the Renaissance, only the first three of the traditional parts retained any significance – memoria and pronuntio pertained largely to oral expression and rhetoric was by that time a part of the discipline in the writing of both prose and poetry. Another development was the gradual simplification of figurative language. Medieval treatises had gradually reduced the complex categories of rhetoric to tropes and figures. Even as early as postclassical criticism, these two categories had failed to maintain separate status and distinctions. Quintilian had noted that “many au-


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1.3 the Literature and Culture of the Late Seventeenth Century ...

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thors have considered figures identical with tropes”; furthermore “there are some who call tropes figures.” By the sixteenth century, Elizabethans thought of rhetorical devices mostly in terms of figures, and rhetoricians usually listed under that classification not only tropes but also schemes and repetitions. For example George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) divided figures into three groups: those which serve the ear (‘auricu-lar’), those which serve the mind (‘sensible’) and those which serve both together (‘sen-tentious’). Among the chief rhetoricians of the Renaissance, three classes of figures were considered most important. The first group consisted of figures of thought: definition, division, distinction, enumeration, cause, effect, antecedent, consequence, comparison, similitude, dissimilitude, example, and citation of authority. The second group consisted of various forms of exclamation, interrogation, and description – all designed to sway emotions. The third group consisted of some 150 figures depending upon such merely mechanical devices as spelling, diction, and syntax. Because of its importance in the creation of wit, the first group, in particular comparison, similitude, and dissimilitude, received increasing attention in the seventeenth century.

Figurae verborum and figurae sententiae

The subordination of rhetoric to techniques of style, together with the simultaneous sim-plification of rhetorical devices into classes of figures, had great bearing upon the kinds of wit, as the English Renaissance viewed them. The simplification of rhetorical devices into classes of figures was important in the discussion of what was later labelled as wit of thoughts and wit of words. According to D. Judson Milburn “wit of thoughts and of words became a common distinction from the seventeenth century onwards” (41). Nowadays this distinction may be slightly obscure but the distinction certainly became the centre of literary criticism in the years following the restoration of Charles II till the second decade of the eighteenth century.

This division of wit arose from the reduction of rhetoric to tables of figures, in which the figure came to predominate verbal ornamentation. Tables of figures were subdivided traditionally into figurae verborum and figurae sententiae. The first, figurae verborum (figures of language, words, speech) sought agreeable sounds either alone or in combination, as in parallelisms, antitheses, alliterations, rhymes, and assonances. The second category, figurae sententiae (figures of thought, matter, sense) sough effec-tive development of the idea in the sentence or sententious statement; it made use of exclamations, rhetorical questions, and suggestions. During the seventeenth century, the discrimination between wit of words and wit of thoughts became increasingly important, and as reaction against excessive ornamentation increased wit of words became the first object of critical attack.



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Epigram

Epigram, recognized as a classical verse genre, was a favoured poetic form during the first three decades of the seventeenth century, after which its vogue started to fade. Generally having the form of a short poem building to a surprising turn of thought or sententious statement, it varied in length from two to sixteen or more lines and the last line or two contained an often surprising ‘sting’ based on wordplay. The content was rather trivial as this epigram by Henry Parrot, one of the most productive Jacobean epigrammatists shows:

Nuptiae post nummos

There was a time when men for love did marryAnd not for lucre sake, as now we see:Which from that former age so much doth varyAs all’s for – what you’ll give? or nought must be.So that this ancient word called matrimonyIs wholly made a matter now of money.*

During the Restoration period, epigram’s artistic status grew more and more unstable as the vogue for verbal wit was disappearing. At the same time, however, epigrammatic herit-age was carried on by such famous writers as John Dryden, whose famous lines: “Here lies my wife: here let her lie! / Now she’s at rest – and so am I” lack the convoluted, Metaphysi-cal quality of their Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors while retaining the ‘sting’. As the period advanced, epigrammatic style became criticized more and more often. Sir Wil-liam Temple wrote of the degenerate moderns, who, “not worthy to sit down at the Feast,” have to “content themselves with the Scraps,” that is, with lesser forms of poetry; thus they incorporate epigrams which “were all turned upon Conceit, or some sharp Hits of Fancy or Wit” (“Of Poetry” quot. in Spingarn, III 99-100). At the same time, however, epigram-matic wit continued to find audience and readership during the first half of the eighteenth century at least, keeping a considerable portion of the press business afloat with numerous reprints of poetical miscellanies and specialized anthologies such as Martial Reviv’d (1722), A Collection of Epigrams (1735), or Selected Epigrams (1797).

Epigram has not ceased to cause fascination as well as indignation to the present day and is a thorn in the flesh for some modern scholars as well. Associated with falseness of wit, its subversiveness especially in the sphere where language and religion are brought into immediate contact, epigram becomes the target of a certain type of literary criti-cism. For example, in a number of his critical writings, Roger D. Lund attacks epigram-matic wit, appropriating the seventeenth-century terminologies of ‘true’ and ‘false’ wit in order to catch it out at ‘sinning against reason’ – to use Jonathan Culler’s phrase – as

*) Henry Parrot, Mastive, quoted by J. William Hebel and H. H. Hudson, eds. Poetry of the English Renaissance, 1509-1660 (New York, 1946), p. 529.



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well as morality. To do so, Lund works with quotations similar in tone to this passage of Pope’s Essay on Man:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;All Discord, Harmony, not understood;All partial Evil, universal Good;All, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,One truth is clear, “Whatever IS, is RIGHT.” (I, 289-94)

Noting Pope’s apparent “teleological confusion”, Lund draws attention to the “aggres-sive binarims as Nature/Art, Chance/Direction, Discord/Harmony, and Partial Evil/Universal Good” that “emerge as the necessary product of Pope’s antithetical logic” result of which is that the author’s “epigrammatic sentiments strike the unsympathetic reader as both surprising and perverse” (Lund, “The Ghosts of Epigram, False Wit, and the Augustan Mode” 77). In another of his texts titled “Infectious Wit: Metaphor, Athe-ism, and the Plague in Eighteenth-Century London” Lund asserts that

[f]or eighteenth-century Englishmen, particularly those who equated social stability with the interests of Church and Monarch, the intellectual movement that created the greatest anxiety was the steady rise of secularism, rationalism, sexual libertinism, and anticlericalism, which had been roughly designated as forms of modern atheism. (46)

Epigram’s ambiguous reception is parallel to that of wit – it signals the fact that liter-ary practice favoured forms and styles which were disapproved of by the contemporary criticism. This chasm bears significantly on the issues of language and its relationship to knowledge and style as it developed during the late seventeenth century. The following part of this study will address these issues in order to provide complete background of the studied period.

1.3.2 Seventeenth-century France: Society and Arts in the State of Flux

As I have suggested above, the Restoration period was an intellectually and politically turbulent time. Thus, when thinking about a work of literary art hailing from England between the years 1660 and 1720, we need to keep in mind that it was not only a long standing classical heritage, but also the empiricism and scepticism of the English prov-enance together with French classicism what shaped them. In the following subchapter I will provide a brief sketch of the French culture, its concerns and dilemmas of the seventeenth century before turning to the philosophical and cultural background of England.

The changing patterns and relationships of seventeenth century France deeply af-fected its literature and philosophy. After the second half of the fifteenth century



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which was marred by endless dynastic rivalry, economic pressure and most impor-tantly the Wars of Religion, a religious and political conflict, the dominant mood of the society was the desire for order, organization and restraint. The court of Henry IV, the king who began the long process of reformation of the powers of state, was busy planning reconstructions of cities and the task of the refining manners and language and bringing together the literary and social scenes had to be taken up by other cir-cles. Marquise de Rambouillet, a wife of one of the most important court members, withdrew from Versailles and helped create a new social movement – préciosité – equal in its exclusivity to that of the court, but with very different tastes and ideology which, ultimately, became the decisive factor in the forming of the seventeenth-century arts and society. Préciosité and neoclassicism, the style it partly helped shape will be the subject matter of the following pages, then, as they have significant implications for the subsequent parts of this study. While my treatment of these issues (préciosité and neoclassicism) will be rather brief at this moment, I will draw on them when discuss-ing the key topics of the second chapter – the bel esprit and the je-ne-sais-quoi – as they represent vital elements in understanding the texts of the French authors analyzed in the next chapter.

Préciosité: the ideal of genteel manners and the concept of honnête homme

The word préciosité (‘preciousness’) denotes a literary style and/or a social movement of French aristocracy of the first half of the seventeenth century that pursued refinement of conversation and gentilesse of manners. The movement’s core members were aristo-cratic ladies, with Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, as its central figure and a dismissed wife of Henry IV., Marguerite de Valois, a royal asset to the circle. They gathered in salons; the most eminent one being that of Marquise de Rambouillet who for more than forty years (1618-1660) entertained visitors from the art crowd as well as Pa-risian respectabilities (Mikeš 19). L’Hôtel de Rambouillet with its legendary le salon bleu became the workshop of the movement that was to influence France’s literary scene as well as political course as one of its many guests were Richelieu, at that time still a bishop of Luçon, cardinal de la Valette, marshal de Souvré and others. The writers included Malherbe, Vaugelas, Chapelain, Segrais, and Voiture. Thomas Kaminsky, drawing on the studies of Ferdinand Brunot and Domna C. Stanton, presents the following picture of this environment, with a new type of a social ideal in its centre:

Within this coterie, politesse became the defining quality of the honnête homme, a person of both elevated character and refined wit who seemed to possess a natural ability to please. Learning was esteemed in women as well as men, so long as it remained well-bred and devoid of pedantry. Grace, wit, and a free but pleasing manner were the touchstones of precieux society. (20-1)

The honnête homme represented the combination of urbanity of manners, sophistication in literary taste and gentility of expressing it which becomes one of the guiding principles of



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literary production in both France and Britain of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries (France, Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture 4).

The literary taste of the préciueses, how they were labelled, revelled in Giambattista Marini or Honoré d’Urfé who wrote the celebrated pastoral novel L’Astrée (1613-9). Ka-minsky suggests that “the concept of préciosité is generally associated nowadays with the affectations of language that Molière satirized in Les Précieuses ridicules” but at the same time he also asserts that “modern French critics generally agree that the so-called jargon of the précieux salons actually enriched the French language while the stylistic character-istics of the authors provided the foundation for French ‘classicism’” (19).

The language and awareness of political endangerment were closely interrelated in the movement’s purifying efforts: “As far as language was concerned, the efforts to purify and chisel it, to get rid of all vulgarity and to distinguish it from the vulgar, mach-iavelism-soaked hedonism of the new social classes was only the beginning”24 (Divadlo francouzského baroka 22). The refinement of the language gradually became the over-re-finement, the purifying effort produced affectedness and artificiality and, finally, issued in hypocrisy. Préciosité put a ban on words such as ‘cow’, ‘pig’, ‘breast’ and ‘to breed’ be-cause they all referred to things of ‘vulgar’ and ‘low’ origin (Divadlo francouzského baroka 22). The movement’s striving for difference and originality bred metaphorical, kenning-like expressions like ‘liquid element’ for water, ‘buttress of life’ for bread or ‘inhabitants of Neptune’s kingdom’ for fish (ibid.).

The movement’s main impetus was the need to differentiate the language from that of the French bourgeoisie, the relatively new class of merchants and bankers and to oppose the political and economic strength this class was gradually gaining. The seventeenth century saw the last phase of the shift of power from aristocracy to the capitalist middle class and the aristocratic isolation of language, refuge in safety of the salons was a last and desperate act of defence. There was, however, a considerable literary contribution in this language exercise. The salon frequenters developed considerable skill in em-ploying metaphors, which sometimes, admittedly, produced overtly subtle, far-fetched comparisons. Still, the overall tendency to precision, sophistication, and most impor-tantly the stylistic self-awareness of préciosité shaped some of the founding principles of neoclassicism.

neoclassicism and la ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’

The battle between the ancients and the moderns was the result of speedy development of literary taste during the first half of the seventeenth century. The tradition of human-ism, the ideological complement of the Renaissance with its penchant for rules and imi-tation of the ancient authors was opposed to the Baroque ‘modernism’ which strove for the excessive, ornamental in music and visual arts and far-fetched metaphor (la pointe) in literature. By 1630 this style became more and more outdated and replaced by préciosité and its pre-classical concerns with emotional restraint and order as the ruling features of



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expression. François de Malherbe, the pioneer of French classicism, initiated the form-ing of its first principles during the 1630s and by the mid-century, the classical doctrine was complete.

Neoclassicism, as it was instituted in France during the 1630s, was the literary in-strument of a state bent on centralizing and consolidating its authority. As a response to the scrutinization by the state, writers soon developed meticulously coded methods of writing. Thus Pierre Corneille, for instance, circumvented some of the rigidities of French neoclassical formal prescriptions by developing and refining strategy that John Dryden later used against Corneille himself, that of ‘misquotation’ – in the sense of inventing another’s words, not altering them. The official French literature of the period aimed to be socially conformist: its function was to describe man as a universal phenomenon, not an individual with idiosyncrasies distinguishing him or her from the rest. The concern with proportion, propriety and order was the central frame-work of the style. The already mentioned notion of bienséance and vraisemblance are closely related to it. The former term refers to the principles of decorum maintained not only by the members of the fashionable salons, but also by characters of the liter-ary and dramatic works these honnêtes gens produced and consumed. It required no violence, no foul language or buffoonery, it preferred lofty themes and noble char-acters – both in real life and on stage. The principle of vraisemblance demands that the actions and plots be believable for which purposes the three Aristotelian unities of time, place and action were rediscovered and applied rigidly the neoclassical play-wrights, especially by Molière and Racine. As the process of rediscovery and new ap-preciation for the ancient literary rules and production became wide-spread, a wave of resistance against these strict regulations appeared and with it the battle between the ancients and moderns.

While I do not intend to go into chronological details of the battle here, it is necessary to at least briefly summarize the two camps and their opinions. The ‘battle’ itself could be more readily described as a series of – mostly personal – attacks between individual members of the opposite sides, starting around the mid-century and dying away after 1715. It is important not so much for its immediate outcome, but rather for the pattern of literary exchange which was then iterated by the English authors. Its significance also lies in the ideological implications, as both sides tended to promote a different set of cul-tural standards. It is not surprising then, to see the term taste repeated again and again, as it was one of the key issues of the dispute.

The central belief of the advocates of the moderns that modern literature has ben-efited from the general advance of knowledge that had occurred between ancient times and the present. The two works that support this idea are Charles Perrualt’s Parallèle des anciens et les modernes (1688-97) and Bernard Fontenelle’s Digression sur les ancienes at les moderns (1688). Perrault asserted that “knowledge of the human heart had increased, so the modern poet has an advantage over his predecessors”; Homer, for example, “would have written a better epic if he had lived in the age of Louis XIV” (The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 4 The Eighteenth Century 91). While supporting monarchy, the moderns were more inclined to acknowledge the shifts in the social strata, and they are



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often associated with Paris and the salons. Their taste was for the politesse and ingenuity of language; the Greek and Latin culture was for them – in some extreme cases – a syno-nym of dark, barbarous times.

The ancients were represented by Jean de la Fontaine (1621-95), Jean de la Bruyère (1645-96) or Nicolas Boileau-Déspreaux (1636-1711). These authors represented a circle much closer to the official power of Versailles and the king. For the ancients the classics of antiquity remained worthy of admiration and imitation. This, however did not imply slavish copying, but continuing an old tradition which had been revitalized at the Ren-aissance and this feature of their style is emphasized by Peter France or Antoine Adam, who claims that one of the crucial motives of the neoclassical literature was the “wish for renewal, the new creativeness” (142). Similar tensions between the feelings of obliga-tion to acknowledge the literary and cultural traditions and the need to outgrow can be observed in the English society of the Restoration period.

1.3.3 Society in Transition: Restoration England and its culture

For Derek Hughes, the question of naming is one of the most characteristic themes of Restoration drama. In the introductory chapter of his English Drama 1660-1700 as well as elsewhere, he claims that the act of naming and entitlement, i.e. identifying oneself or another is a moment when a character’s social and familial place as well as linguistic order is restored. This act always happens through the medium of language (Hughes, English Drama 1660-1700, 26). In this section I want to argue that this ‘pre-naming’ state of instability or equivocality was not only characteristic for the portrayal of the human existence in late seventeenth-century England, but it can also be applied to the area of human intellectual output of that time – mainly that concerned with literary and dra-matic criticism and the embryonic aesthetics. The period of Restoration was – in words of Paul Hammond – “an age of unstable critical vocabulary” and the circumstances of this instability will now be analyzed in order to provide an ideological background for the following parts of this study.

Restoration England is sometimes pictured as a flamboyant, care-free period of Eng-lish history, one in which King Charles II and his train of royal concubines and courtiers – loved by his people – spend days visiting bawdy and irreverent Restoration comedies, celebrating the end of the horrors of the Puritan interregnum (1642-1660) during which the official theatrical production was banned. It is however much more realistic if we choose to see this period as a dynamic time of transition from old modes (political, economic as well as social and cultural) to new ones. The spirit of the period can be con-veniently characterized by the words of John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury who wrote that “[t]he fashion of the age is to call every thing into question” (English Drama 1660-1700 1).

One of the foremost areas which was influenced by ‘the questioning mode’ of the times was religion. The rise of scepticism and new forms of religions (e.g. Deism) gave space for a new critical discourse which runs through most of the philosophical works



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of Thomas Hobbes and other philosophers of the period. The “explosion of upper-class atheism” practised by e.g. playwright Earl of Rochester or theatre critic Charles Gildon, though a statistical minority, was an important influence on the ideas these authors presented in their works. Closely connected to the deterioration of the system of Chris-tianity as the universal codex of laws is the questioning of the nature of morality – in Leviathan Thomas Hobbes portrayed man as an appetitive and morally relative creature, for whom right or wrong is insignificant in the state of nature in which he is at war with all other man. This idea clashed dramatically with the whole concept of unchanging universality of Christian morals.

Consequently, these ideas destabilized the concepts of the nature of personal (psy-chological, sexual etc.) and social identity. Influenced by the French Renaissance phi-losopher Michel de Montaigne, Hobbes claimed that the human life and consciousness must be viewed in the terms of the processes of matter in motion, implying that human identity is essentially unstable. As far as social identity is concerned, the horror of the state of nature with its brutality in hostility drove men to form societies, exchanging the dangerous freedom of anarchy for subjection to a protective authority. The most stable protection being offered by an absolute sovereign, men contracted away their natural rights in return for security (13). Thus, Hobbes’s conception of society is based on a paradox: humanity creates societies not to fulfil its nature but to escape it – man is in equal measure savage and citizen – these two elements remain eternally conflicting, yet eternally inseparable. His view is in fact an explicit rejection of Aristotle’s concept of man as zoon politicon.

Hobbes then dissolved the universal, natural character not only of traditional hier-archy but also of traditional morality. Moral values were decided by political authority; Hobbes even likened social codes to the rules of a game when he stated that “[i]t is in the Laws of a Commonwealth, as in the Lawes of Gaming; whatsoever the Gamesters all agree on, is Injustice to none of them”, and continued by defining morality in his 1656 essay Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, as not transgressing the rules set by those involved: “As men in playing the turn up trump, and civil conversation our mo-rality is all contained in not disobeying of the laws” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 388).

the intellectual milieu of the restoration period: the ancients and the moderns

The intellectual context of the majority of the Restoration authors – and certainly of those analyzed in the third chapter of this study – is usually described as “neoclassical”. However, the term “Neoclassicism” has acquired a number of meanings, often result-ing in contradictory statements. It will be useful to present a brief survey of the term’s definitions before I continue with describing the specific features of the intellectual background of the Restoration period themselves. As Robert D. Hume suggests, “neo-classical” is sometimes used simply as a descriptive term to designate works falling within the 1660-1800 period or, in its more restricted sense, it can be used to mean French literary theory of the later seventeenth century. Even though these definitions seem to



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offer genuine advantages (the former because it is neutral in its assessment, the latter because it clearly implies the influence of the French literary orthodoxy on the English writing) they ultimately do not serve their purpose. The neutrality of the first definition does not hold true, since the term carries the clear implication of a revival of or a re-turning to an earlier culture. The strictly national demarcation of the second definition is unrealistic mostly because, as the period went on, an increasing amount of genuine classicism appeared which was not imported from the other side of the Channel (Hume Dryden’s Criticism 155).

The well-known cultural controversy, which helped define the Restoration period, was the clash between the ideas supporting the dominance of the artistic and intellec-tual values of the Ancient Rome and Greece, and those in favour of the contemporary (and more or less local) culture. The notorious proponent of the Ancients’ views was Sir William Temple who argued against the Modern position in his essay “On Ancient and Modern Learning”. In the essay he incidentally repeated the commonplace, origi-nally from Bernard of Chartres, that we see more only because we are dwarves stand-ing on the shoulders of giants. As Bernard Levine maintains: “The quarrel […] both preceded the Restoration and continued to be argued for a long time afterward, but it took on a peculiar form and significance in the later century” (Levine viii). Many (if not most) Restoration authors “began with a self-consciously modern position, but after much vacillation, each wound up accepting a large dose of ancienneté” seeking “a position somewhere on a sliding scale between the extreme demands of both parties, and in doing so they developed a stance to culture that has sometimes been called “ba-roque”, but may also be seen as a prelude to eighteenth-century neoclassicism” (ibid.). Levine rightly observes that “the tension between the ancients and the moderns was undoubtedly one of the chief defining characteristics of Restoration culture and color-ed much of its thought” (ix). The basic condition of the quarrel – and much of the intellectual history of the period – was a broad insistence that the ancient Greeks and Romans had set the supreme models and standards for every sort of endeavour, most particularly for politics and the humanistic arts associated with it: rhetoric and oratory, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.

Ancienneté was thus the basic inheritance of the Restoration gentleman, as it had been earlier, reinforced now by a repugnance to the profoundly disturbing revolution-ary events that had so recently challenged both the social order and the classics.” Levine suggests that the outcome of the battle was draw “in which the field was pretty much divided – the ancients commanding the humanities, and the moderns the sciences” and the Restoration “anticipated the outcome and defined itself in the process” (ix-x).

Language, knowledge, and epistemology in the late seventeenth-century English culture

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Neoplatonic view that Adam’s original language had been a system of natural signs, genuinely corresponding to the things



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expressed, was in decline. The schism between the signifier and signified became more evident than ever before. The irreconcilable gap between words and things was a theme of much of the contemporary philosophy which became increasingly aware of vague-ness of words. Hobbes, for example, vigorously rejects the idea of natural language and frequently expresses horror of confusing words with ‘things’, “believing that the subor-dination of the sects and the intellectual stagnation of scholasticism were alike sustained by a corruption of language in which insignificant expressions were held to correspond to real entities” (English Drama 1660-1700, 14). For Hobbes, linguistic signs have no es-sential significance, “for language originates in arbitrary compact, as consequence to the need to establish signs for the conducting of social intercourse” (15).

Similar to its function in Hobbes’s theory of morality, consensus communis is the un-derlying principle of language and communication: “That is a true sign, which by the consent of men becomes a sign” (Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society, 221). Consequently, the linguistic compact is potentially unstable and “it is perpetually necessary to establish agreed meanings and careful definitions” (English Drama 1660-1700, 15). According to Deborah Fisk Payne the suspicion that language is not transparent medium through which reality can be grasped undeformed was present in the writings not only of Thomas Hobbes, but also his predecessor Francis Bacon, and contemporaries Thomas Sprat and John Locke. These philosophers were all “aghast at language gone astray” and “attempted to slip a leash on words, to domesticate them into isomorphic relationship with objects in nature” (Payne 411). John Locke’s position as expressed in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1698) is that of nearly extremist rejection of language, as the following lines show:

[...] figurative speeches and allusion in language will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. I confess in discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight than information and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed from them can scarce pass for faults. But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetorick, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invent-ed, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment, and so indeed are perfect cheats: And therefore [...] they are [...] wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them.[…] Eloquence [...] has too prevailing beauties in it, to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. (III. x. 34)

The atmosphere of untrustworthiness of the unstable language influenced both Res-toration comedy – especially its usage of language and thematic choices – and the form-ing genre of literary and dramatic criticism. It becomes most conspicuous when people use it metaphorically, “that is, in other sense than [words] are ordained for; and thereby deceive others” (Leviathan, ch. 4, 102).


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2 official and Alternative classical Aesthetics: Bouhours, Méré, and Boileau

La vraie éloquence se moque de l’éloquence.

Blaise Pascal, Les Pensées (1669)

La confiance fournit plus à la conversation que l’esprit.

François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (1665)

In this chapter I look at the texts of three French authors – Dominique Bouhours, cheva-lier de Méré, and Nicolas Boileau – in which theories of esprit, its version bel esprit, and several other related terms like the je-ne-sais-quoi and the sublime are expressed. Unlike Boileau’s L’Art poétique, one of the most well-known texts of the French neoclassicism, both Bouhours’s Les Entretiens d’Artiste et d’Eugène and La Maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit, and Méré’s Discours de l’esprit are seriously under-researched and rarely analyzed texts. While these two latter authors’ writings belong to the genre of literature of social life, often not distinguishing between the appreciation of artistic, psychologi-cal and social values, Boileau’s interests are more specifically literature-based. However, even in his theories concerning esprit he pursues the ideal of balance between the artistic truthfulness and moral integrity. Esprit also appears to have played an important part in the early modern French society’s process of self-identification. In particular, the act of defining a term like esprit, or the je-ne-sais-quoi becomes crucial in determining the culture’s ideological positions.

The seventeenth century is usually considered a golden period of French criticism. Boileau, Bouhours and other French critics disparaged the poetry of Italy and Spain, though they drew rather more than they cared to acknowledge from sixteenth-century Italian critics. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century France had assumed a lead-ership in literary criticism which the rest of Europe, including even Italy, acknowledged (The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. The Eighteenth Century 83). Dogmatic and leg-islative in tone, the French critics like Boileau, Rapin, and Le Bossu were far away from the technical and philosophic treatment of literary language of the generations of critics to come, but their achievement must be considered seriously as they represent the stage of early modern European criticism in which “a strong tendency among theorists […] to take over psychological doctrines as a foundation for their views, to displace rhetoric (in its widest acceptation as the “art of writing”) from its traditional basis of classical author-ity and common-sense observation and establish it on properly philosophical founda-tion” (Stone 22).


2 Official and Alternative classical Aesthetics: Bouhours, Méré, and Boileau

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Theories of esprit in the texts of Boileau, Bouhours and Méré demonstrate that the term serves as a catalyst of this gradual change, partly because it is so flexible in its se-mantic and contextual usage. Also, tracing its interplay with the already mentioned je-ne-sais-quoi and sublime will hopefully yield new insights into the ways various streams and doctrines of French neoclassicism interacted and responded to each other. The tensions between them are part of my interest in this chapter, and emphasis on the social dimen-sion of esprit is detectable in Bouhours’s theories of the bel esprit, where the adjective adds an appreciative tone to the expression.

2.1 dominique Bouhours and Poetic Ideologies of the Bel Esprit

2.1.1 The bel esprit and the je-ne-sais-quoi

Dominique Bouhours was born in 1628 in Paris where he also died in 1702. Although today he is usually remembered as an essayist and neo-classical critic, during his time he was also known in his capacity of Jesuit priest, as he engaged in theological and liter-ary polemic with the Jansenists. For the purpose of my reading of Bouhours, the most important fact is that he was a frequent and influential visitor to the salon of Madeleine de Scudéry, where he made a name as an expert on matters of style and language – this fact is attested by Nicolas Boileau and Jean La Bruyère who considered him a foremost authority in this field and Jean Racine who allegedly sent him Phèdre for approval.

When considering the terms of the bel esprit and the je-ne-sais-quoi which lie at the heart of Bouhours’s poetic theory I will be concerned specifically with how these terms were strategically employed by the French author in his discourse of cultural, social, and liter-ary elitism. I do not attempt to separate the literary from the social and cultural sphere in my approach, as I believe this particular period perceived them to be interconnected in a way that defies any clear-cut compartmentalization. In this respect, I agree with Richard Scholar, who points out that “[w]hat is striking about the discourse of art and artistic appreciation in late seventeenth-century France culture is how embedded it is in the discourse of social distinction” (Scholar 199). Authors of this period were used to deploy their social credentials as artists to explain the qualities of their writings; indeed, Bouhours and others talk about these two spheres “as if they were one and the same thing” (ibid.). I also believe that this intertwinement of qualities renders the period’s literary creative and critical output considerably inaccessible but at the same time it is the reason for its fertility in terms of interpretive possibilities.

Taking into account the nature of the relationship between the literary and the cul-tural, my approach will therefore posit the two terms as tools of literary and social exqui-siteness employed by the members of the polite circles and salons in order to establish and maintain their exclusiveness. In Bouhours’s two major critical works, Les Entretiens d’Artiste et d’Eugène and La Maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit both the bel



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esprit and the je-ne-sais-quoi play an important role of indispensible tools of cultural and ideological appropriation. This role is also the possible reason for their elusiveness, which is not a result of incapability on the part of their users but a carefully designed strategy. In the following account I will partly draw on my comments concerning sprez-zatura and préciosité movement the previous chapter.

2.1.2 Les entretiens d’Artiste et d’eugène: The Key concepts of the New Aesthetic Introduced

In Les Entretiens d’Artiste et d’Eugène (1671, henceforth Les Entretiens) Bouhours intro-duces the bel esprit and the je-ne-sais-quoi as key terms of what will become his alternative aesthetic theory and devotes a great deal of attention to their description. The text is composed of six dialogues, two of which are devoted to the concepts of the bel esprit and the je-ne-sais-quoi. The dialogues involve two friends, Ariste and Eugene, who are based on Bouhours himself and René Rapin, his friend and fellow Jesuit. The names of the characters are derived from Greek and Latin and both mean “well-born”. The two men converse in the agreeable discursive manner of the well-informed amateurs which had become established in the salons or – in the words of the narrator – “the free and familiar conversations that well-bred people have [...], and which do not fail to be witty, and even knowledgeable, though one never dreams there of making wit show, and study has no part in it”25 (Les Entretiens 2).

The subjects of the conversations are chosen and dealt with in erudite, but not pe-dantic manner. The six topics covered by the interlocutors are the sea, regarded to be an object of contemplation, the French language, secrets, true wit (“Le Bel Esprit”), the ineffable (“Le Je ne sais quoi”) and poetical devices (“Les Devises”).* Commenting on the choice of topics, Charles Harrison points out that “[c]ontrary to the predominant intellectual rationalism of the time, Bouhours uses the dialogue form to explore the na-ture of those indefinable critical qualities that are perceived instantaneously through the workings of intuition, rather than gradually through the operations of reason” (Art in Theory 1648-1815 222). Thus, the bel esprit is conceived as a person who acts decisively on the basis of individual but justifiable intuition while the je-ne-sais-quoi may be seen as that which the bel esprit or the ‘true artist’ uniquely generates. As these suggestions imply, the tendency represented in Bouhours’s speculations is more isolation of an ineffable criti-cal virtue from the wider category of aesthetic production, and of the ‘artist’ from the ‘illustrator,’ the ‘designer’ or the ‘entertainer’.

*) The first “entretien” on sea has been analyzed in a great detail by R. G. Maber in his “Bouhours and the Sea: The Origins of the First “Entretien d’Ariste et d’Eugène” which appeared in The Modern Language Review 75.1 (1980), pp. 76-85. Also, an extensive account of the whole text is presented in Nicholas Cronk’s The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (chapter 3 ‘Inventing le je ne sais quoi: Bouhours’s Les Entretiens d’Artiste et d’Eugène’, pp. 51-76) which partly informs this subchapter.



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Entretien IV: the bel esprit as a tool of poetic truth

The concept of the bel esprit is the central topic of the fourth ‘encounter’ of Eugene and Ariste. The two protagonists set out to define the bel esprit by clarifying its relationship to common sense. Right from the start of the dialogue it is clear that for them the bel esprit is not opposed to common sense, but rather represents its specific kind:

True wit, […], is inseparable from common sense, and it is a mistake to confuse it with that sort of vivacity which has nothing to do with it. One might think that judgment is the founda-tion for beauty of wit; or rather bel esprit is of the nature of those precious stones which are not less solid than brilliant. There is nothing more beautiful than a well-cut and well-polished diamond; it shines on every side and on every facet.26 (The Continental Model 161) *

The dialogue continues with metaphorical description of the bel esprit: “It is solid but brilliant matter, it dazzles but has consistency and body. The union, the mixture, the proportion of the brilliant with the solid give it all its charm and all its value. There is a symbol for bel esprit as I conceive it”27 (ibid.). As the metaphor unravels, the bel esprit is being described in even more glamorous terms:

It is equally brilliant and solid; it might well be defined as common sense which sparkles. For there is a kind of gloomy, bleak common sense which is hardly less the contrary of wit than is a false brilliance. The common sense I am speaking of is entirely different; it is gay, lively, full of fire […] ; it proceeds from a straight and luminous intelligence and from a clear and pleas-ant imagination.28 (161-2)

Bouhours’s bel esprit, then, has to command both vivacity as well as common sense; the perfect balance of these two faculties “renders the mind subtle but not vapid, brilliant but not too brilliant, quick to conceive an idea, and sound in all its judgments”29 (162). This kind of wit thinks of things properly and expresses them correctly, it is concise, and even though it is “concerned more with things than with words” it does not “scorn orna-ments of language” while not seeking them out30 (ibid.).

Nicholas Cronk contests that, although Bouhours’s explanations of the bel esprit are not entirely coherent, the whole dialogue has “poetic language as its central concern, [and] the emphasis on ‘le bel esprit’ and ‘le génie’ takes the discussion beyond the mi-metic framework of the earlier part of [Les Entretiens]” in that the author seems to be making a radical suggestion that ‘le bel esprit’ and ‘le discernement’ are active qualities required in the reader of a literary work (Cronk 60). The discussion of the bel esprit further provides an answer to those who criticized the moral function and status of lit-erature. If the writer is possessed of ‘a gift from heaven […] a divine I know not what’,

*) Les Entretiens had not been translated into English before the twentieth century. The only translation of the text appeared as The Conversations of Aristo and Eugene in the anthology The Continental Model: Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century in English Translation, eds. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier.



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and if readers are equipped with the bel esprit to help them interpret the writer’s inspired pronouncements, it is hard to argue that poetry obfuscates truth31 (The Continental Model 163). On the contrary, it is ‘discernment’ which allows the reader to see “things […] for what they are in themselves”32 (161). At the same time, it is the writer’s inspiration which revelas “all things to the soul in their true light”33 (169). Cronk concludes that “Bouhours is adamant that poetic language has the power to reveal higher truths; by implication, […] it can be a force for moral good” (Cronk 61).

the bel esprit as a tool of cultural appropriation

Bouhours’s bel esprit can also be regarder as a highly selective tool for reader’s inter-pretation of authorial intentions. In the last part of the dialogue, the French critic is concerned with the conditions under which one is eligible to possess the bel esprit. The two main ones are race and gender. The latter is adumbrated already in the first part of the dialogue, where Eugene suggests that “[t]he beauty of wit is a masculine and gallant beauty which has in it nothing soft or effeminate”34 (quot. in Art in Theory 224). Later, Bouhours attempts to put forward a ‘climatic’ theory of genius in his dialogues on the bel esprit, when he suggests that scarcity of les beaux esprits in northern countries is owing to the cold, damp climate, and that climate is responsible for the particular nature of the French genius. While Ariste maintains that the bel esprit is accessible to all nations, Eugene’s arguments make him eventually admit that “the bel esprit is rarer in cold coun-tries because nature in those parties is drearier and more languishing so to speak” with Eugene further asserting that the quality of “the bel esprit as you have defined him is not at all compatible with the coarse temperament and the massive bodies of northern peoples”35 (The Continental Model 175).

As Faith Beasley suggests, Bouhours’s account of the influence of the worldly culture on the quality of the bel esprit is underscored by the influence of national identity when he writes that“ [it is] the fate of the French nation to have this fine quality of mind today when other peoples do not have it”36 (176). Later he states that “one might say that all the intelligence and all the learning of the world are now among us and that all other nations are barbarous when compared with the French”37 (179). According to Beasley, “Bouhours’s temporal identification of these distinguishing qualities of the French lan-guage [as well as] his emphasis on the fact that esprit and bon sense are now common whereas they ‘used to be so rare’ can be viewed as further evidence of the worldly mi-lieu’s pervasive influence by the 1660s” (73-4). I believe Beasley reveals a significant inner contradiction in Bouhours’s viewpoint when she suggests that while appearing to praise the significance of the worldly influence, the text “also reflects the growing opposition to this influence, especially its female component” (74). Contrary to the common respect paid to women on basis of their role in the spreading of the policies of the bel esprit and bon sens (as mentioned in the account of the seventeenth-century French society in the first chapter), Bouhours seems to be refusing most women the faculty of esprit, and con-sequently, the title of bel esprit:



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That bright flame and that good sense […] do not result from a cold and moist complexion: the cold and moisture which make women “weak, timid, indiscreet, light, impatient and talka-tive […], prevent them from having the judgment, the solidity, the strength, and the precision which bel esprit demands. That phlegm with which they are filled and which gives them their delicate coloring does not agree well with delicacy and vivacity of mind; it blunts the cutting edge of the intellect and dims its light. If you reflect on this question you will see that what is brilliant in women partakes of the nature of lightning which dazzles for a moment and which has no solidity; women shine a bit in conversation, and provided the talk be of trifles they do well; but beyond this they are not very reasonable. In a word, nothing is thinner or more lim-ited than the female mind.38 (The Continental Model 180)

In Bouhours’s theory the bel esprit represents the exclusive propriety (and property) of a very narrow section of society, and can only be achieved through education and social experience. The subtle charm of the bel esprit is not a natural state of affairs but a result of the process of linguistic and social betterment. According to Richard Scholar, the bel esprit is the term that Bouhours uses “to repackage aristocratic honnêteté. The narrator of the texts describes Ariste and Eugene as ‘honnestes gens’ at the beginning of their Entretiens” (208). In fact, the bel esprit is established as the quintessence of hon-nêteté by the fourth entretien in which Ariste and Eugene distinguish true beaux esprits from “crude-minded peasants, obtuse pedants, and the super-subtle poetasters who have usurped their title in recent years” (209). The beaux esprits form a quasi-aristocratic elite that Ariste and Eugene’s intervention serves to protect and sustain. As Scholar suggests, the very fact that such intervention is regarded as necessary suggests that “the identity and constitution of this elite is in fact an object of ideological and social conflict” (ibid.). When they come to define true bel esprit, the two friends play a familiar game. Ariste’s definition of bel esprit as ‘good sense which sparkles’ is strategically incomplete: beyond all the definable qualities of the bel esprit, there is something more39: “the mind must have besides a certain clarity which all great geniuses do not have” 40 (The Continental Model 166). The indefinite adjective ‘certain’ (‘une certain’) adds a considerable degree of ineffability here, just as Eugene does when he asserts that the bel esprit must possess ‘je ne sçay quell agrément’ (I know not what charm). The quintessence of honnêteté is the bel esprit, but the essence of the bel esprit seems to be the je ne sais quoi, the topic of the fifth entretien and of the following section.

Entretien V: the je-ne-sais-quoi

The fifth dialogue of Les Entretiens deals with a mot juste that describes the things that cannot be expressed, i.e. the je-ne-sais-quoi – an expression which is usually described as the ineffable aspect of beauty or style and which had been taken by the French from the Spanish (el no sé qué) in the first half of the seventeenth century. This je ne sais quoi, the indefinable quality that can be felt in an object of all kinds as well as in a person but cannot be described in any simple terms emerges as a topic of the discussion Ariste and



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Eugene are having without any introduction or prelude, as if quite naturally, in the easy flow of the conversation. One of my goals of this subchapter is to show that this kind of nonchalant introduction of topics is Bouhours’s specific strategy to enhance his aesthetic theories with modish concepts. The two gentlemen reveal themselves in this respect to be true beaux esprits, go-betweeners connecting the worlds of learning and wit. Before demonstrating how the ineffability of the bel esprit relates to that of the je-ne-sais-quoi, I will provide a brief introduction to the latter term.

Scholar identifies three realms the term can be related to: passions (i.e. psychology), culture and nature. In the confines of the first realm the je-ne-sais-quoi “draws two indi-viduals […] into sympathy or antipathy at first sight” (Scholar 59-60). In the realm of cul-ture “the je-ne-sais-quoi is not a particular relation, but instead, a universal quality” (60). This claim resonates with Ariste who says that “there are certain mysterious qualities which are universal so that everybody is equally touched by them” (The Continental Model 188).41 Therefore, a culture can collectively recognize a distinguishing quality in some of its individual members or works of art. In the third realm, nature, the je-ne-sais-quoi is responsible for the inexplicable movements of attraction and repulsion which regularly occur between the magnet and iron, the tides’ ebb and flow, the human body and the diseases that it suffers. In these three realms, Scholar argues, “the je-ne-sais-quoi remains sealed within the lived world of created nature” (Scholar 60).

Finally, there is a fourth, tentative realm, proposed by the two friends: that of the transcendental relationship between humans and their divine maker. Ariste describes hope for salvation, and indeed salvation itself, as “I know no what of a different kind” and Eugene reinforces this upward direction of the term out of the created world into the realm of the divine by suggesting that “this mysterious quality partakes of the essence of grace as well as of nature and art” to which Ariste replies in the form of rhetorical question which makes his proposal the more decisive: “[T]hat grace, I say, what is it but a mysterious quality of a supernatural order which can be neither explained nor under-stood?” 42 (The Continental Model 191)

the je-ne-sais-quoi as a sign of quality

Scholar makes a powerful claim which establishes the je-ne-sais-quoi as a topic of polite conversation in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. I follow his ar-gument, but would like to suggest that the je-ne-sais-quoi is not only the topic of the conversation but also – and perhaps more importantly – the ideological tool of the discussion, not unlike the bel esprit. Scholar in fact seems to hold a similar view when he suggests that the je-ne- -sais-quoi represents a sign of quality. Following his line of argument as well as expanding my own argument concerning the bel esprit, I will now demonstrate how the two terms participate in establishing a culturally defen-sive mechanism of a certain social group amidst the society of the seventeenth-century France. The je-ne-sais-quoi becomes the indefinable stamp of quality of a very selective social group, relying on the previously mentioned lexical sign of the bel esprit with its



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already demarcated exclusiveness; the other three signs are honnêteté, galanterie, and urbanité.

Around the mid-seventeenth century a circle of minor nobles and bourgeois supported the monarchist cause during the burst of civil war, and they were subsequently rewarded for their loyalty. The group was in need of fashioning a social identity and galanterie was convenient as it emphasized cultural distinction over noble origins. This model then spread among other – mostly Modern – authors and their supporters – Bouhours, Fon-tenelle, Madame de Scudéry – and this conversational ideal was reiterated by portrayal in literary works. Scholar suggests that what he calls ‘game of nescioquiddity’ is at play in the case of the je-ne-sais-quoi just as it was in the case of the bel esprit. The game takes place in salon conversation among the members of polite circles. Where the previous circles used a certain manner of conversation and demeanor to articulate a particular philosophical position, the gallant circle makes the manner itself the topic of conversa-tion (185).

The “je-ne-sais-quoi game” follows a stereotypical pattern: a member of the polite cir-cle wonders aloud what it is that lends some people (and their literary, social or other achievements) an air of ‘quality’. The initial name for this quality was honnêteté, which was then replaced by urbanité, and the bel esprit respectively. The interlocutors attempt each in turn to define this elusive quality which generates a series of adjacent adjectives of quality. These are used to describe the ways in which it makes itself felt in particular situations. The ultimate attempt, i.e. a definition of the sum of the qualities, is, however, a failure which is then admitted by all participants. This, Scholar argues, is a necessary outcome of the ‘game of nescioquiddity’, as its function is to reinforce the elitism of the group by not being able to find a definition of the requirements for joining the circle in the first place. Thus, the members manage to keep the outsiders out while constantly electing themselves as insiders by effectively denying a workable definition of the quali-ties needed for entering the circle. To support this hypothesis, Scholar quotes Norbert Elias who argues that “through their necessary contacts with rich bourgeois social strata, the seventeenth-century courtly aristocracy could not prevent ‘the spreading of their names, their customs, their tastes and their language to other classes’” (Scholar 190). By renewing the indefinable signs of their own quality, its vogue words, members keep the circle intact when the signs threaten to spread beyond. The game of nescioquid-dity is thus a playful defense mechanism of cultural elitism. Scholar summarizes this mechanism in the following lines: “The polite circle suggests that its subtle charm is, like magnetic attraction, a truly inexplicable occult quality. But this charm can be shown to be an instrument designed to protect and further the interests of a particular group” (Scholar 211).

An important feature of the defense mechanism of the je-ne-sais-quoi is sprezzatura. The je-ne-sais-quoi is so well made that it tricks the outsiders into thinking that it is in fact a gift of nature. Without mentioning this connection directly, Bouhours makes a very explicit claim concerning the relationship between the two terms when he writes: “the great masters […] have always tried to give charm to their works by hiding their art with great care and skill” 43 (The Continental Model 190). The je-ne-sais-quoi in Bouhours is a cultural



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practice that masquerades as a natural property: the tag ‘ars est celare artem’ (the art lies in concealing the art), which appears in the rhetorical works of Aristotle and Cicero, here describes an entire culture. Bouhours’s Les Entretiens are themselves a perfect proof of this assumption: the topics of the dialogues are carefully assembled to testify to this theory – the dialogue on sea with its unfathomable depths and air of mystery, the dia-logue on the secrets all represent notions in which the je-ne-sais-quoi is very easily located, and the dialogue on the French language explores the site of the battle for undefinability itself. Both the je-ne-sais-quoi and the bel esprit have an important place in Bouhours’s ex-pansion of the poetic theory of cultural elitism in another of his critical texts, La Maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit.

2.1.3 la Maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit: The theory expanded

La Maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687, henceforth La Maniére) consists of four dialogues between two men of letters, Eudoxe and Philanthe. As usual, the names stand for qualities the two speakers represent: the former is associated with “classical simplicity and good sense, while the latter suggests fancy and floridity” (Clark 263). The first dialogue deals with “false thoughts”, equivoques, hyperboles, puns, conceits, etc., and shows that no thought should be admitted, however agreeable, unless it is “true”; the second and third dialogues discuss the true and the false in the sublime and wit ; and the fourth deals mainly with obscurity (ibid.).

the bel esprit and le sublime: Bouhours’s theory of la délicatesse

The bel esprit recurs in La Maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (translated into English as The Art of Criticism or, the Method of Making a Right Judgment upon Subjects of Wit and Learning in 1705) during a discussion of true and false wit. However, it is not the central theme of the text, but merely one of the conditions and necessary qualities which a person or a work of art has to possess in order to reach the ultimate goal of aesthetic efforts – the natural. The set of aesthetic terms Bouhours uses to present his theory includes, apart from esprit, classical categories such as beauty (beauté), the natural or inborn (naïf), the great (grand), the delicate (délicate), the pretty (le joli), and the plain (simple). Bouhours’s agenda is quite complex in this text as it takes a direct part in the heated aesthetic and ideological disputes of his own time.

First, the dialogues function as a response to a critical debate concerning the sublime which was spurred by Boileau’s 1674 translation of Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime. The translation belonged to one of many literary events in the course of the querelle – in 1693 Boileau published a new edition of the translation which included a number of critical reflections directed against the theory of the superiority of the Moderns over the Ancients. Although an Ancient himself, Bouhours never belonged to the orthodox circle



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of this side of the battle, but rather remained closer to the stylistic ideals of a previous generation, upholding the rhetorical tradition which favoured a slightly more orotund, less austere poetic style. Therefore, his position in the debate of the sublime is not en-tirely in agreement with the Ancient line.

Second, like other French critics of his day, Bouhours opposed those Italian and Spanish poets of the late Renaissance style who, with their far-fetched conceits, were the enemies of true wit. In La Maniére, these far-fetched conceits were associated with false wit and unnaturalness by both speakers. “Italian poets are not used to be very natural” claims Eudoxe, accusing the Italian poets Guidubaldo Bonarelli and Torquato Tasso of having “too much Art,” an expression clearly related to jeu d’esprit, false wit: “[T]he Heart explains it self ill by a turn of Wit, and I wou’d willingly say with a Man of Good Judgment. I don’t love such a far-fetch’d beginning, above all in a violent passion in which Sprightliness has no part” 44 (The Art of Criticism 171). Opposing both these au-thors as well the proponents of the sublime (and by extension the ideas of the ancienneté), Bouhours advocates the ‘natural’ thought, that directs the reader’s mind towards the ob-ject or idea in view rather than towards the ingenuity of the writer, saying that a ‘natural thought’ has “simple Beauty, without Art” 45 (156). This claim, i.e. that something like excess of wit is possible, serves as a topic for a whole dialogue, as Philanthus, whose taste is for the ornamental and florid, begs to be enlightened on this matter.

While Bouhours does not subscribe to the ideal of the sublime, he does not allow his two interlocutors to dismiss it completely either. Instead, he manages to weave the concept into his own aesthetic theory which is based on many elements, thus creating a more complex texture of argument than had been represented by Les Entretiens. One of the central critical concepts Bouhours’s theory rests upon is délicatesse (delicacy). In the second dialogue Eudoxe sets out to present this concept whose position to the other ele-ments of Bouhours’s theory is rather complicated. It also seems to be one of the vogue-words of the day, as Philanthus suggests: “Tell me I pray, […], what is precisely Delicacy? Nothing else is talk’d off ; and I talk of it every Minute without well understanding what I say, and having a clear Notion of it” 46 (The Art of Criticism 110). After acknowledging the difficulty of capturing the essence of a ‘delicate Thought’, using a strategy not unlike that employed by Eugene and Ariosto in their attempts to define the je-ne-sais-quoi in Les Entretiens, Eudoxe suggests that

[w]e must in my Mind reason on the Delicacy of the Thoughts, which make Pieces of Wit, as we do of those of Nature ; the most delicate are these where Nature takes pleasure to work in little, and where the matter is almost imperceptible, makes us doubt whether she has a Mind to show or hide her Address” 47 (111).

A delicate thought is such a thought which is expressed by few well-chosen words and the sense which it contains is neither too ostentatious nor too plain. This feature brings délicatesse very close to the bel esprit in Les Entretiens, where Ariosto says that “[m]uch meaning is gathered into few words, everything is said that need be said an only that is said which must be said” 48 (The Continental Model 162). Furthermore, it must be “hid to



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the end that we may look for it, and that we should guess at it, and keeps us in suspense to give us the pleasure of discovering it all at once, when we have knowledge enough”

49 (ibid.). Once again, délicatesse is revealed to have surprisingly similar features to wit in the requirement for a certain amount of knowledge necessary to discover it as well as the mental energy which must be invested in the act of discovering, gratified by the sensation of surprise. By giving this new critical concept bel esprit-like features, as well as strategically mentioning the je-ne-sais-quoi when explaining it, Bouhours makes it clear that La Manière is an expansion of the ideas proposed in Les Entretiens.

The implied critique of the sublime becomes overt in the conclusion of Eudoxe’s explanation of la délicatesse when he asserts that “[w]e may conclude that delicacy adds something to the Agreeable and Sublime” 50 (The Art of Criticism 111).

[T]he great and the sublime are not natural, nor they can be, for the natural carries in it somewhat low, or less elevated ; did you not tell me, interrupts Philanthus, that Simplicity and Grandure [sic] were not incompatible? Yes, replyd Eudoxus, and I say so still, but there is a cer-tain difference between a noble Simplicity, and pure Plainness, one only excludes Ostentation, and the other Greatness it self.51 (156)

As Nicholas Cronk points out, “Bouhours outlines a critical concept (la délicatesse, la naïveté) which embodies le sublime but includes much else besides” (Cronk 134). Bouhours manages to include Boileau’s sublime into his own discussions, but in “a man-ner which divorces [it] from Boileau’s conception” (ibid.).

the role of the bel esprit in Bouhours’s theory

The task remains now to evaluate what place the bel esprit has in Bouhours’s theory ex-pressed in Les Entretiens and La Manière. Both texts reveal clearly the various tensions underlying poetic theory of the 1670s and it is equally evident that Bouhours is sensitive to the dilemmas posed for poetry by a nomenclaturist theory of language. No matter if we are more inclined to accept presumptions made by Nicholas Cronk who maintains that Bouhours is articulating a full-blown aesthetic theory complete with set of criti-cal terms or by Michael Moriarty, arguing that as a critic, Bouhours belongs to a stage of the seventeenth-century French criticism “concerned with establishing correct taste rather than formulating rules” (as opposed to the prescriptive neoclassical criticism of earlier decades), the bel esprit still stands before our eyes as a particle in Bouhours’s system of neoclassical aesthetic of suggestion, whose distinctive feature is the rejection of the principle of wide accessibility and clarity while holding on to the requirement for naturalness (The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. The Renaissance 526). Thus in La Manière Bouhours “links good taste to a classical poetics, based on Latin and Greek models against Spanish and Italian, an aesthetic of naturalness, though leaving some room for the sublime conception, against the old Baroque conceit” associated with false esprit (ibid.).



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I am more inclined to agree with Moriarty, who emphasizes the salient features of Bouhours’s system of thought and the balance the critic tries to achieve. On the other hand, I believe that Cronk’s attempt to present Bouhours’s ideas as what he calls ‘full-fledged aesthetic theory’ might be slightly exaggerated (Cronk 65). Cronk later argues with regard to Les Entretiens that “the dialogue form helps shield what might otherwise appear as a fundamental incoherence in Bouhours’s critical thought,” explaining that it “helps Bouhours to deal allusively with the difficulties which he clearly perceives in contemporary poetic theory but which he feels unable to address more directly” (73). However, it seems difficult to accept that a certain type of form of Bouhours’s literary output can save his ideas from being eventually labelled as fundamental incoherence. In my opinion, the dialogue form employed by the author attests more to the contem-porary penchant for this type of prosaic form, as it allowed for setting an example of how a polite and entertaining, yet erudite and informative conversation should be con-ducted. Bouhours’s confusion of the characteristic features of esprit and délicatesse which I have just pointed out contrasts in his discerning between esprit and what is delicate and strong. The tension between the two latter terms is mentioned more than once by Bouhours, for example during a discussion on rarity of the real bel esprit, where Eugene says that “qualities as contrary as vivacity and common sense, delicacy and strength, […] are not often found together” 52 (168). Dismissing what passes for wit in the society, Bouhours produces a definition of bel esprit which is centred on the individual’s ability to discern objects at their proper value:

[…] true beauty of wit consists in a just and delicate discernment which those gentlemen do not have. That discernment shows things to be what they are in themselves, not stooping too soon, as do the common people who do not go below the surface, and not going too far like those refined intelligences which, through an excess of subtlety, evaporate in vain and chimeri-cal imaginings. 53 (The Continental Model 161)

From this point of view, then, bel esprit in Bouhours’s writings, although it does not occupy a foremost position among the critical terms he operates with, is used by the critic to represent a compromise between the two extreme positions. It is a role which will become evident in other critics’ theories as well, albeit in different contexts. It is nevertheless important to acknowledge this function of wit as a conspicuous one within the framework of the early modern theories of wit.

2.1.4 Bouhours’s Reception in England

Comparing the overall Bouhours’s influence in England to that of one of his contem-poraries, Alexander Clark writes: “It is clear that Bouhours’s fame was a more fragile growth than that of Le Bossu, […],[b]ut it must be evident […] that whenever one dis-cusses the origin and spread in English criticism of the idea that ‘good sense’, ‘truth’, ‘nature’ are at the basis of all good imaginative writing, it is at one’s peril that one


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neglects to reckon with Bouhours” (Clark 274). More specifically, Bouhours’s ideas on the bel esprit and the je-ne-sais-quoi received a considerable amount of attention in the Restoration England. The je-ne-sais-quoi was taken up by many major playwrights of the period when discussing wit or attempting to provide an elegantly evasive definition of it, employing an equal strategic by-pass to what Bouhours himself perfected in the two above discussed texts.

In general, the term enjoyed particular success in the polite conversation of Resto-ration in England. It constitutes one example of “the vogue for French elegance that Charles II and his courtiers brought back with them to England in 1660” (Scholar 42). The je-ne-sais-quoi appears for the first time in Robert Boyle’s tragedy Tryphon (1668) and it confirms that Bouhours in 1671 is making use of a word already in vogue. The French expression is mentioned in ‘The Prologue’ when the protagonists, Nokes and Angell, attempt to defineanother fashionable epithet, ‘wit’:

NOKES. A wit is in one word – I know not what?ANGELL. Of that kind Title give your Poet Joy. A wit is then in French, A je ne scay quoi. A modish name.NOKES. Yes, Sir, that Name to gain, How many of our Writers crack their brain? (Boyle, Prologue to Tryphon)

“Boyle’s two elegant wits display the je-ne-sais-quoi as a linguistic fashion item in Resto-ration London” (43). The ‘modish name’ stands here for an equally modish thing and it was afterwards used in a rather ironic and mocking sense in several texts, both theatre plays and essays. In Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (1676), for example, the coquettish Lady Gimrack seduces a young man with the modish confession: “[...] sight of you did stir in me a strange Je ne sçai quoi towards you” (III, ii). Earl of Shaftesbury in his collec-tion of essays Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1713) refers to, no doubt with a very polite irony, that “je ne sais quoi of wit, and all those graces of mind which these virtuoso-lovers delight to celebrate” (Shaftesbury 63).

Restoration comedies use the je-ne-sais-quoi to describe those who would pass for hav-ing wit. But, as Scholar observantly points out, one’s man wit is another man’s foppery. Congreve’s Double Dealer (1694) includes an English précieuse ridicule, Lady Froth, who is characterized as ‘a great Cocquet; pretender to Poetry, Wit, and Learning’ in the dra-matic personae (Congreve 16). Lady Froth holds that the heroine’s unaffected admirer, Mellefont, lacks what she calls ‘a Manner’. The two ladies share the following exchange during which Lady Froth provides an explanation of her usage of the term:

LADY FROTH. Some distinguishing quality, as for example, the belle-air or brillant of Mr. Brisk; the solemnity, yet complaisance of my lord, or something of his own, that should look a little je-ne-scay-quoish; he is too much of a medioc-rity, in my mind.



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CYNTHIA. He does not indeed affect either pertness, or formality; for which I like him. (II, ll. 42-7)

While Scholar reads this passage as a proof of how “the je-ne-sais-quoi is […] firmly set-tled as the subtle artifice by which one cultivates a natural manner,” I prefer to see it as a clear sign of the demise of the je-ne-sais-quoi and its related set of terms including the bel esprit towards the close of the seventeenth century. In the comedy, Lady Froth is one of the villains, whose social pretense and inauthenticity goes hand in hand with her own admiration for the foreign forms of affectation. For that is what the je-ne-sais-quoi as well as the bel esprit finally came to be regarded as – signs of counterfeit emotions and out-dated attitudes which started to fall out of the audiences’ favour towards the close of the seventeenth century.

The importance of Bouhours’s discussion of the bel esprit as a part of an unorthodox neoclassical aesthetic theory was recognized by Joseph Addison in the Spectator 62, in a passage which significantly promoted the French critic’s reputation across the channel:

Bouhours, whom I look upon to be the most penetrating of all the French Criticks, has taken Pains to show, that it is impossible for any Thought to be beautiful which is not just, and has not its Foundation in the Nature of things: that the Basis of all Wit is Truth; and that no Thought can be valuable, of which good sense is not the Ground-work. (The Spectator I 268)

Good sense, in Bouhours’s view, could sometimes operate instinctively and rapidly but with great certainty: in such cases it was the same as good taste (The Cambridge His-tory of Literary Criticism, Vol. 4 77-8). However, while Bouhours’s stylistic strategy aimed at restricting the territory of literary and artistic appreciation that only belonged to the members of the salon culture of French society, Addison’s own concerns with style were, as we will see in the third chapter, much closer to the tastes and ideologies of the newly establishing merchant classes of the English early modern coffeehouse culture.

Some of Bouhours’s premises and opinions of esprit and other terms will be appearing in the following subchapter which deals with his follower – chevalier de Méré. Similarly to Bouhours, he puts forward a theory of esprit which cannot be regarded as an exam-ple of the official neoclassical, rhetoric-based, critical doctrine, but rather as a newly emerging aesthetics of suggestion. At the same time, however, his association of esprit with nature puts him close to the ideas of Nicolas Boileau, whose ideas of esprit are the subject of the third subchapter of this chapter. As such, Méré’s ideas provide an impor-tant connecting link between the aesthetic of suggestion and a more official doctrine of dogmatic neo-classicism.


2.2 Chevalier de méré: Esprit as Light of nature

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2.2 chevalier de Méré: Esprit as light of Nature

Chevalier de Méré was born in 1607 in the southwestern France; the exact place of his birth as well as most other facts of his life is unknown. Subsequently, the status assigned to his person by the twentieth-century literary history is rather obscure. One of the few things that seem to be undisputed is that he was a high-living French socialite and essay-ist. However, today he is far better known for his involvement in a mathematical problem which has given rise to the modern probability theory rather than for his involvement in the high life of the French society or for his literary achievements. An ardent gambler, Méré asked two mathematicians, Pierre Fermat and Blaise Pascal, to provide an expla-nation of his persistent losses in the game of dice. In computing the odds involved in gambling, their solution to the problem – now usually referred to as chevalier de Méré’s problem or paradox – represents an important contribution to what is today called theory of probability.

Another fact about his life that seems to be certain is that he was connected to the family of Mme de la Bazinière, a wife of the trésorier de l’Epargne and was tasked with counselling the couple’s two daughters in matters of social conduct and polite conversa-tion. A frequent visitor to the fashionable salons of the mid-century France, he was one of the key theorists of the concept of honnêteté which he presented as a compendium of aesthetic and moral values (charm, naturalness, good taste, and politeness). For Méré honnêteté is an ideal of individual excellence, but it is inseparable from aristocratic he-gemony. Paradoxically, given that the honnête homme is the opposite of the pedant, he often tends to adopt a pedagogical tone. As a salon writer, Méré is known for four Dis-cours (1677) and six Conversations (1688) concerning charm, wit, and conversation, and six further Discours, published posthumously.

2.2.1 The Polite lexicon: the je-ne-sais-quoi, honnêteté , and esprit

In his writings, Méré repeatedly uses the je-ne-sais-quoi to describe the charms of a non-chalant or negligent style in conversation, prose style, and painting alike. He discerns just such a negligent je-ne-sais-quoi in the paintings of Apelles, a Greek painter. This air of natural ease, Méré reveals to his reader, hides a subtle artifice:

In all activities […] one recognizes the masters of the craft by I know not what that is free and easy and always pleasing, but which one can hardly acquire without great practical experience […] Charms animate correctness in all I have just said but they do so in such a natural manner that they look like a pure present of nature. This is equally true in activities of the mind, such as conversation, where one needs to have the same freedom if one is to make oneself agree-able. 54 (Oeuvres complètes II 121)

Here, Méré echoes ideas of Bouhours who also suggested that in relation to the je-ne-sais-quoi the acted ease and air of negligence are vital features. Using strategies not



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unlike Machiavelli, Méré himself makes the point repeatedly. According to Richard Scholar, the je-ne-sais-quoi “is something of a stylistic tic in his writing” (The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in the Early Modern Europe 212).

In Des Agrémens, included in the first series of his Conversations, Méré describes the term, which for him is closely connected to the ‘art de plaire’ cultivated by the honnête homme, by the following words: “What appeals to me the most, and what one should in my opinion strive after the most in their attempts to please, is the I know not what which can be easily perceived, but not as easily explained […]”55 (Discours de l’esprit 95). In another of his Conversations, Méré and his fellow correspondent discuss how best to define honnêteté (Oeuvres complètes I 74). Although it appears in a variety of forms, true honnêteté can be instantly recognized by its principal effect: it is pleasing (75). However, recognizing the effects of honnêteté and defining the quality itself are two very different things. Méré ends a long speech by recounting his previous conversation on the topic with a lady who combines beauty with a turn of mind that her peers find irresistibly pleasing. As it turns out, she embodies the very quality that she asks him to define:

After all that, a lady of perfect beauty, and with a wit so lovable that even the most beautiful women could not help loving her, asked me what it was to be a honnête homme, and a honnête femme too, since it amounts to the same thing; and once I had told her what I thought about the matter and she had talked about it with great good sense, she fully admitted that all of that seemed to her necessary of one were to be that about which she was asking, but that there still remained something inexplicable about it which is easier to recognize when one sees it in practice than to say what it is. What she was imagining is something noble, I know not what, which enhances all the fine qualities, which comes from the heart and wit alone, and of which the other things are merely the retinue and trappings. 56 (Oeuvres complètes I 77)

Not only does this quotation confirms what has been said about the je-ne-sais-quoi in Bouhours’s theories in the previous subchapter in terms of the nescioquiddity, but also – and more importantly – it brings up several important literary-critical topoi that link Méré to Bouhours and the tradition of the salon aesthetics.

First, Méré identifies esprit as one of the two sources of the noble je-ne-sais-quoi which characterizes honnêteté. I already pointed out in the previous chapter that the equality of sexes with regard to honnêteté has been contested by Nicholas Hammond. While the traditional view of the modern literary history is that women of the French salons took a great part in the process of cultivating the conduct and forms of polite expres-sion and in fact initialized the whole movement, there are signs in the form of textual evidence suggesting that Hammond’s relatively isolated voice may be right. Second, the connection and contrast between heart and mind mentioned in the last sentence is a dynamic dichotomy which I attended to in the previous chapter, and would like to expand it with respect to Méré’s ideas pertaining to taste. Third, the excess of wit (not mentioned in the above passage directly but closely connected to the heart-mind dichotomy) provides another link between the theories of Bouhours and Méré as both consider the issue and its implications in their writings. I will explore these topics in



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the following section of this subchapter in my analysis of one of his first four Conversa-tions titled Discours de l’esprit.

2.2.2 Discours de l’esprit: The Polite Society versus Nature

In the discourse, which has a form of a letter to a noble lady, Méré’s main purpose is to explain to the anonymous Madame which features constitute esprit and how to rec-ognize it in a person of a quality. The critic presents a gradually developing, if slightly sketchy, ideas on the term which cross over the borders of philosophy, aesthetics, literature, psychology as well as history. This expostition is framed by the account of a tour of historical figures, hailing both from the ancient history (Homer, Socrates, Caesar, August and Cleopatra) and a more recent one (Louis XI, Henri IV, Cardinal Richelieu), assigning esprit to some (Socrates, Henri IV) while denying it to others (August, Cleopatra).

Women and esprit

Regarding accessibility of esprit to women, Méré shares a view which is rather similar to that of Bouhours. However, he is putting it across in a less direct manner, presumably because he is writing to a lady. The fact that the addressee is a woman is made clear at the very beginning of the epistle as Méré begins it by amicably reprimanding the lady for being overmodest:

It seems to me, Madam, that you love modesty more than you should and despite that I find that sometimes you allow yourself to be withdrawn from it. The cause for this may lie in that you have not considered what modesty is and that you think that the more one demeans one-self, the more modest one is. 57 (Discours de l’Esprit 1)

Méré concludes that “this virtue […] consists of perfect balance” 58 and suggests that modesty and esprit do not necessarily exclude one another (ibid.).

Why could you not be in agreement concerning the rare qualities of your own wit, you whose deeds are good and whose need for communion so slight, that even if you were less beautiful than you are, you would never cease to be the loveliest person in the whole world? 59 (ibid.)

The criticism turns into panegyric once Méré starts persuading the lady that those qualities of her person which she herself regards as the least attractive are in fact those that make her exceptional and admirable: “You converse in a simple manner, you do not say pretty words or sweet things; you withdraw yourself from judging, you make deci-sions for your own person only, and when you come back from a theatre, you usually have nothing good or bad to say about it” 60 (Discours de l’Esprit 2).



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Although the praise of the lady’s qualities is amassed throughout the letter, it is worth noting that it is a praise of a certain kind only. Indeed, women are always judged according to the criteria of appearance and modesty, as opposed to men, who are val-ued on the basis of their courage, learning and wit: “This man, they say, has wit, but he is not learned; this one has much wit, but he has no knowledge of the ways of the world; this woman is beautiful, but there is no brilliance in her, and this woman is very pretty, but her features are not regular enough” 61 (4). The qualities of courage, beauty or education are seen as inferior to the quality of wit; those who possess it stand above all others: “The most courageous men are not always the best judges of courage, and the most beautiful women are often bad judges of beauty, but people who have much wit, are able to discern those who do well even in the least important aspects of their lives” 62 (11).

If, after all, wit is acknowledged as a quality a woman can come to possess, there are still obstacles between her and the full-fledged respect. The impediments are recounted by Méré as something other people claim (“There is another way of talking which is frequently to be seen” (6)), in a rather straightforward manner: “I must admit that you have enough wit but do not have any judgment” 63 (6). Méré himself seems not to sup-port this claim as he explains that “to have esprit and to judge well is almost the same thing” 64 (ibid.). However, nowhere in the letter does he clearly dissociate himself from this point of view which seems to be in a direct opposition to the view of the modern scholars on the social status of women in the seventeenth-century France. For example, Jolanta Pekacz contends that “women occupied a special place as experts in matters of taste in seventeenth-century France” and she goes on to claim that “[t]hey were often perceived as superior judges, primarily due to their lack of formal education. The lack of education made women’s intuition unspoiled, their taste “natural,” and their imagina-tion sharper than men’s” (‘The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment’ 281).

Méré does not dwell on this topic long enough to come to an unequivocal conclusion; subsequently, his opinions of this matter have to be qualified as ambiguous. Instead, he moves on to attempt a more abstract and depersonalized definition of esprit which will be the topic of the last two sections of this subchapter.

Esprit: definition and dialectic

The first definition of esprit comes after several pages of the letter, and one of its most significant features is its tentativeness; the phrase ‘il me semble’ (‘it seems to me’) is used by Méré repeatedly. He sets out to define esprit in very broad terms: “It seems to me that esprit lies in the ability to understand things, to consider them from all sorts of perspectives, to clearly judge them as well as their value, to discern what one has in com-mon with the other and in what it is different, and to know how to discover the most well-hidden ones” 65 (10). In accordance with what he claimed about esprit in connection to women, Méré defines it as nearly identical with judgment. The definition continues



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in similarly general terms when he claims that “[i]t also seems to me that it is an infal-lible sign that one has wit to know the best means and how to employ them in all which one undertakes” 66 (10). Esprit, then, seems to lie in ways of conduct and achieving one’s goals in general, an idea which is repeated again later in the text: “[...] the best proof that one has wit and knows how to use it is to live well and to conduct oneself in the proper manner” 67 (12).

After this preliminary demarcation comes a series of negative definitions describing what esprit is not: “Wit must not be confused with reason as if they were the same thing, and I find that one can easily be very reasonable and not have more than very little wit.”

68 (16) Reason is defined by Méré as “a power of soul which is common to both wit and feeling” 69 (ibid.). Another quality esprit should not be mistaken for is talent – a quality of lesser order which one can possess if they are endowed with esprit70 (17). Méré continues to produce several more signs of esprit interestingly, he interchanges the term with intel-ligence and judgment in the two last instances: “Another sign of esprit is when one does not let allow themselves to be fooled by fashion or customs, or when one makes decisions only when one knows what the decision is about […];”71 also “[...] it is a good sign of intel-ligence not to understand what is not intelligible, and yet another sign of good judgment is to reject without reflection a bad ambiguity which is nowadays often valued as witticism”

72 (18-9). In this last instance, esprit becomes synonymous with good judgment as well as good taste as Méré is now operating in the sphere of literature and its appreciation. When Michael Moriarty claims that Méré “constantly stresses the rarity and distinctiveness of good taste, as of honnêteté,” a similar claim can be made with regard to esprit – for Méré, just like for Bouhours before him, it is a quality one of which most distinctive features is exclusiveness and uniqueness (The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism 526). Méré goes on to distinguish two kinds of esprit. First, there are those among us

[…] who are in minority, [and] understand things in themselves. These have the ability to search the ideas of nature and have invented or perfected the arts and sciences. The other type are those of a more lazy or careless nature who usually never invent anything, but they compre-hend what they are told by the inventors, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. 73 (28)

Méré identifies these two types as “inventors” and “those who do not invent” 74 (ibid.). With respect to the former, more unique, type of esprit, he writes that “[…] this first disposition which renders us capable to comprehend, comes to us when we are born, it is a gift from heaven, it is a natural light which cannot be acquired; however, it can be increased, improved, refined, and this is what we call to acquire wit” 75 (28). Just like taste, then, esprit can be trained and cultivated and therefore is related closely to the basic values of polite society. The light metaphor, already present in Bouhours’s conception of esprit is crucial for Méré’s theory and represents a repeating image which will again re-appear in writings of the English authors analyzed in the following chapter, most dis-tinctly Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism. I will now explore the ideas of esprit which lie behind this metaphor in the last section of Méré’s Discours.



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the ultimate metaphor: Esprit as natural light

After the introductory account based on the general definition of esprit, Méré eventually proceeds to formulate his own theory of the term. In doing so, he draws on the already explored themes of female qualities, defending simplicity which often is mistaken for stupidity – esprit’s great nemesis (“stupidity does not loathe esprit any less than esprit stu-pidity” 76). Méré suggests that simplicity, while being somewhat limited in its capacities, should still be appreciated and respected as it

[…] presents itself as sweet, amenable, docile, steady, just, magnanimous, grateful, and a bit suspicious. It does not defy but itself, and when it errs, it loves being informed about the mis-take, and tries to correct it. It admires good qualities which it can explain to its own advantage; it would love to see everyone happy. If its light does not reach too far, at least it is pure, and it is well aware of what it wants, and is always prepared to receive it. 77 (32-3)

Here, simplicity is described in terms which are traditionally associated with the femi-nine qualities and while Méré does not equate it with esprit but rather sees it as an ancil-lary, it is clear that he values this quality very highly. Several pages later, the light analogy is expressed in a most succinct manner when Méré claims that “[w]it is a sort of light [which] creates and reflects all at once” 78 (41). According to Jacques G. Benay’s essay L’Honnête Homme devant la Nature, ou la philosophie du Chevalier de Méré, esprit in Méré’s writings becomes equal with nature which

considered in its totality, is a source of light and understanding; it is a reservoir of ideas, and – finally – a homeland of the esprits purs. It is a source of light as it emanates sincere and natural reason, as opposed to the social or political reason. Thanks to it a man gets rid of the false clarities which obscure his judgment and ruin his feelings.79 (30)

This reading brings Méré closer to the neoclassical admiration of nature; at the same time, however, Benay seems to be suggesting that this nature is of a more complex and spiritual making as he connects it with ‘Metaphysical esprit’. Still, the main stress rests on the qualities of sincerity, authenticity of expression and perception: “This natural reason which Méré defines as ‘a gift from heaven’ corresponds to a sort of charm which is ‘l’esprit métaphysique,’ superior to all others and whose perception allows those who possess it to discern the harmonies, proportions, and numbers present in nature and ad infinitum” 80 (ibid.) The ‘esprits métaphysiques’ are the ones who are capable of ac-cess nature and all its precepts, and who “searched in the ideas of nature and invented or perfected the arts and sciences” 81 (Benay 30). The other types of esprits, which Méré calls ‘mathematical’ or ‘geometrical’ “do not invent … they comprehend what the inven-tors have to say” 82 (ibid.) The emphasis on the balance between understanding nature in its complexity and entirety on the one hand, and possessing the ability to create on the other, seems to be the red line running not only through the Discours, but a unifying thought of Méré’s aesthetics. The ‘pure wits’ are those who embody this rare quality and



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together they inhabit a pastoral-like ‘patrie lointaine’ far away from the false truths and artifices of the fashionable salons– a society which only the most prefect honnêtes hommes are permitted to enter .

According to Benay, this interpretation of Méré’s theory of esprit is confirmed by the critic’s growing aversion to the city, its pretentious and over-cultivated way of life, pro-fessing sympathy for the simplicity of country: “Do not believe that I am enchanted by Paris or by the Court. It seems to me that I am a citizen of the world, not unlike Socrates; and yet from time to time I turn my eyes towards my home town in the country, and perhaps it is with same tenderness which Cato felt for his homeland” 83 (31). Thus, Méré reappraises and reappropriates esprit, taking it out of the fashionable précieuse salons into the company of those unaffected by the entanglements of jeux d’esprit-riddled conversa-tion, discarding along the way both the précieuse ideal of delicate artifice as well as the dogmatic neoclassical doctrines. Of course, this radical move on Méré’s part has to be seen in the light of his incoherent and slightly contradictory theories – his aversion to the Court expressed bluntly in the above quotation can be contradicted by his equally keen appraisal of the new Court expressed in the Discours. At the same time, the vehe-ment tone of what is clearly more personal piece of writing must be acknowledged as unique within the context of the early modern French ideas on esprit and his ideas rep-resent an important body of thought and aesthetic and ideological stance which throws much-needed light on the development of the terms in question. Before exploring theo-ries of wit which were formed on the English side of the channel, I will now look into the ideas on esprit of the last proponent of the French literature of the latter part of the seventeenth century, the defender of neoclassical theory, Nicolas Boileau- Déspreaux.

2.3 Nicolas Boileau-déspreaux and the Ideal of Neoclassical Esprit

This subchapter further examines the role of esprit in the “conspiracy to protect the ineffable,” the element of allusiveness, tentativeness, almost secretiveness, and a feature which can be said to characterize the birth of the French aesthetic thought of the latter part of the seventeenth century (Borgerhoff ix). This feature is shared by esprit with the je-ne-sais-quoi of Bouhours’s theory of cultural exclusiveness as well as with the sublime which is one of the central literary-critical terms of the poetic theory of Nicolas Boileau. I will first introduce Boileau’s critical precepts and then concentrate on his two key works: Le Traité du sublime, his translation of the treatise On the Sublime by the Greek rhetorician Longinus, and his own critical masterpiece, L’Art poétique.*

Le Traité du sublime and L’Art poétique were both published in 1674 as a part of Boile-au’s two-volume Œvres diverses. They were conceived by the poet as a critical diptych and it is clear that they should be interpreted thus. I will therefore first look into the ways

*) For the sake of simplicity, I will henceforth refer to ‘Longinus’ or Pseudo-Longinus as Longinus.



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in which Boileau employed esprit in his translation of Longinus and his own poem on poetry and criticism. Next, I will provide a comparative analysis of the French text of the poem and its 1680 English translation. Boileau’s interest in the sublime in L’Art poé-tique seems to be an extension of the ideas he mediated in the translation of Longinus’s treatise. The basic premise is that nature and art are not opposed, but rather subsumed in ‘the perfect manner of sublime’; and raison is not the instrument of logic it is usually taken to be, but a means of insight and a principle of control for the creative writer. Thus esprit describes innate potential, but also creative power: it is both an inherited gift and an act of judgment. It is significant that Boileau uses both esprit and nature to translate the Greek φύσις. Other contexts of esprit will also be discussed, in particular with regard to the moral issues connected to literary criticism and production which Alexander Pope will draw from in An Essay on Criticism – his own attempt to formulate the current state of the English criticism and the rules which (ought to) guide those taking part in it.

2.3.1 Boileau as a critic

The appreciation of Boileau as an individual critic and the consequent significance as-cribed to the critical principles that he formulated has been contested at various points of the literary history. While he was perceived as a writer of low lampoons and less-than-elegant panegyrics by his own contemporaries and as a model of poetic elegance and critical perception by the eighteenth-century critics, he has dwindled to the status of a minor and rather obscure writer representing an outdated version of stilted unreality by the mid-twentieth century. Traditionally regarded as the patron saint of the French neoclassicism by its supporters, and at the same time seen as a pedant who had cramped and tethered French poetry in the shackles of rules and dry clinging to rationalism by those disfavouring the literary style, he has until recently been labelled a prosaic and pompous versifier. In either case, this old-fashioned notion of Boileau as the archpriest of a rationalist cult of rules has still not been entirely superseded or discredited.

For the purpose of my analysis of the use of the term esprit in Boileau’s criticism, I wish to adopt the viewpoint of the recent literary history, which has done a consider-able amount of work revaluating the critic’s status. In particular I share a thesis of Jules Brody whose research is directed at Boileau’s critical theories from the point of view of his ideas on the sublime, and who stresses the intuitive nature of critical perception and the neoclassical notion of reason in general, and the way in which for Boileau this intuition is linked with ‘knowledge’ in the widest sense – not so much factual knowledge as experience, wisdom, and mental vigour. The importance of reason and the rational is usually regarded as one of the key premises of the neoclassicism. Reason must be however understood in an impersonal, idealized way, as it is closely connected to the principles of vraisemblance and bienséance and is virtually included in them. It does not imply the willingness to follow a logical argument wherever it leads but rather the belief that reasoning is the instrument by which critics can establish the significance of these fundamental concepts and so lay down rules for creative writing. All this suggests that


2.3 nicolas Boileau-déspreaux and the Ideal of neoclassical Esprit

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the neoclassical doctrine can hardly be regarded as binding or monolithic as was fre-quently supposed.

In keeping with this statement, I wish to propose that Boileau, not unlike Domin-ique Bouhours, bases many of his theoretical assumptions on art of the je-ne-sais-quoi without necessarily attempting to reduce the sublime to it. For example in the Preface to the 1701 edition of his collected works, Boileau directly relates the term to the cause of aesthetic pleasure: “[i]f I am asked to say what charm or salt is, my reply will be that it is a je-ne-sais-quoi that one is able to feel much better than to express” 84 (Œuvres poé-tiques 4). Here, Boileau emphasizes the vagueness of his conception, but immediately explains that aesthetic pleasure is brought about by the first expression of a thought that everyone has had. The origin of the je-ne-sais-quoi here is not wrapped in mys-tery: it is universally acknowledged truth and, plausibly, an equally accessible ability. Boileau, then, does not follow Bouhours in his unyielding isolation of the term from the undistinguished majority, but instead displaces the aristocratic, elitist values of a minority good taste by the universal values of a ‘public’ culture. His position on the ‘nescioquiddity game’ seems to be rather negative as he chooses to adopt an ideologi-cally unbiased pose in his criticism.

As I have already demonstrated in my analysis of Bouhours’s employment of esprit in the theories of the je-ne-sais-quoi and la délicatesse, there was enough space in the neoclas-sical doctrine to accommodate matters which had little to do with jejune rules or sober rationalism. It becomes more and more conspicuous that the intuitive and indefinable played a significant role in the French theories of poetic creation and appreciation of the latter part of the seventeenth century. My analysis of Boileau’s conception of esprit and its relation to reason and the sublime will hopefully expand this hypothesis.

2.3.2 esprit in Boileau’s Translation of Le traité du sublime

Throughout the Traité du sublime Boileau uses esprit interchangeably with nature to render φύσις, Longinus’s word for “natural endowment”. But that is hardly its total meaning here. Esprit denotes native gift, as well as a capacity for awareness and restraint. Longinus wrote that “the first and most important source of sublimity” is “the power of forming great conceptions” which in Boileau’s translation became ‘certain elevation of mind which makes us think fortuitously of various things’. From here on, Boileau developed the suggestion that the mental quality basic to great writing though “certain” to exist is of an “uncertain” essence. In the ninth chapter of the treatise the burden of what Boileau was trying to make the ancient author say becomes clearer: “Elsewhere I have written as follows: ‘Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.’ Hence also a bare idea, by itself and without a spoken word, sometimes excites admiration just because of the greatness of soul implied” 85 (IX 2). The step from ‘certain’ to the je-ne-sais-quoi was natural for Boileau. The note of tentativeness which Boileau strikes both in the Traité and in discussions that grew up around it seems to characterize an inability to explain as well as genuine willingness to welcome and live with the inexplicable. Further on, dur-



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ing discussion of Homer, the Ancient poet possess ‘loftiest mind’ (‘élévation d’esprit’): “Hence sublime thoughts belong properly to the loftiest minds” and is associated with the sublime proportions: “The distance between heaven and earth – a measure, one might say, not less appropriate to Homer’s genius than to the stature of his discord”86 (IX 4). In this context, the ‘élévation d’esprit’ is used to characterize the poetic achieve-ment of Homer’s prime, the Iliad, with its impressive battle scenes, and heroic portraits of gods and men. This poem, filled with action and dramatic tension, was, in Longinus’s view, the fruit of the poet’s maturity, while the Odyssey with its emphasis on narrative and the marvelous the work of the old age. Boileau turned this proposition into an ever so slightly judgmental statement: “When we turn to the Odyssey we find occasion to observe that a great poetical genius in the decline of power which comes with old age naturally leans towards the fabulous”87 (IX 12). The idea of weakness which Boileau inserts here for no apparent reason, undergoes a rather elaborate extension as his rendering of the judgment on the Odyssey develops. Boileau seems to be suggesting that something has happened to Homer’s esprit:

[…] comme Homère composé son Iliade durant que son esprit était en sa plus grande vigueur, tout le corps de son ouvrage est dramatique et plain dèaction ; au lieu que la meilleure partie de l’Odyssée se passe en narrations, qui est le génie de la vieillesse.

[…] les génies naturellement les plus élevés tombent quelquefois dans la badinerie, quand la force de leur esprit vient à s’éteindre.

[…] les grands poètes et les écrivains célèbres, quand leur sperit manque de vigueur pour le pathétique, s’amusent ordinairement è peindre les mœurs. (IX 13-15)

In each of these three passages Boileau chooses to explain the aging poet’s decline by the loss of an inner strength which had stayed up the intense productions of his vigorous maturity. Between the erratic conduct of an aging, failing poet and the controlled, re-lentless carriage of Homer’s prime all the difference lies in the flagging of what Boileau calls esprit.

If Homer strays from the path of intensity, Boileau seems to be suggesting, it is be-cause with the decline of his esprit he was also deprived of his principle of control. By esprit Boileau seems to mean here, as in fact he often does in the Art poétique, not merely an innate potential, but an effective creative power, having as much to do with judgment as with talent or gift. This acceptation, moreover, was frequent in the seventeenth-centu-ry French cultural context. The word brought together the ideas of innate ability, taste, intellect and judgment; as Jules Brody points out, many French authors and moralists employed the term in this particular way:

Bossuet, like Descartes, used esprit for the ‘mind’ : ‘nous n’avons point de mot plus proper pour expliquer celui de νούς et de mens.’ La Fontaine opposes esprit to savoir as ‘intelligence’ or ‘taste’ to ‘learning.’ In the same way La Bruyère speaks of women and courtiers as having



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‘beaucoup d’esprit sans erudition.’ Like La Rochefoucauld he equates it also with ‘jugement’; elsewhere he considers it a creative faculty more comprehensive than talent: ‘Entre l’esprit et le talent il y a la proportion du tout à sa partie.’ Mme de Sévigné was pleased to hear Louis Bourdaloue preach on frequent communion ‘si adroitement et avec tant d’esprit.’ (Brody 59)

In making the unfaltering gait of Homer’s prime a function of his esprit Boileau seems to be suggesting that deep within the creative mind he saw a complex connivance of the natural and the intellectual, vitality and restraint. He will continue to interpret esprit in his own attempt to express principles of good writing and correct appreciation of poetry. Before analyzing the term’s role in the text of L’Art poétique, I will briefly introduce the poem in its broader context, focusing mainly on the preliminary issues of the translation as well as composition.

2.3.3 L’Art poétique: The Text and the context

L’Art poétique (1674) is a prescriptive treatise written in a highly polished, witty couplet verse. Often hailed as a modern version of Horace’s Ars Poetica, it resembles its model in form and mood as well as in the contents. The first and last of the four cantos deal with general principles of poetry and criticism and offer general advice to authors and critics; the first one including a history of the ‘Parnasse français’. The middle two cantos outline the principles of good writing in the various genres, including some (for example, son-net, rondeau, madrigal) not known to Horace. William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks describe L’Art poétique as an “amusing expansion of Aristotle and Horace to encompass the several genres […] which were countenanced by the French classicism. The poem exhibits a certain interesting Gallic bias, as of classicism nationalized, and a nicely rea-sonable wit” (Literary Criticism 235).

L’Art poétique was translated into English as The Art of Poetry by William Soames in 1680 and revised by John Dryden two years later.* Dryden replaced the examples from French literature with examples from English literature in order to make the text more accessible for his readers.** The adaptation is an attempt to find a similar pattern in English literature between approximately 1660s to 1680s similar to the pattern found by Boileau in French literature of the same period. The intention on the part of the translators to produce an English ‘poetic’ is also shown by the omission of passages irreverent to English literary con-ditions, such as verses 21 to 26 of Canto I, where hiatus, enjambment etc., are discussed. An interesting divergence from the spirit of the original can be found in the passage relat-ing to burlesque poetry, where Boileau’s point is either missed, or – far more probably – purposefully distorted. Where Boileau recommends to his fellow-poets “Imitons de Marot

*) In my subsequent analysis of the text, I will use the 1683 edition of the translation as it appeared in The Continental Model. Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Scott Elledge and Don-ald Schier, pp. 208-69.

**) In doing so, Dryden followed the practice initiated by George Etherege, Lord Buckingham, and John Oldham, all of whom chose to find English analogues to various French culture-specific references.



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l’élégant badinage, / Et laissons le burlesque aux plaisants du Pont Neuf” Dryden has “But learn from Butler the buffooning grace, / And let burlesque in ballads be employed”. While more or less authentic willingness to add the last refinements to English verse was one of the features of the English criticism of the 1680s, the tradition of satiric mode of writing, which excludes the idea of decorum and nobility of style as well as admiration to-wards satirists (in this case Samuel Butler’s Hudibras), was too strong to be subdued by the neoclassical doctrine. The two codes were irreconcilable and the French point of view had to yield to the English one. Similar liberties were taken by the translators when dealing with l’esprit and wit as I will show in the next section of this subchapter.

Drawing attention to the generic tension characteristic for works of verse criticism, Gor-don Pocock makes an interesting point when he argues that while the poem’s title could suggest it is meant as a systematic treatise setting out neo-classical doctrine, the poem itself can be read as a dramatic event (83). It is a known fact that Boileau gave readings from L’Art poétique in various salons from 1672 onwards. The poem was meant to be read aloud in the fashionable environment of the Parisian aristocratic and artistic circles. While the element of dramatic recitation was always of a great concern to Boileau, in this poem it is crucially important. At the outset of the text, Boileau seems to be insisting that to write well the poet must possess not only “native poetic potential (génie), which is not entirely rare,” but some other ability, which is considerably more difficult to find: “a secret source of poetic effectiveness which is extremely rare.” Much of L’Art Poétique revolves around this indefinable centre, which is felt for the first time in the proposition in lines 3-5, between ‘influence secrètè’ and ‘genié’: “If at the Birth the Stars that rul’d thy Sence / Shone not with a Poetic Influence : / In thy strait Genius thou wilt still be bound” 88 (ll. 3-5).

Another significant issue concerning the composition of L’Art poétique is the question of the interplay of the intellectual with the moral. The stress on the guiding power of rea-son (la raison, le bon sens) and its necessary dominance over the poetic devices (la rime) is put forward by the poet very early in the Canto I: “What-e’re you write of Pleasant or Sublime, /Always let sense accompany your Rhyme ; / Falsely they seem each other to oppose ; / Rhyme must be made with Reason’s Laws to close / And when to conquer her you bend your force, /The Mind will Triumph in the Noble Course” (ll. 27-32). Reason for Boileau and his contemporaries was not a calculating attitude of mind, nor yet the analytical and critical, generalizing and abstracting reason of philosophers, but rather the Cartesian reason which directs the human soul and distinguishes true from false. This is the meaning of the term which Boileau uses to culminate this passage in, creating what has since his times become practically proverbial couplet in French:

To Reason’s yoke she [rhyme] quickly will incline,Which, far from hurting, renders her Divine:But, if neglected, will as easily stray,And Master Reason, which she should obey.Love Reason then : and let what e’re you WriteBorrow from her its Beauty, Force, and Light.89

(ll. 33-8)



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This mapping out of the power relations allows Boileau to smoothly connect the intellect-ruled poetic abilities and the ethical imperative. Further on in the Canto I, the lack of sense or knowledge of the proper way of writing, is discussed in the language of ethics: “Observe the Language well in all you Write, / And swerve not from it in your loftiest flight. /The smoothest Verse, and the exactest Sence / Displease us, if ill English give offence : / A barb’rous Phrase no Reader can approve” 90 (ll. 155-9). A clumsily composed phrase is ‘vicieux’ and the list of the offences continues with adjectives like ‘orgueilleux’ (proud) and ‘méchant’ (evil) for a bad writer (ll. 160-2). Literary faults are moral errors, the result of lack of self-knowledge: “But Authors that themselves too much esteem, / Lose their own Genius, and mistake their Theme” 91 (ll.19-20). The moral quality of intellectual clarity comes out most forcefully in lines 147-54 of Canto I, with their attack on those who cannot think straight. The clinching line is celebrated: “What we conceive, with ease we can express”92 (l. 153). The appeal for moral self-scrutiny and call for self-knowledge does not involve an author exclu-sively, but is presented as a communal activity: “[…] find you faithful Friends that will reprove, / That on your Works may look with careful Eyes, / And of your Faults be zealous Enemies : / Lay by an Author’s Pride and Vanity, / And from a Friend a Flat-terer descry”93 (ll. 186-90).

2.3.4 Use of Esprit in L’Art poétique

As I have already mentioned, the English translation of the poem was rather loose in its replacement of the French authors with the English ones. Scott Elledge and Donald Sch-ier even suggest that it is more appropriate to call it an adaptation rather than a transla-tion (The Continental Model 385). From the point of view of the term which lies at the centre of my interest and the way it was handled by the translators the term adaptation is certainly much more appropriate as a very non-orthodox approach was employed by Soames and Dryden with regard to its translation.

The term esprit appears thirty eight times in L’Art poétique while there are only twenty four occurrences of ‘wit’ in the English translation. Esprit is in fact more often translated as ‘mind’ (six times) than as ‘wit’ (five times). For example “L’esprit rassasié le rejette à l’instant” is “The Mind once satisfi’d, is quickly cloy’d” (l. 62); “L’esprit à la trouver aisément s’habitue” is “The Minds will Triumph in the Noble Course” (l. 32); “Sans rien dire à l’esprit, étourdir les oreilles” is “Confound my Ears, and not instruct my Mind” (l. 36); “L’esprit n’est point ému de ce qu’il ne croit pas” (l. 50) is “The mind’s not mov’d, if your Discourse be vain” (l. 51); “L’esprit ne se sent point plus vivement frappe” (l. 57) becomes “The mind is most agreeably surprised” (l. 55); and “Tout prend un corps, une ame, un esprit, un visage” (l. 64) is “All must assume a Body, Mind, and Face” (l. 163). There are often instances where esprit or its modifications are transformed into various expressions; for example bel esprit becomes ‘charming Poetry’ (l. 8); esprit is ‘Weight’ (l. 12), ‘Authors’ (l. 19), ‘Writer’ (l. 147), ‘Reader’ (l. 159), ‘l’esprit phlegmatique’ (l. 72) is ‘cold Rhyme’ (l. 73).



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As James H. Jensen points out, Dryden uses ‘wit’ in his translation to express several things. First, to describe an inventive man with a copious fancy – such a person’s abilities can make him anyone from an urbane, polite conversationalist to a great poet. In this sense, he uses ‘wit’ or ‘wits’ as the translation for poète, auteur, ‘les plus savants auteurs’, ‘un sublime écrivain’, ‘noble esprit’, and ‘comic wit’ (poet) for ‘le comique’. In the sense of invention, fancy, and expression, fused with judgment, as for example perceived in a finished work, it is the faculty which controls or orders. In The Art of Poetry ‘la noble hardiessse’ (“la noble hardiesse des plus beaux vers”) as well as the expression ‘rêveries’ become ‘wit’. Also, “l’agréable et le fin” is translated as ‘wit’ and the sentence “Horace a cette aigreur mêla son enjoument” (l. 152) is “Horace his pleasing wit to this did add” (l. 147) (A Glossary of John Dryden’s Critical Terms, 5).

In the poem, Boileau clearly employs esprit in multiple senses which often contradict each other and contrast intuitive creative power with judgement and restraint. In fact, similarly wide scope of esprit’s meaning characterizes Boileau’s own creative writing. Susan W. Tieffenbrun drew attention to the highly expressive way in which the author renders the complex duality of the term in the ninth of the twelve poems which con-stitute Les Satires, a collection of twelve highly topical satirical poems. The two aspects of the creative mind are actually severed and personified in order to engage in a dia-logue which strikingly resembles the classical Freudian patterns of ego and superego interaction. In it the restraining superego of a satirist suffers in his awareness of his own sterile power as a poet and a social critic is confronted by the rash and intuitive esprit-ego. The courageous and swift esprit-ego is finally won over and silenced by the super-ego’s cautious pleading, but only after the pragmatic super-ego turns the discus-sion to the subject of the King, with whom the Satires began in the form of the Discours au Roy. Representing the ultimate, divine authority, “Louis incarnates for the esprit-ego the sole truly legitimate subject to which he can in good conscience address his verse, since the King, unlike the rest of the audience, is certain to comprehend and appreci-ate his work in the spirit in which it was created” (Tieffenbrun 683).

In my analysis, I was able to locate four different meanings of esprit in the poem. The two meanings identified by Tieffenbrun in Les Satires relate to the author’s mind: the first, the esprit-as-ego is the one which instigates the poetic action; it is creative but often without restraint and rational judgment while the other, the esprit-as-superego is rational and keeps the ego in place while depending on its creative energy. In fact, although Tief-fenbrun does not make it explicit, it is clear that they depend on each other and only together can they produce poetry. Thus the super-ego is invoked by Boileau at the outset of the poem where some ground rules are laid down for potential poets: “Ni prendre pour genie un amour de rimer :/Craignez d’un vain plaisir les trompeuses amorces, /Et consultez longtemps votre esprit et vos forces” (Do not mistake for genius the desire to rhyme: / Fear the deceitful baits of vain pleasures, / And consult well your wit and abilities”) (ll.10-2). In the very next line there is an example of the esprit-as-ego, serving as a warning to those authors who fall under the spell of their own ego and vain pride: “Mais souvent un esprit qui se flatte et qui s’aime, / Méconnaît son génie et s’ignore soi-même” (But often a wit who flatters himself and who himself loves / Misjudges his



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genius and does not know his own self”) (ll.19-20). Here, once again, the artistic failures are closely linked to the social and ethical ones. The stress on reason and sense can be identified in the following lines as well, where they are needed to supervise the creative powers “[q]ue toujours le bon sens s’accorde avec le rime; / L’un l’autre vainement ils semblent se haïr; / La rime est une esclave , et ne doit qu’obéir. /Lorsqu’à la bien chercher d’abord on s’évertue, / L’esprit à la trouver aisément s’habitue” (“so that good sense always agrees with rhyme; / They seem to hate each other only, / Rhyme is a slave, and should but obey. / While one strives hard searching for it, / The mind will learn to find it easily”) (ll. 28-32). Unchecked by reason and good sense, the esprit-as-ego suc-cumbs to the false beauties of verbal creativity.

However, esprit should be present not only in the author, but is equally important in a reader. Here too, it can assume the form of a restrained and restraining appre-ciative ability with taste for balance and the rational or of an exuberant and shallow mind favouring the excessive and frivolous. As Boileau continues to explore the theme of interconnectedness of the aesthetical and ethical requirements in author, he con-demns the ‘barren superfluity’94 of the précieux (ll. 49-60). Such writing is not welcome as “[l]’esprit rassasié le rejette à l’instant” (The mind once satisfied quickly rejects it”) (l. 62). Still, the formal aspect of poetry cannot be ignored either. Stressing the regularity of rhyme and mellifluous vocabulary, the critic also exhorts that the author “[f]uyez des mauvais sons le concour odiex : / Le vers le mieux rempli, la plus noble pensée / Ne peut plaire à l’esprit quand l’oreille est blessée” (Avoid odious noise of the unpleasant sound: / The verse can be infused with most noble ideas, but still will not please the mind, if it hurts the ear”)(ll. 110-2). Without having to make it more obvious, the readers (or Boileau’s audiences) understood that the esprit here is of the kind which can appreciate the balanced poetic creation in which lies the basis of true wit. A similar image of confounded ears and neglected mind can be found in Canto III where Boileau describes how a badly-written play (“a mass of ill-joined miracles”) “says nothing to the mind, and deafens the ears” (l. 36).

Apart from these meanings esprit can also stand for simply ‘mind’ in the sense a seat of mental activity. It is the only meaning of the term in Boileau which does not seem to have any – positive or negative – connotations. This ‘neutral’ sense of esprit is appears several times in the poem, for example in Canto III where Boileau describes the rules for composing a perfect piece of heroic poetry: “Là pour nous enchanter tout est mis en usage; / Tout prend un corps, une âme, un esprit, un visage” (ll. 163-4). In this case, Dryden’s translation is fairly accurate: “Here fiction must employ its utmost grace, / All must assume a body, mind, and face” (ll. 162-3). Similarly, the lines “[l]’Evangile à l’esprit n’offre de tous côtes” (l. 201) is translated as “The Gospel offers nothing to our thoughts,” (l. 200) is more or less accurate, with esprit having a neutral charge as “thoughts.” A few lines later, a similar phrase “[l]a fable offre à l’esprit mille agréments divers” meaning ‘the fable offers to the mind thousands diverse pleasures” (l. 237) is translated as “In fable we a thousand pleasures see” (l. 236). Occasionally esprit can mean the mental activity itself, as for example in the line 340: “Aux accès insolence d’une bouffonne joie, / La saggesse, l’esprit, l’honneur, furent en proie” – here the term can



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assume a meaning ranging from mental activity as such to the appreciative term signify-ing an exceptional quality of the activity.

Commenting on character delineation in comedy in Canto III Boileau writes: “La nature, féconde en bizzares portraits, / Dans chaque âme est marquée à de differents traits; / Un geste la découvre, un rien la fait paroître. / Mais tout esprit n’a pas des yeux pour la connoître” (ll. 369-72). Here, esprit is a part of a commonplace metaphor typical for the seventeenth century. The idea that mind had eyes in fact served think-ers from Plato onward and it denoted a privileged, suprasensual “vision,” which was implicit all along in Boileau’s injunction to “open eyes” to Reason’s light. Reason as a kind of intellectual sense examines things through the eye of the mind. Involved in the last quoted lines, then, is a sensitivity to nuance, a flair for rightness, which is noth-ing else than Reason.

Esprit can also signify a person or, by extension, a certain social status. At the be-ginning of Canto I Boileau identifies his target audience and their aspirations with an early warning: “O vous donc qui, brûlant d’une ardeur périlleuse, /Courez du bel esprit la carrier épienuse” (ll. 7-8). By Dryden and Soames this is translated as “You, then, that burn with a desire to try / The dangerous course of charming poetry.” However, a less loose translation of the lines would be “You who, burning with a dan-gerous desire, /Embark on the thorny journey of a true wit,” making the warning for all those who want to take part in the salon life of the French high society much more obvious: You are about to enter a world which, although glittering and full of easy glamour on the surface, is in reality filled with hidden obstacles for those who want to conquer it.

The meanings of esprit employed by Boileau I identified in the poem demonstrate that the term covered an extensive scope of conceptual nuances, ranging from neutral descriptive one to both positive and negative denotations of abilities of appreciation and composition of poetry. While Boileau does not make esprit the central critical term of his text, it nevertheless constitutes an indispensable critical platform on which he can build his main aesthetic theory of good versus bad taste both in authors and readership and audience.

2.3.5 Boileau’s Reception in England

In terms of general impact of Boileau’s œuvre magistrale, the poem spurred a series of similar efforts within a few years after the publication of the Soames-Dryden adaptation. The first wave was represented by three most notable texts: Rochester’s Allusion to the Tenth Satire of Horace (1680), the Essay upon Poetry by John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave (1682), and translation of Horace’s Ars poetica by Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon as well as his Essay on Translated Verse (1684); the second wave included Epistle to a Friend (1700) by Samuel Wensley, and Essay on Unnatural Flights in Poetry (1701) by George Granville, and of course Essay on Criticism (1711) by Alexander Pope. I will deal with the comparison of Boileau’s and Pope’s theories of esprit and wit respectively later; as far as



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the above-mentioned attempts are concerned, it will suffice to say that, unlike Pope who stood apart from the tradition and the crowd, they are all full of commonplaces, of the authors themselves as well as of others.

In this chapter, texts of three French critics – Dominique Bouhours, chevalier de Méré and Nicolas Boileau were analyzed in order to demonstrate how these authors employed the term esprit. I demonstrated that in all of the three authors’ theories, the concept has variety of usages beyond the boundaries of verbal or literary sphere of culture. Unlike Bouhours and Méré, who merge the literary and the social contexts of esprit, Boileau sees the two as necessary and equally valuable ingredients in an outstanding work of literary art which possesses the quality.

Presenting esprit as one of elements of the French aesthetical theories, I also wished to explore how the term interacts with other critical concepts, in particular the sublime and the je-ne-sais-quoi. Here, the je-ne-sais-quoi should be seen as the object of competing discourses: in the mouth of Méré, it serves for instance to register judgments of social incongruity (the pretensions of a scholar to honnêteté); Boileau uses it to denote the par-ticular quality of literary work that satisfies ‘the general taste of mankind’, a quality he interprets as the expression of an idea that everyone must have had, in a form that seizes their attention. On the other hand, the extensive discussion in Bouhours’s Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugene emphasizes the omnipresence of the je-ne-sais-quoi – in nature, art, and even divine grace – and seems to be aimed at preserving mystery as a means to sustain-ing the ideal of harmonious conversation. I will now continue my reading of the early modern ideas on wit by looking at the theories of three selected English critics of the latter half of the seventeenth century and analyzing their works in order to determinate the significance and specific uses they ascribed to wit.



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3 true and False Wit: Dryden, pope, and Addison

Wit’s now arrived to a more high degree;

Our native language more refined and free.

Our ladies and our men now speak more wit,

Than all the former age of poets writ.

John Dryden, Epilogue to The Conquest of Grenada (1669)

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out

whatever came earlier; in the hope of reacting at last

a point that could be called a true present,

a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Paul De Man, Literary History and Literary Modernity (1970)

In this chapter I will examine the works of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison with respect to wit, tracing the term’s development in their writings. While concentrating on Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy, Pope’s Essay on Criticism, and Addi-son’s Spectator series of essays on wit, I will also include some of their other critical texts. Because all three authors are traditionally considered to be the most significant critical authorities of the period between 1660 and 1720, I will provide a short overview of the nature of the Restoration and the early eighteenth-century English criticism. As we will see, the nature of the contemporary criticism interacts to a great degree with the way wit was employed by the selected authors.

I particularly look to explore the ways the term developed in each author’s under-standing as a part of the contemporary critical terminology, with its gradually changing meaning and as a part of the culture’s self-identifier through which society denoted its own differences from past times and expectations for future. Using this double signified-signifier approach, I hope to arrive at a more complex portrait of wit during its prime time. While I will make en passant comparisons among the individual English authors’ conceptions of wit, a comparative analysis of the English and French authors will provide a conclusion to this chapter.

The literary (or in Dryden’s case dramatic) criticism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has not enjoyed much attention or appreciation on the part of


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modern scholars. Many remarks have been made by modern critics regarding the unsta-ble nature of Restoration criticism. I believe that J. E. Spingarn is right when he states that “seventeenth-century criticism is really a very troubled stream; winds from every quarter blow across its surface; currents from many springs and tributaries struggle for mastery within it” (Spingarn, I cvi). A similar view is held by Robert Hume who claims that “the Restoration is not an intellectually homogeneous period. Its temper – if it is possible to speak of such thing – must be seen as an inharmonious blend of incongru-ous elements” (Hume, Dryden’s Criticism 176). I agree with Hume and Spingarn that the Restoration is a transitional period and that critical texts of John Dryden mirrors his intellectual milieu to a remarkable degree.

3.1 John dryden and Vagaries of Restoration Wit

In this subchapter, I will explore the usage of the term wit in the critical works of John Dryden. To understand how Dryden employs the term, I will first examine the nature of his critical oeuvre, which, as was already mentioned in the introduction, has been under a more or less constant attack of modern critics. While trying to justify Dryden against the widespread charges of cavalier inconsistency and critical carelessness, I wish to prove that his employment of the term wit has suffered from similarly unfair misinterpreta-tion and accusation of haphazard treatment and apparent contradictions. Furthermore, considered within the context of the contemporary literary criticism, his employment of critical terminology – and in particular that of French provenance – should cast some light on his usage of the term in question.

3.1.1 The Specifics of dryden’s critical Style and Terminology

Robert Hume contends that Dryden’s criticism was not of the typically neoclassical pro-scriptive kind, and suggests dividing his criticism into three types, even though he acknowl-edges that such categories are far from absolute. The first type is prescriptive criticism (e.g. “The Grounds of Criticism today”), the second is speculative (Essay of Dramatick Poesy) and the last type is explanatory (the vast majority of his critical efforts) (Robert Hume, Dryden’s Criticism 6-7). He counters George Watson who thought Dryden’s criticism was most of all prescriptive, and asserts that Watson “underemphasizes the transitional nature of Dryden’s work” (Dryden’s Criticism 24). Hume characterizes Dryden’s criticism as fol-lows: “To look for a tidy pattern in the development of Dryden’s criticism is ultimately pointless. He never tried to work out a formal aesthetic, and his comments on the practice of criticism amount to no more than some scattered commonplaces” (6). Dryden is much keener to examine the possibilities of resolving specific literary problems (such as details of language, plot, characters, theatrical conventions, etc.) than attempting to deal with ab-


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stract issues, which make him uncomfortable.* H. James Jensen refers to Dryden’s style as ‘rambling’ and considers it to be the reason why the author never systematically developed a work or theory of criticism to any length, and his discussions of particular subjects, as well as why many of his great critical statements, occurred in isolated passages, and often in momentary digressions. As a result, one passage can seldom represent Dryden’s over-all views on a subject and – in Jensen’s words “he will cheerfully deny at one time what he confidently affirmed two years earlier” (4).

In addition to the nature of Dryden’s criticism, we need to consider his unique concep-tion of critical terminology. In parallel to the aversion towards abstract topics, his dislike of technical terms, such as those used in rhetorical textbooks, led Dryden to come up with terms that were frequented in cultivated circles of aristocracy, or the critical words which came from French, the polite language of precise and sophisticated criticism. Thus Dryden’s critical terms usually have both general and specific meanings. His use of French meanings for English equivalents can sometimes be misleading or puzzling depending on whether the French or the English meaning might apply or whether an English meaning is quite different from the French. For example, “point” cannot be understood without knowledge of the meanings of the French pointe. Dryden’s ‘point of wit’ is “a thought which surprizes with a certain subtlety of imagination, a kind of word play” 95 (Cayrou 674). A ‘point’ thus must be regarded as rhetorical rather than emotional. Dryden’s use of ‘spir-it’ also cannot be understood without knowledge of the various meanings of esprit. Still, ‘spirit’ is, as we have seen in a previous chapter, such a complex term that in some areas neither the French nor the English meanings are in a total agreement with Dryden’s use. One of the meanings of ‘spirit’ is similar to ‘genius’, to the indefinable essence of a great work of art, and thus to the conception of Bouhours’s je-ne-sais-quoi, at least after 1671.**

Analyzing the nature of the Restoration criticism, Paul D. Cannan suggests that “part of the reason these critics seem to flounder so much is because they are searching for a critical voice” (19). Seen in the light of this explanation, Dryden’s criticism cannot be dismissed as a product of a muddled mind, which seems to have been a suggestion on the part of many modern scholars. However, there have been other, more helpful, explana-tions. George Watson suggests that Dryden’s inconsistency can be accounted for by a com-bination of ‘a sense of tact’ and the influence of scepticism, the most powerful stream of the contemporary philosophy (60), while Michael Gelber contends it was a reflection of Dryden’s “attempt to bring his theories into harmony with his art” (3). In his study of Dryden’s theory of comedy Frank Harper Moore also notes the now nearly notorious claim of modern literary historians that Dryden’s critical opinions are a sign of amateurish insouciance. Moore defends Dryden, explaining that “these changes constitute a reasoned

*) Comparing the English and French dramatic criticism of that period, Gunnar Sorelius makes a similar claim, saying the English criticism was “much more pragmatic and empirical than that of France. Restora-tion critics – […] almost all of them [being] also dramatists in their own right – show great awareness and understanding of the practical needs of the theatre” (‘The Giant Race Before the Flood’: Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration, 31).

**) One of Dryden’s notable paraphrases from Bouhours’s “Je ne sais quoi” appears in his dedication of Am-boyna, one of his less notable dedications.



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development of his theory; they are the products not of inconsistency and insincerity but of open-mindedness and continued interest” (10). I am inclined to agree with Gelber and Moore rather than with Watson and I develop their line of argument and defence of Dryden furthermore with a claim that this gradual transition should be seen as a reflection of the changing taste as well as the force which changes the taste as I will manifest in the following part of this subchapter.

Dryden might have felt a similar unease towards wit – a word which was perused very frequently in the Restoration criticism, and which often denoted the struggle of writers, playwrights and philosophers to voice new ideas or reformulate old ones. C. S. Lewis finds those attempts “amusing evidences of the word’s drift towards its dangerous sense” (Lewis, Studies in Words 100) and he offers a – hardly unintentionally simplified – over-view of contemporary ideas on the term:

1650: Davenant, describing something ‘which is not, yet is accompted, Wit’, includes in it ‘what are commonly called Conceits, things that sound like the knacks or toyes of ordi-nary Epigrammatists’.

1664: Flecknoe warns us that wit must not include ‘clenches (puns), quibbles, gingles, and such like trifles’.

1667: Dryden tells us that wit does not consist of ‘the jerk or sting of an epigram nor the seem-ing contradiction of a poor antithesis...nor the jingle of a more poor paronomasia’.

1668: Shadwell corrects those ignorant people who believed ‘that all the Wit in Playes con-sisted in bringing two persons upon the Stage to break Jests, and to bob one another, which they call Repartie’.

1672: Dryden classifies ‘clenches’ as ‘The lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’.1700: Dryden says that ‘the vulgar judges ... call conceits and jingles wit’. (Studies in Words 100-101)

In fact, all these are attempts at defining what wit is or should be by means of elimina-tion of the undesired elements. Paul Hammond’s labelling of the Restoration as ‘the age of unstable vocabulary’ should not be understood then as a euphemism for a period in which people would comfortably “slip in and out of the different meanings [of the word] without noticing it” as C. S. Lewis suggests. Rather, I propose to regard it as a period of wit’s pendency; a period of tentative, not “tactical” definitions (103). The “amusing evidences” may appear less amusing and more instructing when seen as proofs of a com-plex situation in a period, where wit started to gradually lose its clear, well-established connotations and became increasingly problematic as well as useful for its users.

John Dryden, as one of the chief shapers of the Restoration literary production, pro-duced his texts, artistic as well as critical, according to the current taste (and, also, often with regard to his financial situation) which changed rather quickly in the course of the late seventeenth century. One of Dryden’s first poems “Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings”, written in 1649 when the future Poet Laureate was about eighteen years old, pays tribute to the then decaying Metaphysical wit consisting of shocking images and a ceaseless flow of conceits:



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Was there no milder way but the Small Pox,The very Filth’ness of Pandora’s Box?So many Spots, like naeves, our Venus soil?One Jewel set off with so many a Foil?Blisters with pride swell’d; which th’row’s flesh did sproutLike Rose-buds, stuck i’ th’Lily-skin about.Each little Pimple had a Tear in it,To wail the fault its rising did commit:Who, Rebel-like, with their own Lord at strife,Thus made an Insurrection ‘gainst his Life.Or were these Gems sent to adorn his Skin,The Cab’net of a richer Soul within?No Comet need foretell his Change drew on,Whose Corps might seem a Constellation. (ll. 53-66)

The bizarre metaphorisation, awkward elision and harsh sounds contribute to the general unevenness of the poem in which the Metaphysical wit reached its last stage of every fashion-excess bringing out irritation from the audience. The general movement of poetics was towards a more regular rhythm, even lines and natural accents in the style of Edmund Waller and others. Wit found its new station in the heroic couplet, which Dryden mastered in his MacFlecknoe nearly thirty years later after this slightly morbid elegy. In Mac Flecknoe (written 1672, published 1682), wit’s satirical lashings reveal its potential for slanderousness and profanity which were soon to become its own ruin. The poem satirizes Thomas Shadwell, “a Whig, Protestant and dully moralistic dramatist” who was Dryden’s successor in the office of Poet Laureate. In the poem, Shadwell is to succeed one Richard Flecknoe, a minor poet and Dryden’s adversary, as “Prince of Nonsense” (imaginary equivalent to the function of Poet Laureate). Flecknoe praises his follower’s potential in these famously satirical lines:

Sh[adwell] alone my perfect image bears,Mature in dullness for his tender years.Sh[adwell] alone, of all my Sons, is heWho stands confirm’d in full stupidity.The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,But Sh[adwell] never deviates into sense.Some beams of Wit on other souls may fall,Strike through and make a lucid interval;But Sh[adwell]’s genuine night admits no ray,His rising Fogs prevail upon the Day; (The Works of John Dryden, II. 54)



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The antithetical turns upon the maturity of dullness, the strength of stupidity, and the inability to deviate into sense all show wit’s ability to combine the comic and the intellectual. The gradual change of attitude towards wit can be detected not only when Dryden uses wit as a working tool, but when he thinks about the word as a part of critical vocabulary. Judson D. Milburn summarizes this development as follows:

When [Dryden] was most enthusiastic toward wit, his aim was to ‘please’ or ‘delight’ first, and then to ‘instruct’. By 1677 he had reversed these aims, for now comedy aimed first to instruct delightfully. In 1700 he was apologizing for having placed pleasure before instruction. The same shift is evident in his opinion of wit. Whereas he had early emphasized the importance of the secret graces which violated the rules, by the mid-eighties he was stressing propriety and decorum. (264)

Still, in the poem, Dryden defends wit against humour. With it he attacks Shadwell’s humour, his farcical ‘humour characters’. Shadwell declares his lineage from Jonson, but Jonson’s satire of humour characters has by now degenerated into Shadwell’s meaning-less laughter, laughter for its own sake. As Ronald Paulson suggests, Dryden presumes that wit operates “more efficiently on these figures then the mere representation of ‘the follies and extravagances of Bedlam’. He makes wit normative in a satire of humor; the poet’s wit provides the “bite” that Shadwell’s humor so notably lacks” (46).

The fact that Dryden was able to produce several, sometimes opposing, definitions of wit should not be interpreted as a proof of literary double-dealing or carelessness. Dif-ferent contexts of wit called for different definitions, just as new genres and changing tastes of the times did. John Sitter stresses the dialogical nature of Dryden’s most famous definition:

If we take Dryden at his words, that wit ‘is a propriety of words and thoughts; [...]’ – we have a definition that happily refuses to separate wit from words and conversation. And in this sense, making the barest historical allowance for the fussiness that would later attach to ‘pro-priety’ and ‘elegantly’, Dryden’s wit is clearly related to the conversation of English-speaking human beings ever since. (85)

The emphasis on the social, dialogical aspect of the notion specifies wit’s function in late seventeenth century English culture and at the same time endangers its position as an easily identified synonym for either mental qualities or its verbal product. It transfers wit from the ever so slightly secluded realm of philosophical categories or rhetorical figures of speech into the dangerously unstable sphere of social interaction, with its ceaselessly changing tastes, sensibilities and ideologies. In the following part of this subchapter I will examine with Dryden’s more or less isolated statements concerning wit in his critical texts will be examined. By contextualizing them, I hope to demonstrate that Dryden’s attitude towards wit was not a result of his “muddled mind”, but rather a self-conscious attempt to deal with various themes and questions posed by the literary practice of the changing late seventeenth-century English culture.



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3.1.2 The Beginnings: the essay of Dramatick poesy

Essay of Dramatick Poesy – written 1665, published 1668 – is an example of explanatory criticism according to Hume’s categorization. It has a form of a dialogue on dramatic practice between four speakers: Eugenius (meant to represent Lord Buckhurst, Dryden’s patron), Crites (Sir Robert Howard, a dramatist and Dryden’s son in law), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sedley), and Neander (meaning ‘new man’ – a hint that Dryden, a member of the gentry class, is entitled to join in this dialogue on par with the three men who are both older and his social superiors).

The four friends discuss three topics: The relative merit of classical drama (upheld by Crites) as opposed to modern drama (championed by Eugenius); whether French drama, as Lisideius maintains, is better than English drama (supported by Neander, who famously calls Shakespeare ‘the greatest soul, ancient or modern’); and the question of whether plays in rhyme are an improvement upon blank verse drama – a proposition that Neander, despite having defended the Elizabethans, now advances against the scep-tical Crites (who also switches from his original position and defends the blank verse tradition of Elizabethan drama). In reality, it is closer to six set speeches arranged in three pairs than to a dialogue in the Platonic sense, as George Watson rightly observes (40). Crites argues for the Ancients, Eugenius for the Moderns; Lisideius cries up the French drama, Neander the English; Crites defends blank verse, Neander rhyme. The inflexibility of the dialogue, which is deliberate according to Watson as well as Hume (Watson 41, Hume, Dryden’s Critcism 48), provides a not very dynamic platform for an authentic discussion, but is a rather fixed medium in which topics are merely displayed. Indeed, Dryden makes no attempt to argue the issues out, arrive at compromises or spot overlapping parts of the speakers’ positions.

Dryden does not attempt to formulate a definition of wit in the essay. However, he uses the word in the first dialogue mainly as a key term in distinguishing the achieve-ments of the drama of his own days from the playwrights of the past age, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. He, then, does not employ or explore the term as a signified, but rather as a signifier, whose signified – for the time being – is left com-fortably undefined. The most important feature of this signifier is its ability to denote the measure of improvement and refinement of language and conversation between the age of Shakespeare, Fletcher and Jonson and Dryden’s own times:

But, that you may know how much you are indebted to those your masters, and be ashamed to have so ill requited them, I must remember you that all the rules by which we practise the drama at this day, either such as relate to the justness and symmetry of the plot; or the episodi-cal ornaments, such as descriptions, narrations, and other beauties, which are not essential to the play; were delivered to us from the observations that Aristotle made, of those poets, which either lived before him, or were his Contemporaries: we have added nothing of our own, ex-cept we have the confidence to say our wit is better; which none boast of in our age, but such as understand not theirs. (Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I 27)



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But he also talks about wit in terms of superiority of comedy of wit versus the Jonso-nian comedy of humours, stating: “I think him [Jonson] the most learned and judicious Writer which any Theater ever had. He was a most severe Judge of himself as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it” (Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I 69).

As mentioned in the first chapter, Dryden’s intellectual environment was an example of the tumultuous mixture of the influences of French classicism and contemporary Eng-lish ideas. For Dryden, the Ancients as well as more recent predecessors were the bibli-cal race of giants before the flood indeed, but he was not ready to bow before them in a gesture of self-deprecation. His ruminations of Shakespeare, Jonson and others betray a confidence which was an important feature of the Restoration culture.

3.1.3 Annus Mirabilis and Beyond: Theory Expounded

As has already been pointed out, Dryden’s own definitions of the term have often been found inadequate and confusing. They were so for his contemporaries, too, and even caused a “prefatory war” with Thomas Shadwell, a minor Restoration playwright. The source of the confrontation was Dryden’s assertion in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie that Jonson’s wit falls short of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher. Dryden was not at-tacking Jonson then, however; he was using his example to argue for the superiority of the English drama over the French. But Shadwell mistook those comments as an affront to Jonson and his own dramatic practice, and as shameless self-promotion of Dryden’s comedy of wit. In the preface to his play The Sullen Lovers (1668), he accused Dryden of emphasizing wit at the expense of character. Dryden took up the opportunity to answer this accusation in the preface to An Evening’s Love (1671), where he described Ben Jon-son’s plays as pleasant: “[…] but that pleasantness was not properly wit, or the sharpness of conceit, but the natural imitation of folly” (148).

In this explication, we are beginning to see that Dryden’s employment of the term indeed has to be considered within the actual literary context. In this particular place, ‘sharpness of conceit’ indicates the emphasis upon liveliness as distinct from the apt and perfect description of ‘natural imitation’; but this is emphasis only. A year later Dryden writes about Ben Jonson in the Defence of the Epilogue that

the most judicious of poets, he always writ properly, and as the character required; and I will not contest farther with my friends who call that wit: it being very certain that even folly itself, well represented, is wit in a larger signification; and that there is fancy, as well as judgment, in it, though not so much or noble […] (178)

For Dryden wit had to include both judgment and fancy in order to produce authentic artistic value. This can be traced in fact as early as 1667, when he published the poem Annus Mirabilis. In the preface, he describes “the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem” as “some lively and apt description […] such […] that it sets before your eyes the



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absent object as perfectly, and more delightfully, than nature” (98). This specific defini-tion is preceded by a lengthier, yet more general definition of wit, which takes into ac-count its two different aspects:

The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet, or wit-writing (if you will give me leave to use a school distinction) is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after: or, without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent. Wit written is that which is well designed, the happy result of thought, or product of imagination. (97-8)

As John Sitter contends, this definition of wit is Dryden’s “most striking and most complicated” because it first proposes “a twofold distinction between “wit writing” and “wit written” and then merges these into a threefold description of “imagination” (Sitter, 79). “Wit writing” in this dichotomy is the process, while “wit written” is the result and as Sitter observes, “wit written” “will turn out to be the wit of most of Dryden’s discussions, where it becomes, simply, “a propriety of thoughts and words” (80).

However, other critics find definitions like this one wanting. The failure of such defini-tion, as David Wykes points out in his study Preface to Dryden, is that it seems too general, as does Dryden’s later notorious definition penned in ‘The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence, prefaced to The State of Innocence’ (1677): “a propriety of thoughts and words” (Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I 207). In fact Dryden himself was aware of the vagueness of his account, and he attempted to narrow down the definition by explaining what wit is not in the preface to Annus Mirabilis:

But to proceed from wit, in the general notion of it, to the proper wit of an heroic or histori-cal poem; I judge it chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging of persons, actions, passions, or things. It is not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis (the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme) nor the jingle of a more poor Paronomasia; neither is it so much the morality of a grave sentence, affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil. (Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I 98)

Dryden proceeds by presenting a positive definition: “[...] it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent ob-ject, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature,” which finally becomes “wit is a pro-priety of thoughts and words or, in other terms, thoughts and words elegantly adapted to the subject” (I 207). Dryden continues by elaborating on the topic of the nature of the creative act of poetry – one of the very few passages in all of his critical writing, where abstract criticism is not interrupted by some practical advice:

So then the first happiness of the poet’s imagination is properly invention or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought, as the judgment represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and



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adorning that thought, so found and varied, in apt, significant, and sounding words: the quick-ness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression. […]This is the proper wit of dialogue or discourse, and consequently of the drama, where all that is said is to be supposed the effect of sudden thought; which, though it excludes not the quickness of wit in repartees, yet admits not a too curious election of words, too frequent al-lusions, or use of tropes, or, in fine, anything that shows remoteness of thought or labour in the writer. (98-9)

In the relatively late ‘To the Right Honourable My Lord Radcliffe’ prefixed to Exa-men poeticum: Being the Third Part of Miscellany Poems (1693) Dryden’s discussion of wit takes the form once again of a comparison between poets – Ovid, and, among others, Virgil. “If wit be pleasantry,” Dryden says, “he [Ovid] has it to excess; but if it be propri-ety, Lucretius, Horace, and, above all, Virgil are his superiors” (II 163). Here, Dryden’s doubts concerning wit’s true nature come to the surface most clearly. Edward Pechter comments: “The implied doubt of the if-subjunctive constructions illustrates once again Dryden’s open-mindedness. Wit may and should be seen as residing in both pleasantry and in propriety. Dryden’s comparison does not reject one poet or the other” (Pechter 26). I would like to extend this assumption by adding that, just as Dryden’s mind is open to appreciation of both poets – Virgil as well as Ovid, his mind is open to both concep-tions of wit – i.e. wit as pleasantry and wit as propriety – as they both represent two dif-ferent kinds of legitimate poetic value.

This dual legitimacy can be described by means of the set of terms from the con-temporary aesthetics – the “faculties” of judgment and fancy. Judgment accomplishes aptness, perfectness, accurate representation – a just, proper imitation, while fancy ac-complishes liveliness, elegance – in other words, works taken by nature up to a higher pitch. It seems, then, that Dryden, while apparently allowing the meaning of the term to fluctuate, insists throughout his criticism upon the comprehensive nature of wit, stress-ing its inclusion of both fancy and judgment.

3.1.4 French vs English, Moderns vs Ancients: Wit as compromise

Dryden’s siding with the Moderns was enabled by his idealization of wit. The basis of the argument – i.e. the present correcting the past – reflected his theory of comedy of wit (represented by plays of his fellow authors and his own) pitted against the comedy of humours. In the already mentioned prologue to An Evening’s Love (1671) he distin-guishes wit and humour: “The first works on the judgment and fancy; the latter on the fancy alone: there is more of satisfaction in the former kind of laughter, and in the latter more of scorn” (Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I 146). Several pages later, he expands the comparison by listing the differing effects both devices have on the reader: “[...] for the business of the poet is to make you laugh: when he writes humour, he makes folly ridiculous; when wit, he moves you, if not always to laughter, yet to a pleasure that



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is more noble” (I 152). By arguing for wit over humour Dryden identified himself with the Earl of Rochester, the aristocratic Court Wits and the libertine tradition as such. Fur-thermore, by citing the conversation of courtiers and, the ultimate model, the monarch himself, the epitome of witty conversation, he was able to equate wit, polite discourse, aristocracy, and monarchy.

Despite Dryden’s often proclaimed antipathy for French culture, his knowledge of their literature and criticism was profound, detailed, and very up-to-date during his whole literary career which spanned over almost forty years. He read, appropriated, or was in-fluenced by Pierre and Thomas Corneille, Racine, Molière, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry, Quinault, La Calprenède, and he made references to works of St. Evremond, Boileau, Segrais, Bossu, Dacier, Rapin, l’Abbé d’Aubignac, du Bartas, Descartes, Fon-tenelle, Malherbe, and Perrault. As his career was nearing its end, he even began to refer to French authors with respect and sympathy, so much so that it is possible to claim that “Dryden kept insisting upon his Englishness, but [...] his scope was decidedly European” (2). Lord Buckingham’s comedy The Rehearsal (1672) satirically lashes out at Dryden’s manner of unbridled acquiring of plots and speeches. In the following scene of the play Bayes (indicating the bay leaf – the symbolic plant of the Poet Laureate) boasts – though not specifically referring to robbing the French – his “ingenious” composing methods:

BAYES. And I do here averr, That no man yet Sun e’er shone upon, has parts sufficient to furnish out a Stage, except it were by the help of these my Rules.

JOHNSON. What are those rules, I pray?BAYES. Why, Sir, my first Rule is the Rule of Transversion, or Regula Duplex: changing

verse into Prose, or Prose into verse, alternative as you please. [...] I take a book in my hand, either at home or elsewhere, for that’ s all one, of

there be any Wit in’t, as there is no book but has some, I Transverse it; that is, if it be Prose put it into Verse, (but that takes up some time) and if it be Verse, put it into Prose.

(5-6, I.i.)

Although Dryden’s principles for writing and evaluating literature came mostly from the Ancients and the French authors, he applied them in a personal way, giving Resto-ration readers and audiences standards by which to judge art. His fundamental princi-ple, which comes from the Ancients, is that art is imitation of nature. A record of his changing concepts of wit is a good barometer of the varying proportions of imagination and judgment Dryden demanded. In ‘wit writing’ and ‘wit written’, an excess of either imagination or judgment was an extreme; a balance of each carried to great heights, in the highest genres, manifests itself in a work of ‘sublime genius.’ Dryden’s most char-acteristic personal stance appears to be his abhorrence of extremes, and therefore he constantly vacillates in attempting to find a balance, a golden mean, on every occasion, in judging all works of art and in debating all practical critical problems.



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3.2 Alexander Pope and Wit as Meta-criticism

This subchapter focuses on Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, usually regarded as a masterpiece of the early Augustan criticism and – in words of Joseph Addison – an as-semblage of the “most known and most received observations on the subject of literature and criticism” (Spectator No. 253). Even though I will refer to several other texts by Pope throughout this subchapter as well, its centre is constituted by the analysis of the Essay, as the poem represents a point of contrast with the following subchapter’s main text – i.e. the Spectator papers on wit by Joseph Addison. Although it chronologically precedes the Spectator series on wit (May 1711), it is often considered to be the pinnacle of the early eighteenth-century English criticism and therefore should be logically concluding this chapter. My placing it before the subchapter on Addison is a choice based on several arguments, mainly concerning the interplay of wit and the development of literary criti-cism in the early eighteenth century which will be the key theme of this subchapter.

3.2.1 An essay on criticism: critics’ Enigma

The approach of the modern criticism to the Essay is a testament to its internal complexi-ties and conflicts: Some critics suggest it should be primarily treated as a work of liter-ary criticism (e.g. Phillip Smallwood in his study Reconstructing Criticism: Pope’s Essay on Criticism and the Logic of Definition), while others (e.g. Patricia Meyer Spacks in her article ‘Imagery and Method in An Essay on Criticism’) emphasize the moral aspect that unites the issues of criticism and creative writing. Meyer Spacks contends that the Essay is first and foremost a work of poetic nature with wit having a central position in the poem: “The poetic ambition of the Essay on Criticism centers in its attempting to demonstrate how wit can provide a controlling power for what wit creates” (Meyer Spacks 107). Wit for Pope, she continues, is “the image-making faculty, […], equivalent to invention, the power of poetic discovery and creativity...” (‘ibid.). In a rather impressionistic manner, William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks point out that “[Pope’s] poem is never without the interest of a certain shimmer upon the surface through the implied dimension of criticism of criticism” (Neoclassical Criticism 236).

The relationship of modern literary criticism to the Essay has been a rather strained one. There have been several studies published in the past sixty years which are very pro-tective of the text, but there exists another approach, rarer and more sober one. I believe that while the former approach often provides various valuable contexts without which the text could not have been understood properly, the latter approach – because it is less defensive – tends to be more revealing about the poem’s significance for our present times. This more objective approach is represented, among others, by Paul D. Cannan who acknowledges the poem’s many flaws and confusions. Part of his assumption relies on the contemporary criticism, provided by John Dennis’s Reflections Critical and Satyri-cal, Upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay on Criticism (1711), which claimed that a part of the problem of the poem is that it has “a confused sense of audience: at times [it]


3.2 alexander Pope and Wit as meta-criticism

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seems to be instructing critics how to judge writers, and elsewhere, telling writers how to placate critics” (Cannan 179).

Cannan also sums up the difficulties modern scholars have experienced acknowledg-ing the poem’s qualities claiming that “[…] Pope scholars often seem embarrassed by the poem as a literary criticism: despite its memorable verse, the poem is highly derivative […] and marred by ambiguous terminology and poor organization” (171). As Cannan contends, the emergence of criticism in England towards the end of the seventeenth century “was concomitant with the rise of the institution of authorship” which brought with it questions about the relationship among author, critic, and audience that remain to be analyzed even today (173). Thus, the Essay on Criticism represents the challenges of asserting oneself as critic, with or without simultaneously claiming the status of poet. As a virtually unknown author at the age of twenty-two, Pope had to demonstrate his right to criticize through his performance, not by means of his established respect. But he also took advantage of his anonymity in the poem: like Addison’s and Steele’s Mr. Specta-tor, Pope presents himself as the model critic by asserting his credentials and by setting himself in opposition to the abstract notion of the bad critic. The persona which Pope creates in the Essay, Cannan suggests, is hardly one of a novice: “[R]ather he carefully casts himself as the ideal critic”, the hero-critic with nearly Superman qualities (174). Accordingly, several scholars have suggested that, in the Essay, Pope is less interested in critical theory than in establishing himself as a poet and it certainly is an opinion that one must keep in mind while examining the poem. Ruben Quintero asserts that the “Es-say on Criticism encapsulates [Pope’s] poetical intentions, and he wishes to prepare his most influential reader, the literary critic, for them” (21). Ripley Hotch argues that the Essay “is not about criticism, but about the young poet writing the poem, his situation, and his claim to merit. For the poem is, if anything, not a disquisition on criticism, but a proof of the qualifications of the author to assume his place as head of the kingdom of wit he describes” (474-5). Principally I agree with Hotch, although I would like to modify his assertion slightly. Pope is indeed very much interested in asserting himself as a respected and authoritative figure of early eighteenth century English literature, nevertheless, I would not go so far as to suggest that he does not care for the state the contemporary criticism is in – rather he is set on the position he could (and should) take in it. Thus, his concern is the establishing of the relationship between the individual and the (poetic) society, while using the concept of wit as the whet-stone of the process.

The Essay is divided into three parts: the first prescribes rules for the study of art criticism, while emphasizing the compromise of the contemporary – often conflicting – ideas on criticism in the form of a harmonious system. The second part exposes and analyzes the causes of wrong criticism, and the third part characterizes the morals of a good critic and praises the great critics of the past centuries. Thus, though the poem seems to suggest that its main concern is theory and practice of art and, specifically, liter-ary criticism, its actual scope is much wider and the two themes – literary criticism and literary practice – are presented by Pope as two interlinked activities.

As far as the form of the poem is concerned, it is quite important to realize that while expressing ideas and recommendations about the obligations and strategies of a good



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eighteenth-century literary critic, the Essay belongs to “the venerable, if short-lived, tradi-tion of English verse criticism, which enjoyed a vogue in the early 1680s” (Cannan 178). Modern critics, Cannan continues, are often quick to distance Pope’s poem from this tradition because it is an essay on criticism, not poetry. According to Maynard Mack, “[t]he content of the poem would be quite new to its readers so far as treatment inverse was concerned, there being extant several reputable versified ‘Arts’ of poetry, including Ho-race’s, but nothing quite like a critical ‘Art’ (Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life 178). As Cannan suggests, this form must have been considered old-fashioned and Pope’s contemporaries (Addison, Dennis and others) must have made this connection. While a few examples of verse criticism appeared between 1685 and 1711, they hardly represented the cutting-edge of critical discourse, represented for example by serialized criticism in the Spectator. Ideo-logically, verse criticism was also the province of the aristocratic, gentlemanly critic and not in keeping with the current trend – again, best exemplified in the criticism of Addison and Steele, Charles Gildon’s manual for appreciating Shakespeare appendixed to the Rowe Shakespeare etc. This aspect of the Essay and the ramifications it has for the employment of wit in the poem will be explored in the latter part of the present subchapter.

Modelled after the precedents of Horace’s Art of Poetry and Boileau’s L’Art Poétique in its contents as well as structure, the Essay repeats the classical principles of criticism in a simple, conversational language, which occasionally borders on banter. Apart from wit, other key terms of neoclassical criticism explored in the poem are Nature, genius, taste, ancients, and rules. As I have shown in the introduction, the term wit and its function in the Essay received some attention from William Empson mainly because it represented an example of what he called a ‘word with a complex structure’. However, what Emp-son’s study overlooked was the historical and intellectual context of the poem. I will now present two studies of the poem which try to understand the poem’s central term against these backgrounds in order to set it into a proper context before I continue to discuss its connections with Dryden’s employment of the term.

3.2.2 The contexts of An essay on criticism

The approach of Edward Niles Hooker in his article ‘Pope on Wit: The Essay on Criti-cism’ is traditional in its literary-historical framework of argument; there is no theoreti-cal basis or theorem which is subsequently tested. Hooker poses three questions which he intends to answer: First, taking into account that Pope writes an essay devoted to the principles of criticism, what makes him dedicate so much time and attention to wit rather than taste; second, what were the literary discussions and controversies in which Pope was involved at that time and which led him to express his opinion in the Essay, and third, “what body of contemporary thought was available to him as he wrote, and how it illuminate[s] the direction and implications of his thinking” (185-6). The study is also motivated by wish to justify the reputation of the text in question and to clarify Pope’s intentions and achievements as a part of a more universal rehabilitation of Pope’s work suggested by Hooker (185).



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E. N. Hooker sees the Essay as Pope’s defence of the term against the attacks of moralists that became numerous towards the end of the seventeenth century. Pope, himself both an author and a critic, is interested in the cooperation between the critical and creative skills. He identifies true genius as the highest form of talent in the poet, and true taste as the highest talent in the critic and proceeds to formulate a principle that the best critics are those who excel as authors themselves: “In Poets as true Genius is but rare, / True Taste as seldom is the Critick’s Share; / Both must alike from Heav’n derive their Light, / These born to Judge, as well as those to Write. / Let such teach others who themselves excell, / And censure freely who have written well” (An Essay on Criticism ll. 11-6).* True taste and true genius also work in close proximity. The conceptual shift from genius and taste to wit which Hooker performs is rather abrupt as well as metaphorical: According to him a discussion of the art of criticism would be idle unless it expounded taste by revealing the ways and standards of genius. Or, since genius is distressingly rare, one may, like Pope, examine the ways of wit, that more inclusive thing, conceived of as literary talent or as the distinguishing element in literature, the breath of life informing the dull clay (186). Using one of John Dryden’s rules on the employment of wit in the process of literary creation (“The composition of all poems is, or ought be, of wit”), Hooker describes it poetically as ‘a spark’, ‘fire, invention,’ the life-giving force and his differentiation of wit and its tra-ditional counterpart – judgment – follows the Hobbesian and Lockean line of thought: “Sense and judgment are the solid, useful stuff with which the writer works, but wit is the magic that lifts the stuff to the plane of belles-lettres” (186).

During the last decade of the seventeenth century, the English society became saturat-ed with wit for two main reasons. The first, rather complex one, was related to the chang-ing attitude towards language and its ability to access truth and knowledge. Whereas the conceited wit of Metaphysical metaphors used to be seen as a direct link to the hidden, esoteric truth, the philosophers of the 1670s were demanding simple, clear language, untainted by similes and metaphors which were regarded now as deceitful and detrimen-tal. Another reason was that Restoration comedy, appropriating Metaphysical wit and modifying it so that it suited its need for quick, insightful, social discourse dealt with themes often believed immoral and witty metaphors were playwrights’ favourite device of conveying the tabooed truths. The new, often satiric, wit, apparently less concerned with matters of spiritual nature, became a tool with which to attack religion and subvert morality. In Hooker’s opinion those moralists who attacked wit during that time in fact attacked literature per se, as wit in the sense of impulse for creative writing was Pope’s main sense throughout the poem (187). These were the key reasons that led Pope to write the poem and to devote so much space to wit. Hooker concludes his article in an apologetic tone: “If he [Pope] was not entirely successful in conveying his meaning with utter clarity, the fault lay partly in the lack of a critical vocabulary” and a reminder that if we wish to comprehend the poet’s views of the literary art, we must read the poem “with a fuller awareness of its historical setting” (204).

*) All subsequent quotations from the Essay are taken from the Twickenham edition of Poems of Alexander Pope, volume I., Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, p. 237-326.



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As Hooker rightly observes, the Essay is remarkable for its emphasis on wit instead of other aesthetic categories, e.g. taste, genius, etc. It shows to what extent the term was of great concern to the early Augustan critics. This can be also proven by the acerbic critique from the pen of John Dennis landed on the original version of the Essay and published in his already mentioned Reflections Critical and Satyrical. One after the other, Dennis picks up the lines of the Essay concerned with wit and tears them to shreds, com-menting that “[w]herever this Gentleman talks of Wit, he is sure to say something that is very foolish” (411). Dennis takes notice of the ambiguity with which Pope uses the term. Finding fault with the four lines as they appeared in the first edition of the poem: “What is this Wit that our Cares employ, / The Owner’s Wife that other Men enjoy? / The more his Trouble as the more admir’d, / Where wanted scorn’d, and envy’d where acquir’d” (Dennis, Reflections Critical and Satyrical 411) he says: “[...] what does he mean by acquir’d Wit? Does he mean Genius by the word Wit, or Conceit and Point?” (411). If by wit Pope means Genius, it cannot be, as Genius is never acquired, if he uses the term to mean conceit, point, it does not make sense at all, as “those are things that ought never to be in Poetry, unless by chance sometimes in the Epigram, or in Comedy, where it is proper to the Character and the Occasion; and ev’n in Comedy it ought always to give place to Humour” (411). Dennis’s conclusion is marked with scathing criticism of both the poem and its author:

He dictates perpetually, and pretends to give Law without any thing of the Simplicity or Majesty of a Legislator, and pronounces Sentence without any thing of the Plainness or Clearness, or Gravity of a Judge. Instead of Simplicity we have little Conceit and Epigram, and Affectation. Instead of Majesty we have something that is very mean, and instead of Gravity we have something that is very boyish. And instead of Perspicuity and lucid Order, we have but too often Obscurity and Confusion. (ibid.)

I believe that Arthur Fenner is right in suggesting that another layer of historical context should be taken into account when reading the poem when he says “Pope’s contribution to a rather bitter warfare then raging between the “wits” and their critics, a warfare which had included the Ancients and Moderns controversy, Collier’s Short View and the many replies to it, Blackmore’s Satyr Against Wit, and several Spectator essays” (238).

For Fenner, the Essay is first and foremost “a defense [sic] of poets against foolish and hostile critics in tones that shift gradually from banter to a passionate plea” (ibid.). The banter is clearly discernible in the opening lines:

‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of SkillAppear in Writing or in Judging ill;But, of the two, less dangerous is th’Offense,To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;



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A Fool might once himself alone expose,Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.” (An Essay on Criticism, ll.1-8)

Fenner contends that these lines should be read to mean that it is “hard to say which is a worse bungler, but surely a bad poet is less dangerous to us than a bad critic, and in recent years bad critics have become ten times more numerous” (238) and recall the “critical wars” raging during the time the poem was written.

In Emile Audra’s and Aubrey Williams’s introduction to the Twickenham edition of the Essay the term is approached both from the point of view of the immediate context of the poem and – in a broader context – as a key item in the vocabulary of the Augustan literary criticism. Audra and Williams also explain why Pope chose the term as the po-em’s central theme and what function it had on the contemporary literary scene. They claim that Pope’s poem dealing with the nature of poetic art both from the point of view of the poet and the critic is an uncompromising synthesis of all the moods and strains current in the neoclassical literary criticism. The fact which has been bothering many modern literary critics and readers alike – the poem’s apparent obscurity and loose and contradictory usage of such central terms as ‘nature’ and ‘wit’ – is interpreted as Pope’s deliberate attempt at formulating the principles of the neoclassical criticism. The poem is a result of Pope’s preference to maintain the complications issuing from the highly eclectic set of values at work during the period rather than succumbing to the simplifi-cations of artistic truth. The Essay’s antithetical reality is not obscured but emphasized intentionally by Pope whose main goal is to harmonize the opposing attitudes of several critical schools (Audra and Williams 213).

If it appears then that Pope uses his key word of choice as a part of often contradictory assertions, we should understand that he does so for a reason. Audra and Williams pro-ceed to give an account of the word’s usage story from roughly 1650 to 1710. Similarly to Spingarn’s approach, they follow the wit-versus-judgement line of the development. These two notions in fact symbolize two opposing forces in the evolution of the ideas concerning literary art and its (in)capability to access truth. In association with poetry, wit – which till the Renaissance had been itself very closely connected to rhetoric – is opposed to rational reasoning whose popularity was growing stronger as the seven-teenth century advanced towards its end. The French logician Peter Ramus reassigned the “anciently established five parts of the art of rhetoric” (i.e. invention, arrangement, memory, expression (style) and delivery) so that it included only expression and style, while the three other parts were now included in dialectic (215). This division reduced the function of rhetoric to a concern with mere ornamentation of truths that logic was happy enough to discover.

An important consequence of this division was the tendency to associate wit with the merely pleasing, ornamental, fanciful, impetuous, and insubstantial. According to Audra and Williams, this means that “[t]he ultimate effect of such a line of thought as this would be the trivialization of poetry itself: the faculty of wit and the figurative language it inspires are seen as unrelated to truth and real knowledge, to ‘things as they are’”



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because the “figurative language is of the essence of poetry, the denial of its ability to express truth is the denial of the value and dignity of poetry” (217).

Compared to Dryden’s usage of wit throughout his literary career, Pope’s employment of the term is similarly diffuse in the space of a single poem. Pope, for whom the main sense of wit in the poem seems to be synonymous with invention or creative impulse, could not agree with this concept of wit-as-ornament and therefore attempts to blur the distinctions between wit and judgement. However, there are many couplets in the poem which still cause disagreement among the modern critics. The common argument of the period that wit needs to be controlled by judgment is recounted by Pope in the lines that “There are whom Heav’n has blest with store of Wit / Yet want as much again to manage it” (ll. 80-1, 212). Audra and Williams suggest that the apparent paradox of this couplet was however no confused ambiguity, as is often believed, but a very clear authorial intention as some thirty years later, Pope revised the lines and preserved its equivocal character: “Some of whom Heav’n in Wit has been profuse, / Want as much more, to turn it to its use” (213). On the other hand, William Warburton prefers to think that in the original version of the poem where these two lines read: “There are whom Heav’n blest with store of Wit, / Yet want as much again to manage it” (The Works of Alexander Pope 326), in the first line wit is used, in the modern sense to mean the effort of imagination; in the second line it is used, in the ancient sense, for the result of judgment. Warburton asserts that Pope wanted to give the reader a hard time puzzling over these lines, which in the first version draw too much attention to the semantic shift (from the ‘lower’ kind of wit , i.e. imagination to the higher kind of wit, i.e. judgment or reason) and he endeavoured to keep this shift out of sight by altering the lines into the final version: “Some, to whom Heav’n in wit has been profuse, / Want as much more, to turn it to its use” (p. 327). My understanding of the two lines is that the change in phrasing actually heightens the sense of paradox, thus reaching the effect of meta-wit discussed in the first chapter.

3.2.3 From ‘Wild heap’ to ‘Nature to Advantage dress’d’: Pope’s dual conception of Wit

As has been suggested by the above mentioned critics, Pope’s conception of wit in the Essay is an uncompromising synthesis of roughly dual structure. I would like to test this assumption by closely analyzing the Essay on Criticism as well as Pope’s other texts. In a letter to William Wycherley Pope agrees with the playwright that

[...] whatever lesser Wits have risen since his [Dryden’s] Death are but like Stars appearing when the Sun is set, that twinkle only in his absence and with the Rays they have borrowed from him. Our Wit (as you call it) is but Reflection or Imitation, therefore scarce to be call’d ours. True wit, […], may be defin’d as a Justness of Thought and a Facility of Expression; or […] a perfect Conception with an easy Delivery. (The Correspondence of Alexander Pope 2)



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Three years later, boldly opposing the older playwright’s suggestion that “sprightliness of wit despises method,” Pope says:

This is true enough, if by Wit you mean no more than Fancy or Conceit; but in the better no-tion of Wit, consider’d as propriety, surely Method is not only necessary for Perspicuity and Harmony of parts, but gives beauty even to the minute and particular thoughts, which receive an additional advantage from those which precede or follow in their due place:” (34)

‘The better notion of wit’ is clearly a nod in the direction of the neoclassical efforts to dignify the term which will be the main mission of Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s Spectator. There are other lines of the Essay as well as Pope’s other texts that testify approval to this shift: “But true Expression, like th’unchanging Sun, / Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon” (An Essay on Criticism, ll. 315-6). The idea of wit’s time-lessness is of course a revamped line “True Wit is everlasting like the Sun” borrowed from the Essay on Poetry (1682) whose author, John Buckingham, Earl of Mulgrave, was a great friend and patron of Pope’s. In another instance Pope describes with almost Drydenian imagery the ill preferences of older times: “Some to Conceit alone their Taste confine, / And glitt’ring Thoughts struck out at ev’ry line / Pleas’d with a Work where nothing’s just or fit; / One glaring Chaos and wild Heap of Wit” ( ll. 289-91). And, like Dryden himself, Pope is perfectly capable of straying from his own theoretical precept to composing an example that defies it as these line of his ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ testify:

Most souls, ‘tis true, but peep out once an age, Dull sullen pris’ners in the body’s cage: Dim lights of life, that burn a length of years Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres; Like eastern kings a lazy state they keep, And close confin’d to their own palace, sleep.(The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems 341, ll. 17-22)

Being sometimes called ‘Elegy on the Death of an Unfortunate Lady’, the poem clearly recalls lines of Dryden’s To the Duchess of Ormond (“imprison’d in so sweet a cage, / A soul might well be pleas’d to pass an age”), and Donne’s The Second Anniversary (“She, whose faire body no such prison was, / But that a soule might well be pleas’d to passe / An age in her”) respectively, thus propelling the Metaphysical penchant for “glittering thoughts” Pope refuses to consider valuable. In 1706 Pope writes in a letter to Wycherley that “Donne had definitely more Wit than he wanted Versification: for the great dealers in Wit, like those in Trade, take least Pains to set off their Goods; while the Haberdash-ers of small Wit, spare for no Decorations or Ornaments” (quot. in Meyer Spacks 127). Here, Pope struggles with the overwhelming tradition of the Metaphysical poets. On the one hand, he regards them unworthy of following because of their lack of discipline, on the other he is clearly susceptible of the creative energy of their genius – this dilemma



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makes it difficult for him to arrive to a negative final judgment of (all of) them. And Pope also comments on wit in the notes to his translation of Homer’s Iliad: “There cannot be a truer kind of wit, than what is shewn in apt Comparisons” (107). Gradually, however, Pope finds that wit must be understood and employed in all its complexity to be of any use or, as Meyer Spacks puts it, “[w]it’s function as ordering power is as important as its creative force” (113). The imagery of the Essay testifies to this fragile balance.

The “pro-creation” aspect of wit in the Essay can be to a certain extent attributed to Dryden’s influence on the poem, which is usually felt to be quite substantial but difficult to locate. I agree with John Sitter that it is most visible in Pope’s consistent adoption of the “pleasure principle” (“gen’rous Pleasure to be charm’d with Wit” (l. 238)) Dryden takes for granted and in the Essay’s broad insistence, which also follows “of necessity,” that wit is nothing if not good writing. What must be understood by good writing is the act of poetic creation, production – in short – work. Here, wit’s materiality – as opposed to the neoclassical attempts to ennoble it with abstraction – becomes very conspicuous. Pope reminds his readers that “[p]oetry is always a physical labor and pleasure” (Sitter 86). The charm of wit referred to in line 238 can be only apprehended by the readers if they are fully aware of the physical labour the poet puts into the production of the poem. I suggest expanding Sitter’s observation by adding that the pleasure of creation of poetic texts may even be linked to sexual pleasure that wit becomes associated with in the Essay.

The sexual metaphors are pervasive throughout the Essay – failure in the attempt at wit is equivalent to sexual failure in “But Dulness with Obscenity must prove / As shameful sure as Impotence in Love” (ll. 532-3). When Pope dramatically poses the basic question: “What is this Wit, which must our cares employ?” (l. 500), he immediately answers him-self: “The Owner’s Wife, that other Men enjoy” (l. 501), and, in perhaps the most crucial – and certainly most often quoted – couplet of the poem wit and judgment are paired in a most difficult yet fundamental relationship – that of matrimony: “For Wit and Judgment often are at strife, / Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife” (ll. 82-3). The ideal of total complementarity and sufficiency is almost utopian and the poem keeps stressing the near-impossibility of reaching this harmony.

In discussing wit or conceits, Pope argues that true wit exists in the harmonious relationship among idea, image, and expression, thus effectively imposing upon the rebellious faculty of wit a standard of propriety and justness. The “pro-discipline” aspect stresses the power of wit as a clarifying, thus an order-bringing element – and in associa-tion with Sun (“true Expression, like th’unchanging Sun, / Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon”) it is transfigured into divinity. Wit concerns itself with “The naked Nature and the living Grace,” thus being equivalent to the vast energy of divine and graceful nature (l. 294). The mysterious creative energy of the first aspect of wit becomes the “to Advantage drest” Nature of the latter aspect – “True Wit is […] ; / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest” (ll. 297-8) in another, hugely popular, yet often slated couplet in the first part of the poem. The tension between what is thought and what is expressed re-minds us of the material nature of wit, and at the same time opens a new track of Pope’s agenda which has already been announced in the first part of this subchapter – that of



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the poet-critic as a hero. Pope’s idea of ideal critic and wit’s role in it will be the topic of the concluding part of this subchapter, in which I will show how to read the intricate relationship between the individual artist, his guild and wit. As we will see, this relation-ship shares certain points of interest with Addison’s understanding of wit a means to moderate wit’s first aspect with morality, but still maintains a unique point of view.

3.2.4 Pope and Addison I: Pride, Vanity and Wit

Addison reviewed Pope’s Essay extensively in the Spectator No. 253 of 20 December 1711. He gave the poem high praise, asserting that the poetry and the expression were admira-ble though the sentiments, excusably, were not new. The passages to which Addison took exception were those which reflected upon Dennis’s critical tantrums and he also hinted at a possible streak of envy and malevolence of Pope’s character when he claimed: “I am very sorry to find that an Author, who is very justly esteemed among the best Judges, has admitted some strokes of this Nature [envy and detraction] into a very fine Poem […] which […] is a Masterpiece in its kind” (The Spectator 482). The somewhat pontifical air of the paper was precisely what was needed to wound and enrage the abnormally sensi-tive younger poet and this minor criticism adumbrates the falling out of the two authors that was to follow in a few years’ time. More significantly though, Addison’s jab at Pope introduces us to the conjunction of aesthetic and ethics. More specifically, it zooms in on the questions of the relation of moral qualities of a poet or a critic which is closely intertwined with the poem’s discussion of wit.

The correlation between moral and aesthetic obligations becomes the central topic of the last part of the Essay, even though we can see hints scattered throughout the whole poem. For example, early in the first part, Pope refers to “a Critick’s noble name!” (l. 47). This phrase suggests a possibility (which later in the poem will become necessity) of close connection between the artistic and the ethical in a critic. In this aspect Pope follows Boileau who expresses a similar necessity in the fourth part of his L’Art Poétique. Here, I believe Patricia Sparks is wrong when she asserts that Pope and Boileau disagree about this matter. She contends that in his poem the French critic implies a possible antithesis between good man and good poet-critic, supporting her claim with the following lines from Boileau’s poem (she quotes them in French only, without providing the English translation): “Que les vers ne soient pas votre éternel employ. / Cultivez vos amis, soyez homme de foi. / C’est peu d’être agréable et charmant dans un livre, / Il faut savoir encore et converser et vivre” (Spacks, ‘Imagery and Method in An Essay on Criticism’117). She suggests that these lines demonstrate that in Boileau’s conception of the artist one can be agreeable or even charming in a book without being so in life; to devote oneself to the eternal occupation of verse is to neglect the responsibilities of personal moral-ity. I believe that Spacks misreads Boileau’s lines. Compare her interpretation with the English adaptation of these lines by Soames and Dryden: “Let not your only business be to write; / be virtuous, just, and in your friends delight. / ‘Tis not enough your poems be admired; / bur strive your conversation be desired” (The Continental Model, 263). In



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my opinion these lines emphasize the need to ‘live beyond book’ – a good writer needs to cultivate his or her own personal relationships, for it is not enough to be charming in a book, virtuosity is the main goal of every artist. For Pope – as for Boileau, for that matter – no such dissociation which Spacks seems to be implying is possible: the identity between good critic and the good man is simply necessary, not just possible.*

The third part of the poem constantly emphasizes the association of criticism and good manners. When Pope urges that one should not “let the Man be lost” in the critic, he adds, “Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join; /To Err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine” (ll. 524-5), he is urging the fellow-critics to partake of divinity through high mo-rality. The message – the conduct of the good critic is that of the good man – is clear even though occasionally Pope swerves to a more general advice, for example “As Men of Breeding, sometimes Men of Wit, / T’avoid great Errors, must the less commit” (ll. 259-60). Here Meyer Spacks insightfully comments: “Commitment to the realm of wit, […] requires self-discipline, self-knowledge, relinquishment of lesser ideals” (120).

Good breeding and, consequently, good taste, is also contrasted to artifice and van-ity of false wit – both in conduct and in artistic preferences. The ideal critic, Pope asserts, is “well-bred” though learned and “sincere” though well-bred as well as “blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d” (ll. 635, 639). He also must possess “knowledge both of Books and Humankind” because “‘Tis not enough, Taste, Judgment, Learning, join” (l. 640, 562). Therefore, the good critic should “let Truth and Candour shine” in his judgment and perhaps most significantly has to have “a Soul exempt from Pride” (l. 563, 641).

As Arthur Fenner points out, the idea of pride is lurking behind every other line of the poem. For Augustans pride was the super-category in which most sins could be included, because any violation of God’s law is a “refusal to take one’s proper (subordi-nate) place in the Chain of Being He has created. To try to be something one is not – as does bumpkin in regal purple, or an ape dressed like our grandsires (l. 321, 332) – is to disrupt the hierarchy of Nature” (Fenner 237). A good poet and critic must follow Na-ture (l. 68), and not only where she has set standards for poetry, but where she has “fix’d the Limits fit” to a critic’s mental powers, “And wisely curb’d proud Man’s pretending Wit” (ll. 52-3). Modern critics, the second part of the Essay suggests several times, have not followed Nature, but have left their proper places in her hierarchy: “Poets, a Race long unconfin’d and free, / Still fond and proud of Savage Liberty, / Receiv’d his [Aris-totle’s] Laws, and stood convinc’d ‘twas fit / Who conquer’d Nature, shou’d preside o’er Wit” (649-52). False learning and wit has turned some into “coxcombs Nature meant but fools” who “in search of wit lost their common sense” (ll. 27-8); others are not even a species at all – unsuccessful poets turned critics, unnatural and deformed things which can pass for neither: “Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past, / Turn’d Criticks next,

*) My reading of the passage is also consistent with the editor of Boileau’s work, D. Nichol Smith, who com-ments on these lines says that “Boileau carried out his own instructions to the letter. He cultivated the friendship of the leading writers of the time, and in particular of Racine, Molière, and La Fontaine ; and he was a decided force in a conversation.” For more details on Boileau’s relationships with other French authors, see Boileau, L’Art Poétique (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1915), p. 93.


ASUS

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that of the editor

3.3 Joseph addison and the aesthetics of neoclassical Wit

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and prov’d plain Fools at last; / Some neither can for Wits nor Criticks pass, / As heavy Mules are neither Horse nor Ass” (36-9).

For Pope, then, wit is the perfect balance between the raw energy of the poetic crea-tion (represented by ‘Liberties of Wit’) on the one hand and the structuring faculty that channels this energy (represented by ‘Wit’s Fundamental Laws’) (l. 717, 722) on the other. A poet who is capable of achieving this harmony, can become a critic who “Supream in Judgment, as in Wit, / Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ” (657-8). A critic, who is not a poet himself, must nevertheless possess the same faculty: “A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit / With the same Spirit that its Author writ” (233-4).

As we have seen, Pope’s poem and the ideas on wit expressed in it are consistent, but often obscure and difficult to disentangle. The poet puts forward an authoritative theory or set of rules which – if followed – will provide for establishment of a new discipline of literary criticism. Therefore, I cannot agree with David B. Morris who contends that the Essay on Criticism “reclaims the legacy of John Dryden for English critics, endorsing his principles, backing his often speculative and exploratory spirit of inquiry, and provid-ing a secure, compact, flexible theory of criticism to stabilize the practice of his English successors” (34). I believe that Pope’s treatment of the topic is much more authoritative and prescriptive than Dryden’s. Also, while continuing to expand some of those themes Dryden concerned himself with, Pope is much more aware of the wide scope of wit’s meaning, utilising it in a significantly more creative and sophisticated manner than the older poet. In the following subchapter I will explore to what extent Pope’s conception of the term differed from that of Joseph Addison, the father of the early modern jour-nalistic style.

3.3 Joseph Addison and the Aesthetics of Neoclassical Wit

As has been mentioned in the introduction, the Spectator scholarship has been rather scarce. Only one major study has been published in the last two decades – Brian McC-rea’s Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, its Canon, and the Professionaliza-tion of Literary Criticism. McCrea’s central interest lies in identifying and analyzing the strategies Addison and Steele employ to secure as large readership as possible for their paper, assuming that their main motivation was popularity. To be read by as many people as possible, the paper must be written in a clear language, hence any sort of ambiguity or tendency towards metaphorical mode of expression is an unwelcome, detrimental even, feature of the discourse of the journal. McCrea devotes a whole chapter to this simple claim, quoting various passages from the Spectator and elsewhere, focusing on Addison’s attack of puns and false wit. After my analysis of wit in Addison’s texts, I will come back to some of McCrea’s claims in order to contrast them with my own reading of the issues raised by him in regard to wit. I will conclude this subchapter by comparing Addison’s and Pope’s usage of the term in a larger context of their artistic agendas and styles.



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3.3.1 the spectator and the Neoclassical criticism

The Spectator was a daily periodical founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele who were the journal’s main contributors. Each ‘paper’ was approximately two thousand words long, and the original run consisted of more than five hundred numbers which were collected into seven volumes. After a short hiatus the paper was revived without the involvement of Steele in 1714, appearing three times in a week for six months. These pa-pers were then collected to form the eighth volume. The goal of the Spectator – as stated in its tenth issue – was “to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality” and to bring “Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and Coffee-Houses” (The Spectator I 44). One of its functions was to provide readers with educated, topical talking points, and advice in how to carry on conversations and social interactions in a polite manner. In keeping with the values of Enlightenment philosophies of their time, the authors of the Specta-tor promoted family, marriage, and courtesy. George Saintsbury suggests that Addison supervised the overall scope of the paper, which was “written on a deliberate system, and divisible into three groups” – the first group consisting of the early papers on true and false wit (Nos. 58-63), and of essays on the stage, the second focusing on the elaborate criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Nos. 267-86), and the third containing the series on the pleasures of the imagination (Nos. 411-18) (Saintsbury 173).

What unites these three groups of papers and in fact runs as a red thread through Addison’s whole work is the concern with language and its role in the educating and civilizing process of the early modern reader. In this subchapter, I will attempt to trace this red thread of language and especially its relationship to verbal wit – a topic to which Addison devoted much attention. Apart from the Spectator papers, I will also look at some of his much less known texts, mainly Notes on Some of the Foregoing Stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1697) and Dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (1721).

3.3.2 the spectator Series on Wit

Michael G. Ketcham identifies four methods for defining wit in the Spectator series (i.e. series on criticism and taste): (1) analytical method consisting in separating what Ad-dison calls “false”, “true” and “mixed” wit; (2) historical method by tracing the history of wit from classical through Gothic and modern times; (3) applying the conventional categories of neoclassical criticism – in wit “the first Race of Authors, who were the great Heroes in Writing, were destitute of all Rules and Arts of Criticism; and for that Reason, though they excel later Writers in Greatness and Genius, they fall short of them in Ac-curacy and Correctness” (No. 61); and (4) the method of searching for the psychological explanations – Addison contrasts his own definitions with Dryden’s definition of wit as “a Propriety of Words and Thoughts applied to the Subject” (No. 62) (Ketcham 71).

In the first essay on wit (No. 58 of May 7 1711), Addison’s main motive is to “estab-lish [...] a Taste for polite Writing” and he proceeds to set out a plan to trace out “the



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History of false Wit and distinguish the several Kinds of it as they have prevailed in different Ages of the World” (The Spectator I 245). He is motivated by fear of revival of “those antiquated Modes of Wit that have been long exploded out of the Com-mon-wealth of Letters” because lately there have been “several Satyrs and Panegyricks handed about in Agrostick, by which Means some of the most arrant undisputed Blockheads about the Town began to entertain ambitious Thoughts, and to set up for Polite Authors” (The Spectator I 245). In this single sentence, Addison identifies several important things: One of the poetic forms of false wit (acrostic, i.e. a poem in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line spells out a word or a message), associa-tion of false wit with the genre of satire and panegyric, and more significantly still his true motivation for tracing out the history of false wit. False wit is closely associated with those who try to set up for [polite] authors, i.e. the would-be writers or artists in general. Addison’s real goal is not aesthetic (to establish a standard of taste in writing) or literary-historical (to summarize the changing poetic styles), but ideological – to defend himself and his profession against those who may wish to infiltrate the guild and impose upon those whose sensibilities are not as highly trained as to distinguish between what is a good piece of writing and what is not. In the “Art of false Wit”, Ad-dison continues, “[...] a Writer does not shew himself a Man of a beautiful Genius, but of great Industry” (I 246). He goes on to identify picture-poems (favoured by the Meta-physical poets and often dubbed acrosticks) as another type of false wit and criticizes them for their derogative attitude towards poetic art: author of such a poem had to first “draw the Out-line of the Subject which he intended to write upon, and afterwards conform the Description to the Figure of his Subject” (I 247). During this creative process, poetry is treated in an impermissible manner: it is to “contract or dilate itself according to the Mould in which it [is] cast” (ibid.). Addison quotes Dryden’s Mac Flec-knoe to support his own position.

In the second essay on wit (No. 59 of May 8, 1711) Addison points out for the first time the social appeal of a wit when he says: “there is nothing more certain than that every Man would be a Wit if he could”, thus hinting at the increasing social attractiveness of the status of writer in the early modern European culture (I 249). Those would-be wits (i.e. authors) are characteristic for the inappropriately painful and futile attempts at es-tablishing this status: “[W]ere one to gain [the title of wit] by those Elaborate Trifles [...], a Man had better be a Gally-Slave than a Wit” (ibid.). He goes on to identify some more forms of false wit: lipogram (a poem in which a certain letter is omitted), rebus (a poem in which a whole word is omitted and replaced by an image) and echo-poem (e.g. George Herbert’s Heaven (1633)). He quotes a part of Samuel Butler’s mock heroic Hudibras (1664). Addison also associates the origin of these forms of what he calls false wit with the ancient Greek authors but his criticism is directed at the Metaphysical poets who revived these poetic methods “purely for the sake of being Witty”(I 251). The ancient au-thors (or rulers respectively), practised this kind of wit for some actual purpose (e.g. the rebus-coin of Caesar, who placed the figure of elephant on the reverse side of the coins. The word Caesar meant “elephant” in Punic and it was against laws to place a private man’s image on the coin).



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The Christian monks are identified as the main culprits of this vogue of false wit in the beginning of the third essay on wit (No. 60 of May 9, 1711). The monks as the masters of learning in the early Christian period took up to this kind of wit which required time and industry, but not genius and capacity. They not only restored the ancient techniques of false wit, but also “enriched the World With Inventions of their own” – e.g. anagram, “which is nothing else but a Transmutation of one Word into another, or the turning of the same Set of Letters into different Words; which may change Night into Day, or Black into White, if Chance [...] shall so direct” (I 254). Here, Addison alludes to the central danger of language employed in creative way – manipulation and deformation of reality. Also, he adds another feature of false wit: it is not guided by necessity (artistic or any other), but by mere chance. Again, he emphasizes the disproportional quantity of time invested into the creation of this kind of writing – he recounts a story of a man who, trying to come up with an anagram for his mistress’s name, “shut himself up for half a Year” before finally coming up with one (I 255). Other types of false wit include chronogram (favoured by the Germans) and bouts rimes (favoured by the French).

In the fourth paper on wit (No. 61 of May 10, 1711) Addison mostly attacks punning and discusses the battle between the Ancients and the Moderns before mentioning the distinction between false and true wit for the first time. Punning, Addison asserts at the outset of the essay, is the most frequent kind of false wit:

The Seeds of Punning are in the Minds of all Men, and tho’ they may be subdued by Reason, Reflection and good Sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest Genius, that is not broken and cultivated by the Rules of Art. Imitation is natural to us, and when it does not raise the Mind to Poetry, Painting, Musick, or other more noble Arts, it often breaks out in Puns and Quibbles. (I 259)

He quotes Aristotle (Rhetoric, Chapter 11) who ranks paragram as a proof of good writing. According to Addison, the age that was most pun-prone was the reign of James I (1566 –1625), i.e. the time of Baroque poetry, marinism, gongorism, Metaphysical poetry etc. During this time, pun “was delivered with great Gravity from the Pulpit, or pronounced in the most solemn manner at the Council-Table” (I 260). Pun infected the everyday speech, and – by extension – the reality, it ceased to respect the borders of its designated area of influence, as Addison observes: “The Sermons of Bishop An-drews, and the Tragedies of Shakespear, are full of [Puns]” (ibid.). Thus, the religious practice was undermined by the subversive wit and the same rhetoric was used by a sinner to make repentance in the church as by an actor during a soliloquy on the stage. Addison is sarcastic about “a famous University of this Land”, which was lately “Infested With Punns” and suggests ironically that the reason might be the nearby fens and marches (I 261).

Defending the ancient authors who used puns, Addison says they did not know any better – they “were destitute of all Rules and Arts of Criticism, and for that Reason, though they excel later Writers in Greatness of Genius, they fall short of them in Ac-curacy and Correctness” (ibid.). To distinguish several kinds of wit produced by the first



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race of the writers (i.e. the Ancients) was the task of the second race of authors, and they did so upon the criterion of their being founded in truth. Ancient authors (apart from Quintilian and Longinus) did not know how to separate false and true wit, because the distinction was not settled yet. The dichotomy of false and true wit lay at the core of the establishment of Augustan art criticism. He then continues to locate the revival of false wit: “[it] happen’d about the time of the Revival of Letters [i.e. Renaissance], but as soon as it was once detected, it immediately vanish’d and disappear’d” (I 262). Addison also predicts that it will one day be yet again revived “in some distant Period of time, as Pedantry and Ignorance will prevail upon Wit and Sense” (ibid.). Here, “wit” is of course the right kind of wit i.e. he true wit.

Finally, Addison defines pun as “a Conceit arising from the use of two Words that agree in the Sound, but differ in the Sense” (I 262-3). If “a Piece of Wit” is true, it needs to stand the test of translation: if “it bears the Test, you may pronounce it true; but if it vanishes in the Experiment, you may conclude it to have been a Punn” (I 263). He then likens false wit to “vox et praeterea nihil” (i.e.sounds without sense) and contrasts it to true wit whose essence lies in the metaphorical “Induitur, formosa est: Exuitur, ipsa forma est” (let her be dressed or undressed, all is one, she is excellent still) (ibid).

The penultimate essay on wit (Spectator no. 62 of May 11, 1711) starts by Addison quoting from Locke’s Essay on the difference between Wit and Judgment: “[...] Wit ly-ing most in the Assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with Quickness and Variety, herein can be found any Resemblance or Congruity thereby to make up pleas-ant Pictures and agreeable Visions in the Fancy” (I 263-4). On the other hand, judgment “lies […] in separating carefully one from another, Ideas wherein can be found the least Difference, thereby to avoid being misled by Similitude and by Affinity to take one thing for another” (I 264). In Locke’s account, metaphor is associated with pleasantries of wit and fancy and opposed to judgment and reason. Addison approves of this definition of wit and adds that not every resemblance of Ideas is what we call wit, “unless it be such an one that gives Delight and Surprize to the Reader: These two Properties seem essential to Wit, more particularly the last of them. The ideas should not lie too near one another in the Nature of things, for where the Likeness is obvious, it gives no Surprize” (I 264). Apart from the obvious resemblance, some further congruity must be discovered in the two ideas that is capable of giving the reader some surprise.

Addison then defines true wit as resemblance of ideas while false wit as resemblance of single letters (as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, acrostics), sometimes of syllables (echo-poems, doggerel rhymes), sometimes of words (puns, quibbles), and sometimes of whole sentences or poems (picture-poems), and proceeds to introduce a third type of wit: “mixt Wit” – consisting partly in the resemblance of ideas and partly in the resemblance of words. This kind of wit abounds in Cowley, Waller, “the Italians”, occasionally Dryden, while Milton, Spencer, Boileau, most of the ancient Greeks, are above it. Mixt wit has “innumerable branches”, and it is the composition of puns and true wit. Addison disa-grees with Dryden’s famous definition of true wit as “Propriety of Words and Thoughts adapted to the Subject” (I 267). This definition, Addison contends, is applicable to good writing in general. As George Williamson points out, Addison misquotes Dryden here,



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but the misquoting emphasizes the opposition between Addison’s position and earlier perceptions of wit. For Dryden, according to Addison’s misreading, wit can be tested by looking at the work itself, by assessing the proportions between words and thoughts. For himself, Addison turns to Locke’s definition of wit as “lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures in the fancy” (quoted in No. 62). Addison modifies his definition, as well, in order to further emphasize an affec-tive psychology: “every Resemblance of Ideas is not that which we call Wit, unless it be such an one that gives Delight and Surprize to the Reader” (No. 62). Addison “appeals beyond the formal qualities of the work to the mechanisms of the mind” (Ketcham 72). I will devote a part of the following section to the element of surprise and its significance in Addison’s aesthetic theory.

Addison agrees with Dominique Bouhours that no thought can be beautiful that is not just and does not have its foundation in the nature of things: “[...] the Basis of all Wit is Truth; and [...] no Thought can be valuable, of which good Sense is not the Ground-work” (I 268). Boileau is also a supporter of this principle which is “the natural Way of writing, that beautiful Simplicity, which we so admire in the Compositions of the An-cients” (ibid.). This ability stems from the strength of genius. Those who lack in it, try to compensate for it with “foreign Ornaments” (ibid.). Addison compares these authors to “Goths in Poetry”, who, like those in architecture, try to supply “beautiful Simplicity” with “all the Extravagancies of an irregular Fancy” (ibid.).

Doubting the taste of “English Poets as well as Readers” and calling it “extremely Gothick”, he quotes Dryden, who in turn quotes Jean Regnauld de Segrais who distin-guishes the readers of poetry according to the capacity of judging into three classes (I 269). Addison only quotes the first, lowest class of the readers: “the Rabble of Readers” in other words “Les Petits Esprits [who] “prefer a Quibble, a Conceit, an Epigram, before solid Sense and elegant Expression: These are Mob-Readers” (I 269). In the very last paragraph Addison returns to Locke’s definition of wit and expands it by suggesting that “not only the Resemblance but the Opposition of Ideas does very often produce Wit” (I 270). However, he does not provide details of this suggestion nor does he give any examples, stating only that he “may possibly enlarge upon [this topic] in some future Speculation” (ibid.).

In the last essay on wit (Spectator no. 63 of May 12, 1711) Addison recounts his last night’s allegorical dream of several schemes of wit: In his dream, he enters Region of false wit, governed by Goddess of Falsehood. Nothing in this land appears natural – trees blossom in leaf-gold, produce bone-lace and precious stones. The fountains bubble in opera tunes, are filled with stags, wild-boars, and mermaids, dolphins and fish play on banks and meadows. The birds have human voices; the winds are filled with sighs and messages of distant lovers. Addison ventures upon a ‘gothic’ building in a dark forest – it turns out to be a heathen temple of the God of Dullness. The god is surrounded by his worshippers: Industry and Caprice. There is an altar covered in offerings of axes, wings, cut in paper and inscribed with verses (picture-poems). The votaries present include ‘Regi-ment of Anagrams,’ ‘Body of Acrosticks,’ ‘files of Chronograms,’ ‘Phantom of Tryphiodorus



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the Lipo-grammatist,’ all engaging in pastime like Rebus, Crambo, and Double Rhymes (I 271-2). Outside the temple, Addison passes by ‘a Party of Punns,’ and on his way out of the region, he meets Goddess of Truth, whose arrival is signalled by “a very shining Light”(I 273). On her right side, “there marched a Male Deity, who bore several Quiv-ers on his shoulders, and grasped several Arrows in his hand. His name was Wit” (I 273). The frontiers of ‘the Enchanted Region’ were inhabited by “the Species of MIXED WIT, who made a very odd Appearance when they were mustered together in an Army” (ibid.). He goes on to describe the members of the species as follows: “There were Men whose Bodies were stuck full of Darts, and Women whose Eyes were burning Glasses: Men that had Hearts of Fire, and Women that had Breasts of Snow” (ibid.). This big group divided up into two parts, “one half throwing themselves behind the Banners of TRUTH, and the others behind those of FALSEHOOD” (ibid.).

The brightness of Truth makes Falsehood fade away and with her the whole army “shrunk into Nothing,” the temple sinks, the fountains recover their murmurs, birds their voices, the trees their leaves, “and the whole Face of Nature its true and genuine Appearance”(I 274). Then Addison inspects the army of true wit: there is the ‘Genius of Heroic Poetry,’ ‘Tragedy,’ ‘Satyr,’ ‘Rhetorick,’ ‘Comedy,’ and ‘Epigram,’ who “marched up at the Rear” and “who had been posted thereat the Beginning of the Expedition, that he might not revolt to the Enemy, whom he was suspected to favour in his Heart”(ibid.). Addison is “very much awed and delighted With the Appearance of the God of Wit,” for “there was something so amiable and yet so piercing in his Looks” that he feels himself inspired “with Love and Terrour” (ibid.). The God offers his quiver of arrows as a present to Addison who, reaching his hand to accept it knocks it against the chair and wakes up.

3.3.3 Ambiguity and Surprise: Addison’s Aesthetics of Neoclassical Wit

The ideas on different types and quality of wit expressed in the six Spectator essays on wit are usually believed to have appeared for the first time in this series. In fact, Addison voiced most of them some fourteen years prior to the publication of the wit series and, to my knowledge at least, this fact has so far gone unnoticed. In 1959 Bonamy Dobrée observed that “[t]he odd truth is that Addison ceased to develop, to change in any way, after [...] 1698. Everything he has to say is implicit in the notes to Ovid’s Metamorphoses of 1697, and his essay on Virgil’s Georgics” (113) but he never gave the specifics of Addison’s arrested development. It is therefore worth devoting some space to these early expres-sions of Addison. As early as 1697 Addison, commenting on Fable V in his ‘Notes on Some of the Foregoing Stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, criticizes ‘playing on words’ in Latin authors.

[…] as true wit is nothing else but a similitude in ideas, so is false wit the similitude in words, whether it lies in the likeness of letters only, as in anagram and acrostic; [...] or whole words,



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as puns, echoes, and the like. Beside these two kinds of false and true wit, there is another of a middle nature, that has something of both in it. When in two ideas that have some resem-blance with each other, and are both expressed by the same word, we make use of the ambigu-ity of the word to speak that of one idea included under it, which is proper to the other. [...] most languages have hit on the word, which properly signifies fire, to express love by, (and therefore we may be sure there is some resemblance in the ideas mankind have of them;) from hence the witty poets of all languages, when they have once called love a fire, consider it no longer a passion, but speak of it under the notion of a real fire, and, as the turn of wit requires, make the same word in the same sentence stand for either of the ideas that is annexed to it. (The Works of Joseph Addison I 150-1)

He then goes on to criticize the middle kind of wit, which he likens to “ambiguity”, notably harshly:

Ovid […] is the greatest admirer of this mixed wit of all the ancients, as our Cowley is among the moderns. Homer, Virgil, Horace, and the greatest poets scorned it, as indeed it is only fit for epigram and little copies of verses; one would wonder therefore how so sublime a genius as Milton could sometimes fall into it, in such a work as an epic poem. But we must attribute it to his humouring the vicious state of the age he lived in, and the false judgment of our unlearned English readers in general […]. (The Works of Joseph Addison I 151)

These excerpts from The Notes constitute not only an attack on punning but also an attack upon ambiguity, even upon metaphors. Only “weak” poets will rely upon com-parisons of the sort illustrated by the metaphor of fire and love. Great poets may stoop to “this mixt wit” but only as they submit to the “vicious taste” and “false judgment” of “unlearned […] Readers” (151).

Brian McCrea suggests that “[b]oth Addison and Steele, throughout their writings, criticize punning,” suggesting the motives are of ethical nature: “[…] Steele opposes the off-color double entendre of Restoration comedy for moral reasons” (McCrea 38). But, as he contends, the authors opposed the usage of puns and “‘forced conceits’ for epistemological as well as for ethical reasons. Insofar as a pun depends upon one word bearing at least two possible meanings, Addison and Steele feel that puns are confusing, destructive of clarity” (38). McCrea believes that “Addison naively (by the standards of modernism and postmodernism) assumes that words can refer to one idea, and to one idea only. The striking metaphor, the surprising conceit, [...] are to be avoided indeed, any kind of verbal wit is taboo” (39).

As I will show, these assumptions are correct only to a certain extent. For now, how-ever, let us pursue McCrea’s line of argument further. He writes that “[t]he uses that Addison and Steele find for verbal ambiguity (puns, and wit) allegory, repetition, and personae all reveal how their quest for popularity led them to seek clarity” and quotes Samuel Johnson who “rightly observed in his Life of Addison that, “His purpose was to infuse literary curiosity by gentle and unsuspected conveyance into the gay, the idle, and the wealthy; he therefore presented knowledge in the most alluring form, not lofty and



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austere, but accessible and familiar” (37). McCrea further asserts that it is important to observe Addison’s relentless attempt to limit ‘double meanings’ as expressed in his ‘Dia-logues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals, especially in Relation to the Latin and Greek Poets’ written probably in 1703-05:

The[…] learned medallists […] tell us [that], the rabbit, [...] may signify either the great multi-tude of these animals […] or, perhaps the several mines that are wrought within the bowels of that country, the Latin word Cuniculus signifying either rabbit or a mine. But these gentlemen do not consider, that it is not the word but the figure that appears on the Medal. Cuniculus may stand for a rabbit or a mine, but the picture of a rabbit is not the picture of a mine. A pun can be no more engraven than it can be translated. When the word is construed into its idea, the double meaning vanishes. The figure [...] before us means a real rabbit, which is there found in vast multitudes. (The Works of Joseph Addison I 325)

For Addison, McCrea suggests, meanings of this type are nothing more than ‘puns’ and they must be vanquished in order for the act of interpretation to be valid – i.e. if an interpreter wishes to successfully ‘construe’ the ‘idea’ upon which the work of art is based: “These ideas, of course, can be represented by figures; the woman on the medal can stand for Spain. But the correspondence must be exact and one-to-one. The woman is Spain; the rabbit is a rabbit. The rabbit cannot represent both rabbits and mines” (Mc-Crea 40). Addison attacks punning and any kind of verbal wit because double meanings destroy the clarity that he believes is necessary to both build and affect a large audience. Thus, McCrea believes “[i]n the terms of Jacques Derrida, Addison and Steele willingly subordinate ‘writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily [sic] spoken language’” (quot. in McCrea 42). Such a view of language also stands against Terry Eagleton’s assertion in his Literary Theory: An Introduction that “[t]he hallmark of the linguistic revolution of the twentieth century, from Saussure and Wittgenstein to contemporary literary theory is the recognition that meaning is not simply something “expressed” or “reflected” in language: it is actually produced by it” (ibid.) McCrea there-fore concludes that “[t]his view of language dominates postmodern literary criticism and theory and makes Addison and Steele largely irrelevant to the discipline and its profes-sors” (ibid.).

We may find many of McCrea’s assumptions perceptive, even true. I wish to take issue with him, however, with regard to his statement that “[a]mbiguity is a low kind of wit because in the ‘nature of things’ one ‘image’ should express one ‘idea’; one ‘verb’ should have one ‘sense’. Literature thus should not ‘surprize’ the reader, but rather should make ‘sense’ in a natural, which here becomes a simple and direct, way” (65). Against this assumption (i.e. that literature, or generally, art should not surprise the receiver) many objections could be raised. First of all, there is Addison himself who says regarding the mixed type of wit in the Notes that “[t]his way of mixing two different ideas together in one image, as it is a great surprize to the reader, is a great beauty in poetry, if there be sufficient ground for it in the nature of the thing that is described” (The Works of Joseph Addison I 147).



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I believe that what Addison really suggests is that under certain conditions mixed wit can be of a considerable aesthetic value. The key means of achieving this value is sur-prise. The element of surprise and novelty are in fact the key features of Addison’s aes-thetics which he develops in some of the later issues of the Spectator journal. However, it is another issue, adumbrated in his earlier work (in this case his Georgics essays published in 1693), which proves McCrea’s claim dubious at the very least. There is one clear hint in the Essay on the Georgics that tells us what direction Addison’s later criticism is to take. After quoting a passage from the second Georgics, he writes:

Here we see the poet considered all the effects on this union between trees of different kinds and took notice of that effect which had the most surprise and, by consequence, the most de-light in it, to express the capacity that was in them of being thus united. [...] This is wonderfully diverting to the understanding, [...]. For here the mind, which is always delighted with its own discoveries, only takes the hint from the poet, and seems to work out the rest by the strength of her own faculties. (The Works of Joseph Addison I 156-7)

The stress on the element of surprise, as William H. Youngren rightly observes, “was later to be canonized, under the name of novelty, along with greatness and beauty, as one of the three great sources of the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’” (Youngren 273).

To claim that Addison believes that literature, or art as such, should not provide sur-prise to its consumer is therefore to seriously misread his ideas on literary art and, con-sequently, to misunderstand his aesthetics in general. I believe that McCrea – not unlike C. S. Lewis – overlooks the distinction between the sphere of everyday communication, in which ambiguity can be a source of serious and potentially harmful misunderstand-ings, and the sphere of literature, in which it is welcome as a source of artistic value. I believe that his emphasis on the motives of Addison and Steele’s striving at clarity of speech is important but perhaps needs to be slightly modified. It is true, of course, that the two authors had a wide accessibility on their minds when producing the texts of the Spectator. However, given the nature of the paper, its genre and purpose, as they were stated at the beginning of this subchapter, I suggest we see this choice of style as a proto-journalistic, not purely literary strategy. In this respect Addison’s text differs from Pope’s significantly – unlike the latter poet Addison writes about wit, but does not demonstrate it at the same time.

3.4 Wit and Esprit: Points of Accord and dissonance

This subchapter offers comparative reading of the theories and ideas on wit and esprit as they appeared in the texts analyzed in the two previous chapters. As I already pointed out in the Introduction, my primary concern is to stress what is different in the authors’ opinions rather than to stress presumably obvious similarities. My hypothesis was that the image of wit and esprit will be – despite the fact that the two words have similarly


3.4 Wit and Esprit: Points of accord and dissonance

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complex etymology and operate in cultures sharing many characteristic features – at least partially disparate. The objective of this subchapter, then, is to point out and pur-sue these points of dissonance in order to come up with a closing argument concerning the relation of the two terms. I will nevertheless begin this subchapter with an account of the influence of French literary criticism on its English counterpart by summarizing the views of Dryden, Pope, and Addison in order to the general background of my sub-sequent analyses.

The readings which follow the introductory section of this subchapter are meant to juxtapose the texts analyzed Chapters 2 and 3 while utilizing the suggestions and con-texts I introduced in the theoretical chapter, thus interconnecting all the parts of the thesis. Bringing together the contexts of wit I proposed for consideration in the first chapter with the ideas on both of the terms in their specific historical settings in the two analytical chapters will hopefully yield some previously over-looked perspectives on the English term which has been the centre of the centre of my interest. In addition, I hope the comparative analysis will throw some new light on the ways in which wit is theorized by the contemporary literary criticism and, also, that it will possibly offer some fresh insights into the individual authors and their work.

3.4.1 The French criticism in England: The Question of Influence

The question of the influence of French criticism in England of the second half of the seventeenth century is a rather precarious one. The general opinion is that, unlike in poetry and drama, where the English were unwilling to give up primacy to the French, in matters of literary criticism their ideas were heavily informed by the French critical output. Thus for example A. F. B. Clark claims explicitly that “[e]ver since the resump-tion of literary activities with the return of Charles II in 1660, the eyes of Englishmen turned towards France as the source of critical light” (233), describing the situation as one of a complete and unabashed imitation:

[f]rom 1660 onwards, the English criticism derives practically all its theories and laws from France. Almost every French critical work is translated into English after its appearance and often goes through several editions in translated form during the eighteenth century. It is not till the second half of that century that systematic doubts begin to be expressed regarding the value of the French critics. (ibid.)

Similarly, J.W. H. Atkins suggests that as a result of the influence of the French criti-cism, “a new field of literary inquiry was opened up in England; a new direction was given to critical studies; and currency was given to fresh doctrines relating to […] new standards of literary judgment” (Atkins 70). The situation, as perceived by contempo-rary critics themselves, was one filled with tensions, often of national character, already hinted at Bouhours’s account of bel esprit. Thomas Rymer in the preface to his 1694 translation of Rapin’s Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote (1674) sums it up in a light,


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jocular tone; however, it is important to remember that this was a true nature of the situ-ation surrounding the status of critics and criticism in the last third of the seventeenth century:

The Author of these Reflections is as well-known amongst the Criticks, as Aristotle to the Philoso-phers : never Man gave his judgment so generally, and never was judgment more free and im-partial. He might be thought an Enemy to the Spaniards, were he not as sharp on the Italians ; and he might be suspected to envy the Italiand, were he not as severe on his own Countrymen. […] (Rapin, Monsieur Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie In General 5)

With regard to the English critics, Rymer observes, clearly with personal interest at stake, that “till of late years England was as free from Criticks, as it is from Wolves, that a harmless well-meaning Book might pass without any danger” (2).

Among the English authors, whose texts were analyzed in this chapter, it is mostly John Dryden who generally speaks up for the French critics and their achievements. In his Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1692), he pays a tribute to the French critics in going back to his early struggles with the problems of composition:

when I was myself in the rudiments of my poetry, without name or reputation in the world, hav-ing rather the ambition of the writer than the skill; when I was drawing the outline of an art, without any living master to instruct me in it; an art which had been better praised than studied in England […] when thus, as I say, before the use of the vast ocean, without any other help than the pole-star of the ancients, and the rules of the French stage among the moderns. (Clark 234)

In the Dedication to the Aeneis (1697) his admiration for the French critics is expressed with sheer sincerity: “For impartially speaking, the French [critics] are so much better than the English, as they are worse poets” (ibid.). Alexander Pope belongs to a new generation of critics, who familiarized themselves with the precepts of the French neoclassicism early in their careers and as much as they were influenced by them, they constantly challenged them in their works. Thus in the Essay on Criticism he makes a bold statement regarding the resistance of the English to the French writing that “critic-learning flourished most in France, / The rules a nation born to serve, obeys; / And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. /But we, brave Britons, foreign laws despised, / And kept unconquered and un-civilized, / Fierce for the liberties of wit and bold, / We still defied the Romans as of old” (712-8). Similarly Joseph Addison, usually respectful towards the French critics, now and again becomes uneasy about the constant repetition of “diction, design, unities” and his patience gives out occasionally as in the following passage from the Spectator No. 291: “A few rules extracted out of the French authors, with a certain cant of words, has sometimes set up an illiterate heavy writer for a most judicious and formidable critic” (The Spectator I 205). Therefore, even though the modern critics usually evaluate the influence of the French criticism on the English literary scene of the Restoration period as one of un-equivocal agreement, it is important to keep in mind that the actual situation was one of conflicted nature filled with tensions, be it of personal, national or artistic character.



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Boileau’s L’art poétique and Pope’s Essay on Criticism: Wit and language

What connects L’Art poétique and Essay on Criticism on a general level is their common in-terest in pursuing the matters of poetic production and literary criticism and also a long-established commonplace that there is not much originality of thought or contribution of new literary theories in either of them as they both function rather as collecting tank of the already proposed thoeries. However, by the title of the poem, not An Essay on Po-etry but An Essay on Criticism, Pope is differentiating himself from the tradition in a new perspective. He appears to be raising the ‘Art of Poetry’ to the second power. Wimsatt and Brooks comment: “In actuality the notion of ‘criticism,’ when scrutinized, very read-ily becomes transparent, focusing telescopically on the more concrete matter of poetry itself, so that what Pope says is actually De Arte Poetica” (Neoclassical Criticism 236). This manoeuvre cannot be found in Boileau’s poem, transparently titled L’Art poétique.

As the analyzed texts by Boileau and Pope show, wit is repeatedly theorized as a two-part concept with one part tending towards unbridled creative impulse which suffers no restraint and the other part towards surpressing it. Thus they oppose the philosophies of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, described in the first chapter of the thesis, both of which ascribe the dangerous, creative impulse to what they call Fancy or Imagination, while reserving the controlling, restrictive force to Judgment. This definition of wit has been contested not only by Pope and Boileau, but also other French critics. For example La Rochefoucauld, in his Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, rejects the separation of the two mental faculties, claiming that

We are deceived if we think that mind and judgment are two different matters: judgment is but the extent of the light of the mind. This light penetrates to the bottom of matters; it remarks all that can be remarked, and perceives what appears imperceptible. Therefore we must agree that it is the extent of the light in the mind that produces all the effects which we attribute to judgment.96 (59)

However, even he was not consistent in his opinion and often dissociated wit from judgment, for example in maxim no. 258 he says that “[g]ood taste arises more from judgment than wit”97 (170).

If we agree to link the more unstable part of wit to the act of poetic creation and the more controlling part to the act of criticism, it becomes clear that Pope, though balancing the two parts of wit in order to keep within the confines of the neoclassical doctrine of harmony, manages to playfully smuggle the creative part into the poem. Thus, a text which is titled Essay on Criticism is in fact a poetic exercise in witty writ-ing. A similar concern is absent from Boileau’s poem and the tone of the poem is far more prescriptive than playful. The question of creative attitude towards language is a very complex one and cannot be successfully answered at this moment. However, it might be noteworthy to consider a claim of Rupert D. V. Glasgow who – with regard to the language of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Jonathan Swift – argues that they all should be sited in “[…] an Irish tradition, the Gaelic roots of which seem to have been



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conducive to a predominantly playful attitude to language and to be responsible for the Anglo-Irish heritage of wits” (Madness, Masks, and Laughter 80). While avoiding sweep-ing generalisations, I wish to suggest that in Pope’s poem which is officially a treatise of literary criticism but factually an exercise in verbal wit, there is some evidence to sup-port Glasgow’s – modified – claim that the Anglo-Saxon tradition of language relishes in witty verbal jocularity. Thus, both Pope and Dryden, while avouching their respect for the neoclassical doctrines based on reason and rules, can be found sinning against them in their own artistic texts. This paradox is one of the reasons for the tension sur-rounding the literary criticism of the analyzed period of English literature.

By coming back to the issue of esprit not having a similarly wide range of meanings compared to wit in Pope’s and Boileau’s texts (wit is said to have seven meanings, while esprit only four with the sense of neutral ‘mind’ being the prominent one) or, by means of generalisation, in French literary theory of the second half of the seventeenth cen-tury, we also come back to the English term’s more unstable usage in relation to gender categories which I demonstrated in my analyses. We see that the impuls for unrestrained playfulness is inherent to the English mind which puts up a constant fight to subdue it by heightening the feature of control. To carry the point even further, I would suggest that this may be the reason for the uneasiness to theorize wit in a neutral manner in some of the critical studies which we witnessed in the chronological summary of the twentieth-century approaches presented in the first chapter. However, this proposition would deserve a more thorough investigation in order to produce some solid and con-clusive results. At this point, I will have to leave it in the form of suggestion for future research and continue with my comparative reading of the two terms.

3.4.2 Wit and Esprit as Signs of Advancement in English and French culture

Another point of difference can be drawn between the question of progress of the French Court as reflected for example by the account of esprit in Méré’s Discourse de l’Esprit and the process of refining wit as a sign of progress of English literature and its language, represented in various critical writings of John Dryden. From this point of view, both terms were seen as ‘signs of quality’ – to borrow an expression from Richard Scholar – in case of the French culture, it was part of the discourse of the French Court; in case of the English culture, the appraisal was connected directly to the literary sphere. More importantly however, they were both related to the merging of the literary and social, mentioned in the introduction to the second chapter with relation to how esprit was theorized in the works of Dominique Bouhours and chevalier de Méré. Another ex-pression for quality that encompasses both the ideal of noble and pleasant conduct and the proper style in a work of literary art is decorum. There are many similarities between the concerns and criteria of decorum and wit and esprit. Originating in rhetorical theories of Aristotle and Horace, decorum is what prescribes which style is appropriate to which subject and is responsible for the requirements of purity of genres – one of key rules of



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neoclassicism. Social decorum prescribes limits of appropriate social behaviour within a set situation.

In Méré’s Discourse de l’Esprit the term esprit is used to emphasize distinction between the illusory and genuine beauties of the contemporary French Court in comparison to the old one. Speaking about the current tastes of the members of the polite circles, the critic observes that “[w]hat we are told about the old Court does not suit the taste of our ladies”98 (19). “But finally one can be sure that there was little wit at the old Court”99 (20-1). Summarizing the development of the advancement of French culture, the Court and esprit become the key criteria: “How can it be then that this Court is so different to that which used to be in the old days? Henry the Great who was a good judge of all things, and who never studied anything but the art of war, and the late king methinks did not contribute to it very much. The Prince whom we have seen, had a delicate wit and would say excellent things”100 (23).* However, Méré distinguish-es the ‘true beauties’ (‘vrais Agrémens’) from the false ones; the true advancement of the Court is associated with the first sort: “The Court has therefore made some progress concerning wit and galanterie, but it was achieved under the great Prince who is admired by the world, and who has plenty of true beauties”101 (ibid.). Eventually the Court emerges from Méré’s account as a symbol of ‘shining falsehood’ (‘un faux brillant’) which often passes for true esprit: “Shining falsehood which is born out of confused and volatile imagination, passess easily for agreable wit, provided that one observes closely manners of the Court, and the majority of those who are more skilfull [...], are convinced that they do not need more than to have studied hard in order to acquire wit”102 (45). This reading of Méré’s relationship to the polite society confirms what was proposed earlier with respect to the critic’s sceptical attitude towards the metropolitan way of life. The falseness, artifice and ingenuity, both of social conduct and as its aesthetic representation are socially localized in Méré. It might be interest-ing to trace relationship of the dichotomy of the city and court versus the country to esprit from political perspective in other Méré’s texts and correspondence as the Court usually associated with the King and powers of the State.

Among the English authors, it was John Dryden who first employed the term wit to differentiate between past and present achievements in the sphere of social conduct and aesthetics. For instance, in Defence of the Epilogue. An Essay on the Dramatick Poetry of the Last Age attached to Conquest of Grenada (1672) he writes that “[i]f Love and Honour now are rais’d, / ‘Tis not the Poet, but the Age is prais’d. / Wit’s now arrived to a more high degree; / Our native language more refin’d and free. / Our ladies and our men now speak more wit / In conversation than those poets writ” (Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I 89). I have suggested that Bloomian anxiety of influence might be in play in Dryden’s conception of the poetic tradition and the role wit serves in it. Dryden’s relationship towards his precursors, although not one of depressed alarm, suggests a certain amount of tension, as exemplified by these lines: “We acknowledge

*) The Prince here is Louis XIV (1638 – 1711), the ‘Sun King’, the late king is Louis XIII (1601 –1643), and Henry the Great is Henri IV (1553 –1610).



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them [Shakespeare, Fletcher and Jonson] our fathers in wit; but they have ruined their estates themselves, before they came to their children’s hands” (I 85). If Harold Bloom claims that “the covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet’s fear that no proper work remains for him to perform” I suggest to expand this estimation in order to include Dryden and his generation of fellow poets defying the weight of poetic achievemnt of the previous authors (Bloom 148). In general, however, wit is regarded by Dryden as a usefeul element in the proc-ess of dissociation from the older generation of authors. In the works by Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison analyzed earlier in this chapter, this relationship is similarly conflicted, and the distinction between what is considered genuine wit and what only passes for it in relation to the past and present constitutes a great part of both of the authors’ discussions of wit.

Alexander Pope distinguishes between wit as ‘fancy or conceit’ and another kind “consider’d as propriety” which is the “better notion of wit” (Correspondence of Alexander Pope 34). The former kind is the “wild heap of wit” based on conceits and ‘glitt’ring Thoughts’ (An Essay on Criticism 289-91). This is the wit of the generation of the Meta-physical poets which is generally rejected by Pope, even though he is forced to make an exception personified by John Donne, who had “definitely more Wit than he wanted Versification” (quot. in Meyer Spacks 127).

Joseph Addison’s relationship to the poetic heritage of the the Metaphysical poetry as an expedient of his distinction between the right and wrong type of wit can be grasped in three issues of the Spectator series on ballads - Nos. 70, 74, and 85. Seing it as a pen-dant to the already analyzed series on wit (Nos. 58-63), Alfred B. Friedman suggests that “[a]ll the three ballad papers are permeated with an animus against the ‘Gothics manner of writing’ against those who have ‘formed to themselves a wrong and artificial taste upon little fanciful writers and authors of epigrams.’ These are the readers who (No. 70) are ‘unqualified for the entertainment’ afforded by an ordinary song or ballad” (Friedman 5). In the Spectator No. 74 Addison writes: “Had this old song been filled with epigrammatic turns and points of wit, it might perhaps have pleased the wrong taste of some readers” (Spectator I 290). To emphasize the wrong taste of those who prefer the poetic devices of the out-dated sort, Addison repeats: “If this song had been written in the Gothic manner, which is the delight of all our little wits, whether writers or readers, it would not have hit the taste of so many ages, and have pleased the readers of all ranks and conditions” (295).

In the texts of Nicolas Boileau and Dominique Bouhours esprit does not to fulfill the role of the meter of good and bad poetry or taste. In Bouhours’s texts, the two pairs of friends (Ariste and Eugene and Philanthes and Eudoxe) sometimes use the term jeu d’esprit to express the chief failures of the foreign, mostly Italian and Spanish variants of Metaphysical poetry. Thus when analyzing the hero mourning his his lady’s death in Tasso’s epic poem La Gerusalemme liberate they criticize the flowery language full of con-ceits which in their opinion clashes with the tragedy of the scene: “Tears and Witticisms are very disagreeable Company, and grief has no occasion for such Points”103 (The Art of Criticism 48). Jeu d’esprit is also associated with the excess of this deplorable wit and



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does not agree with the more natural, less ingenious esprit: “[T]he Heart explains it self ill by a turn of Wit, and I wou’d willingly say with a Man of Good Judgment. I don’t love such a far-fetch’d beginning, above all in a violent passion in which Sprightliness has no part”104 (The Art of Criticism 171).

3.4.4 Wit and Esprit: Terminology of New Taste

In generalized terms, it might be said that the dilemmas of wit analyzed in this study are the result of clash between what Peter France calls “demands of truth-telling and sincer-ity and those of persuasive communication” of language (3). This is certainly true as far as the underlying philosophical principles explored in the first chapter are concerned. A satisfying explanation of these dilemmas, particularly with regard to the comparative point of view of this subchapter, must include discussion of the forming aesthetic cat-egory of taste and the role which wit played in it. We have seen the dichotomy of what the English early modern authors call true and false wit serve as a demarcation line between the old and new poetic styles and types of taste. In the French, this dichotomy is captured by the difference between the terms esprit, which has much wider ring of meanings than the English wit, and jeux d’esprit, which stresses the verbal playfulness as-sociated with the general idea of false wit more explicitly than its English equivalent.

Esprit, bel esprit, and jeu d’esprit

I have already suggested in my comparison of the use of wit and esprit in Pope’s and Boileau’s texts that esprit assumes the neutral meaning of ‘mind’ more often than wit. This applies as well for theories on esprit of François de La Rochefoucauld who in his Re-flections on Various Subjects provides an extensive classification of various types of minds according to their qualities. When faced with the task to describe the bel esprit, La Ro-chefoucauld’s account testifies to the general complications related to vagueness of the term: “The expression ‘Bel Esprit’ is much perverted, for all that one can say of the dif-ferent kinds of mind meet together in the ‘Bel Esprit.’ Yet as the epithet is bestowed on an infinite number of bad poets and tedious authors, it is more often used to ridicule than to praise”105 (La Rochefoucauld, Reflections 84). The English translation seems to be equally awkward, as the term esprit is translated as both ‘mind’ and ‘wit’ within the space of a single paragraph, even though it clearly has the same meaning in all five instances:

There are yet many other epithets for the mind which mean the same thing, the difference lies in the tone and manner of saying them, […]. Custom explains this in saying that a man has wit, has much wit, that he is a great wit; there are tones and manners which make all the difference between phrases which seem all alike on paper, and yet express a different order of mind.106 (Reflections 84, emphasis mine).



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Concerning terminology used to express aesthetic appreciation, esprit turns out to be similarly unreliable and unstable as the bel esprit as my analysis of the aesthetic theory of Dominique Bouhours in the second chapter suggested: the je-ne-sais-quoi, the sublime, délicatesse share features too similar to allow clear and unambiguous distinction of in-dividual traits. Bel esprit seems to emphasize the social dimension of esprit, it never as-sumes a neutral meaning, very often stands for a person, and in such a case it is a person of a very specific character. Similar to honnête homme, the bel esprit rarely assumes female identity or is described with adjectives associated with it.

true and false wit

Looking back at Dryden’s definition of wit, Pope writes: “True wit, […], may be defin’d as a Justness of Thought and a Facility of Expression; or […] a perfect Conception with an easy Delivery” (The Correspondence of Alexander Pope 2). The dichotomy of ‘true’ and ‘false’ appears in embryonic stage in the theories of Dryden, who wavers between con-flicting positions on what qualities wit should be associated with. By modifying Dryden’s definition, Pope makes it clear that his ideas on the matter of appreciation are much less foggy, even if they are often compromised by the irrepressible impulse to deploy or appreciate the more material, sensuous and subsequently more volatile kind of wit. Addison’s contribution to the classification of the terms is the most conspicuous, if not trouble-free. Delineating very obvious differences between true and false wit, Addison falls into a trap of his own making by introducing third, ‘mixed’ type of wit only to. As-sociated mainly with punning, i.e. wordplay and the mode of vebal playfulness which generates ambiguity and destroys clarity, mixed wit is condemned as harmful. At the same time, nevertheless, Addison allows this mode to retain some aesthetic value by connecting it with the elements of novelty and surprise, key features of his neoclassic aesthetics.

The adjectives ‘true’ and ‘false’ help to diversify what in fact are the two opposing yet complementary components of wit – the tendency towards verbal playfulness, and rejection of literal meaning in favour for metaphorical mode of expression, and hence ambiguity. This falseness is associated with Metaphysical poetry which, at its worst, was based solely on the principle of verbal ingeniousness, and was governed by the urge to display one’s ability to produce never before used images and metaphors. In the fashion-able society, such ability was highly valued for its immediate effectiveness. As some of the authors – Méré in particular – demonstrate, it was also a type of ability which was associated with superficiality and excessive artifice both from the point of aesthetic ex-pression as well as social conduct. The excess of external ornamentalization or exagger-ated expressivity – be it of poetic language or a style in the form of far-fetched conceits or one’s demeanour in the form of affectation – was what made ‘false’ wit incompatible with the requirements for natural and well-balanced aesthetic mode. On the other hand, ‘true’ wit signifies what is genuine, unstudied and unpretentious. It is not subject to the ambition to draw the audiences’ attention to oneself at all costs. In the sphere of aesthet-



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ics, it exercises a command over both creative and receptive qualities. As a concept, it is more complex than false wit, as it de facto includes some of its features but pairs them up with the restraint of intensity, measured expression and sober rationalism. The balance of these two elements is what makes wit ‘true’, i.e. a valuable and respected aesthetic concept.

To my knowledge, there is no equivalent to the systematic approach to this terminol-ogy as exemplified by Addison’s series on wit in the French aesthetic texts of the early period. What seems to be obvious, then, is that jeu d’esprit is the equivalent of false wit. As for true wit, I believe that it is covered by one of meanings of esprit; and there is no attempt on the part of the authors analyzed in this study to come up with a qualitative adjective to emphasize their approval. One obvious reason for this may of course be that there was never a need for such a term, as the expression jeu d’esprit was sufficiently distinctive as well as suggestive in its explicit acknowledgment of the element of play. The term bel esprit seems to be specifically related to the sphere of social contact in the French context, more specifically with the polite circles represented by the précieuse sa-lons and the Court. There is no original equivalent of this term in the English language, but it was adopted and became part of more or less historical terminology where it excu-sively described a cultivated, witty or clever person who uses the mind creatively.



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conclusion

The aim of this study was to explore the term wit as a particular historical phenomenon, presenting it in its past and present contexts. The concept has been treated as a histori-cal agent and actor, concentrating in particular on its activity at the crossroads of the early modern spaces of English literary criticism and theory and the worldly literature of politeness. The exploration was carried out within linguistic, theoretical, and histori-cal frame, emphasizing the multi-disciplinary dimension of the term, as well as bringing into the question encounters with the French literary criticism and its usage of the term esprit. In these encounters, both concepts emerge as markers of anxieties and uncertain-ties of era of political and social upheaval, countered with renewed urges toward cer-tainty and semantic unequivocalness. The historical agency and development of wit was examined through its activity in a range of different texts and contexts some of which are rarely discussed in the contemporary literary criticism.

At the same time, the study emphasized wit’s vitality and attempted to posit it as a liv-ing concept by suggesting that its current status as “a quaint category of verbal clever-ness” does not encompass the term’s potential (Sitter 5). Therefore, the traditional view of the concept’s agency as a predominantly verbal and literary device is challenged by proposing that the term should be viewed as aesthetic concept rather than a rhetoric-based poetic device. For this purpose, I present theory of visual arts and social conduct of the Renaissance Italy, known as sprezzatura, semiotic model of theatre proposed by Czech theorist Ivo Osolsobě, and a theory of games as sites for wit’s employability in the spheres of non-literary nature.

As a way of concluding, I will highlight some important aspects of wit’s and esprit’s agency in the theories of early modern literary criticism. I will further argue that the textual analyses carried out in the second and third chapters of the thesis attest to the gradual development of wit from the device of rhetoric-based poetic to the broader and more flexible field of aesthetics. This in turn confirms the legitimacy of my suggestion to revaluate the modern concept of wit and to consider it rather as an aesthetic concept, operative in various artistic theories, than as a narrowly verbal device confined to the field of literary production. Finally, I will suggest topics for further research branching out of the present study.


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In the theories of the first French author, Dominique Bouhours, “‘Le Bel Esprit’ in-troduces a reader-oriented dimension designed to make manifest the moral value of reading literature (as against those who argue that literature imitates too well and is therefore immoral)” (Cronk 72). Complementing the bel esprit, “‘Le Je Ne Sçay’ is an at-tempt to establish a new literary concept which can defend forcefulness of expression (as against those who believe that literary discourse, as a second-degree imitation, is inher-ently flawed)” (ibid.) First of the two analyzed Bouhours’s texts – Les Entretiens d’Artiste et d’Eugène – reveals clearly the various tensions underlying poetic theory in the 1670s. Bouhours is evidently sensitive to the dilemmas posed for poetry by a nomenclaturist theory of language. As Cronk suggests, “the drift of discussion in the Entretiens, with its emphasis on the je ne sais quoi and the bel esprit points towards an aesthetic of sugges-tion – an aesthetic which stands in inevitable opposition to the prevailing poetic theory of unproblematic clarity” (70). Bouhours seeks to elaborate upon this notion further in La Maniére de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit, where he tries out a new term for this ineffable literary quality, la délicatesse.

Chevalier de Méré shares the basic premise of Bouhours, i.e. the connection of his theories of the je-ne-sais-quoi and esprit to the sphere of social decorum. In Discours de l’esprit he expounds his ideas of the latter term to a lady stressing the discprepancy be-tween what is genuine esprit and what is mistaken for it. Associating it with judgment, he rejects falseness and artifice of behaviour and aesthetic experience, metaphorically defining esprit as ‘a sort of light’ which has the power to create and reflect things at the same time. The light metaphor, appearing already in Bouhours’s theories, is one of the most persistent with respect to esprit as well wit. One other point of connection is the relationship of Bouhours and Méré towards the question of women and their access to esprit. While Bouhours clearly associated esprit with the masculine quailities, and presented it as virtually taboo for women, Méré’s position is more ambivalent. Without explicitly addressing the topic, he constantly links women with beauty and men with courage. Furthermore, in a suggestive list of adjectives, Méré presents sim-plicity as a commendable quality, as it stands for limited, yet still receptive and agree-able feature.

The emphasis in Boileau’s theories on esprit shift from the social to the literary field as he explores wit as a two-part concept in his Satires. Both parts participate on the creative process which requires rationality and control as well as energy and imagination. In my analysis of the use of the term esprit in Boileau’s L’Art Poétique I identify several different meanings of the term and compare them with the English equivalents in a contempo-rary adaptation of the poem. Basically, esprit can assume four different roles depending on which of the two elements and which position towards the aesthetic object is taken. It can thus assume the role of restrained receiver of the aesthetic experience, one who appreciates the balance and the rational, or it can assume the identity of a shallow and easily impressed mind which has weakness for the frivolous and superficial. A similar dy-namics can be found between the two author-like types of esprit: esprit-ego which is rash and intuitive as well as highly creative. In order to produce valuable results, it has to be restrained by a more pragmatic super-ego which is the controlling element in esprit. This


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type of dynamics is in fact fundamental for majority of discussions of the nature of wit in the English literary and aesthetic theories which I will now expound.

John Dryden’s theories of wit are a typical product of the immediate post-Restoration years. Influenced by the brand new stream of neoclassic criticism imported from France, reacting against the English variant of Baroque poetry, and burdened by the weight of literary achievements of Shakespeare and Jonson, Dryden attempts to both adopt the new neoclassic doctrines and accommodate the requirements of his own audiences. As a prolific playwright, his theories of wit make an attempt to conciliate these conflicting tendencies. This is the reason behind his rather unsystematic attitude towards wit. On the one hand, he claims that wit is ‘propriety of words and words,’ on the other, he sug-gests that “it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature,” ( Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays I 207).

Alexander Pope’s theories, although not as explicitly contradictory as those of Dryden, clearly attest to the inner tension which – as I claim – is the inherent feature of wit. In his Essay on Criticism, a poem dealing with the issues of poetic creation and criticism and heavily influenced by Boileau’s L’Art poétique, he presents a similar model of wit to that of the French critic, contrasting the ‘pro-creation’ aspect of wit to the ‘pro-discipline’ aspect. Also similar to Boileau is Pope’s concern for the moral and aesthetic balance in the process of artistic creation and appreciation, which can be juxtaposed to the bal-ance of the individual elements of wit. Pope sees wit as the perfect balance between the raw energy of poetic creation and the structuring, and the order-bringing faculty that supervises the act of creation. At the same time, Pope is able to playfully utilize the very concept which he theorizes in the poem which making it a unique proof of the precepts and ideas expressed in it.

The concern for pragmatic clarity and unequivocalness as opposed to the aesthetic pleasure of surprise and novelty are at the centre of Joseph Addison’s theory of wit. My reading of his theories was partially informed by a debate with Brian McCrea whose study, although twenty years old now, is still the most recent study in Addison literary scholarship. Using Addison as a part of his own agenda, which – paradoxically – tries to use the author as a proof why the contemporary literary criticism does not concern itself with writers like Addison and Steele, McCrea contends that Addison opposed the element sof ambiguity and surprise in his theories of wit, in order to make his texts ac-cessible to as large numer of readers as possible. However, McCrea simplifies the matter so that it serves his own case. Addison’s main mission stands in a sharp contrast with the elitist nature of the post-World War II English department, nourished by the post-struc-turalist “valorization of inaccessibility” (Claiborne Park 662). As much as McCrea’s claim brings up many thought-provoking and uncomfortable questions, my concern is that not only does he manipulate Addison’ s theory of wit and imagination but that his manipu-lations are based on misresearched claims. Furthermore, I find that McCrea bases his reading of Addison on a Habermasian premise that the development of English coffee-house culture and its “periodical press marked the emergence of a potentially egalitarian discursive space, a realm governed more by rational force of the Berger argument than


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by the institutional force of existing power relations” (Pollock 707). However, in agree-ment with Anthony Pollock, I believe that “this interpretation of the post-Restoration public space is compromised,” especially with respect to the issues of gender and class (ibid.).

Addison systematically traces the development of wit in the seventeenth century, com-ing up with categories of true and false wit, which represent the final encapsulation of the qualities and features tentatively suggested by the previous theorists. This pinning down of the vital differences between the two opposing tendencies represents the cul-mination of the early modern theories of wit as well as a beginning of a new branch of philosophy of perception, based on categories such as taste, beautiful, and art – aesthet-ics. The ideas on wit expressed by Addison in the wit series of the Spectator were later developed by him in the series on ‘Pleasures of Imagination’, where he formulated his proper aesthetic theory.

Early modern ideas on wit and esprit explored in this study constitute a body of theory which revolved around the questions of creative process and modes of reception of its result. In the comparative subchapter of the third chapter I presented several perspec-tives on how the individual theories differ from one another. I tried to point out the singularities which emphasized the differences between them. Nevertheless, if we wish to find some points of agreement, they will appear before our eyes very clearly. The inherent tensions of the two elements constituting the concept are present in most theo-ries of the French and English critics as well. They approach wit and esprit from various positions and explore their various aspects; however they face similar basic dilemmas and reveal identical structure of the term. Accumulating issues of gender, morals, style, and ideology, theories of wit and esprit unquestionably represent a vital part of the early modern aesthetic discourse.

While this study aimed at presenting the concept of wit from multi-disciplinary point of view, it did not propose to present a comprehensive account of wit’s agency either in its historical or its contemporary context, as such a task is clearly beyond its feasibil-ity and resources. During the period of researching and writing of the study, I have come across several topics which did not suit my purposes, but which, in my opinion, deserve further inestigation. The question of the relationship between the political and ideological scene – which during the latter half of the seventeenth century is extremely interesting in itself – and the discourses of wit representsts one of these topics. Although the issues of style in interaction with the competing ideologies of the day are the key theme of Robert Markley’s study Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, where his primary concern are Restoration comedies, he avoids the question of wit completely. And, last but not least, comparative reading of the French and English plays with respect to the interplay of wit and politics is also worth considering.


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143

endnotes

1) “[…] manifeste, […] un dynamism mental particuleir. [...] l’ambiquïté d’une époque où naît la pensée moderne.”

2) “[…] dont la gamme des significations est extrêmement vaste, a été employé pour le traduire, au prix de beaucoup d’équivoques, étant donné le caractère vague du mot français.”

3) “[…] les Français, quand ils veulent donner un nom à cette faculté mentale qui permet de relier de manière rapide, appropriée et heureuse des choses séparées et que nous appelons ingegno, emploient le mot esprit (spiritus), et de cette puissance mentale qui se manifeste dans la synthèse, ils font quelque chose de tout simple, parce que leurs intelligences exagérément subtiles excel-lent dans la finesse du raisonnement plutôt que dans la synthèse”.

4) “1. L’esprit comme pensée, opposé au corps 2. L’esprit comme degree eminent des faculties psychiques créatrices 3. L’esprit comme tournure partucliére de pensée et 4. L’esprit, catégorie esthétique”

5) “Esprit désigne tout le psychisme humain, ou parfois, plus spécialment, les facultés intellec-tuelles (quand on opposes « l’esprit » et « le couer » c’est-à-dire l’intelligance et l’affectivité) ou les facultés d’invention (parfois opposées au jugement). C’est en ce sense que les ouvres littéraires et artistiques sont dites « ouvres de l’esprit » : ce ne sont pas seulement des objets matériellement réalisés, mais aussi et surtout les fruits d’une activité de la pensée.”

6) “Ce sense est ancien, mais il faut le connaître pour éviter des contresens. On a dit, surtout au XVIIe siècle, qu’un écrivain avait de l’esprit, là où l’on dirait aujourd’hui qu’il a du talent, ou de génie. Ainsi Louis XIV disait à Mme de Sévigné, àpropos d’Esther, « Racine a bien de l’esprit. » Ce sense s’efface au cours du XVIIIe : Voltaire, auteur de l’article Esprit (Philosophie et Belles-Lettres) dans l’Encyclopédie, l’écarte au profit des sense suivants.”

7) “C’est, dit Voltaire, un mot générique qui a toujours besoin d’un autre mot qui le détermine ... L’esprit sublime de Corneille n’est ni l’esprit de Boileau, ni l’esprit naïf de la Fontaine », etc. Il s’agit ici du caractère particulier d’un auteur, de son genre propre de pensée, de vision du monde, et de style. À partir de ce sens, on a appelé « Esprit de ... » au XVIIIe siècle et début de XIXe, un résumé de l’oeuvre d’un auteur, avec quelques extraits choisis; cet emploi du terme n’existe plus aujourd’hui ; mais, comme titre, il avait en son temps une certaine valeur com-merciale.”

8) “L’esprit est ici une finesse piquante de la pensée, qui détermine la catégorie esthétique du spirituel.”


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9) “[…] si il se combine bien et facilement avec le comique et le satirique, il ne se confond avec deux.”

10) “Des lourdises peuvent faire rire, elles n’ont pas spirituel ; un lapsus peut amuser, […] , et déclenche l’hilarité, ce n’est pas un mot d’esprit […].”

11) 1. L’inventivité de rapports inattendus 2. Convenance pertinente des éléments ainsi rapprochés 3. L’aisance et la légèreté 4. La signification.

12) “Mirabeau était capable de tout pour de l‘argent, même d’une bonne action.”13) “[…] affranchissement […], du banal, du prêvu ; jeu d’une puissance créatrice, âme en lib-

erté.”14) “[Witz] heißt ursprünglich Schauheit oder Findigkeit. Unter den Einfluss der französischen

esprit verengt sich der Begriff im 18.Jh. zu seiner heutigen Bedeutung. Dem Satirischen und der Karikatur verwandt, ist der W. eine durch den Verstand geprägte Form des Komischen. Er steht damit im Gegensatz zum warmen, gemütvollen, «vernünftigen» Humor.”

15) “Sein wichtigstes Bauprinzip ist die Kürze (Jean Paul). Als eine «einfache Form» des Erzählens (Jolles) besteht er in der Regel aus zwei Teilen, der W. Erzählung und der Pointe. Prinzipiell ist allerdings zwischen Wort-W., Situations-W. (gag) und Handlungs-W. zu unterscheiden. Seine Pointe stellt zwischen einander sonst fremden Dingen oder Vorstellungen verborgene Ähnli-chkeiten her oder löst eine «hochgespannte Erwartungen» in nichts aus (Kant, Vischer).”

16) “Die Grundstimmung des W. ist aggressiv. Das Lachen, das er hervorruft, richtet sich gegen ethnische Minderheiten (Juden- oder Neger-W.), gegen soziale Randgruppen (Behinderten-, Irren-W.), gegen bestimmte Berufsgruppen (Arzt-, Lehrer-, Pfarrer-, Richter-W.), gegen die Regierung (politischer W.) etc.”

17) “Der W. ist respektlos, hält sich an keine kulturellen Normen, durchbricht Tabus und ermögli-cht so die (indirekte) Befriedigung verbotener oder verdrängter Wünsche (Bachtin). Seine Lust resultiert aus dem plötzlichen Abbau des «Hemmnisaufwands», der gegenüber den ver-botenen Gefühlen, Gedanken oder Triebregungen errichtet worden ist.”

18) “[…] vtip je svou podstatou to samé, co metafora, totiž obraz, jehož použití řečníkem urychlí a usnadní pochopení něčeho, co by bylo jinak třeba vysvětlovat dosti nesnadno a zdlouhavě a vzbudí tím naši libost.”

19) “Vtip je tedy – zobecníme-li tento postřeh i na řešení jiných úloh než rétorické úlohy někomu něco vyložit – řešení určitého relativně nesnadného úkolu, řešení, které přitom překvapuje svou snadností: dodejme, že toto řešení je překvapivější (tedy i účinnější), jestliže si pro ně „ne-jdeme daleko“, jestliže využijeme toho, co je po ruce a co přesto jiného použít nenapadlo.”

20) “Vtipný bude tedy šachista (ale také fotbalista nebo volejbalista), využije-li situace, kterou nám soupeř sám namáhavě vytvořil, vtipná bude odpověď, užije-li slova nebo obratu, s kterým vyru-koval partner či protivník, vtipné bude řešení rovnice, využije-li souvislostí předchozím postu-pem již vytvořených, vtipná bude práce skladatele, vytěží-li překvapivé bohatství z chudičkého motivku nebo dokáže-li […] změnit k nepoznání celý charakter tématu, vtipná bude kompoziční práce spisovatele, nebude-li se pachtit s tím, aby vymýšlel pro novou dějovou funkci novou postavu, ale využije-li postavy původně vymyšlené pro jinou funkci, a obě funkce spojí […].”

21) “[…] vtipná je prostě zdánlivá odbočka, z níž se nečekaně vyklube výhodná zkratka a nejkratší spojení k cíli.”


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22) “Už Aristoteles spojuje vtip s metaforou: metafora však není nic jiného než model, jenže model „o patro výš“ : to, co dělá modelování s věcmi (totiž že je bere jako náhražky jiných věcí), dělá metafora s jejich názvy. Spojme tedy vtip směle nejen s metaforou, ale i s modelem. Vynález modelu je ostatně klasicky vtipné řešení: nenamáhá se získat to, co k dispozici není, a využívá toho, co k dispozici je, a dokonce z toho nedostatku udělá největší výhodu.”

23) “Každé divadlo (ve smyslu dramatické dílo) modeluje komunikaci komunikací: bere to, co k dispozici je a dělá z toho model oné komunikace, o niž jde a která k dispozici není.”

24) “Pokud šlo o jazyk, nezůstalo při snaze vytříbit ho, zbavit ho obhroublostí a odlišit se jím od zvulgarizovaného, machiavelismem nasáklého hedonismu nové společenské vrstvy. ”

25) “[…] conversations libres & familiéres , qu’ont les honnestes gens, quand ils sont amis, & que ne laissent pas d’estre quelquefois spirituelles, & mesme sçavantes, quoy qu’on ne songe pas à y avoir de l’esprit, & que l’étude n’y ait point de part.” (2)

26) “Le vray bel esprit , […] , que ce discernement exquis appartient plus au bon sens , qu’au bel esprit ; & c’est se méprendre , que de le confondre avec je ne sçay quelle vivacité qui n’a rien de solide. Le jugement est comme le fonds de la beauté de l’esprit : ou plûtost le bel esprit est de la nature de ces pierres precieuses , qui n’ont pas moins de solidité , que d’éclat. Il n’y a rien de plus beau qu’un diamant bien poli & bien net ; il éclate de tous costez , & dans toutes ses parties.” (235-6)

27) “C’est un corps solide qui brille ; c’est un brillant qui a de la consistence & du corps. L’union , le mélange , l’assortiment de se qu’il a d’éclatant de solide , fait tout son agrément tout son prix. Voilà le symbole du bel esprit , tel que je me l’imagine.” (236)

28) “Il y a du solide & du brillant dans un égal degré : c’est à le bien définir , le bon sens qui brille. Car il y a une espece de bon sens sombre & morne , qui n’est gueres moins opposé à la beauté de l’esprit , que le faux brillant. Le bon sens dont je parle , est d’une espece tout differente : il est gay, vif , plein de feu , […] , il vient d’une intelligence droite & lumineuse , d’une imagina-tion nette & agreable.” (236)

29) “[…] fait que l’esprit est subtile, & qu’il n’est point évaporé; qu’il brille , mais qu’il brille point trop ; qu’il conçoit proptement tout , & qu’il juge sainement de tout.” (236-7)

30) “Un vray bel esprit songe plus aux choses qu’aux mots […] les ornements du langage.” (237)31) un don du ciel […] je ne sçay quoi de divin’ (234).32) “les choses telles qu’elles sont en elles-mesmes.” (235)33) “tous les objets dans leur jeur”, “les veritez les plus obscures” (254).34) “[l]a beauté de l’esprit est une beauté masle & genereuse , qui n’a rien de mol, ni d’effeminé.”

(237)35) “les beaux esprits sont un peu plus rares dans les païs froids , parce que la nature y est plus

languissante & plus morne pour parler ainsi” […] “le bel esprit tel que vous l’avez défini , ne s’accomode point du tout avec les temperament grossiers & les corps massifs des peuples du Nord” (270).

36) “[c’est] l’étoile de la nation française d’avoir présentement ce beau tour d’esprit que les autres nations n’ont pas” (271).

37) “on dirait que tout l’esprit & toute la science du monde soit maintenant parmi nous , & que tous les autres peuples soient barbares en comparaison des François […] je ne sçay rien de plus commun dans tout le Royaume , que ce bon sens delicat y estoit si rare autrefois”


Endnotes

146

38) “Ce beau feu & ce bon sens […] , ne viennent pas d’une complexion froide & humide : la froi-deur & l’humiditè qui rendent les femmes foibles , timides , indiscrettes , legeres , impatientes , babillards , […]les empeschent d’avoir le jugement , la solidité , la force , la justesse que le bel esprit demande. […] elles ne sont pas trop raisonnables.

39) “[…] le bon sens qui brille […].”40) “il faut encore y avoir une certain clarté que tous les grands genies n’ont pas” (246-7).41) “il y a des je ne sçay quoy universels, dont tout le monde est touché également.”42) “je ne sçay quoy d’un autre ordre” […] “[…] le je ne sçay quoy est de la grace aussi bien que de

la nature et de l’art. […]; [C]ette grace, dis-je, qu’est-ce autre qu’oun je ne sçay quoy supernatu-ral, qu’on ne peut expliquer, ni comprendre?”

43) “[…] les grand maistres […] ont tasché toûjours de donner de l’agrément à leurs ouvrages, en cachant leur art avec beaucoup de soin, et d’artifice.”

44) “[…] trop d’art. Le cœur s’explique mal d’abord par un jeu d’esprit, & je dirois volonriers avec un homme de bon goust. Je n’aime pas un commencement si recherché, sur tout dans un passion violente, où le brillant ne doit avoir nulle part.” (234)

45) “pensée naturelle [a] je ne sçay qouy beauté simple, sasn fard & artifice.” (217-8)46) “Ah dites-moy, je vous prie, [...], ce que c’est précisément que délicatesse ! on ne parle d’autre

chose , j’en parle à toute heure moy-mesme sans bien sçavoir ce que je dis , ni sans en avor une notion nette.” (157)

47) “Il faut, à mon avis , raisonner de la délicatesse des pensées qui entrent dans les ouvrages dèesprit , par rapper à celle des ouvrages naturels. Les plus délicatets sont ceux où la naure prend plaisir à travailler en petit , & dont la matière presque imperceptible fait qu’on doute si elle a dessein de montrer ou de cacher son adresse.” (158)

48) “On ramasse beaucoup de sens en peu de paroles : on dit tout ce qu’il faut dite , & on ne dit précisément que ce qu’il faut dire” (237).

49) “il semble d’abord quelle le cache en partie, afin qu’on du moins elle le laisse seulement en-trevoir , pour nous donner le plaisir de le découvrir tout-à-fait quand nous avons de l’esprit.” (158)

50) “[d]’où l’on peut conclure que la délicatesse ajoûte je ne sçay quoi au sublime & à l’agréable.” (159)

51) “Le grand, le sublime n’est point naïf, & ne le peut estre: car le naïf emporte de soy-même je ne sçay quoi de petit, ou de moins élevé. Ne m’avez-vus pas dit, intrrompit Philanthe, que la simplicité & la grandeur n’estoient pas incompatible? Qûï, reprît Eudoxe, et je vous le dis encore, mais il y a de la différence entre une certaine simplicité noble & la naïvité tout pure: l’une n’exclut que le faste, l’autre exclut mesme la grandeur.” (218)

52) “[…] des qualitez aussi opposes, que la vivacité et le bon sens, la delicatessen et la force, […] ne se rencontrent pas toûjours ensemble” (252).

53) “Car la veritable beauté de l’esprit consiste dans un discernement juste et delicat, que ces Messieurs-là n’ont pas. Ce discernement fait connoistre les choses telles qu’elles sont en elles-mesmes, sans qu’on demeure court, comme le peuple, dui s’arreste à la superficie: ni quasi sans qu’on aille trop loin, comme ces esprits rafinez, qui à force de subtiliser, s’évaporent en des imaginations vaines et chimeriques”. (235)


Endnotes

147

54) “[…] en tous les exercise […] on connoist les excellens maistres du mestier à je ne sçay quoy de libre et d’aisé qui plaist toujours, mais qu’on peut geure acquerir sans une grande pratique […]. Les agrémens animent la justesse en tout ce que je viens de dire; mais d’une façon si naïve, qu’elle donne à penser que c’est une present de la nature. Cela se trouve encore vray dans les exercices de l’Esprit comme dans la Conversation; où il faut avoir cette liberté pour s’y rendre agreable.”

55) “Ce que j’aime le mieux, et qu’on doit selon mon sense le plus souhaiter en tout ce qu’on fait pour plaire, c’est je ne sçay quoi qui se sent bien, mais qui ne s’explique pas si aisément […].”

56) “Aprés tout, une Dame parfaitement belle et d’un esprit si aimable, que mesme les plus beles ne pouvoient s’empêcher de l’aimer, me demandoit ce que c’estoit qu’un honneste homme, et une honneste femme, car l’un revient à l’autre : et quand j’eus dit ce que j’en croyois, et qu’elle en eut parlé de fort bons sense, elle avoüa bien que tout cela luy semblait nécessaire pour estre ce qu’elle demandoit, mais qu’il y avoit encore quelque chose d’inexplicable, qui se connoist mieux à le voir pratiquer qu’à le dire. Ce qu’elle s’imaginoit consiste en je ne sçai quoi de noble qui releve toutes les bonnes qualitez, et qui ne vient que du cœur et de l’esprit; le reste n’en est que la suite et l’équipage.”

57) “Il me semble, Madame, que vous aimez plus que vous ne devriez la modestie , & je trouve pourtant que vous ne laissez pas quelquefois de vous en éloigner. Cela vient peutétre de ce que vous n’avez pas guerre consideré ce que c’est , &que vous croyez que plus on s’abaisse , plus on est modeste.”

58) “Cette vertu , […] , consiste dans un juste milieu […].”59) “Et pourqoui ne pouvez vous demeurer d’accord des rares qualitez de vôtre esprit , vous qui l’avez si bien fait & si peu commun , que quand vous seriez moins belle vous ne laisseriez pas d’estre la plus aimable personne du monde?”60) “Vous parlez simplement , vous ne dites ni de beaux mots, ni de belle choses ; vous étes re-

tenuë à juger , vous ne decidez de rien qu’en vous-méme, & lors que vous revenez de la Come-die ou du Balet , vous n’en parlez pour l’ordinaire ni en bien ni en mal.”

61) “Cét home , diton , a bien de l’esprit , mais il n’est pas savant : cét autre a beaucoup de l’esprit , mais il ne sait pas le monde : cette femme est belle , mais elle n’a rien de piquant , & cette autre est fort jolie , mais ce ne sont pas des traits bien reguliers.”

62) “Les plus vaillans Hommes ne sont pas toûjours les plus grands Juges de la valeur , & les plus belles Femmes jugent souvent mal de la beauté , mais les gens qui l’ont beaucoup d’esprit , remarquent ceux qui l’ont bien fait dans les moindres actions de leur vie.”

63) ““Voici encore une façon de parler dont se sert frequentement. Il faut avoüer que vous avez bien de l’esprit , mais que vous n’avez point de jugement.”

64) “[…] avoir esprit en tout, & bien juger de tout , c’est presque une méme chose.”65) “Il me semble que l’Esprit consiste à comprendre les choses , à les avoir considerer à toute

sortes d’égards , à juger nettement de ce qu’elles sont , & de leur juste valeur , à discerner ce que l’une a de commun avec l’autre , & ce qui l’en distingue , & sçavoir prendre les bonnes voyes pour découvrir les plus cachées.”

66) “Il me semble aussi que c’est une marque infaillible qu’on a de l’esprit , de connoître les meil-leurs moyens , & de les savoir employer pour bie faire tout ce qu’on entreprend.”


Endnotes

148

67) “[…] la plus grande preuve qu’on a de l’Esprit , & qu’on l’a bien fait , c’est de bien vivre & de se conduire toûjours comme on doit.”

68) “Il ne faut pas confondre l’esprit & la raison , comme si c’étoit une même chose , & je trouve qu’on peut bien étre fort raisonnable & n’avoir que fort peu d’esprit.”

69) “[…] une puissance de l’ame commune à l’esprit & au sentiment […].”70) “[…] esprit & le talent ne sont pas de meme nature […] l’esprit est d’une si grande étendue

que la moindre chose qu’on fait par l’esprit, témoigne qu’on seroit capable de tout ce qu’on entreprendroit , qu s’y voudroit appliquer sous d’excelens maitres.” (17-8)

71) “C’est encore une marque d’un bon fonds d’esprit , de n’étre abusé ni des modes , ni des cou-tomes ; de ne decider de rien à moins que de bien voir ce qu’on decide […].”

72) “[…] c’est un bon signe d’intelligence de ne pas entendre ce qui n’est pas intelligible , & que c’est encore une marque d’un bon discernment de rejetter sans reflexion une mauvaise équiv-oque qu’on veut faire valoir comme un bon mot.”

73) “Il y a deux sortes d’esprits. Les uns qui sont en petit nombre, comprennent les choses d’eux-mémes. Ce sont eux qui on cherché dans les idées de la nature & qui ont inventé ou perfec-tionné les arts & les sciences. Les autres qui sont d’un naturel plus paresseux ou plus negligent n’inventent pas pout [sic] l’ordinaire , mais ils comprennent ce que leur disent les inventeurs , tantôt plus vit, tantôt plus lentement.”

74) “inventeurs” […] “ceux qui n’inventent pas.”75) “[...] cette premiere disposition qui nous rend capables d’entendre , nous vient quand nous

venons au monde , c’est un present du Ciel , c’est un lumiere naturell qui ne se peut aquerir , mais elle s’augmente, elle s’éclaircit, elle se perfectionne , & c’est ce que nous appellons aquerir l’esprit.”

76) “[…] la sottise n’a pas moins d’aversion pour l’esprit que l’esprit pour la sottise.” (32)77) “[…] la simplicité se montre douce , accommodante , docile , égale , juste , liberale , reconnois-

sante , & peu soupçonneuse. Elle ne se défie que d’elle-méme ; & quand elle fait quelque faute , elle aime bien qu’on l’en avertisse , & tâche de s’en corriger. Elle amire les bonnes qualitez qu’elle peut expliquer à son avantage , elle voudroit que tout le monde fut heureux. Que si sa lumiere n’est pas d’une grande étenduë , ce qu’elle en a , pour le moins est si pur , qu’elle sent bien ce qui lui manque , & qu’elle est toûjours préte à le recevoir.”

78) “l’esprit est une espece de lumiere , & la lumiere se produit & se refléchit tout d’un coup.”79) “[…] la nature, considérée dans sa totalité, est une source de lumière et d’entendement, un rés-

ervoir d’idées, enfin la patrie lointaine des esprits pur. C’est une source de lumière pusiqu’elle départit la raison sincère et naturelle, par opposition à la raison soicale ou politique donc acquise. Grâce à elle l’homme de défait des fausses clartés qui obscurcissent son jugement et gâtent ses sentiments.”

80) “Cette raison naturelle que Méré définit comme étant “un présent du Ciel” correspond à une espèce de grâce qui est “l’esprit métaphysique,” supérieur entre tous, et dont la perception permet à celui qui l’a reçu de discerner les accords, les proportions et les nombres qui sont dans la nature et qui vont à l’infini.”

81) “[…] ont cherché dans les idées de la nature et qui ont inventé ou perfectionné les arts et les sciences.”


Endnotes

149

82) “[…] n’invent pas … ils comprennent ce que dissent les inventeurs.”83) “Ne croyez pas que je sois enchanté de Paris ny de la Cour. Il me semble que je suis Citoien

du monde, à peu près comme l’estoit Socrate, et je ne laisse pourtant pas de tourner de temps en temps les yeux vers mon village, et peut-estre avec autant de tendresse qu’en avoit Caton pour sa patrie.”

84) “[…] que si on me demande ce que c’est que cet agrément et ce sel, Je répondray que c’est un je ne sçay quoi qu’on peut beaucoup mieux sentir, que dire” (4).

85) “J’ai déjà écrit ailleurs que cette elevation d’esprit était une image de la grandeur d’âme; et c’est pourquoi nous admirons quelquefois la seule pensée d’un homme, encore qu’il ne parle point ... : par example, le silence d’Ajax aux Enfers ... Car ce silence a je ne sais quoi de plus grand que tout ce qu’il aurait pu dire”.

86) “[...] certain élévation d’esprit dont les pensées sont toutes sublimes : comme on le peut voir dans sa description de la Déesse Discorde, qui a, dit-il, ‘La tête dans les Cieux, et les pieds sur la Terre.”

87) “Je vous prie de remarquer … combien il est affaibli dans son Odyssée, où il fait voir en effet que c’est le propre d’un grand esprit, lorsqu’il commence à vieillir et à décliner de se plaire aux contes et aux fables.”

88) “Si’l ne resent du Ciel l’influence secrète, /Si son astre en naissant ne l’a formé Poëte. / Dans son genié étroit il est toujours captif” (ll. 3-5).

89) “Quelque sujet qu’on traite, ou plaisant, ou sublime, / Que toujours le bon sens s’accorde avec le rime; / L’un l’autre vainement ils semblent se haïr; / La rime est une esclave , et ne doit qu’obéir. /Lorsqu’à la bien chercher d’abord on s’évertue, / L’esprit à la trouver aisé-ment s’habitue; / Au joug de la raison sans peine alle fléchit / Et loin de la gêner , la sert et l’enrichit. / Mais, lorsqu’on la néglige, elle devient rebelle, / Et pour la rattraper, le sens court après elle. / Aimez done la raison: que toujours vos écrits / Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix” (ll. 27-38).

90) “Surtout qu’en vos écrits la langue révérée / Dans vos plus grands excès vous soit toujours sac-rée. /En vain vous me frappez d’un son mélodieux, / Sie le terme est impropre ou le vicieux; / Mon esprit nèadmet point un pompoux barbarisme” (ll. 155-9).

91) “Mais souvent un esprit qui se flatte et qui s’aime, / Méconnaît son génie et s’ignore soi-même” (ll.19-20).

92) “Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairment” (l. 153).93) “Faitez-vous des amis prompts à vous censurer ; / Qu’ils soient de vos écrits les confidens

sincères , / Et de tous vos defaults les zélés adversaires. / Dépouillez devant eux l’arrogance d’Auteur , Mais sachez de l’ami discerner le flatteur” (ll. 186-90).

94) “l’abondance sterile” (ll. 59).95) “[p]ensée qui surprend par quelque subtilité d’imagination, par quelque jeu de mots.” 96) “On s’est trompé lorsqu’on a cru que l’esprit et le jugement étaient deux choses différentes.

Le jugement n’est que la grandeur de la lumière de l’esprit; cette lumière pénètre le fond des choses; elle y remarque tout ce qu’il faut remarquer et aperçoit celles qui semblent impercep-tibles. Ainsi il faut demeurer d’accord que c’est l’étendue de la lumière de l’esprit qui produit tous les effets qu’on attribue au jugement.” (141)


Endnotes

150

97) “Le bon Goût vient plus du jugement que l’esprit.” (178)98) “Tout ce qu’on nous rapporte de la vieille Cour n’est pas au gout des Dames d’aujourd’hui”

(19).99) “Mais enfin on se peut asseurer qu’il y avoir peu d’esprit dans la vieille” (20-1).100) “Comme se peut-il donc faire que cette Cour soit si differente de ce qu’elle étoit autrefois?

Henri le Grand qui jugeoit bien de tout , quoi qu’il n’eut guere étudié que le métier de la guerre , & le feu Roi ce me semble n’y ont pas peu contribé. Ce Prince que nous avons veu , avoit l’esprit delicat, & disoit d’excellentes choses” (23).

101) “La Cour a donc fait du progrés en ce qui regarde l’esprit & la galanterie , mais elle s’acheve sous ce grand Prince que le monde admire , & que les vrais Agrémens n’abandonnent point” (ibid.).

102) “Un faux brilliant , qui ne vient que d’une imagination boüillante & confuse , passé aisément pour un esprit agreeable , pourveu que la maniere de la Cour y soit bien observée , & la plûpart des plus habiles , […], sont persuadez qu’il ne faut qu’avoir beaucoup étudié pour avoir bien de l’esprit” (45).

103) “Les jeux d’esprit , replique Eudoxe, ne s’acordent pas bien avec les armes , & il n’est pas question de pointes quand on est saisi de douleur” (296-7).

104) “Le cœur s’explique mal d’abord par un jeu d’esprit, & je dirois volonriers avec un homme de bon goust. Je n’aime pas un commencement si recherché, sur tout dans un passion violente, où le brillant ne doit avoir nulle part.” (234)

105) “On a abusé du terme de bel esprit, et bien que tout ce qu’on vient de dire des différentes qualités de l’esprit puisse convenier a un bel esprit, néanmoins, comme ce titre à été donné a un nombre infini de mauvais poètes et d’auteurs ennuyeux, on s’en sert plus souvent pour tourner les gens en ridicule que pour les louer” (112).

106) “Bien qu’il y ait plusieurs épithètes pour l’esprit dui paraissent une même chose, […]. L’usage ordinaire le fait assez entendre, et en disant qu’un homme a de l’esprit, qu’il a bien de l’esprit, qu’il a beaucoup de l’esprit, et qu’il a bon esprit, il n’y a que les tons et les manières dui puissent mette de la différence entrée ces expressions dui paraissent semblables sut le papier, et qui experiment néanmois de très différentes sortes de l’esprit” (114).


151

Addison, Joseph 17, 27, 32, 68, 98, 100, 107, 109-18, 120, 124, 126, 131-2

— The Works of Joseph Addison 116-8— The Spectator 17, 68, 98, 100, 107, 109-11,

118, 120, 124, 132ancienneté 53, 64

Bel esprit 12, 14, 16, 48, 55-68, 81, 84, 119, 125-7, 130

bienséance 50, 76Boileau, Nicolas 10, 16-7, 34, 36, 51, 55, 63, 65,

75-85, 97, 100, 107-8, 113-4, 120-2, 124-5, 130-1

Bouhours, Dominic 16-7, 55-75, 77, 85, 89, 114, 119, 122, 124, 126, 130

— La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit. Dialogues. 55-6, 63, 130

Cannan, Paul D. 89, 98-100Congreve, William 30, 67, 132Culler, Jonathan 15, 25-6, 28, 46

Decorum 50, 80, 92, 122-3, 130délicatesse 16, 63-6, 77, 126, 130Derrida, Jacques 117Dryden, John 12, 17, 23-6, 28,-30, 32-4, 46, 50,

53, 79-84, 87-97, 100-1, 104-7, 109-11, 113-4, 119-20, 122-4, 126, 131

— Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays 29, 93-6, 123, 131

Eagleton, Terry 117Eliot, T. S. 12, 14, 19, 22, 30-3, 35Empson, William 14, 22-4, 100 esprit 11-8, 21, 34-7, 39, 48, 55-85, 89, 114, 118-

9, 121-7, 129-30, 132

fujimura, Thomas Hikaru 31

Gombauld, Antoine, chevalier de Méré 16, 55, 68-9, 71, 73-4, 85, 122, 130

index

The study is concerned with aesthetics and literary criticism, which have therefore been omitted. The primary object of the study, wit, has also been omitted due to its high occurrence in the text. Titles of works of art and literature are entered under their author. Where the author of a work is not cited, the work is entered under the heading ‘literary works’.


152

Index

Hobbes, Thomas 21, 32-3, 52, 54, 101, 121honnêtes gens 50Hughes, Derek 51Hume, Robert D. 52-3, 88, 93 je-ne-sais-quoi 10, 12, 14, 16, 48, 55-7, 60-5, 67-

70, 75, 77, 85, 89, 126, 130

Literary works— Beowulf 23Locke, John 26-9, 54, 101, 113-4, 121

McCrea, Brian 109, 116-8, 131Metaphysical poetry 19, 22, 30, 32-4, 112,

124, 126Montaigne, Michel de 27, 52

Osolsobě, Ivo 15, 40-1, 129

Plato 33, 43, 53, 84, 93— Phaedrus 44— The Republic 44Pope, Alexander 17, 22-3, 25-6, 28-30, 32-4, 44,

47, 73, 76, 84-5, 87,98-109, 118-22, 124-6, 131 — Essay on Criticism 22-3, 34, 44, 73, 76, 84, 87,

98-101, 103-5, 107, 109, 120-1, 124, 131 préciosité 48-9, 57politesse 48, 51

Rapin, René 55, 57, 97, 119-20— Reflections on Aristotle’s treatise of poesie 120

Scholar, Richard 56, 60-2, 67-8, 70, 72, 85, 88-9, 99, 109, 122, 131

Shadwell, Thomas 67, 90-2, 94Shakespeare, William 13, 43, 93-4, 100, 124,

131— Love’s Labour’s Lost 43Sitter, John 11, 15, 25-30, 92, 95, 106, 129Spingarn, Joel E. 14, 19-21, 46, 88, 103sprezzatura 15, 39-40, 57, 62, 129sublime 10-1, 15-6, 36, 38-40, 55-7, 63-5, 75-8,

80, 82, 85, 97, 116, 126

Tave, Stuart 39

vico, Giambattista 14vraisemblance 50, 76


Ediční rada (vědecká redakce)

prof. PhDr. Ladislav Rabušic, CSc. (předseda)Mgr. Iva Zlatušková (místopředsedkyně)prof. RNDr. Zuzana Došlá, DSc.Ing. Radmila Droběnová, Ph.D.Mgr. Michaela Hanouskovádoc. PhDr. Jana Chamonikolasová, Ph.D.doc. JUDr. Josef Kotásek, Ph.D.Mgr. et Mgr. Oldřich Krpec, Ph.D.prof. PhDr. Petr Macek, CSc.PhDr. Alena Mizerová (tajemnice)doc. Ing. Petr Pirožek, Ph.D.doc. RNDr. Lubomír Popelínský, Ph.D.Mgr. David PovolnýMgr. Kateřina Sedláčková, Ph.D.prof. MUDr. Anna Vašků, CSc.prof. PhDr. Marie Vítková, CSc.doc. Mgr. Martin Zvonař, Ph.D.


Vydala Masarykova univerzita roku 2013Vychází jako Spisy Filozofické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity v Brně č. 41??

Odpovědná redaktorka doc. PhDr. Jana Chamonikolasová, Ph.D.Tajemník redakce prof. Mgr. Libor Jan, Ph.D.

Návrh obálky a grafická úprava: Pavel KřepelaTisk: ????

Vydání první, 2013Náklad 300 výtisků

ISBN 978-80-210-???ISSN 1211-3034

KláRA BIcANOVá

FROM RhETORIc TO AESThETIcS:

WIT ANd ESPRIT

IN ThE ENglISh ANd FRENch ThEORETIcAl WRITINgS



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Klara Bicanova - From Rhetoric to Aesthetics: Wit and Esprit in the English and French Theoretical Writings of the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries