âThere is no truth more universally knownâ, writes Henry Home, Lord Kames, the eminent Scottish Enlightenment man of letters, âthan that tranquillity and sedateness are the proper state of mind for accurate perception and cool deliberation. [âŠ] Passion [âŠ] hath such influence over us, as to give a false light to all its objectsâ (Henry Home 1785, I. 153). As Kames observes, reasonâs necessary dominance over the passions is one of the most axiomatic precepts of the age. It is asserted and reasserted throughout eighteenth-century writing. The frequency with which this maxim is reiterated during the period gives the impression that its viability and desirability are accepted as straightforward. âWhat Reason weaves, by Passion is undone,â proclaims Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man (Pope 1734, II, l. 42). Popeâs neat wisdom reappears at the end of the century in a sermon by the Reverend James Archer, who warns his congregation of âthe conflict of tumultuous passion warring against our reasonâ (Archer 1794, 60). Pronouncements such as these, which proffer what Kames refers to as âtruthâ, assert that which is purportedly âuniversally knownâ with aphoristic certainty. But does the word âknownâ here signify that which is discovered from experience (empirically) or that which is believed in theory (conjecturally)? Does the word âtruthâ refer to the idea that reason should govern passion or to the utterance of this idea? It is hard to discern whether Kamesâs statement, like Popeâs a few decades earlier and Archerâs a few decades later, functions as a philosophical proposition or a critical observation; whether the knowledge on offer is their own or a reminder of other peopleâs; whether the hyperbole that colours each of these rhetorical flourishes indicates emphasis or irony. Despite their authoritative posturingâtheir apparent confidence that passion must necessarily be subordinate to reasonâthe authorsâ linguistic inflations and semantic equivocations at critical expositional moments index misgivings concerning the truth of this knowledge and the knowledge of this truth.
Eighteenth-Century Literary Affections starts from the premise that the urgency, the forcefulness and the regularity with which reasonâs influence over the passions is invoked in eighteenth-century writing, far from pointing towards an uncontroversial verity, in fact reveal the palpable resistance with which this principle is frequently met. This book seeks to capture some of the ways in which the periodâs many utterances of the belief in reasonâs necessary dominance over passion lay bare a discernible shortfall between the conviction of the rhetorical mode typically used to declare it and the characteristic evasiveness of attempts to explain it. The sharp discrepancy between the two, the book proposes, produces an unacknowledged pathos that registers not just the unattainability of an ideal that is mounted with such cheerful optimism in the period, but the persistence, against all the odds, of the hope that this ideal might yet become reality.
In recent decades, scholars have begun more closely to attend to the range of conceptual categories that were used by writers in the long eighteenth century to frame debates about reason and passion. AmĂ©lie Rortyâs pioneering essay, âFrom Passions to Emotions and Sentimentsâ, charts the ways in which the terms âemotionâ and âsentimentâ began to displace the term âpassionâ over the course of this period (Rorty 1982). Isabel Riversâs two-volume work, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in English, 1660â1780, documents some of the many ways in which the periodâs affective vocabulary derives from Christian theology (Rivers 1991â2000). Thomas Dixon builds on this work in his book From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category to show how the shifts in terminology that are witnessed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflect a gradual move away from Christian conceptions of the soul towards a secular, more scientific understanding of the relations between the mind and body (Dixon 2003). Amy Schmitter has outlined in detail the ways in which key affective terms used in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophyânotably âpassionâ, âaffectionâ and âsentimentââmutate and accrue new meanings over the course of the period (Schmitter 2013a, 2013b). The work of such scholars has revealed that the binary between reason and passion was never as clear-cut as Kamesâs ostensible truism would have us believe. In fact, as the work of Rorty, Dixon and Schmitter has shown, eighteenth-century discourse had already made available a term with which to capture the distinctiveness of a hybrid category, or what Raymond Williams might have termed a âstructure of feelingâ, that occurs at the fault-line between reason and passion (Williams 1977, 131).1 In eighteenth-century writing, the term âaffectionâ is used to denote emotions that are calm, orderly and permanent, as opposed to emotions that are violent, disorderly and fleeting (passions). Like reason, affections are deliberately chosen and therefore resemble thoughts. But, like passions, they take intentional objects and are therefore conceived as emotions, since, as Peter Goldie has explained, âat least since the time of Aristotleâ philosophers have believed that emotions âare directed towards an object: if I feel fear, then there is something, some object, which is the object of my fearâ (Goldie 2000, 3â4). Engaging thought and emotion at once, they reconcile passion and reason. Intriguingly, frustrated by the obvious limitations presented by the view that passion and reason must be oppositional in character, recent philosophers of the emotions have sought to generate revisionist accounts that understand emotions as a form of, and not in tension with, cognition. Robert Solomon, for example, in his influential book The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life has argued that all emotions (which he calls âpassionsâ) are chosen (Solomon 1993). Philip Fisher similarly finds in Vehement Passions that emotions are a cue to legibility: each âof the strong emotions or passions designs for us an intelligible world and does so by means of horizon lines that we can come to know only in experiences that begin with impassioned or vehement states within ourselvesâ (Fisher 10). By equipping us with a way to distinguish between âpassionsâ, which are emotions that are precisely unchosen, and âaffectionsâ, which prefigure Solomonâs notion of emotions conceived as kinds of judgements, and Fisherâs notion of emotions as a form of intelligence that mark âthe contours of the limited radius of our willâ (12), eighteenth-century philosophy provides a means to resolve a conceptual problem that contemporary philosophers, limited by the relative paucity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century affective vocabulary, have struggled to find the language to overcome.
Validated by reason, affections are not merely identified by eighteenth-century commentators as an alternative kind of emotion to passion, they are viewed as a positively redemptive kind of emotion, and their cultivation is recommended throughout eighteenth-century writing as a guaranteed route to religious, moral, social, political and aesthetical order. Indeed, so consequential are the goals that regulated affections promise to fulfil that they often inspire a markedly didactic rhetorical mode. Such didacticism is most readily apparent in writing on the affections which is set up as what Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell call âa conversation between the âexpertâ and the readerâ (Glaisyer and Pennell 2003, 13). But, as the eighteenth-century medic and cleric, Thomas Cogan, observes in one of his several seminal extended essays on the emotions, An Ethical Treatise on the Passions (1807), whether or not its author adopts an overtly teacherly role, writing on the affections anyway participates in an enterprise that aims to reform the readerâs emotions:
The study of the passions and affections of the human mind [âŠ] is not confined to the mere contemplation of a force, which we all acknowledge, and all have felt, both by its salutary and pernicious influence; it is a study, which also enables us to direct the impetus of the mind to its proper objects, temper the degrees of its energy to the peculiarities of the case, and place the more permanent affections on those things which cannot deceive or disappoint. For, although speculations of a philosophical nature may amuse and flatter, it is UTILITY alone which makes every species of knowledge of sterling value. (Cogan 1807, vi)
Cogan highlights the widespread assumption in the period that the statement in print of the desirability of âpermanent affectionsâ directly facilitates the readerâs capacity to exert reason over passion (the perceived urgency of which is underscored by Coganâs strained use of capitalization). Even when a work on the affections does not explicitly advertise the practical benefits of the theories it mounts, then, it lays the groundwork for others to do so.
Eighteenth-Century Literary Affections sets out to better our understanding of the relationship that eighteenth-century writers forge between the category of the affections and the didactic mode. This bookâs central argument is that eighteenth-century writing on the affections is prescriptive not just because, as John Morillo has observed, all writing on the emotions during the period participates in the education of the reader, but more particularly because affections are created by their categorization in linguistic form.2 Unlike passions, affections resist William Empsonâs notion that emotions are âexpressed by languageâ (Empson 1985, 1). Equally, they resist Isobel Armstrongâs theory that textual emotions come into being in the âbroken middleâ, âthe gap [âŠ] between affect and representationâ (Armstrong 2000, 110; 115). The orderly affections prized in eighteenth-century writing come into being only through the act of their ordering in language. Writers during the period who represent the affections use language not as a vehicle in which to transmit them but as a tool with which to constitute them. It is not possible, then, to refer to a gap between these emotions and their representation in language; the affections are unavailable outside their inscription in written form. Consequently, writing can recommend, but cannot convey, the orderly emotions it represents. The textual act of âplac[ing]â the âpermanent affectionsââtheir categorization in languageâis thus always a didactic gesture, a gesture that aspires for worldly, and even after-worldly, perfection.
Given the significance of what rests on the linguistic differentiation between affections and passions, it is striking to observe that eighteenth-century works are persistently unable to pin down concrete definitions of the emotions they promote. While passions are outlined in precise detail, outlines of the affections are invariably vague and obscure. For example, in Elements of Criticism, Kames provides an appendix of âTerms Defined or Explainedâ. In this compendium, âpassionâ and âemotionâ are glossed in passing, but âaffectionâ is given a substantial entry. The dedication of such space to an explanation of the term ratifies its importance in eighteenth-century analytical vocabulary. At the same time, it underlines its opacity, tacitly acknowledging the epistemological problems it yields. The entry for âaffectionâ reads:
Affection, signifying a settled bent of mind toward...