Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel

Fielding to Austen

Roger Maioli

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319398587
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319398594
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book is about the empiricist challenge to literature, and its influence on eighteenth-century theories of fiction. British empiricism from Bacon to Hume challenged the notion that imaginative literature can be a reliable source of knowledge. This book argues that theorists of the novel, from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen, recognized the force of the empiricist challenge but refused to capitulate. It traces how, in their reflections on the novel, these writers attempted to formulate a theoretical link between the world of experience and the products of the imagination, and thus update the old defenses of poetry for empirical times. Taken together, the empiricist challenge and the responses it elicited signaled a transition in the longstanding debate about literature and knowledge, as an inaugural round in the persisting conflict between the empirical sciences and the literary humanities.

© The Author(s) 2016

Roger MaioliEmpiricism and the Early Theory of the NovelPalgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Maps of Worlds Unseen: Empiricism and Knowledge in the Novel

Roger Maioli¹

(1)

University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

May God never allow us to publish a dream of our imagination as a model of the world.

Sir Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna

End Abstract

The rise of British empiricism put imaginative literature in a tough spot. It discredited the epistemic defenses of poetry the Renaissance owed to Antiquity, pressing poets and fictionists to either resign their cognitive ambitions or reaffirm them in accordance with new rules. The challenge was met in at least three different ways during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Romantic poets denied empiricism’s authority to decide on matters of knowledge, whereas novelists who accepted that authority either professed to be mere entertainers or tried to bring the novel into alignment with the epistemology of the day. The last development is the topic of this book. In order to contextualize my discussion of particular cases, I set up in this introduction the broader intellectual stage on which my central figures played their roles. I consider how empiricism altered older conceptions of imaginative literature and what those changes mean for our current picture of the relationship between empiricism and the novel. In addition, I claim that the body of novel theory that emerged in response to the empirical challenge places the rise of the novel at a crucial juncture in the history of aesthetics, a moment when the debate about literature and knowledge took an unprecedented and irreversible turn.

Empiricism and the Traditional Defense of Poetry

In a famous passage of the Poetics, Aristotle asserts with epigrammatic pithiness the superiority of poetry over its more prosaic cousin: “Poetry is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history; poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (1451b).¹ Aristotle’s maxim became a staple of poetical treatises after the original Poetics resurfaced in Renaissance Italy, reappearing virtually unchanged in artes poeticae by Gian Giorgio Trissino, Francesco Robortello, Antonio Minturno and a number of other commentators.² It found fertile soil in Britain as well, where the universality of poetry was celebrated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, from Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham to Lord Shaftesbury and George Turnbull. Despite occasional opposition, the critical climate of those times favored the idea that poetry, by communicating unchanging truths about the cosmos, was more enlightening than history, sometimes even than philosophy.

Views on what exactly made poetry “universal” tended to vary, but as far as the transmission of knowledge is concerned universality has a clear advantage over particularity. Because the universal refers to the perennial rather than the contingent features of reality, universality yields transferrable principles rather than merely local truths. Sidney puts this point incisively: “The historian…is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is (to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things) that his example draws no necessary consequence and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.”³ At the basis of Sidney’s stance is a suspicion of a type of reasoning whose philosophical standing had never been high: induction by incomplete enumeration.⁴ The historian fails to convey a useful doctrine because “he stand upon what was, as if he should argue, because it rained yesterday, therefore it should rain today” (8). Past events, for Sidney, may have been the products of fortune, and consequently provide no reliable guidelines for regulating one’s future conduct. The stories told by the poet, by contrast, are not grist for the reader’s inductive mill – they are not sources of data for the discovery of new truths – but instantiations of general truths that are already ascertained. Poetry thus folds the concrete examples of history under the abstract precepts of philosophy.

But how does the poet gain access to those precepts? It cannot be from observation, since Sidney himself admits that “right poets…borrow nothing of what is, has been, or shall be” (12). The Defense of Poesy offers no straightforward answer to this question, but we get a sense of what Sidney’s answer would have been from his remark that “[t]he skill of each artificer stands in that Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself…[T]hat the poet has that Idea is manifest by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them” (10). The implication seems to be that whatever universal truths find their way into the poem stem from an “Idea or fore-conceit of the work” which, as Sidney makes clear, comes less from sense perception than from “the zodiac of [the poet’s] own wit” (Defense of Poesy 10, 9). The reader, in turn, should go back to that original source, and “frame his example to that which is most reasonable, be it in warlike, politic, or private matters” (20).⁵ Reason, for the poet as for the reader, grants access to truths of universal scope.

This rationalist doctrine was not unique to Sidney. It reappears in a number of subsequent sources, receiving lucid expression more than a century later in the work of John Dennis:

To follow Nature in giving a draught of human Life, and of the manners of Men…is not to draw after particular Men, who are but Copies and imperfect Copies of the great universal Pattern; but to consult that innate Original, and that universal idea, which the Creator has fix’d in the minds of ev’ry reasonable Creature, and so to make a true and a just Draught. For as ev’ry Copy deviates from the Original both in Life and Grace, and Resemblance, a Poet who designs to give a true Draught of human Life and Manners, must consult the universal Idea, and not particular Persons.⁶

While Dennis shares the traditional preference for universals over particulars, this aspect of his doctrine has no Aristotelian backing.⁷ Universals, for Aristotle, exist not on a higher plane of Ideas, but in things, and the only way to develop ideas of them is by means of sensory experience. In this regard, Aristotle is an empiricist.⁸ By contrast, Dennis’s reference to “that innate Original, and that universal idea” is radically anti-empirical, involving a Christianized appeal to Plato’s theory of Ideas.

While it might seem perverse to enlist Plato’s aid on behalf of a defense of poetry, the move was neither unique nor new. It was originally made by Cicero, who invoked Plato to explain the origins of our conception of perfect eloquence. Cicero’s explanation relies on an analogy between oratory and sculpture:

Surely [Phidias], while making the image of Jupiter or Minerva, did not look at any person whom he was using as a model, but in his own mind there dwelt a surpassing vision of beauty; at this he gazed and all intent on this he guided his artist’s hand to produce the likeness of the god. Accordingly, as there is something perfect and surpassing in the case of sculpture and painting – an intellectual ideal by reference to which the artist represents those objects which do not themselves appear to the eye, so with our minds we conceive the ideal of perfect eloquence, but with our ears we catch only the copy. These patterns of things are called ἰδέαι or ideas by Plato, that eminent master and teacher both of style and of thought; these, he says, do not “become”; they exist for ever, and depend on intellect and reason.⁹

The story of how Phidias modeled his statues on Platonic ideas was retold by Seneca the Elder and ancient Neoplatonists, achieving canonical status in discussions of art in Italy from the Trecento to the Seicento; we find Sir Joshua Reynolds lamenting its popularity as late as the last third of the eighteenth century.¹⁰ Its central insight – that the arts “give no bare representation of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives”¹¹ – shielded artists from Plato’s attack in the Republic by redefining and in some cases doing away with the notion of mimesis. Far from replicating the imperfect objects that appear to the senses, the artist copies, or expresses, the timeless ideas that appear to reason. Cicero’s analogy with eloquence shows that this theory applied just as well to the craft of the wordsmith as to that of the sculptor, and his early modern inheritors were happy to apply it with equal latitude. John Dryden, for example, extended to epic poetry the Neoplatonic theories of Giovanni Bellori’s Vite de’ pittori (1672), which are close in spirit to the views of Sidney and Dennis.¹² In time, as poetical treatises made room for the appeal to Ideas, Aristotle’s notion of the universality of poetry came to rest on a Platonic theory of knowledge, and this unlikely collaboration became a pervasive feature of early Neoclassicism.¹³

This theoretical rapprochement between the Poetics and the Republic was not the only defense of poetry available in this period; it coexisted, often in the same text, with appeals to ancient authority or to the truth of Christian parables (themselves a high form of poetry), with modern rearticulations of Aristotelian vraisemblance or “probability” (as the French term came to be translated in England), and with the notion that traditional texts are rendered “true” by the test of time. The Aristotelian–Platonic synthesis nonetheless furnished the strongest philosophical argument for cognitive defenses of poetry between the Italian Renaissance and the early eighteenth century. The argument in question is disarmingly simple: poetry is cognitively valuable because it communicates timeless truths, which poets discover not by means of inductive inferences from particulars, but by consulting their own ideas of universals. While modern proponents of this view often dispensed with Plato’s ontology, they nonetheless espoused the anti-empirical implications of the appeal to Ideas. Like Sidney and Dennis, they were suspicious of the products of the senses and favored instead the paradoxical notion that truthful representations of nature should not resemble the nature one sees. “Among us,” says the Florentine critic Agnolo Segni, “there is no perfection, or any semblance of what ought to be; but when a fable imitates that perfection and its truth, it is poetry.”¹⁴ Should the poet attend to the actual state of earthly things, Dennis warns, then “whenever a just and discerning Judge comes to compare that Draught with the original within him, he immediately finds that that Draught falls extremely short of the Truth of Nature, and immediately disapproves of it, as a second, ungraceful, faint, unresembling Copy” (“Reflections,” 418, n. 1). The doctrine that poetry should improve upon nature is also championed by Dryden, Sidney, Puttenham, Shaftesbury and others, retaining its currency even among later critics with little investment in the theory of Ideas, such as Addison, Johnson, Reynolds and most eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The cognitive value of poetry, from this perspective, depends on the poet’s insight into realms that are more orderly and stable than the disorienting world of the senses.

One hardly needs to say that such a theory and its corollaries were unlikely to appeal to the opponents of rationalism. Baxter Hathaway observes, quite pointedly, that

literary critics in all ages have assumed that poetry is some kind of reconciliation of the universal and the particular, but the important question for any given period is the extent to which the taste and metaphysics of the time move the emphasis one way or the other from dead center. (130)

Move the emphasis is what empiricism did, and it did it radically. In fact, it moved it all the way towards the particular.

From the very beginning, the driving purpose of empiricism was to rebuild our picture of the world from the ground up, allowing the multifariousness of nature to take precedence over the neat constructs of the mind. Bacon’s Instauratio Magna provided the movement with a method and a statement of purpose: “seeing how the commerce between the Mind and Things…could be entirely restored, or at least put on a better footing” (3). Reason left to its own resources was unequal to this task; it was “some stately pile with no foundations,” and Bacon assigned the senses the important task of building one (2). His method consisted in an unprecedentedly complex system of induction, involving elaborate versions of those inferences from experience Sidney had contemptuously dismissed. The end of inductive logic, according to Bacon,

is to teach and instruct the intellect not to batten on and embrace abstract things with the mind’s fragile tendrils (as common logic does), but really to slice into nature…in such a way that this science may emerge not just from the nature of the mind but from the very nature of things. (443)

And things, pace Aristotle, are now taken to be all particular. Empiricism replaces the ontological realism of the old view with a radical nominalism, according to which “there [is] nothing in the world Universall but Names; for the things named, are every one of them Individuall and Singular.”¹⁵ This shift in ontology has direct epistemological consequences. It means that general propositions about the worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. David Hume and the Empiricist Challenge
• 3. Interlude
• 4. Empiricism and Fielding’s Theory of Fiction
• 5. Varieties of Propositionalism: Lennox, Austen, Godwin
• 6. Laurence Sterne and the Experience of Reading Fiction
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter