Clear views
Jonathan Keates
_The Oxford History of English Literature vol VIII: The Mid-Eighteenth Century John Butt and Geoffrey Carnall (Oxford £14) The sole fact which absolutely needs to be known about Napoleon is that his favourite author was Ossian. It says everything about the Corsican mountebank that his bedside reading should have been a pseudo translation of a notional Gaelic epic, the Product of romantic nostalgia on the part of a Scotch academic later to become agent to. the Nabob of Arcot and Member for a Cornish rotten borough. A case, indeed, of °ne sublime humbug's professional admiration for another (though Marie Louise, apparently, tucked herself up with the solider conforts of Pride and Prejudice). Ossian's creator, Macpherson, is seriously and fairly discussed in this, the latest volume in the Oxford History, emanating, aPpropriately, from Edinburgh and comPieted, from John Butt's initial draft, by Geoffrey Carnall. Scotland certainly bulks largely enough to rouse the ghost of the enraged Johnson, Whose apotheosis by a Scotchman forms the culmination of a typically adroit conspectus Of memoirs and biography. The authors' Patriotism, instrumental in exhuming such. Otherwise hopelessly obscure figures as the diarist George Ridpath and Robert Fergus„s°11, whose Daft Days sparked off Burns's Lowland muse, does them credit. This, after all, was the culture which produced Alan Ramsay's portraits, Lord Kelly's symphonies and the architecture of James Athenian' Stuart and the Adam brothers.
An undue partiality now and then declares itself, however. To lay Hume alongside Gibbon is all very well, but Immediately afterwards to attempt a resurrection of Robertson's India and Charles 11 is pushing enthusiasm to the limit. It seems a pity also that if we are urged. to reopen Armstrong's Art of Preserving Health and Beattie's Minstrel, there Should be'no more than a cursory mention °f Langhorne's Country Justice, none at all of Shenstone's shorter poems, and that We should solemnly be told that `there is no need to spend time on Anstey's New Bath Guide'. Smollett, incidentally, Scotland's Only major 18th-century novelist and the subject of one of Butt's most discriminating Critical summaries, thought Anstey good enough to plagiarize wholesale for some of the best scenes in Humphrey Clinker. The period as a whole is unquestionably the most absorbing and least adequately known in English literature, and the authors signal achievement is to have emphasized the fruitful conflict between its preoccupation with classical literary 'kinds' and its wilder flourishes of spontaneity. Here only the drama starts to flag a little, a mischmosch of restrained romps and decorous tear-jerking — 'no other branch of 18th-century literature has sunk so far beyond any reasonable hopes of rescue' — though it is good to recollect that behind Sheridan and Goldsmith lies the consummate professionalism of Murphy, Kelly and Cumberland and of the Garrick tradition of acting. Elsewhere the exuberant variety and inventiveness are stunning, and we ignore at our peril an age which produced Rasselas and Clarissa Harlowe, Cowper's 'Task' and Gray's 'Elegy', Reynolds's 'Discourses' and Burke on the Sublime.
It was also the last epoch of European civilization in which academic, technical and scientific matter still possessed an accessible and immediately readable ' quality. We are distinctly the poorer for not being able to supply Virgilian treatises such as Dyer's 'Fleece', an idyll of textile manufacture, or Grainger's `Sugar Cane', a plantation Georgic with advice on how to choose your slaves (Worms lurk in all: yet pronest they to worms Who from Mundingo sail'). Butt sends us, besides, to Priestley's History of Electricity and Paley's Natural Theology in search of evidence of the contemporary love of powerfully induced sensation.
To remind us that travel was no mere matter of Italian jaunts by `milordi inglesi' and their bear-leaders there is James Bruce at the Nile cataract, plunged in 'a total oblivion of where I was, and of every other sublunary concern' and Arthur Young exasperated at the lack of French newspapers, 'I might as well have demanded an elephant'.
The sections on the genesis of the Decline and Fall and the Life of Johnson are models of lucidity, finely sensitive to the complex inspirations behind each work. The covers, too, are once and for all whisked off Johnson as critic in a triumphant justification of the method and emotional directness underlying the Preface to Shakespeare and the Lives of the Poets.
A salutary broadening of critical focus in recent decades guarantees justice being done to the minor novelists of the period (in the case of the sentimentalist Mackenzie, perhaps a little more than justice) and it is good to see Fanny Burney's Camilla and The Wanderer getting their crumbs of praise at last, though Richard Graves's hugely spirited Columella or The Distressed Anchoret deserves a greater lionizing. The best literary histories are those which catch fire from the works and writers they discuss. What Hugh Blair said of `Ossian' in 1764 may be justly applied to Butt and Carnal!: On all occasions he is frugal of his words; and• never gives you more of an image, or a description, than is just sufficient to place it before you in one clear point of view. It is a blaze of lightning . . .
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