The Rhapsodical Manner in the Eighteenth Century

8/2/2019 The Rhapsodical Manner in the Eighteenth Century

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The Rhapsodical Manner in the Eighteenth CenturyAuthor(s): Richard TerryReviewed work(s):Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 273-285Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3730666 .

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APRIL 1992 VOL. 87 PART 2

THE RHAPSODICAL MANNER IN THEEIGHTEENTH CENTURY

It has long been a commonplace wisdom that the compositional habits of early-eighteenth-century poets differ markedly from those of Romantic ones. TheAugustan poem was supposedly a verbal and musical sculpture, an appointedartefact, whereas the Romantic poem was characteristically an impromptu distilla-tion of experience, mostly indifferent to pat prescripts about formal organization,and sticking faithfully to the contours of felt reality. Put gnomically, the Augustanscontrived poems whereas the Romantics wrote poetry. One influential workevincing these attitudes wasJames Sutherland's A PrefacetoEighteenth-Centuryoetry,which found the Augustans predictably unwont to the 'free expression of sponta-neous emotions' and emphasized their respect for the public nature of poetry,claiming that writers distinguished between 'what was merely a matter of personalmemoranda and what might be worked up into a regularpoem' (my emphasis).1The 'well-made' poem constitutes a small part of that conceptual battery termedneo-classicism, but there are reasons to think that its centrality within Augustanliterary culture may be figmentary. Treatment of the matter entails discussing boththe verifiable compositional habits of poets and the licence given them by contempo-rary genre-theory to create poems resistant to the claims of'form'. This essay mostlyaddresses the latter, and attempts to map out a revised orthodoxy as regards theordonnance of some eighteenth-century poetry by concentrating on rhapsody,conceived as a species of writing admitting 'no fixed form or plan'. I shall suggestthat rhapsodical principles were familiar even within early-eighteenth-centuryculture and that some illustrious long poems, chiefly William Cowper's TheTask,areto a high degree constituted by them; and I shall claim that from the rhapsodyformat evolved a more diffuse agenda of architectonic ploys, such as studieddigressiveness and the pretence (at least) of poetic spontaneity.It is worth beginning with the quixotic processes by which some eighteenth-century poems came into being. Many, even well-known poems, were nevertextually settled but, instead, evolved incrementally through the turnover of edi-tions: Pope's Rape of theLock and TheDunciad,for example, both gained extra sectionsthrough compositional revision. The addition to The Dunciad of the variorumapparatus (1729), combined with the belated satiric apotheosis of Cibber in place ofTheobald (1743), exemplify alterations that are judiciously continuous with anoverall aesthetic aim: a strong show of documentary immediacy being imperativewithin Pope's satiric campaign. However, while the updating of the satire, with newcultural abuses being brought to book, mattered tactically for Pope, many otherpoems which were substantively redrafted after initial publication (two primeexamples are Samuel Garth's The Dispensary (1697) and Thomson's The Seasons(1730)) seem to have metamorphosed through nothing more than an authorialinability to leave them alone.Some light is shed on Augustan compositional habits by Pope's Epistle to Dr.Arbuthnot(I735), which the poet described as a 'Sort of Bill of Complaint, begun

1A PrefaceoEighteenth enturyoetryOxford:ClarendonPress, 1948), pp. 71, 77.

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RICHARD TERRYas in his 'rapsodies of Heathenism' and 'rapsody of Proverbs quite from thepurpose'. Sense 3b is a specifically literary vision of this: 'A work consisting ofmiscellaneous or disconnected pieces, etc; a written composition having no fixedform or plan.' In the titles of rhapsodies of this persuasion, the preposition taken is'on' or 'upon'. The other germane sense, comprising an alternative construction ofwhat went towards a rhapsody, is 4: 'An exalted or exaggeratedly enthusiasticexpression of sentiment or feeling; an effusion (e.g. a speech, letter, poem) markedby extravagance of idea and expression, but without connected thought.' Thoughthe two literary denominations of rhapsody could easily embody themselves inworks of an entirelydifferentcast, the dictionaryallows for some inter-penetrationinso far as an effusiveoutburst is likely to be accompanied by an absence of'connectedthought'.Rogers is chiefly interested in explicating the supposed semanticjolt administeredby Shaftesbury's titular collection of'Philosophical Rhapsody'. He arrangesrhap-sody's principal classified meanings into time-bands, arguingthat the acceptation ofthe word falls into three phases. First, it meant a farragoor miscellaneous composi-tion; second, it assumed the sense of a high-pitched effusion lookedat in a reprovingway; finally, it came to mean a fervid outpouring considered neutrally. Rogersthinks the word works like a barium particle, showing up large modifications ofcultural taste during the century, and he finds the later, equable acceptance ofrhapsodical traits anticipated in Shaftesbury's semantic shock-tactic. Rogers'sargument rests heavily on the assumption that Shaftesburychose the word 'rhap-sody' with deliberation and so as to invoke both of its chief meanings. He puts downShaftesbury's seemingly novel endorsement of thepoetic ordonnance of rhapsody tothe organicist views expounded elsewhere in TheMoralists: he idea that nature isintegrated through vague, sympathetic correspondencesbetween parts and wholesrather than through observance of strict, quasi-artistic principlesof formaldesign.Though my argument's trajectorydiffers from Rogers's, it is appropriate that Ishould set down some objections to these claims. For one thing, the lexicalcollocation ('Philosophical Rhapsody') tried out by Shaftesbury may have beenarrived at with less strategical foresight than Rogers assumes. The first draft of thework, circulated privately in October I705, bore the title (equally oxymoronic) TheSociableEnthusiast:A Philosophical dventure. he subsequent introduction of'Rhap-sody' appears to have been with a view to its coverage of the same semantic groundas 'Enthusiast', though this is conjecture.The surmise, however, is strengthened bythe fact that the published Moralists ontains numerous equally pert conjunctions:'philosophical' collocating with 'romance', 'enthusiasm', 'passion', and 'flights'.'Rhapsody' is pointedly absent fromthe body of the text, yet the collocative patternstrongly suggests that Shaftesburyconceived it as duplicating, or approximatingto,the meanings of the other terms: that is, he used rhapsody purely for its sense of anenraptureddelivery rather than as a planless composition.What became identified as the rhapsody of the title was a rapturousoutburst bythe character Theocles, a surrogate for Shaftesbury, devoted to the fancy that the'universe [is] one entire thing'.7The section comprised severalspeeches, puncturedby exchanges between Theocles and his friend, Philocles. The rhapsodic style

7 CharacteristicsfMen,Manners,Opinions,Times, tc.BytheRightHonourablenthony arlofShaftesbury,d.byJ. M. Robertson, 2 vols (Gloucester, MA: Richards, 1963), n, 99.

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276 TheEighteenth-CenturyhapsodicalMannerconsisted of a dense compacting of apostrophes, interrogatives, repetitive phrasingand syntax, and a discernibly liturgical roll to the periods; and the mannerpredictably became much imitated and parodied.8 That Shaftesbury identifiedTheocles's reverie as the single rhapsodic element is suggested by comments madein his MiscellaneousReflections 1714), where he defends the orthodox structure of TheMoralists (as a Platonic dialogue) and criticizes, at a general level, compositional'negligence and irregularity'.9 What lies behind these criticisms is a stern endorse-ment of neo-classical principles of design, chief amongst which was that parts of acomposed structure should be non-transposable. Shaftesbury invokes this principlecategorically, and in a way that expresses stiff intolerance of the auxiliary sense ofrhapsody as a formless work:If there be any passage in the middle or end which might have stood in the beginning,or anyin the beginning,which mighthave stood as well in the middleorend;thereis properly n sucha piece neither beginning, middle, nor end. 'Tis a mere rhapsody,not a work. (II, 317)The rhapsodical manner drew strength from new tendencies in aesthetic thought. Inparticular, the fact that its rise was due to new canons of acceptability, rather thansimply to the coming of a wholly new phenomenon, brought it into parallel withother aesthetic categories whose popular image was being overhauled. Amongstthese was the term that Shaftesbury associated closely with rhapsody, 'enthusiasm'.In the seventeenth century, 'enthusiast' had been used narrowly as a term ofexcoriation against occultists, and one of Swift's satiric ruses in A Taleofa Tub was toextend its meaning from those who affected arcane knowledge to the whole body ofdissenting worshippers. Shaftesbury's Letter ConcerningEnthusiasm(1708) played acrucial role in the rehabilitation of the word in drawing a distinction between goodand bad forms of enthusiasm, and the appearance of Joseph Warton's 'TheEnthusiast: or the Lover of Nature' (I744), a work demonstrably influenced byTheocles's reverie in TheMoralists, finds the term enshrined as a perfectly judiciousway of responding to natural beauty. The brand of emotional monumentalismpioneered by Theocles's rhapsodic outburst, which passes into set-piece oratoricalflights in other long poems of the period, linked rhapsody with the nascent cult of thesublime: another concept beginning to enjoy a heyday. Interest in Longinus hadbeen revived by Boileau's translation in I674, and Longinian ideas were popu-larized further in two critical treatises written by John Dennis, TheAdvancement ndReformationof Modern Learning ( 701) and The Growthof Criticism in Poetry (1704).Though Dennis treats the sublime as a category of rhetorical effects, rather than as apsychology of aesthetic response, Longinian ideas influenced him in proposing theprincipal end of poetry to be 'Enthusiasm', seen as consisting of'Admiration, Joy,Terror, Astonishment, flowing from the Thoughts that naturally produce them'.10That concepts such as enthusiasm and sublimity were fast rising in acceptabilityhelped to promote the status of rhapsody, considered singly in its sense of ahigh-pitched effusion, for such effusiveness was linked from the outset with con-templation of natural sublimity. However, the alternative sense of rhapsody, as a

8 For Shaftesbury's general influence, see Cecil A. Moore, 'Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets inEngland', in PMLA, 31 (1916), 264-325. Thomson imitates Theocles's rhapsody in TheSeasons1746),'Winter',11. o6-I7.9 Characteristicsf Men,II, 334.10John Dennis, CriticalWorks, d. by E. N. Hooker, 2 vols (Baltimore,MD:Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, I939-43), I, 218.


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structurally disjointed work, also gained something from the new intellectualclimate. Most important was the association ofideas, a conceptwidely addressedbyphilosophers such as Locke, Hartley, and Hume. Interestingly, Locke's Enquiry,which provides the seminal discussion, stresses the depressing likelihood thatpeople's thought connexions will be made by habit or chance ratherthan by reason,yet in spite of this unpromising start, the association of ideas served throughout thecentury as one plausible means of ascribing some rationale to formless works:Alexander Knox even went so far as to claim that 'poetryowes its very existence tothat natural exercise of the human mind which is usually termed the association ofideas'."1 However, even granting that associationism did enable critics to claimmethod for works of an ostensibly unmethodical nature,it remains doubtful whetheranyone ever purposely constructed a work on such principles. Late in the centuryCowper declared that he had written TheTaskafter the subjectof the sofa had beensuggested to him, and 'having much leisure, [he] connected anothersubjectwith it;and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him,brought forth at length [... ] a Volume'; but associationism, though it mightaccount for the poem'sjerky or abstruse transitions, does not really account for theamalgamation of differentforms of writing which so much characterizeseighteenth-century long poems.12 Rhapsodical poems of this order seem born more from theflux and instability of the established Augustan kinds thanfromany desire amongstwriters to produce literaryworks which consciously accorded with this model of themind.The history of rhapsody has to do not merely with the development of writtenforms but also with trends of literary defamation. The word provides a crux withintwo eighteenth-century altercations, and its use in such circumstances probablyilluminates more than is possible throughsimple recourse to dictionaries. Central toShaftesbury's philosophy was benevolism, his trust in an innate moral sense thatdisposed human beings towards moral behaviour independently of the need forsocial coercion. Shaftesbury's ideas were religiously heterodox in their tendency toelide nature with the Godhead, while they were also accusable of moral sentimen-talism in confidently supposing that the private and public good were identical, andwere alike served by personal rectitude. A year after The Moralists,BernardMandeville released TheFableof theBees(1713), consisting of a fable with extendedcommentary, which sought to discredit Shaftesburian tenets against Mandeville'sown belief that the corporate good was served, not hindered, by individual greed.TheFableof the Bees is a pot-pourri of philosophical ideas, satiric badinage, andquasi-Scriblerian ironies in textual agglomeration. Sarcasms dart out at Shaftes-bury from numerous angles. An unfriendly index entry records: 'ShaftsburyLord)his System contrary to the Authors, 372. Refuted by his own Character, 380.'13Asecond part, added in 728, contained a prose parody of Theocles's meditation aswell as other teasing glances at Shaftesbury's ideas. One satiric ploy adopted byMandeville involved dubbing his own treatise a 'rhapsody', as in his 'Vindication'of 723:11TheFlapper,no. 38 (I i June, 1796), cited from Ralph Cohen, TheArtofDiscrimination: homson'sTheSeasons' nd heLanguagef CriticismLondon: Routledge, 1964), p. I80.12 PoeticalWorks f WilliamCowper, d. by H. M. Milford, 4th edn, corrected by N. Russell (London:Oxford University Press, I967), p. I28.13 TheFableof theBees:or,PresentVices,PublickBenefits.By BernardMandeville,d. by F. B. Kaye, 2 vols(Oxford:Clarendon Press, I957), I, 378.

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TheEighteenth-CenturyhapsodicalMannerThe whole s aRhapsody oidofOrderorMethod,butno Partof it hasanything hat s souror pedantick;he StyleI confess s veryunequal, ometimes ery highandrhetorical, ndsometimesverylow and evenverytrivial; uch as it is, I am satisfied hat it has directedPersons fgreatProbity ndVirtue,andunquestionableoodSense.(I,405)I suggested earlier that Shaftesburyuses 'rhapsody'deducibly to mean an enthusi-astic effusion, but Mandeville clearly brings to the fore its sense as a medley ormiscellany, viewed with disapprobation. Mandeville's purpose remains enigmatic,but it is likely that his affectingthe rhapsodicalform himself was designed to exposethe pretentiousness of Shaftesbury'searlierhaving done so; while there may also bea secondary ruse in Mandeville's insistence on those attributes of rhapsody whichwere questionable, and from which Shaftesbury circumspectly distanced himself.All the same, Mandeville's amorphously compiled work does amount to a truerhapsody, so the satiric squint at Shaftesbury'searliertitle is groundedin a perfectlyingenuous disclosure about the peculiar ordonnanceof TheFableof theBees.Mandeville's satiric intelligence about rhapsody, as a word whose plural mean-ings could be exploited for irony, may be arguable, but scarcely so that of Pope.Pope's well-documented feud with John Dennis was ignited in 1711 by Pope'sgratuitous jibe at the critic in AnEssayon Criticism.14hese struckboth at Dennis'sreputation for rule-drivencriticism and at his predilection, in his own writings andin those of others, for poetic sublimity. Dennis's riposte consisted of the scurrilousReflections...] Upona LateRhapsody,Call'd,An Essayon Criticism 1711) which,despite moments of critical insight, vituperatively assassinated both poet and poem.He did not flinch from what must have been the most hurtful of verbal assaultsagainst Pope, against his physical deformity, characterizinghim as 'a hunch-back'dToad'.15 From this point on Dennis's vocational commitment to defaming Pope'swritings often took the form of the aspersion of rhapsody. Windsor orestbecomes a'wretched Rhapsody, not worthy the Observation of a Man of Sense'; TheRapeof theLock s a 'wretched Rhapsody, writ for the Amusement of Boys'; the charge remainsfreely bandied around as late as his Remarksupon the Dunciad (i729).16 My mainconcern, though, is with Dennis's first belligerence and its aftermath,within whichretaliation immediately took the form of a pincerattackon Dennis launched by Popeand John Gay. Pope's spoof-work, The CriticalSpecimen17II), advertised a sup-posedly forthcoming 'Life of the Renown'd Rinaldo' (that is, Dennis) and fabricatedin Dennis's name a shortpoem on the sublime, dubbed 'hisRhapsody'.17 ithin a fewmonths, Gay's Mohocks1712) appeared, with a mischievous dedicatory epistle toDennis, passing on report that the great critic had been 'laying out [his] Time insuch Rhapsodies and Speculations as cannot but be beneficial to the Common-wealth of Letters'.18When Dennis invokes 'rhapsody'to Pope'sdetriment, it does sometimes carrytheaccreditable sense of a work lacking formal coherence, as when he suggests of TheDunciad hat there 'is no such Thing as Action in his whimsical Rhapsody', yet thesmear is mostly general: probably possessing no more critical precision than

14 See Poems, , 243 and n., 270, 306 and n., 307.15 Critical Works, I, 415.16 Critical Works, i, I35, 349. See also I, 398; I, I37, 324, 351, 356, 361, 374.17 TheProseWorksfAlexander ope,1711-I720, ed. by N. Ault (Oxford:Blackwell, 1936), pp. i-I8. AlsoIntroduction, pp. xv-xxxiii.18DramaticWorks, d. by Peter Fuller, 2 vols (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1983), I, 78.

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branding Pope's writings confused hokum, for example.19The specific alternativesense of rhapsody, as a fervid or shrill effusion,seems so wholly inapposite to the coolexactitudes of Pope's Essayon Criticism hat this can hardly enter into Dennis'smeaning. It seems to me central to the wit of the retaliatory sallies againstDennis that they reinvoke rhapsody with an eye specifically for the meaning notintended by Dennis in his fulminationagainst Pope's poem. In takingup the cudgelsagainst Dennis, Pope was set on exaggerating Dennis's appreciation of sublimeliterature into a mental enthusiasm, and thence into a full-blownlunacy. In 17I3 hebrought out TheNarrative f Dr. RobertNorris,ConcerningheStrange ndDeplorableFrenzy of Mr.John Dennis, which makes implicit associations between Dennis'ssupposed mental disorder and his reading of Longinus and Milton. ThoughDennis's addiction to the sublime, and an uncouth freneticism of personal manner,had been recognized well before the affair blew up, Dennis's aspersionof'rhapsody'helped crystallize in Pope's mind a stratagem for counter-attack. This entailedconflating the auxiliary sense of rhapsody as an enthusiastic outpouringof Dennis'salready noted penchant forliterarysublimity, both being escalated into thecalumnythat Dennis was mentally crazed.Principally I am concerned with the acceptation of rhapsody as a structurallydisjointed work, but it is as well to offer some cursory survey of poems entitledrhapsodies which were not of this type. What the dictionary fails sufficiently todemonstrate is the inflection within the word's meaning once it became part oftitular convention. Some poems take the cognomen seemingly because they addressthe religious and philosophical issues brought to the fore by Shaftesbury's TheMoralists.Such poems were the anonymous 'A Divine Rhapsodyor Morning Hymn'( 73 ) and Thomas Cooke's second trumpetingof Shaftesburiantenets,A Rhapsodyon Virtueand Pleasure 1738).20 The sense of rhapsody as a high-pitched effusiontended to slacken into the ready association of rhapsody with any powerfulissue ofheart-felt sentiment. Poems which fulfilled this criterion and which took a satiricordenunciatory turn were a derisoryattackon the moralityof soldiers,A RhapsodyntheArmy 1736); an assassinatory piece on Edmund Burke,BegumB-rketoBegumBow:APoeticalRhapsody n Contemporaryharacters1789); an embattled defence of Irishloyalism, Orange:A PoeticalRhapsody1'798-99). However, the most illustriouspoemdesignated a rhapsody mostly on the groundsof its satiric stridencywas Swift's 'OnPoetry: A Rhapsody'. Another poem within whose title rhapsody seems again toconnote simply a sincere outpouring, though this time characterized by gratitudeand eulogism, was Henry Carey's 'A Rhapsody on Peace' (1713), while MarkAkenside'sjuvenile 'The Poet:A Rhapsody' ( 737), which contains a parodyof theopening of Theocles's meditation, was a lament on poetic penury, composed incomically arch Miltonics.21Four poems are known to me which are designated by title as rhapsodies andwhich conform to the OED's sense 3b: 'A work consisting of miscellaneous ordisconnected pieces, etc., a written work having no fixed form or plan.' Thesepoems, undistinguished though they are, remain of literary historical interest, not19 Critical Works, I, 361.20 'A Divine Rhapsody' appearedin A Miscellany fPoems.BySeveralHands 731 . Throughoutthis essay,I have benefited from the search facilityof the Eighteenth enturyhortTitleCatalogue.21 ThePoems fHenryCarey, d. by FrederickT. Wood (London:ScolartisPress, I930), p. 184;Gentleman'sMagazine, no. 7 (July 1737), 44I-42.

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TheEighteenth-CenturyhapsodicalMannerleast because they tie down to rhapsodya repertoireof traitswhich appeardivorcedfrom the appellation in numerous other long poems. John Smith's 'A Rhapsodyupon a Lobster: PoemBurlesque'1713), was a loose-structuredgallimaufry,rumina-tively satiric in tone. It touches, though without long alighting, on numerous topicsin loose orbit around theprincipal subjectof lobsters, while occasionally lapsing intowholly adventitious business, such as Smith's decrying the evils of presbyters andevangelists.22JosephMitchell's TheShoe-Heel: Rhapsody1727), anotheramorphousmedley, again parts early with its eponymous subject.23It is worth running throughthe contents of this poem, as they usefully exemplify the feverish divagations towhich other rhapsodies were also prone. The poet begins by recounting the loss ofhis shoe-heel as a result of an accident at a stile. This initiates a reverie in which heimagines how the accident might have provedfatal and how his patron, Killmorey,would then have honoured him at his funeral. Then follows praise for the cobblerwho mended the shoe, which deflects into the tale of a sixteenth-centurycobblerwhofell in as a drinking-companion to the young Henry VIII when the monarch was inthe habit of roving the city. Thence Mitchell returnsto Killmorey, adducing him asa paragon of the rural retirement ideal. The poem closes with Mitchell hoping thathis eventual place of rest might be in the vicinity of John Philips's tomb inWestminster Abbey.Next comes William Shenstone's 'Oeconomy: A Rhapsody, Addressed to YoungPoets' (1764), a rambling tirade on the unhappy penuryof poets, inveighing againstthe tyranny of wealth, and encouraging thriftinessin young writers.24'Rhapsody',here, seems doubly appropriate,both to the work's loose formalorganization and toits shrillness of tone. Finally, there is the Rev. Edward Cooper's TheElbow-Chair:Rhapsody1765), which differsfromthe earliertwo in that rather than simply being ahotch-potch of narrative, reverie, panegyric, and topical punditry, it combines thesignificant extra ingredient of landscape description. Sentiments mix with descrip-tions, and while the poem manifests the usual fugitivenessof mind, it pans outwardsfrom a fixed geographical locale. The specificity of the poem's geography brings itclose to the tradition of loco-descriptive poetry, exemplified by Denham's Cooper'sHill and Pope's Windsor orest;but it also prefigures Cowper's TheTask,a poemplaited togetherfrom the alternationof topic and description, and firmlyrootedin aparochial landscape.The purpose of paying attention to such undistinguished poems, and addressingin particular their designation as rhapsodies, is that they reveal much about thehidden aesthetic agenda in other long poems of the period. By 'long poem' I meansuch as Thomson's TheSeasons,Akenside's ThePleasures f Imagination 744, 1757),Young's Night Thoughts I742-45), as well as The Task, compositions that havetended to be subject to the complaint offormlessness, mainly as a result of perceivedincohesion between their well-developed parts and the fuzziness of their overallstructures. It seems to me that one sort of authority for the practices of such poemslay in the precedent of rhapsody, which raised formlessness (within certainguidelines) to the level of an alternative literaryform.That rhapsodyconstituted animprimatur for superficial disorder should give critics pause when, for example,22John Smith, PoemsuponSeveralOccasions 7I3), pp. I74-91.23Joseph Mitchell, Poems on Several Occasions,2 vols (1729), I, 79-1 I8.24 The Works n Verseand Prose of William Shenstone,Esq., 2 vols (1764), I, 285-307.

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approaching the imaginative sprawl of TheTask.25Critics in the eighteenth centuryactually rested perfectly easy with the idea that a genre such as rhapsody might bedefined principally by its lack of definition or by its quixotic subsumption of othergenres. Johnson, though he may have been venting some private intolerance,defined 'essay' as 'a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not aregular and orderly composition', and the same dictionary glosses the noun'miscellaneousness' as a 'composition of various kinds'.Other parts of rhapsody's repertoire shed light on some broader features ofeighteenth-century poetry. The poems of Smith, Mitchell, and Cooper all specifytitularly some commonplace object whose exposition will constitute their subject-matter. The ring of such titles aligns them with another eighteenth-century mini-genre, the paradoxical encomium, in which some nugatory and poetically inauspi-cious subject would be addressed.26The artistry of such trifles lay in pitting theprovokingexiguity of the topic against the poet's powersof ingenious expansion, butequally important was the drawing of a quasi-burlesque irony from the relationbetween the topic's diminutiveness and the techniques of rhetorical escalationexercised upon it. Probably the most prolific exponent of paradoxical encomia wasWilliam Woty, who regularlywroteundersuch slight titles as 'A Pinch of Snuff' and'Poem on a Pin'.27 The principal difference between rhapsodical poems andparadoxical encomia lay in the store set by digression in rhapsodies. Paradoxicalencomia tended to be ephemeral,whereas within rhapsodies,as in other long poems,the organization of length was aesthetically crucial. While one sort of irony, withinboth poetic forms, was fabricated by the treatment of topics normally deemedunpoetical, this irony was complicated in so far as the strict naming of the topic onlybetter allowed a poem to frayoffdigressively fromits putative concern. This createda secondary irony born out of the disproportionbetween the tightly-defined subjectand the prolixity of the digressive rigmarolevisited on it.Pert disregard for their own titles established itself as a trait of some rhapsodicalworks. One reviewerof Edward Cooper's TheElbow-Chairommented perplexedly:'This rhapsody is about every thing but an elbow chair.'28The single author, muchread in the eighteenth century, who was most identified with the use ofdummy titleswas Montaigne. Charles Cotton, in his 'Vindication of Montaigne's Essays',prefixed to his translation, found the Essays justly rank'd amongst MiscellaneousBooks: for they are on various Subjects, without Order and Connexion'.29 Theseeffects comply closely with those of rhapsody; and it may have been that Johnsonhad Montaigne in mind when he defined 'essay'as a prose piece that was 'irregular'and 'indigested'. Cotton, though, goes on to elaboratemorefully the idiosyncrasy ofMontaigne's method, adding:notwithstandingeveral of his Discoursesdo containquite different hingsfrom what ispromis'd n the Titles [... ] yet it does not alwayshappenso; andwhen he has done it,methinks,t israther hroughAffectationhanInadvertancy,o shew hathedid not ntend o

25 See Martin Priestman's survey of critical comments on structural confusion in TheTask, n Cowper's'Task':StructurendInfluenceCambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983), pp. I-5.26 See H. K. Miller, 'The Paradoxical Encomium with Special Reference to its Vogue in EnglandI660- 800', in Modern hilology, 3 (I956), I45-78.27 See TheShrubs fParnassus 1760) and his anthology, ThePoeticalCalendar,2 vols (1763), IX, 63-64.28 Gentleman's agazine,no. 35 (October 1765), 482.29 EssaysofMichaelSeigneureMontaigne... ] MadeEnglishbyCharlesCotton, sq. ( 7I ), p. i.

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TheEighteenth-CenturyhapsodicalMannermakea Work.This does likewiseappear,by theodd,or rather antasticalConnexion f hisDiscourses,wherein romone Matterhemakes ongDigressions ponseveral thers. p.5)While Montaigne's mock-insouciance ('he did not intend to make a Work') mightseem altogether remote from William Cowper's reputed earnestness, the strictadvertisement of a compositional topic, and the subsequent use of digressions tocircumvent it, are techniques central to the first book of The Task, 'The Sofa'.Cowper had a queasiness about beginnings; he confided an anxiety about startingletters in one addressed toJohn Newton, declaring that it was 'much more difficultto put the pen in motion at first, than to continue the progress of it, when oncemoved'; and just as he could begin a letter by complaining of the irksomeness ofepistolary openings, so he sometimes fell back on overt inauguratory ruses whenbeginning poems, orpartsofthem.30Book I, forexample, opens with a well-definedroutine ofMiltonic allusion, but TheTaskas a whole begins with a concentrationoffocus (the more salient in such an expansive poem) on asingle artefact:the sofa.31Inanother letter to Newton, Cowper described it as the 'starting-post from which Iaddressed myself to the long race that I soon conceived a design to run'.32Book I ofThe Task epitomizes one structure of rhapsodic poems, not simply in being un-plannedly miscellaneous but in initially furnishingsome imaginative concentration(on the sofa) beforefanning out into medley. The choosing of an eponymous subject(sofa, lobster, shoe-heel) provided the readerwith a fixtureagainst which a poem'sarts of digression could be appreciated.'The Sofa' typifies the rhapsodic format in playing off its eventual heterogeneityagainst the sharpness of focus implied by the title, yet this is not the sole respect inwhich Cowper's poem encompasses rhapsodic traits. The 'Advertisement' recordshow having 'the SOFA for a subject', the author 'connected another subjectwith it'and 'pursuing the train of thought [... ] broughtforth [... ] a Volume!'.33Cowper'slack of preconception about the poem's direction chimed with his sense of theinscrutability of God's providential purpose: he remarkedresignedly, in a letter toJohn Newton (30 September 1786) that it is 'always impossible to conjecture tomuch purpose from the beginnings of a providence, in what it will terminate'.34More important, though, the poem's supposed origination as a train of thoughtcarried with it the same suggestion of having been spontaneously composed as wasconveyed by other rhapsodical poems. The claim of any poem to extemporarycomposition, to having been conceived in a single creative spasm, can hardly beconceded at face-value; but the making of the claim, and the techniques adopted tosubstantiate it, are of aesthetic interest. The virtue of spontaneous compositionbelonged with the more diffuse poetic ideal of sincerity, whch the rhapsodic formatalso promised to realize. In practical terms, 'sincerity' tended to be assimilated tothe appearance of certain formalploys, and, as the century progressed,one index ofa poem's sincerity became its unorthodox relation to conventional formal proprie-ties. Digressions, in particular, werejustified as they enabled a poet to speak with a30 TheLetters ndProseWritingsf WilliamCowper,d. by JamesKingandCharlesRyskamp,5 vols(Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1979-86), 5 April 1783,I, 121.31 For discussion of Miltonic allusions in Im.1-20, see Dustin Griffin,Regaining aradise:MiltonandtheEighteenth enturyCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 222-23.32 Letters, I December 1784,n, 309.33PoeticalWorks, . 128.34Letters, 1, 92.

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sincerity unobtainable under the strict duress of rules;for this reason, the rhapsodicformat, with its extreme reliance on digressions, could be seen as especiallyamenable to the presentation of authorial personality.35Improvisation has one tiny niche in Augustan culture in the Impromptu poemspenned by such as Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Gray, but the claim ofspontaneity, for the most part, falls within the ambit of rhapsody; though before Ispecify in what ways, it is worth my spelling out some differing grounds on whichsuch a claim might be made. There are probably three main possibilities: first,spontaneousness might be pursued or mimicked when a poem models itself onmental free association, as indicated by Cowper's TheTask.Second, it can arisewhere the period of a work's contemplation is seen to be identical with that of itscomposition, so that all pre-planningis given up; this might seem to overlapwith thefirst category, but it is not inevitable that works presenting themselves as havingbeen composed without premeditation necessarily mimic patterns of thoughtassociation. Third, some pretence of extemporaneous composition is generated insuch works as A Taleof a Tub,Tristram handy, nd Beppo,where the compositionalmoment is introjected as a subject of the work itself, so that the reader has theimpression of being drawn into the process of the work'sgenesis.Cowper's The Taskwas not the only illustrious long poem claimed to have beengenerated extemporaneously. In the preface to Night Thoughts,Edward Youngrecorded: 'As the Occasion of this Poem was Real, not Fictitious, o the Methodpursuedin it, was ratherimposed, y what spontaneously arosein the Author's Mind,on that Occasion, than meditated,r designed.'36uch spontaneity is defined in termsof the unplanned nature of the poem, and its government by the motions of mindrather than by generic design. Spontaneity, or the pretence of it, may seem askewfrom the cool deliberations and the nuanced refinementsnormally associated witheighteenth-century culture, but it was recognizedas a worthy objective even withinsome early poems. Joseph Mitchell's TheShoe-Heel,or example, finishes with apassage summarizing its own method:Thus, n continuedRhapsody,'vesung,Philippian erse,unknowingv'ryLineWhatnextwou'd ollow: nspirationtrange!Thus,holyMen, n earlyChristianTimes,Careless f a To-morrow,ooknoThought

Whatthenmighthappenandwerebless'dofHeav'n.37The witticism here depends on allusion both toJohn Philips's TheSplendid hilling(I701), an early Miltonic burlesque much admired by Mitchell, and to Paul'sEpistle to the Philippians, with its teaching 'Be careful for nothing'.38Just asCowper allowed The Task to develop fortuitously in tactful mimicry of humanblindness to the directions of divine Providence,so Mitchell discoversin scriptureanimprimaturfor unplanned composition.Though I have primarilybeen concernedwith poetry, it is importantnot to forgetTristram handy I759-63), the single most influential work exhibiting rhapsodictraits in the second half of the century. Sterne realized that the term fitted, for he35 See Cohen, TheArtofDiscrimination,p. 105-I9.36 Night Thoughts,d. by Stephen Cornford (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, I989), p. 35.37 Poems nSeveralOccasions,I, I18.38 'Be careful for nothing: but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let yourrequest be made known unto God', Philippians, 4.6, Authorized Version.

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284 TheEighteenth-CenturyhapsodicalMannerfreelylays claim to it in the novel, associating it, on one occasion, with the somewhatadhocprinciples by which characters move in and out of the narrative:'It is so longsince the reader of this rhapsodicalworkhas been partedfromthe midwife, that it ishigh time to mention her again to him.'39Yet the generalbreathlessnessof narrativedelivery, and the continual parallels drawn between narrative time and composi-tional time, equally (though perhaps less explicitly) align the work with rhapsodictraits. The rhapsodic method also features in Thomas Tyers's AnHistoricalRhapsodyon Mr. Pope(1782), which offers a sober and lucid retrospection of Pope's life andworks. The work's appellation is justified in the 'Advertisement', which forewarnsthat the essay 'disdains methods', and Tyers unabashedly admits to a Shandeanimpercipience, confessing that he 'did not know,when he tookup the pen, whether itwould be long or short'.40 As the century progressed, rhapsodic spontaneitybecomes inextricable from romantic irony. The two distinct senses of rhapsody, asan enthusiastic effusion and a formless work, become inseparable in works whoseformalmeanderings are closely related to the mental exorbitances of theirnarrators.The wayward progress of TristramShandyarises directly from Tristram's dizzythought-processes, and the medley effects of Byron'snarrativepoems Beppoand DonJuan are an overt product of the unstinting and self-thwarting garrulity of theByronic narrator.One lexical repercussion of the foothold won by rhapsodical techniques was thepromotion of the word 'improvise'. The only form recognized by Johnson is'improvision', meaning 'want of forethought', the earliest recorded usage comingfrom Thomas Browne (I646): 'Her improvision would be justly accusable.' It issuggestive that improvisation, as a literary procedure,won free of the opprobriumunder which it first suffered only in the immediate aftermath of the rhapsodicallabours of Sterne and Cowper. The first meaning of 'improvisation' given in theOED is 'the action of improvising or composing extempore;also concr. erse, music,etc. so improvised', the earliest recorded occurrencedating to George Colman theElder's Prose on SeveralOccasions1786). Although 'extempore' had been used todescribeunpremeditated compositionfromas earlyas 1553,the fact that 'improvise'was so much later adopted to cover roughly the same semantic ground may havebeen in response to the new compositional practiceswhich this essay has discussed.Considering the literary history of rhapsody demands the simultaneousjugglingof several different balls, each one being a different nuance of the term. Thedistinctions drawn by the OED, which underpin Pat Rogers's argument, probablyintroduce a distortingly over-emphatic sense of scheme. Rogers's harnessingboth oflexicographical evidence and of the specific example of Shaftesburyhelps to sustaina case that the two distinct rhapsodicalformsshareda reasonabledegreeof commonground, with one effectbeing that the initially strongerreputeofrhapsodyas medleyhelped bring about comparable esteem for the other term. Moreover, he sees bothforms as feeding into wider pre-Romantic tendencies in the eighteenth century. Myargument departs from this scenario in stressing the independent strength of thelong, rhapsodical poem. For one thing, I believe that the distinction between the twoforms remained less dissoluble than Rogers hints, while, equally, I see the mixed39Laurence Sterne, TheLifeandOpinions f TristramShandy,Gentleman,d. by Melvyn New andJoan New,3 vols (Gainsville:University of FloridaPress, I978), i, 39.40Thomas Tyers, An HistoricalRhapsodynMr.Pope ... ] TheSecond dition,CorrectedndEnlarged 782),p. 2.


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rhapsody as being sufficiently an Augustan formula that many of the period's mostillustrious long poems can be seen to take their cue from it.In addition to these large reservations, I remaindoubtful about the small print ofRogers's case. He maintains, for example, that the sense of rhapsody as a hap-hazardly structuredwork never suffered rom much of an image problem, so that thechief trend within rhapsody consisted of the alternative sense, the effusive poeticoutburst, catching up in acceptability with its partner, something it achieved 'wellbefore the high tide of Romanticism'.41 My doubtfulness about this scenario istwofold. First, when Swift dubbed a major satiric poem 'On Poetry:A Rhapsody'(1733), it seems likely that he wanted to exploit a sense, residually attaching to theterm, of bluff, soap-box polemic; and this slightly disreputable connotation, ratherthan being an interim phase in the word's inexorableupwardmobility, persistsevenas late as the anonymous Orange:A PoeticalRhapsody 1798-99). My more seriousreservation about Rogers's chronology, though, concerns the specific sense ofrhapsodyas medley, which he takes neverto have been subjectto the obloquy visitedon the rival sense. Yet rhapsodies of this order often did get a bad press. Shaftes-bury's early puffing of rhapsody as effusion quickly involved him in denigration ofthe other form, and even as late as The Task (1785), poems betraying strongrhapsodical propensities were sporadically taxed on that account by reviewers.42Rogers's argument may be guilty of an anticipative teleology in running thelife-history of rhapsody in such strict parallel with the long onset of Romanticism,but another complicating factor is that it always seems to have been part of therhapsodic agenda that it align itself with low-born and 'alternative' literaryforms.During the second half of the centuryrhapsodic traits, always prone to being seen asa manifestation of carelessness, often come together with conscious poetic down-dressing. This is true of the mid-century coterie consisting of Cowper, Churchill,Lloyd, and Colman, whose experiments with familiar style entailed emphasis oncompositional spontaneity and speed, but it is most apt to Byron, the greatestexponent in his era of the familiar style, who also showed interest in literaryimprovisation.43It is eventually Sterne and Byron who bring the rhapsodicvein toits terminus, where rhapsody becomes less to do with the organization of acomposition's length and more to do with a mental picaresque, a peculiar form ofoccupation of a work's psychic space.44SUNDERLAND POLYTECHNIC RICHARD TERRY

41 'Shaftesburyand the Aesthetics of Rhapsody', p. 249.42 Cohen's Art and Discriminationprovides most detail about the critical reception of a single poem,documenting both adverse criticismand the constructionsthat were placed on TheSeasonsn orderthat itcould be considered successful. For the receptionof TheTask,see Priestman.43See Lance Bertelsen, TheNonsenseClub:LiteraturendPopularCulture,749-1764 (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1986), pp. ioI-I9; T. E. Blom, 'EighteenthCentury ReflexiveProcessPoetry', in Eighteenth-CenturyStudies,Io (1976-77), 52-72; Byron'sLetters ndJournals, d. by Leslie A. Marchand, I2 vols (London:Murray, 1973-82), v, 119, 125.44For Sterne and romantic irony, see Peter Conrad, Shandyism: heCharacterfRomanticrony Oxford:Blackwell, 1978).

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The Rhapsodical Manner in the Eighteenth Century