Rescuing the Novel

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"Aesthetics, as a formal branch of philosophy that deals with issues of beauty and taste, originated in 18th-century England. Orthodox discourse on its development usually centers on Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, and on the concepts of the Beautiful and the Sublime. Ronald Paulson argues in a new book that the orthodoxy ignores an important and fascinating aspect of aesthetics' development: William Hogarth's exploration of a third concept--the Novel.

Paulson should know. The William D. and Robin Mayer Professor of English and art history is author of a monumental three-volume biography of the 18th-century English painter and engraver. In his latest book, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Paulson attempts to fill what he refers to as a "lacuna" in the study of aesthetics. In his view, most scholarship about the development of aesthetics since the late 18th century has ignored the most interesting British artists, men like Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, George Stubbs, and Thomas Gainsborough.

Aesthetics developed as a heterodoxy to orthodox religion in England. Cooper, whom historians refer to as Shaftesbury, believed that anyone who adhered to conventional religious practice, which he dismissed as "priestcraft," could not simultaneously be virtuous. He argued that though priestcraft kept the masses in order, it relied on a system of rewards and punishments--be good and go to heaven, be bad and go to hell--that inherently compromised one's virtue. A truly virtuous person, in the earl's view, would be disinterested--virtuous for the sheer sake of virtue, not because there was something to be gained (or lost) in the afterlife.

As a substitute (for the elite, not for the masses), Shaftesbury proposed in 1711 what Paulson calls an "antitheology"--the contemplation and appreciation of beauty, specifically the Beautiful, a Platonic ideal of artistic form. "Aesthetics is entirely a replacement for religion," says Paulson. "The artist becomes a kind of surrogate God, and the closest we can get to God is the artist who produces a simulacrum." Shaftesbury established what came to be regarded as the standard aesthetic tradition.

Forty-six years later, Edmund Burke, the political essayist and statesman, championed another aesthetic ideal, the Sublime. Where Shaftesbury's Beautiful concerned the external qualities of a concrete artistic object, the Sublime referred to the internal sense of awe one feels when in the grips of an overwhelming experience. If the Beautiful was a babbling brook that one could encompass with the mind and speak of as pretty, the Sublime was a raging torrent that could not be encompassed or controlled.

Between these two extremes, Paulson says, there arose in the early 1750s a third ideal: the Novel. Its champion was the poet and essayist Joseph Addison, whose tripartite aesthetics, embracing all three ideals, ran counter to Shaftesbury's monolithic formulation. Addison published a periodical, The Spectator, in which he printed, among other things, a series of essays on "the pleasures of the imagination."

Shaftesbury's system pretty much allowed only for the Beautiful--all else was ugly or deformed. By contrast, Paulson says, Addison wanted to "open space for the stigmatized or marginalized areas of enjoyment." His appreciation of the Novel assigned value to "surprise," "the pursuit of knowledge," "curiosity," and "variety." He wanted to go out into the world and be open to what he found on the street. He created a character in his magazine, Mr. Spectator, who wandered about and reported on the new and strange things he encountered.

From Addison's ideas grew a counter-tradition--counter to Shaftesbury's ideas--with Hogarth as its principal exponent. If Shaftesbury's ideal was a classical Greek sculpture that would inspire an idealized veneration, says Paulson, Hogarth's counter-traditional view was: Why contemplate a statue when you can contemplate a real live woman? While the painters of the Royal Academy promoted an elevated, heroicized style of history painting as the ideal for art, Hogarth rendered the earthy life of 18th-century London, with its whores, peddlers, and common folk. Some of his engravings, like the series A Harlot's Progress, were scandalously blasphemous, subverting the Holy Trinity and, in Paulson's view, savagely satirizing England's priestly establishment.

Hogarth and Addison, with their robust notions of what constituted aesthetic ideals, exerted significant influence over writers such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, Paulson says. These and others pursued the ideal of the Novel in their writings, and in so doing created the literary form that became known as... the novel.

In his book, Paulson asserts that this whole counter-discourse of Addison, Hogarth et al has been largely ignored because in the late 1700s the ideal of the Sublime won out. Much of the point of his book, Paulson says, is to rescue this counter-discourse.

For though the Sublime emerged as the orthodox ideal of its time, Paulson says, "in another sense, the novel [and by implication the Novel] won out. By the end of the century, that's the master's genre."

By Dale Keiger, Johns Hopkins (1996)