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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
One of the earliest discoveries of the pioneer students of “pre-romanticism” was Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance. Phelps and Beers, who discussed only the Letters and the Moral and Political Dialogues, considered Hurd to have been in whole-hearted revolt against neo-classical ideas. Later scholars, taking into account his earlier writings, found both in these works and the Letters themselves certain opinions which seemed conventionally neo-classic; he therefore came to be represented either as a classicist converted to romanticism or as a writer who always wavered between the two positions. In general, his criticism was considered to have been mixed and fluctuating. He was thought to have had no consistent position, but to be important insofar as he anticipated romantic views.
1 This paper was read in an earlier and shorter version at the meetings of the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast, held in Berkeley in November, 1940.1 am indebted to Prof. R S. Crane for comments and suggestions which were helpful in revising the paper for publication.
2 W. L. Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement (Boston, 1893), pp. 112–115; H. A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1899), pp. 221–226; George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism (New York, 1904), iii, 75–78; A History of English Criticism (Edinburgh, 1925), pp. 265–273; Aisso Bosker, Literary Criticism in the Age of Johnson (Groningen, 1930), pp. 231–232. See notes 50, 51 below.
3 Audley L. Smith, “Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance,” ELH, v (1939), 58–81, especially pp. 58, 64, 65, 74.1 do not wish to undervalue Smith's excellent paper. I believe, however, that he has failed to grasp the systematic connections between various specific opinions of Hurd, and that in failing to take account of Hurd's critical method he has missed the main clue to the correct interpretation of his statements. These objections are elaborated in the concluding pages of my paper.
4 Edwine Montague, “Bishop Hurd's Association with Thomas Warton,” Stanford Studies in Language and Literature (1941), pp. 233–256.
5 In “A Seventeenth-Century French Source for Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance,” PMLA, lii (1937), 820–828, Victor M. Hamm shows that Chapelain, “founder of French classicism,” had anticipated Hurd's main position on the poetic value of romance materials. The implication of this parallel, as Hamm points out, is to make “much of the ‘new’ and ‘radical’ in Hurd's work … seem strangely tame and derivative.” In this respect his modest paper gives (in my opinion) a sounder conception of Hurd's significance than the more elaborate studies cited above.
6 Works of Richard Hurd (London, 1811), ii, 3.
7 Ibid., 4.
8 Ibid., 25–26.
9 Ibid., 24–25.
10 Ibid., 23–24.
11 Ibid., 81–84.
12 Ibid., 82.
13 “On the Provinces of the Drama,” Worti, ii, 71. Cf. “Notes on the Art of Poetry,” Works, i, 99–100.
14 “Notes on the Epistle to Augustus,” Works, i, 390–391.
15 Letters on Chivalry and Romance, ed. E. J. Morley (London, 1911), p. 135.
16 Dedication of Hurd's edition of the Epistle to Augustus, Works, i, 282. At the beginning of his “Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” Hurd states that there is no fit method of resolving the questions he proposes to discuss “but by taking the matter pretty deep, and deducing it from its first principles.” (Works, ii, 110).
17 “Idea of Universal Poetry,” Works, ii, 3.
18 Ibid., 4. Cf. “Notes on the Epistle to Augustus,” Works, i, 390.
19 “Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” Works, ii, 129; cf. 147, 200, etc.
20 “Idea of Universal Poetry,” Works, ii, 6–7.
21 Ibid., 8–9.
22 Ibid., 11.
23 “Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” Works, ii, 147.
24 In grounding artistic rules on the universal laws of mind Hurd typifies the most important development of aesthetic theory in his generation. Burke, Kames, and Reynolds, to name only three, agreed with Hurd in attempting to make criticism a “rational science” by revealing the psychological foundations of taste. In his love of philosophy and system, Hurd belongs with these writers, rather than with the unsystematic Warton brothers.
25 “Idea of Universal Poetry,” Works, ii, 26. Cf. “Notes on the Art of Poetry,” Works, i, 66.
26 Works, ii, 4–5.
27 “On the Provinces of the Drama,” Works, ii, 30. Cf. “Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” ibid., 178–179.
28 “Idea of Universal Poetry,” ibid., 13.
29 Ibid., 23.
30 Ibid., 23–24.
31 Ibid., 7. The essence of “pure Poetry,” Hurd states elsewhere, “consists in bold figures and a lively imagery.” (“Notes on the Art of Poetry,” Works, i, 99).
32 “Idea of Universal Poetry,” Works, ii, 7.
33 “Notes on the Art of Poetry,” Works, i, 94.
34 Ibid., 96–105.
35 “Idea of Universal Poetry,” Works, ii, 8–9.
36 Ibid., 6. Cf. “Notes on the Art of Poetry,” Works, i, 139; “Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” Works, ii, 178–179.
37 Ibid., 10. Cf. “Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” ibid,., 238.
38 Cf. Hurd's discussion of the degree of probability required in the plot and characterization of comedy and tragedy; tragedy may deviate farther from nature in its draft of characters, but in the conduct of the fable its laws are more severe. Since their ends are different, their relation to nature must be different. (“Notes on the Epistle to Augustus,” Works, i, 385–388).
39 The final perfection of criticism Hurd says, “would consist in an ability to refer every beauty and blemish to a separate class; and every class, by a gradual progression, to some one single principle.” (“Notes on the Epistle to Augustus,” Works, i, 391. Cf. “On the Provinces of the Drama,” ibid., ii, 105.)
40 Letters i–iii.
41 Letter iv. Cf. Moral and Political Dialogues, iii, in Letters, ed. Morley, pp. 37–75.
42 Letters v–vi. Although Hurd states clearly that he is defending not the “composition” of Gothic works but “the manners described in them” (Letter viii, p. 116), this point has often been misunderstood. Hurd had no taste for the romances, which he despised without having read: “Not that I shall make a merit with you in having perused these barbarous volumes my self; much less would I impose the ungrateful task upon you.” (Letter iv, p. 94. His information is derived mainly from Sainte-Palaye's Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie. See Letters, pp. 55, 94, and cf. Hamm, 820–22, Smith, 69–70, and Beers, 221–222.)
In general, Hurd freely admits the superiority of classic art and taste. In poetry, as in architecture and gardening, the Gothic is not so “just” nor “of so true a taste” as the classic. He does not wish to argue “which of the two is conducted in the simplest and truest taste” (viii, pp. 118, 122). He intends only to show that Gothic materials have qualities of the sublime and marvelous which make them valuable in epic, and that since they grew out of real conditions, they are not wholly fantastic.
For a marked contrast between Hurd's attitude and that of a real antiquarian and lover of the medieval, see Leah Dennis, “Percy's Essay ‘On the Ancient Metrical Romances’,” PMLA, xxix (1934), 81–97. In both knowing and enjoying the romances, Thomas Warton resembles Percy rather than Hurd.
43 Letter vii. Smith notes that appreciation of Spenser was not unusual in the 1760's (p. 72, note), but Montague seems to return to the view of twenty or thirty years ago that liking for Spenser and Milton was “radical” in 1762.
44 Letter viii.
45 Letter ix. Hurd's defense of Tasso has been considered radical, but it should be remembered that Dryden, Dennis, and Pope (among others) were all in some degree admirers of Tasso, and that Voltaire defended him long before Hurd. Cf. A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics (Paris, 1925), pp. 342–47, and Roderick Marshall, Italy in English Literature: 1755–1815 (New York, 1934), pp. 9–10, 14–15, 22–31, 52–61, etc.
46 Cf. “Notes on the Epistle to Augustus,” Works, i, 385–387; “Provinces of the Drama,” Works, ii, 33, 44, etc. These are traditional neo-classical distinctions; cf. Dryden, Essays, ed. Ker, i, 209, ii, 161–162, 211, etc.
47 Letter x, p. 143. Smith states that “It was in his insistence upon the superiority of Gothic manners over classic for the purposes of modern poetry that Hurd was the most original and the most anti-neoclassical.” (Op. cit., 67. Italics mine.) On the contrary, Hurd states emphatically that “the success of these fictions will not be great, when they have no longer any footing in the popular belief.” Milton therefore did well, even a hundred years before Hurd's time, in replacing Gothic fables with more believable fictions—the Christian machinery of angels and devils. Elsewhere Hurd commends Davenant for rejecting the Italian prodigies and enchantments: “These conceits, he rightly saw, had too slender a foundation in the serious belief of his age to justify a relation of them” (“Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” Works, ii, 237–238.)
48 Letters xi–xii.
49 Letter x, p. 143.
50 Bosker, op. cit., pp. 216–222; Saintsbury, History of English Criticism, pp. 265–268
51 Bosker, p. 231; Letters, ed. Morley, pp. 11–15; Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature: 1730–1780 (New York, 1928), ii, 129; Saintsbury, p. 270.
52 Letter viii, pp. 120–121. Cf. “Notes on the Art of Poetry,” Works, i, 72; “Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” Works, ii, 180–182.
53 Letter viii, pp. 118–120.
54 Letters, pp. 109, 117, 144. Cf. 'Notes on the Art of Poetry,“ Works, i, 139; ”Discourse on Poetical Imitation,“ Works, ii, 181–182, 237.
55 “Idea of Universal Poetry,” Works, ii, 7, 8–10, 23–24. See the discussion of fiction, figurative language, and metre in section two above.
56 Works, ii, 8. The definition of poetry in terms of “nature” leads to the same conclusions as the definition in terms of “pleasure”: “All Poetry, to speak with Aristotle and the Greek critics (if for so plain a point authorities be thought wanting) is, properly, imitation…. And the office of genius is but to select the fairest forms of things, and to present them in due place and circumstance, and in the richest colouring of expression, to the imagination.” (“Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” Works, ii, 111. Cf. p. 184.)
57 Letters, pp. 136, 143, 144; Works, ii, 10, and 238–239. Cf. Dryden, Essays, ed. Ker, i, 153, 187, 219, etc.
58 Letter x, p. 136.
59 Op. cit., pp. 64–65. Cf. S. H. Monk, The Sublime (New York, 1935), pp. 104–106.
60 Cf. the treatment of “beauty” in 'Notes on the Art of Poetry,“ Works, i, 110–116, and of ”pleasure“ and ”instruction,“ Works, ii, 16. A striking instance of this way of using terms is the treatment of ”universality“ or ”the general“ in Hurd's essay on the drama. Lessing, who devotes four numbers of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie to the exposition of Hurd's dramatic theory, is puzzled by the apparent inconsistency between Hurd's statement that all poetry imitates general truth, or the universal, and his contention that in tragedy the characterization should be ”particular.“ In Hurd's context, this contention means that tragic characters should be more particular than those of comedy: ”In calling the tragic character particular, I suppose it only less representative of the kind than the comic, not that the draught of so much character as it is concerned to represent should not be general.“ (Works, ii, 49; cf. i, 255–261.) In attempting to fix the meaning of ”the general,“ Lessing pursues Hurd around an endless circle, but in Hurd's own terms these different propositions are not inconsistent.
61 “Notes on the Epistle to Augustus,” Works, i, 392.