with reflections on the abundance of bathos in our own time
I.
Alexander Pope’s “Peri
Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry” [1] satirizes contemporary poets, in
particular for what Pope (in a new application of the word) terms bathos, a
mingling of the commonplace and the sublime that violates decorum. While Pope’s title plays on the treatise On
the Sublime attributed to Longinus, the piece is targeted at his poetic
rivals, Ambrose Philips and a long list of others identified only by
initials. Pope was an active
controversialist on the side of neo-Classicism and Tory rule, though personal
rather than ideological motives seem at the base of many of his polemics. In “Peri Bathous,” for instance, he is less
concerned with setting forth literary principles than he is with criticizing
others’ poor taste. While the essay
might disappoint the theorist, it is filled with Pope’s incisive wit, and
accurately predicts a trajectory of modern poetry which, for better or for
worse, has continued to pursue the “Art of Sinking.”
In what might be called a comic
apocalyptic reflex, Pope’s essay calls for an inversion of conventional values
of literary judgement. The fact is that there
is little to differentiate the satirist from the objects of his ridicule in
theory. They all participate in the assumptions
of neo-Classicism, yet in Pope’s view, his rivals are utterly incompetent. Apart from ridiculing the absurdity of the
“sinking” poetry they produce, Pope attacks hacks who write to order for pay in
spite of the fact that he himself actively and successfully pursued a career as
a professional writer.
Pope and the
targets of his satire share their age’s stress on the value of models and in ornamentation
through a generous use of rhetorical figures.
Thus, he declares, with the
essay’s pervasive irony, that it is a “grievous errour” that “the rules of the
ancients were equally necessary to the moderns” (I) The tropes and figures he examines in some
technical detail (X-XI) had been received ideas as the basis for the
construction of aesthetic texts from the Rhetorica ad Herennium through
Puttenham and into Pope’s day.
The expressions Pope ridicules are not in
form wrong; their absurdity arises through loss of decorum. Pope’s
central model of bathos is a figure in which one element is discordant with the
next, the sort of ill-fitting parts that Horace figures at the outset of the
“Art of Poetry” as monstrous chimerical creatures, for instance, part horse and
part man, or woman and fish. His rivals,
he suggests, are unable to exercise taste enough to make the elements of their
images match. They work the same vein as
he, but cannot perform up to his standard.
The poor taste of the poets Pope ridicules
has, he believes, a material base: they write for money and thus will shape
their efforts toward the most widespread popularity rather than the greatest
beauty. Rather than speaking of inspiration
or genius, he focuses on the business of poetry, speaking of the “trade” and “manufacture”
of literature. (XIII) Using the “Golden Rule of Transformation,”
one may generate absurdities freely and reduce any object to the ridiculous by
the simple technique of examining it through “the wrong end of a Perspective Glass,
by which all the Objects of Nature are lessen’d.” (V) This is in fact only an example of the
departure from common sense and the acceptance of truth in nature which Pope
decries. In a way not wholly unlike the
“commodity fetishization” Marx and his followers regarded as obscuring economic
relations, this false view blocks the creation and appreciation of the sublime
for Pope. [2]
Britain was moving already toward
industrial capitalism during Pope’s time from the feudal agriculture-based
economy, so the arbiter of aesthetic decision was becoming ever less the
nobility and their toadies and becoming the literate bourgeoisie. With even greater plausibility than those in
the eighteenth century who doubted the judgement of the public in making
political decisions, Pope’s persona neatly finesses his replacement of the
Horatian formula by arguing that “if the intent of all poetry be to divert and
instruct, certainly that kind, which diverts and instructs the greatest number,
is to be preferred.” The effect is to
abandon any attempt to impress the cultivated, “men of a nice and foppish
gusto, whom after all it is almost impossible to please,” or “to write for
posterity of whose taste we cannot make any judgment,” and to make “gain the
principal end of our art.” (II) Though
ironically expressed, these views echo Boileau who insists that the poet must
write with “immortal Fame” in mind, that abject dedication to patrons leads to work unbecomingly “fill'd
with fulsome flatteries.” The author
must never choose “Gold for the object of a gen'erous Muse,” yet with “the
Stars propitious Influence” a poet may yet hope “a sharp-sighted Prince, by early
Grants/ Rewards your Merits, and prevents your Wants.” [3]
Therefore, one
need have no particular training, background, or apprenticeship to be poetic;
it is rather within reach of everyman.
In fact, Pope playfully suggests that certain low persons might prove
especially gifted. Since “nothing is
more evident than that divers persons, no other way remarkable, have each a
strong disposition to the formation of some particular trope or figure,” the
production of poetry could be done collectively by these specialists.
(XIII) Thus fishmongers might compose
epithets, since “epithets may be found in great plenty at Billingsgate,”
anadiplosis may be trusted to “common criers and hawkers, who by redoubling the
same words persuade people to buy their oysters, green hastings, or new
ballads,” and “the ellipsis, or speech by half-words” entrusted to “ministers
and politicians.”
In what now seems
a striking anticipation of both assembly line production and the capitalist
creation of imaginative works by committee in film and television designed to
appeal to the largest demographics. In
the early days of the Industrial Revolution Pope had in this essay invented the
English use of the term bathos as though it were necessary to define a new
phenomenon, but, in the centuries since, bathos has flourished to such an
extent and readers have, during the last century, proven so fond on “low”
imagery that the bathetic has proven dominant.
In his own view,
Pope was nothing but normative. It is he
who imitates nature and they who are “anti-natural.” (V) To him he is the reasonable man calling
attention to the failings of the unreasonable.
He considers himself a member not so much of a partisan group as of the
party of the correct. In terms of his
condemnation of writing for money, his own practice had been mixed and
transitional like his age. While
constantly seeking highly placed supporters, Pope had no illusions about
patronage and in the Dunciad satirizes those who value the most
extravagant praise from their poets over the most competent verse. “He wins this Patron who can tickle best” (II
198) Pope’s own competence, allowing him
to build his villa in Twickenham, was made by the sales of his translations of
Homer and then his edition of Shakespeare.
He also cultivated patrons such as Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington
and Allen Bathurst, Baron and later 1st Earl Bathurst. Yet the transitional character of the age is
clear in the fact the popularity and patronage were by no means mutually
exclusive. Pope and others published
sometimes by subscription and one noble title on the list will attract others
as well as those on lower rungs of the social ladder.
The reader may
look to Pope for superb craft and brilliant wit. He excels at formulating “what oft was
Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,” but he does not strive after original
ideas, nor is he really a man of ideas at all.
He is nonetheless an outstanding poet, and it is his poetic gift that
illuminates “The Art of Sinking.” In it
the reader may see art questioning its own ability to survive the coming of the
age of crass capitalist philistinism.
II.
Though the modern
reader may suspect that Pope was not in the end arguing on behalf of anything
more than his own superior practice, he was quite right about the shift in the
business of literature. With the
hegemony of monopoly and finance capitalism in the centuries since has come
likewise a further “sinking.” The
eighteenth century could scarcely have imagined the depths to which modern
artists have sunk during an age in which popularity is virtually uncontested as
an index of excellence, and even the educated discuss television shows and rock
bands and know nothing further of the arts.
These commodified commercial forms, of course, for the most part assume
the predominant values of their society just as all popular genres will tend to
do.
The hierarchical structure which enables
Pope’s complaint of mixing low and high is explicitly opposed by many modern
poets. The tendency is commonplace since
Wordsworth was attacked for his
language “which is coarse, inelegant or infantine,”
betraying “perverseness and bad taste.”
The influential Lord Jeffrey, with assumptions little changed from
Pope’s found in Wordsworth the fault “of connecting his most lofty, tender, or
impassioned conceptions, with objects and incidents, which the greater part of
his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or
uninteresting. All the world laughs
at Elegiac stanzas to a sucking-pig — a Hymn on Washing-day — Sonnets to one's
grandmother — or Pindarics on gooseberry-pye.” [4]
Since that rear-guard
assault by a traditionalist over two hundred years ago, the parameters of
poetry have shifted dramatically and bathos has, proven if not a clear victor,
the stronger contender. Readers will
require no evidence on this score as most of the innovative currents since the
Romantics have justified the use of the banal, the vulgar, and the colloquial
and have often intentionally linked low and high. [5] A brief survey of such practices might
include Whitmanic, Cubist, Imagist, Objectivist, and Socialist Realist poetry
which each of which in its own way values the “low.” Vorticism, Aleatory, and Language poetry
privilege discontinuities. [6] Surely
Pope would have thought quite preposterous the ironic modes of aesthetic
appreciation that have developed in the last hundred years: the kitsch, the
camp, the hip all intentionally appreciate what a traditionalist would find
ugly. Great work has been done even by
the extreme practitioners in this mode; one need think only of Gertrude Stein
and Francis Ponge, but their achievements would have only bewildered a critic
of Pope’s sensibilities.
The causes of
this evolution may be various, but the most significant is surely that named by
Pope – the substitution of an undiscriminating public for a smaller but more
cultivated audience. The analysis of
audience is turned upon Pope himself by Christopher Caudwell, in his classic of
‘thirties vulgar Marxist literary history.
With the pose of certainty associated with “scientific” socialism,
Caudwell asserts that Alexander Pope “perfectly expresses the ideals of the
bourgeois class in alliance with a bourgeoisified aristocracy in the epoch of
manufacture.” [7] Dependent on patrons, poets of his day were
obliged “to To him “Pope’s poetry and his ‘reason’” are “a reflection of that
stage of the bourgeois illusion where freedom for the bourgeoisie can only be
‘limited.’” Introducing a surprisingly
affective term Caudwell says that in the eighteenth century “the imposition of
outward forms on the heart is necessary and accepted.”
While true, these
statements are not far from being simple truisms and thus of little probative value. Every poet, even the avant-garde and the
counter-cultural, must “speak the language of his paymasters.” And surely freedom is always limited, the
living heart cannot be entirely liberated.
Out of tension and contradiction arise history, consciousness, and
poetry, charged always with unsatisfied desire.
Perfect satisfaction, total enlightenment is silent. Absence of form is
chaos. Human ideas are defined by the
specific forms thought assumes under multiple determinants.
A siren in the
form of the mirage of a coherent chain of being sang to Pope. He saw his place beneath a proper king atop a
structure that included enlightened patrons.
Aristocrats might demonstrate their nobility by refined taste in this
scheme while less sensitive readers gulp down bad verse. The more common modern illusion collapses the
old value distinctions and eliminates the standard of decorum. Yet the modern idea of the poet justifies
itself by a kind of democracy of things, a notion developing from Donne through
Wordsworth and Whitman, in which a bedbug may be as grand as a mountain and
form is infinitely variable. We look
back on Pope, then, with nostalgia, as one who lived during those when one
could imagine a bedrock of established truth beneath his feet.
1. the essay was
published under the name Martinus Scriblerus in “The Last Volume” of Motte’s Miscellanies
in Prose and Verse March 8, 1727/8 The authorship is still contested by some
scholars, with Arbuthnot and Swift the other candidates, but contemporary
opinion favors Pope. For a discussion of
the issue in a complete critical edition see Edna Leake Steeves’ The Art of
Sinking in Poetry (1952).
2. Cf. Walter
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).
3. Art of Poetry,
translated by William Soames and revised by John Dryden, Canto IV, lines 100,
138, 143, and 155-159.
4. Francis Jeffrey,
Review of Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes; Edinburgh Review 11
(October 1807) 214-31.
5. Even trends like
the Symbolists and later prophetic and “deep image” practitioners which aspire
to sublimity do so often through unassuming or unlikely imagery.
6. Charles Bernstein
says in “Semblance”: “Textures, vocabularies, discourses, constructivist modes
of radically different character are not integrated into a field as part of a
predetermined planar architecture; the gaps and jumps compose a space with
shifting parameters, types and styles of discourse constantly crisscrossing,
interacting, creating new gels."
7. Illusion and
Reality, 86.
