The Radical Vision of Gerrard Winstanley

 

 

As Winstanley’s writings were published for the most part in separate pamphlet form, I treat their titles (when I mention them) as though they are books, though some are brief.  Page numbers in parentheses all refer to The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited by George H. Sabine (1965) and available at archive.org.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Gerrard Winstanley, the seventeenth century leader of the Diggers of St. George’s Hill in Surrey, was a pioneer of direct action and civil disobedience whose group, like the I.W.W., advocated “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old” [1].  Three hundred years later his example remained fresh enough to animate the Diggers of San Fracisco’s Haight-Ashbury who greeted me and several thousand others during the summer of 1967.  Those who gathered there shared with Winstanley not only his brash attitude and uncompromising anarcho-communism; many were pursuing spiritual paths -- Sufi, Daoist, Zen, quasi-Native American – which they saw as parallel to their social vision.  Winstanley’s religion was the foundation of his politics; he was a Christian, but a heterodox one, whose vision was at once more rational and more mystical than that of his fellow Christians who remained in the pews of the Church of England.    

     In terms of politics, he viewed the profit system, whether feudal or capitalist, as inherently and inevitably vicious.   His communism was absolute in terms of the means of production, primarily agriculture in his view.  (He is careful to note his disagreement with the contemporaneous Ranters who were reputed to practice free love [519].)  Well before Proudhon, Winstanley declared unequivocally that “Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thou shalt not steal, nor kill” (258).  He imagines a utopia in which everyone will work to “cheerfully put their hands to make these things that are needfull, one helping another” (184), then what is produced would be available to all in free stores: “every family, when they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops, and fetch without money, even as now they fetch with money” (526) [2].  Though his basic principle is simple, absolute, and, at its heart, entirely voluntaristic, Winstanley provides details for its operation in practice, involving numerous “peace-makers,” overseers, judges, and others [3]

     Winstanley regularly identifies the oppressive feudal system with “the Norman yoak” imposed by William the Conqueror (as though the Anglo-Saxons had not had their own equally oppressive kings).  To him putting commons to agricultural use seemed legal under traditional law.  More significantly, though, and quite apart from his more pragmatic suggestions, he viewed the Diggers as spiritual warriors and the contention as not between classes, but, as he often repeated, between the apocalyptic figures of the  Dragon and the Lamb.  He explicitly declares that his insights are divine openings, occurring in trance or otherwise gifts of God’s grace, “shown by Vision, Voyce, and Revelation” (257).  Winstanley clearly regards himself as a prophetic voice, a herald of divine insights.  He states with utter confidence that “the following declaration of the word of Life was the free gift to me from the Father himself.” [4]  His active interest in the apocalyptic symbols in the books of Daniel and Revelations, a curiosity he shares with many of his century, including Isaac Newton, is reflected in a number of passages [5].

     While a pursuit of esoteric meaning in Scripture is not unusual for his day, Winstanley’s theology was decidedly unorthodox.  His criticisms of the Established Church and its clergy do not advocate for any reforming sect.  (While he did have demonstrable ties to Quaker meetings, his actual membership has not been proven.)  Perhaps Winstanley could not find a doctrinal home in the England of his day, because his theology was, for all the mystical trappings, shockingly rational, a forerunner in significant ways of Deism and “natural religion.” 

     The most striking sign of his dissent even from Dissenters is in his use of Reason as an equivalent for  God.  Though he also refers to God as ”love” (375, 382, etc.), he explicitly says “I use the word reason rather than the word God in my writings” (104) and commonly speaks of “The Great Creator Reason” (251) and “the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason” (253).  While his attachment to Christian language and to the sacredness of the scriptures remains intact, he was with his elevation of reason a prefiguration of the eighteenth-century advocates of a non-supernatural religion. 

     Due to the compassion manifested in his redemptive role, Christ is primarily identified with love; thus Winstanley speaks of “Christ who is the universall power of Love.” (446)  This emphasis made the idea of eternal damnation unacceptable to him as it would imply a limitation of divine love [6].  To him God’s “power of Universall Love” (375) can do no less than cause “a thorough salvation . . . and leave none under bondage.” (384)  He is quite explicit that since the deity is “absolutely a God of Love” in the end every man shall be saved, though some at the last hour” (82) since “Christ gave himself a ransom for all” (81).  For him in fact the trees of knowledge and of life are beneficial, not forbidden, though subject to corruption, with the first identified with imagination and the second with love and knowledge (452).

     These concepts of God and Christ underlie and justify his social campaign.  For him the mandate for the truly pious to open what he repeatedly calls the “treasury” of earth to all people is nothing less than allowing love and reason rather than tyranny, crime, and self-interest to govern human affairs.  This partial rationalization of Christianity is evident, as well, in his identification of entities such as Adam, Satan, Eden, Heaven, and Hell as essentially psychological though he never denies their independent existence.  Thus the significance of Adam is not as a historical figure, but as he is manifested in every individual (203).  He refers to “the garden of Eden (mans heart)” (447) and notes that “a half hours silence” is equivalent to being in Heaven (223).  The devil that matters is the one “within you” (95).

     With some asperity , he insists that, in fact, all history including the events in scripture are most importantly located within the individual soul.  “All that which you call the history, and have doted upon it, and made it your idol, is all to be seen and felt within you, before you cast off true peace.” Adam and Christ, Cain and Abel, the Canaanites, Amalekites,  Philistines, he very land of Canaan, Judas, Heaven and Hell, good and bad angels are “all to be seen within” (215).  Therefore “that which a man seeks for, whereby he might have peace, is within the heart, not without” (213) and any people who wish to look for heaven or for hell had best look into themselves (216).

     Winstanley rejects authority and even scriptural revelation as the basis for religious belief, privileging only personal experience.  Thinking that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (213) the believer must find inspiration not from books, but inside the soul (204).  For his part he is emphatic in his claim that his own inspiration is of this kind (204), a “free gift to me from the Father himself” (445).  “While I builded upon any words or writings of other men, I builded upon sand.  Man has a teacher within him” (93).  “What I hear another man speak is nothing to me until I find the same experience in  myself” (96).  He claims to receive these “openings,” as the Quakers would call them, from his meditative trance experiences (190, 261, etc.).

     In a few passages, Winstanley comes very close to what sounds like pantheism.  Not only does he call the earth the “mother” of humanity (271), he declares that God is to be seen only in the world.  The deity cannot be fully known and to imagine him is simply “to build castles in the air.”  Not only is God a mystery, the afterlife is as well.  “To reach God beyond the Creation, or to know what he will be to a man, after the man is dead, if any otherwise, than to scatter him into his Essences of fire, water, earth, and air, of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line, or capacity of man to attain to, while he lives in his compounded body.”  All one can really know is this world.  “The creation is all its dimentions be the fullness of him, that fills all with himself, and if you yourself be part of this Creation, where can you finde God but in that line or station wherein  you stand?” (565)

     In the twenty-first century we remain far short of Winstanley’s recovered Eden in an egalitarian anarcho-communism, yet he can still indicate the need for change and the characteristics if a more just social and economic order.  Any step toward a more equitable sharing of the good things of life heads in the right direction.  In his use of direct and uncompromising non-violent action he is exemplary for protestors to the current corrupt regimes of this earth.  And in religion, he points the way to a more truly catholic Christianity, in which the specific symbols of the Christian tradition are understood a symbolic and in which any person may pursue salvation or enlightenment or liberation without sectarian boundaries.  An inspiring example to the cultural revolutionaries of the ‘sixties who, though not perhaps deprived of the necessities of life (as the poor were in the seventeenth century) nonetheless felt alienation and spiritual hunger and who, like him, followed the dictates of their inner vision to try to practice what in Jewish practice is called tikkun olam, the mending of the world.  Gerrard Winstanley was a mystic as well as a revolutionary.  Over fifty years ago, when I met some of the San Francisco Diggers, their message seemed to me quite compatible with that of Che Guevara, honored during “The Year of the Heroic Guerilla” in 1968, whose slogan that year seemed to be on everyone’s wall.

 

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.  [7]

 

The same love of all humanity that motivated Gerrard Winstanley in Surrey animated Emmet Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Peter Berg in San Fransisco’s Haight, and countless others before and since.  Perhaps, I flatter myself, even this essay can spread a little love.  

 

  

 

1.  Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World.

2.  The vision was realized by the San Francisco Diggers.  The Haight-Ashbury store had several incarnations including at 1090 Cole.  A Black People’s Free Store later opened at 1099  McAllister, then one in New York City at 264 East 10^th Street, and many other cities followed.. 

3.  For details see in particular The Law of Freedom in  a Platform or True Magistracy Restored.

4.  Fire in the Bush p. 445.

5.  See, for instance, pp. 87-90 in The Breaking of the Day of God and 464-472 of Fire in the Bush.

6.  Universalism, though later condemned, was taught by early church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Diodorus of Tarsus.

7. From “From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today,” later reprinted as “Socialism and man in Cuba 1965” in The Che Reader (2005).

8.  The Ranters seem to have gone further in  the directions of antinomianism and pantheism.  The most reliable statement of their ideas is likely in Laurence Clarkson’s A Single Eye (1650) which declares “what act soever I do, is acted by that Majesty in me God be in all things” and “if God be in all, why are not all things one in God?”  Though Winstanley takes pains to distinguish himself from this even more radical group, particularly due to the allegations that they (including Clarkson) practiced promiscuous sexual relations, in his own day they were viewed as similar.

What Use is a Princess? [Madame de La Fayette]

 

My account of the controversy in France draws on an article by Andrew Gallix, “Why a 17th-century novel is a hot political issue in France,” The Guardian, Tuesday, March 31, 2009 which notes “France may no longer be the centre of world culture, but culture remains at the centre of what it means to be French,” and a retrospective review of the issue a few years later by Elisabeth Zerofsky, “Of Presidents and Princesses,” The New Yorker, November 8, 2012.

The unpretentious translations are my own.  The original French texts of quoted passages longer than a phrase are provided as end-notes.

 

 

     Though one hardly expects venal politicians, especially reactionaries, to have any taste, Nicholas Sarkozy seemed to have  entertained a particular animus against Madame de La Fayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678).  Always a mediocre student, Mr. Sarkozy must have felt confounded by his literature assignments to such an extent that his distress was still evident when, decades after his schooldays, he complained of the poor princess “I’ve suffered greatly by her.”  To him it could only have been “either a sadist or an idiot” that included the novel in civil service examinations.  Sarkozy asked a sympathetic audience in mockery whether “it happens to you often that you ask a counter clerk what she thought of The Princess of Clèves.”

     The fact that aspiring postal workers in  the United States need not show any familiarity with Moby Dick or the poems of Emily Dickinson does indeed indicate a cultural difference.  The reaction of the French to the denigration of what is generally considered a cultural treasure is likewise difficult to imagine occurring in this country.  In reaction to Sarkozy’s remarks, university students staged readings of the novel, publishers issued three new editions, and booklovers sent copies of Mme. de La Fayette’s book to the president in protest.  (Lovers of literature may be reassured to recall that Mr. Sarkozy was later twice convicted of peculation.)

     In this country, where respect for the nation’s cultural patrimony is far feebler, we might well envy the vigorous defense the French mounted in behalf of their Princesse.  Yet it remains a useful exercise to ignore the immediate reaction of considering anyone who would object to the study of the novel a know-nothing philistine and consider more seriously Sarkozy’s attitude.  What, in fact, is the value to the average citizen of studying such old literature?  And why should such knowledge be encouraged by the state?

     The most fundamental reason that the novel was required reading is the simple fact that from the very outset European education has been founded on textual study.  From the ancient Greeks through the medievals education began with the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all concerned with the effective use of language.  The demands on the student increase when the texts that are studied use archaic or obsolete language and concepts.  Europe went so far as to rely heavily on the challenges of Greek and Latin to provide a sufficient mental workout to train young people.  Oxford today has a flourishing program in English literature, but the subject was never taught there until 1894 and it was ten years more before the first chair of the subject was established.  Until that time, it was thought that the best training, no matter what career the student meant to pursue, was the study of dead languages.  Now, over a hundred years later in America, even the ideal of a liberal education using only English has been largely discarded in favor of vocational training.

     The idea that people are best educated by reading the classics is not peculiar to Europe.  Traditional Chinese and Indian scholars had to know historical philology to read documents already ancient.  In China examinations centered on the Confucian classics determined government appointments from the Sui Dynasty until the twentieth century.  Westerners who have experienced Ph. D. comprehensives and dissertation defenses will identify with the anxiety of the Chinese candidates.  Similarly, traditional schools in India such as the great university at Nalanda maintained vast libraries.  The focus of study was the Sanskrit Vedas, including reading and memorization, with attention to philosophy, textual criticism, prosody, and logic.  The only non-literary topics were astronomy and medicine.  .  

     Of course, those who succeeded in their studies eventually had to acquire new and more obviously practical skills once they began their careers as administrators, bankers, or generals, but (with the exceptions of medicine, law, and theology) this training was on the job.  The location of literary studies at the center of education, once almost universal, has become marginal at best, with English 101, a freshman essay-writing class, a sorry lingering vestige of millennia of practice.

     Whether or not one accepts the reading of literature as the best basis for education, poetry clearly is an essential tool for the species since it is found in every human society.  Perhaps the most undeniable function is entertainment.  Whatever else people are doing as they sit around a fire hearing Anansi stories or at home reading a bestseller or recline in a lounge chair in one chamber of a mall’s multiplex theater, they are amusing themselves.  As soon as it was published La Princesse de Clèves was immensely popular.  Demand outstripped supply and a reader in the provinces had a difficult time obtaining a copy. 

     The book’s appeal may have in part derived from its unprecedented realism, as the author, a comtesse, knew well the court of her own day, but her picture is hardly contained by rules of verisimilitude.  With its center in the glittering court of Henri II graced by the Pléiade poets and written during the even more spectacular reign of Louis XIV when Versailles was built, the narrative doubtless excited reader’s interest just as stories of celebrities, largely unreal, do yet today. 

     An idealized glaze covers in particular the novel’s opening.

       

Grandeur and sophistication have never appeared in France with as much radiance as in the latter years of the reign of Henri II.

Never had there been a court with so many beautiful women and such admirably well-made men.  [1]

 

 

     Even in the context of this magnificent court, the novel’s leading characters stand out.  The Duc de Nemours is “a masterpiece of nature” 9“un chef-d'œuvre de la nature”) and the Princesse herself is a similar marvel.

 

There then appeared at court a beauty, which attracted the eyes of all the world, and one must believe that she was a perfect beauty, to be so greatly admired  in a setting where people were so accustomed to see beautiful people. [2]

 

     This excess of refinement savors of the précieuse sensibility practiced in the salon of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, and familiar from Molière's satire Les Précieuses ridicules.  The hyper-aesthetic values of the court recall those of Heian Japan.  Readers who did not dwell in such lofty circles were nonetheless dazzled by the glory of their betters represented on the page, as indeed many readers are yet today.. 

     Apart from internal monologues as the duc and the princesse cope with their attraction to each other, much of the plot concerns plausible complications such as the stolen portrait or the note the vidame asks Nemours to claim was sent to him.  Several events, however, resemble the unlikely coincidences prominent in earlier romances.  The scene of Nemours eavesdropping on Monsieur and Madame de Clèves in the garden and the king’s fateful insistence on making a final run in the tournament, thus fulfilling a prophecy, would seem contrived in a narration that truly aims at realism.  La Princesse de Clèves thus offers a plot with a theme of love, founded in realism, but heightened by hyperbole and turns of plot too good to be true. 

     Traditionally, though, apologists for poetry have most often maintained that literature is essentially justified not as entertainment but as instruction, revealing “truths” about experience.  Very likely Madame de La Fayette agreed with Pierre Daniel Huet who introduced her novel Zayde (1670) with an essay “Sur l’origine des romans” that noted “Love must be the principal subject of novels” (“L’amour doit être principal subjet des romans”) and specified the goal of fiction writers as “the instruction of the reader” (“l’instruction des lecteurs”) toward the end of “the correction of morals” (“la correction des moeurs”).  For this reason, he specifies that “virtue must always be crowned and vice chastised” (“il faut toujours faire la vertu couronne & la vice châtié”), a requirement that prefigures  the old Motion Picture Code.

     The Princesse is taught the most conservative moral behavior by her mother.

 

She frequently described love to her daughter, showing her what was pleasant about it in order that she might more easily understand what was dangerous: she told her of men’s deceit, their trickery and infidelity, the domestic unhappiness caused by liaisons.  And she explained to her also, on the other hand, what peace accompanies the life of an honest woman, and how much virtue adds to the brilliance and stature of a person who possesses beauty and high birth.  But she showed her as well how difficult it is to maintain such virtue by an extreme self-control and by taking extreme care to retain always that which alone can bring a woman happiness which is to love her spouse and to be loved by him.  [3]

 

     Yet the Princess is such a paragon that she surpasses any ordinary faithful wife.  Though she lacks love for her husband and feels a passionate attraction to the Duke, her behavior remains impeccable. She is so exceedingly punctilious that even after M. de Clèves’ decease, she insists on remaining loyal to his memory.  The novel is less a love story than a tale of a quasi-saint.  The heroine’s scrupulous morality is no less a marvel than her beauty and charm, leading her to a heroic act of self-denial.  She herself says, “I know that there is nothing more difficult than what I mean to do.” (“Je sais bien qu'il n'y a rien de plus difficile que ce que j'entreprends.”)  An Olympic athlete of virtue, she elevates honor, what she calls “duty” (devoir) over love, leaving her beautiful Duke de Nemours a courtly lover whose affair is, like the “distant love” of Jaufre Rudel, the more perfect for being unconsummated.  Her “austere virtue” (“austère vertu”) finds a physical alliance with him impossible, while his devotion, equally “austere” under the circumstances, is likewise exemplary.

     In the last paragraphs M. de Nemours’s emotional energy slowly fades.  “In the end, after years had gone by, and absence had lessened his suffering and  extinguished his passion.” [4]   This leaves the Princess shining alone in the sky, her life blossoming, like the lives of the canonized saints of the church, with many “examples of matchless virtue” (“exemples de vertu inimitables”). 

     Though the book may exalt self-control as a theme, all art aims at beauty, and Mme. de La Fayette’s prose style has, since the publication of La Princesse, been considered an outstanding example of anti-Baroque neo-Classicism.  Her sentences are clear and concise, lacking the elaboration and obscurity associated with trends like English Euphuism, Spanish Gongorism, or Italian Marinism.  Her words are largely abstract with none of the accumulation of concrete specifics with which Flaubert and Balzac build effects.  Her point of view is less like a camera, recording a series of events more or less objectively, than it is a stream of consciousness in the minds of her characters, an exchange of subjectivities in which her readers may imaginatively share. 

     The limpid clarity of her phrasing supports the idealized aspects of the court and enacts the refined sensibilities of the duc and the princesse.  Due to the prestige accorded ancient writers, a sort of Classical simplicity, combining restraint and elegance, was considered the pinnacle of beauty.  By praising Mme. de La Fayette’s book, critics might pay homage to France as the home of a true revival of art, the center of culture in Europe.  This nationalistic concern with purity of language had had earlier been the motive for the foundation of L'Académie française, which continues to this day its attempts to safeguard the French language from ordinary linguistic evolution.

     Here, of course, is the source of the demanding curriculum of the lycées générals.  To know a book like La Princesse de Clèves conveys specifics of history which contribute to a sense of nationhood, but it also cultivates a particular accompanying sensibility, in the French case privileging abstraction and formal beauty.  A reader who has assimilated the style as well as the content of such canonical works might be considered authentically French, though his skin be Senegalese.  Texts like Madame de La Fayette’s novel unite the community of French-speakers in the same way that learning the lore of a tribe does for oral peoples.  And, like any young person being initiated in the myths of a tribe, the French student hoping only for a high mark comes not only to know the group’s history and values, but to consider them exceptional and superior.   

     Defenders of the French literary canon might then argue first of all, that, judging by historical practice, the study of the classics has been found the best training for general intellectual acuity.  Further, reading “great books” also has been considered a significant way to inculcate desirable social and ethical behavior.  The concept of a shared national heritage encourages social cohesion, pride, and even nationalism.  Such non-aesthetic ends have quite naturally played a role in the policies of government-run schools, libraries, and civil service systems, but surely the primary reason for reading Madame de La Fayette (or Racine or Apollinaire), the paramount motive in fact for consumption of all art, is the pleasure found in beauty.  In La Princesse de Clèves one may experience the delights of narrative turns and participate through imagination in the characters’ profound emotional experiences.  The reader will become ever more sensitive to the appreciation of the beauty of the author’s prose.  Such rewards make other considerations trivial.  Politicians, especially the poor students among them and those insensitive to beauty who think only of economic value may question whether people in general should know literature.  Yet a land of post office workers and motor vehicle clerks who are at least capable of reading the classics must surely be a more livable and more humane place than the current United States in which even otherwise well-educated people consume little art not viewable on their streaming services. 

     Most Frenchmen, politicians and citizens, have long been proud of the prestige enjoyed by their language and culture.  In this country we have seen the doublespeak of demagogues who call what is in the common interest elitist while promoting the interests of the one percent.  The right-wing Sarkozy’s opposition to La Princesse de Clèves ignores the rewards acquaintance with her might offer to readers: not only the mental calisthenics considered through history to be the most beneficial, but also the same shared culture that unites tribal societies, resulting in a benign sort of nationalism and encouraging every sort of excellence.  The formulation of a national curriculum based on the classics means that these rewards are available, not only to those who attend exclusive private schools, but to every citizen equally.  Those willing to read with an open mind will develop a capacity for the appreciation of beauty, an appetite easy and inexpensive to satisfy, allowing all citizens to spend time with the finest productions of human ingenuity and in that way to construct bonds with fellow citizens through their shared experience.  Making such texts the basis of education brings multiple benefits, not the least of which is making available to everyone the pleasures of aesthetic and intellectual life.  

 

1.  La magnificence et la galanterie n'ont jamais paru en France avec tant d'éclat que dans les dernières années du règne de Henri second. . . .Jamais cour n'a eu tant de belles personnes et d'hommes admirablement bien faits.

2.  Il parut alors une beauté à la cour, qui attira les yeux de tout le monde, et l'on doit croire que c'était une beauté parfaite, puisqu'elle donna de l'admiration dans un lieu où l'on était si accoutumé à voir de belles personnes.

3.  Elle faisait souvent à sa fille des peintures de l'amour ; elle lui montrait ce qu'il a d'agréable pour la persuader plus aisément sur ce qu'elle lui en apprenait de dangereux ; elle lui contait le peu de sincérité des hommes, leurs tromperies et leur infidélité, les malheurs domestiques où plongent les engagements; et elle lui faisait voir, d'un autre côté, quelle tranquillité suivait la vie d'une honnête femme, et combien la vertu donnait d'éclat et d'élévation à une personne qui avait de la beauté et de la naissance. Mais elle lui faisait voir aussi combien il était difficile de conserver cette vertu, que par une extrême défiance de soi-même, et par un grand soin de s'attacher à ce qui seul peut faire le bonheur d'une femme, qui est d'aimer son mari et d'en être aimée.

4.  Enfin, des années entières s'étant passées, le temps et l'absence ralentirent sa douleur et éteignirent sa passion. 

A Note on Dryden and "Dramatick Poesy"

     One of the most significant attempts to pursue literary theory between Sidney and Peacock, Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy provides a thoughtful, if not systematic, account of neo-classical ideas. The frame of Dryden’s dialogue describes the party of four discussing literature while on a pleasure excursion as the British battle the Dutch at the mouth of the Thames. This dramatic situation not only emphasizes the provisional character of the “essay” form emphasizing relativism, dynamic truth, and a social nexus; it also introduces the patriotic motif that will be significant to Neander’s value judgments.
     Dryden’s fundamental error is his acceptance from his classical antecedents of the notion that art is imitation. He links his literary values to this unconvincing basic concept. Now even in common sense terms there would be little point in seeking to imitate a reality which is itself fully manifest always. Were art mimesis alone, it would never have taken such a central role in human culture. Plato would have been quite right in maintaining that art could only be second-rate were the imitation of lived reality its goal. He might have thought, though, that just as his form or idea of a chair or of love is related to, but not identical with, the chair in my living room, a chair or an affection represented in art will be similarly different from their kin in lived experience, though art’s image is richer in information. Whereas Plato’s “ideas” are simply generalizations, though weighted in the end with the burden of ultimate reality, art’s images suggest at once an individual object and the sum of its occurrences in the reader’s experience, as well as a host of implied, allusive, and symbolic associations.
     The representation of art not as imitation (a mirror in Abrams’ terms) but as creation (a lamp) is a Romantic one. As most of our assumptions remain Romantic today, Dryden’s ideas will find little sympathy from the modern reader. The very idea of “decorum,” which he assumes, has hardly survived into our time in which attempts to violate decorum are part of the stock in trade of the off-Broadway theater. As he finds the French style, so admired by Lisideius, “icy” with the beauty of a “statue” not a play (as though a statue could not be moving), we suspect that Dryden may have the same intuitive reactions as we, though he is bound to express them in terms acceptable to his theory. This assumption is strengthened by Dryden’s insightful analysis of The Silent Woman and his preference for Shakespeare over the more academic Jonson in contrast to many of his generation.
     Yet he then uses this same measure of faithfulness to nature and realism to justify what seem to us moderns as assertively artificial conventions. The notion of the “unities” figures prominently in the discussion, though the author is aware that its strict observance is based neither on Classical precept nor example. Indeed, he finds the French playwrights often violating the rules. What will strike the contemporary reader as odd is that to Dryden, the unities are good because they enhance verisimilitude: one place need not change into another, nor need time be manipulated. The very conventions that would seem to signal a highly conventionalized, unrealistic style are for him the opposite. Now, of course, no one could mistake the doings of actors on a stage for anything other than “fictional,” and the same is true a fortiori for words on a page. Neither competes with lived experience. The observer evaluates each in entirely different terms. When plays or poems are composed according to rule or convention, the first bit of information the consumer receives from the rule is in fact the work’s artificiality, its fictional character.
     Lisideius’ definition of drama, later adopted in shorter form by Neander is “a just and lively Image of Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and Instruction of Mankind.” Yet Dryden knows no likelier source for pleasure than plausibility, as though we do not also find entertainment in the unexpected, the wholly fantastic, in formal patterns and a host of other sources. While discussing the propriety of fights and “tumult” on stage, Neander sensibly comments that, if he can accept that the figures before him are kings and princes, he can equally accept that they strike blows in earnest, not to mention the supernatural pagan deities in Corneille. Where, then, is the boundary of the suspension of disbelief?
     Just as there is an inevitable relation but no direct correspondence between the literary description and the thing described, there can be no point before unintelligibility at which the gap between the two is too large.
     Dryden does no better with the other Horatian end of poetry: instruction. In his reductive view, this involves setting out the morally, perhaps in the end religiously, proper behavior for the benefit of the reader. His faith in the standard of imitation blinds him to any notion of art’s unique ability to investigate contradictions, ambiguities, ambivalences, and the unknown.
     Yet, in spite of our dissent from his conclusions, he has in this dialogue created a memorable scene in which the cultivated idlers toss ideas between them on a lazy afternoon, leaving sea battles to others, however satisfying one’s own nation’s victory may be. What better use for the human consciousness? And surely Britain’s rule on the waters must have seemed to reinforce the claims of her poets. One may regret the erosion of ancient authority whose decline has been more rapid than that of the British Navy in the years since Dryden, but perhaps critics have approached a bit closer to the grand and chryselephantine image of the muse herself in the sancta sanctorum of the reader’s mind.