Addison’s Cato and Liberty

 

George Cruikshank, "John Kemble in the role of Cato" (1816)

 

Citations of the play in parentheses refer to the 2004 edition edited by Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin.  Numbers in  brackets indicate endnotes.

  

     This year, when the American election presents a choice between an outright fascist dictatorship under the most absurd of “strong men” and maintaining our longstanding bourgeois democracy, battered and compromised as it has been from the start by big money men, political dramas of the past seem reanimated with relevance.  I recently watched Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty with its neatly ironic plot of a cynical politician who succeeds only as long as he is corrupt.  A similar theme underlies Robert Rossen’s film of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men.  Willie Stark’s demagoguery, while in ways more benevolent than the current Republican Party, pointed at the country’s vulnerability to a demagogue. [1] 

     I picked up Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) thinking that his hero might offer an appropriate response to tyrannical leaders and that his Caesar might have something in common with the outlandish television performer and would-be caudillo who has mesmerized a third of the electorate.  In fact, this play, though rarely read and even more rarely performed, was once not only extremely popular, but more closely intertwined with American history and ideals than, perhaps, any other work of literature.

     Current neglect of the play is unsurprising.  While Addison’s journalistic essays were lively and colloquial, his drama is icily formal and abstract, the pentameters rolling like a slow but regular drum set loop.  A modern critic states as a matter of fact that “the literary merits of the work no longer attract appreciative comment.” [2]  Lacking the Enlightenment era’s love for the fresh idea of liberty, today’s readers are likely to yawn at Addison’s verse which is more reminiscent of Corneille and Racine than other English poets.  Observance of the “unities” and a lofty theme are no longer sufficient to impress readers or viewers.

     The characters speak in generalities and platitudes.  Cato’s initial determination and Lucius’ concluding moralizing are sufficient examples of this pervasive abstraction.    

 

Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal

Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason”

True fortitude is seen in great exploits

That justice warrants, and that wisdom guides,

All else is towering phrensy and distraction   

                                                            (II, I, 43-47)

               From hence, let fierce contending nations know

What dire effects from civil discord flow,

‘Tis this that shakes our country with alarms

And gives up Rome a prey to Roman arms,

Produces fraud, and cruelty, and strife,

And robs the guilty world of Cato’s life.

(V, iv, 108-112)

 

Even the loves of Marcia and Juba, Portius and Lucia are subordinated to the grand political and philosophical themes of the play.  When Juba attempts to make love to Cato’ daughter Marcia by declaring the intention to emulate her father, she reproves him, saying the national crisis renders such personal goals as love inappropriate.

 

 

Juba: That Juba might deserve thy pious cares,

I’ll gaze forever on thy godlike father,

Transplanting one by one, into my life

His bright perfections, till I shine like him.

 

Marcia: My father never, at a time like this

Would lay out his great soul in words, and waste

Such precious moments.

(I, v, 18-24)  

  

     Meanwhile, Lucia prefers Portius specifically because Marcus is too passionate, “overwarm” (I, vi, 49).  The very signs of deep passion idealized in other drama are for Addison signs of weakness, making him “disfigur’d” (III, ii, 8). 

 

He pines, he sickens, he despairs, he dies:

His passions and his virturs lie confus’d.

(III, ii, 5-6)

 

Indeed, many critics including Voltaire, found the love scenes altogether out of place.  Voltaire praised the play as a whole, calling it the first “regular tragedy in English,” infused with “a spirit of elegance through every part,” yet he (inconsistently) found it marred “by a dull love plot, which spreads a certain languor over the whole, that quite murders it.”  In 1764 an edition was printed with a Latin translation the play “without the love scenes” [3].

     The ill fit of a romantic story in a story glorifying Cato is consistent with the hero’s reputation as a Stoic hero.  Washington himself received an education more vocational than Classical, but had some familiarity and sympathy with Stoicism which was in his day, as in ours, in the air, [4] though sometimes these more modern Stoicisms have little in common with Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.  Cato himself left no philosophic writings, yet he became widely regarded as an exemplary Stoic, particularly in  light of his suicide. [5]

     The figure of Cato was already well-known at the start of the eighteenth century primarily from his biography in Plutarch, but Addison’s immensely popular play increased his reputation.  From the day of its opening Cato was “an immediate, a sensational success” and the play became one of the most frequently performed of the century, running through twenty-six English editions in print during the 1700s. [6]  In the colonies that were to rebel, productions were mounted in many cities, including Charleston in 1736, New York in 1750, Philadelphia in 1759, Providence in 1762, and, following the outbreak of hostilities, in Boston and Portsmouth in 1778. [7] 

     Addison had himself been an active Whig politician, seeking to strengthen the powers of Parliament.  He died well before the conflicts between the British and their American cousins came to a head, but the play was thoroughly pollical from the start.  In a remarkable and unlikely circumstance Frederick, Prince of Wales, produced the play privately at Leicester House in London to oppose the authoritarian tendencies of his own father George II.  Among the performers was Frederick’s son, the future George III to whom was given a new prologue including the lines 1749 to promote his own support for English liberty against the supposed tyranny of his father, George II of Great Britain. The cast featured four of Frederick's children, including the future George III, the bête noire of the American colonists, who spoke a specially-written prologue, which included the line "What, tho' a boy? it may with pride be said / A boy in England born, in England bred,” drawing attention to George II's birth in Hanover, Germany. 

     During the winter of 1778-1779 the Continental Army camped at Valley Forge, a season that has become legendary for the soldiers’ hardships.  After the harsh winter Washington flouted the congressional ban on theater (as well as “every species of extravagance and dissipation” [8]) and arranged for a production of Addison’s play before “a very numerous and splendid audience” [9] including his comrades-in-arms.   

Horatio Greenough's statue of Washington (1832)

     Cato was not only Washington’s favorite play.  It had so deeply entered the consciousness of American patriots that its words seem clearly to have shaped the best-known lines associated with the Revolution. [10]  For instance, Patrick Henry's famous line, reported in 1817 as the dramatic conclusion to a 1775 speech to the Second Virginia Convention "Give me liberty, or give me death!" restates, with dramatic compression, the sentiment of the play’s "It is not now time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death." (IV, iv, 84)  Nathan Hale’s last words, according to the account of British captain John Montresor who was present, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" resembles "What a pity it is/That we can die but once to serve our country." (IV, iv, 80-81)

     The extent to which Addison’s play had permeated American consciousness is clear from the numerous other citations and rephrasings of its lines in the writing of American revolutionaries.  The speech in which Portius says “Tis not in mortals to command success,/ But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it” (I, 2, 43-44) underlies passages in a letter from George Washington to Benedict Arnold dated December 5, 1775, a letter from Washington to Nicholas Cooke dated October 29, 1775, and a letter from John Adams to his wife of February 18, 1776.  Charles Thomson, in a November 1, 1774 letter to Benjamin Franklin, declared himself “ready to ask, with the poet, ‘Are there not some chosen thunders in the stores of heaven armed with uncommon wrath to blast those Men,’ who by their cursed schemes of policy are dragging friends and brothers into the horrors of civil War and involving their country in ruin?” (the quotation is a paraphrase of I, 1, 21–4).  These few examples in which his influence has been noted might be multiplied, and doubtless many reminiscences of the language of the play have not attracted the attention of historians. [11]

     Surely a part what made this play a sensation in the eighteenth century was the neo-Classical taste of the age which fancied high ideals and found abstractions more mighty than particulars.  While no one considered reinstating the old Roman (and Japanese) custom of honorable suicide, Britons and Americans alike admired the frugality, self-control, and dignity of the Stoic pose and cast their leaders in this mold.  The artificiality of the style reinforced what was seen as strength of character in a hero’s strong will. 

      In terms of content, both Old and New World felt the excitement of the fading of the old feudal absolute monarchy and the advent of emerging ideas of liberty and capitalism.  The movement forward, in which the United States played a critical role, inspiring patriots in France, Poland, and elsewhere for generations to come, must have been intoxicating at its outset.   Embodied in texts like Addison’s Cato, the excitement of these new ideas permeated the culture in a way that no play could do today. 

     What art remains from the movement against the Vietnam War?  How many people remember The Teeth Mother Naked at Last?  Surely no one would look at MacBird! today.   Even Country Joe’s "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" is a relic that requires footnotes for people younger than I.  Literary savants know the poets of World War I, but they were never popular in the way that Cato was.  A similar penetration of American culture could probably be achieved today only by a television series.  

     Today we like Cato face the threat of tyranny, but death and submission are not the only choices.  Perhaps an oblique approach to onetime ideals of the country’s founders through Addison’s play can provide a livelier sense of how inspiring self-government once seemed before its slogans became patriotic cliches, employed as often by the enemies of liberty as by friends.   

    

 

 

1.  Rossen had himself undergone historical trials.  Originally an uncooperative witness of the HUAC, he was blacklisted and eventually, like Elia Kazan, named names in order to resume work in Hollywood. 

2.  M. M. Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” The Review of English Studies, Volume XVII, Issue 66, May 1966,

3.  Voltaire, Letters on the English, Letter XVIII, “On Tragedy.”  For a full account see Lisa A. Freeman, “What's Love Got to Do with Addison's "Cato"?,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 39, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1999), pp. 463-482.

4.  See H. C. Montgomery, “Washington the Stoic,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 31, No. 6 (Mar., 1936).  Montogomery says he acquired information about Stoicism from his friends the Fairfaxes and quotes the statement in Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Young George Washington that Washington had an English outline of Seneca “the mere chapter headings are the moral axioms that Washinton followed through life.

5.  His semi-ascetic ways such as going barefoot and wearing a toga without a tunic fit well with Stoicism’s recommended abstemiousness.  Fred K. Drogula, Cato the Younger: life and death at the end of the Roman republic (2019) argues that he may have seen himself instead as representative of Roman mos maiorum rather than as a Stoic. 

6.  See Iskra Fileva, “Stoicism as a Fad and a Philosophy,” Psychology Today, posted August 4, 2022 at  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-philosophers-diaries/202208/stoicism-fad-and-philosophy.  Fileva notes that in 2019 the word Stoic was used more times than in any earlier year in  history.  She lists a few of the best-selling self-help books claiming to represent Stoic ideas: The Power of Stoicism; The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism; Mastering the Stoic Way of Life; 5-Minute Stoicism Journal, and many others.

7.  Robert M. Keller, compiler, Performance Notices in The Colonial Music Institute database, http://www.cdss.org/elibrary/PacanNew/index.htm.

8.  The ban included “all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shows , plays and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”  See Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37.

9.  Mark Evans Bryan, "'Slideing into Monarchical extravagance’: Cato at Valley Forge and the Testimony of William Bradford Jr.,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010). 

10.  I provide no citation as these striking parallels have been noted by many historians. 

11.  A great many other echoes of the language of Addison’s play have been noted as well.  Among the many other correspondences between passages in Addison’s play and the literature of the American Revolution are Jonathan Mitchel Sewall’s new epilogue for the play (1778) which explicitly identified Cato with Washington, Juba with Lafayette, and Caesar with King George and included these lines.

Our senate, too, the same bold deed has done,

And for a Cato, arm’’d a WASHINGTON!

A chief in all the ways of battle skill’’d

Great in the council, glorious in the field! (25-28)

Convention and Innovation in Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour”

 

     Anticipations of Romantic values and literary practices occur throughout the eighteenth century.  Many critics have traced the origins of specific Romantic values in the cults of sentiment and the sublime, the “graveyard school,” and the burgeoning interest in the concept of natural genius and an interest in the works of the archaic, uneducated, and “primitive” writers. This latter development was reflected in greater attention to early poets as well as ballads and other folk materials resulting in the publication of Percy’s Reliques (1765) as well as the frauds of Macpherson’s Ossian (1761) and Chatterton’s Rowley (1777).  This interest led also to the recognition of a number of uneducated working class poets regarded as “natural geniuses,” among them Mary Collier (whose first publication was in 1739), Henry Jones (1746), Mary Leapor (1748), James Woodhouse (1764), Ann Yearsley (1785), John Frederick Bryant (1787), and a good many others.  During the time when writers learned rules of neo-Classical composition adapted from Boileau by Dryden and Pope, some readers sought something different and found support for the idea of untutored art by citing the authority of a Latin tag: Poeta nascitur, non fit (the poet is born, not made).

     Pastoral and georgic poetry might seem to pose a particular problem of decorum since agricultural work is associated with poverty and ignorance and the poetic art with urban sophistication.  Hesiod enjoyed enormous prestige from his position next to Homer but his Works and Days was clearly not a courtly document but included folk traditions and details of actual husbandry.  Likewise the sophisticated urbanite Theocritus may have adapted some language he had heard actually used by herdsmen, but they surely did not sing in the epic dactylic hexameter that he used.  In the English Renaissance the authoritative George Puttenham characterized “Eglogues” as “shepheardly talke” which “in base and humble stile by maner of Dialogue, vttered the priuate and fami∣liar talke of the meanest sort of men, as shepheards, heywards and such like.” [1]  Yet he also maintains, with a lofty embrace of contradictions characteristic of him to claim that such poems were in fact sophisticated symbolic artifices.  Their true focus was not after all “to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loves and communication” but rather “under the vaile of homely persons to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters” even “to enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behaviour.” [2]

     For Thomas Tickell in the early eighteenth century the pastoral is in fact defined by its fantastic unreality.  Pastoral poetry “transports us into a kind of Fairy Land. . . An Author, that would amuse himself by writing Pastorals, should form in his Fancy a Rural Scene of perfect Ease and Tranquility, where Innocence, Simplicity and Joy abound. It is not enough that he write about the Country; he must give us what is agreeable in that Scene, and hide what is wretched.” [3]

     Addison in his preface to Dryden’s Virgil similarly had no doubt that “the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a plowman, but with the address of a poet.” “The low phrases and turns of art that are adapted to husbandry,” should not “have any place in such a work as the Georgic, which is not to appear in the natural simplicity and nakedness of its subject, but in the pleasantest dress that poetry can bestow on it.”  Rather than realism, Addison called for “pomp” and “dignity,” avoiding “meanness” and “letting his subject debase his style.”  “Nothing which is a phrase or saying in common talk, should be admitted in to a serious poem; because it takes off from the solemnity of the expression and gives it too great a turn of familiarity.”  For Addison, Virgil “breaks the clods and tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness.”

     All the same Addison was open-minded enough in some moods to admit that “Human Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures.” He recognized his own “particular Delight in hearing the Songs and Fables that are come from Father to Son, and are most in Vogue among the common People,” noting that “it is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted and approved by a Multitude, tho' they are only the Rabble of a Nation, which hath not in it some peculiar Aptness to please and gratify the Mind of Man.”  He makes good on this general enthusiasm with a detailed appreciation of “Chevy Chase.” [4]  He came to include Homer, Pindar, and Shakespeare among the “great natural Genius's that were never disciplined and broken by Rules of Art.” [5]

     Interest in contemporary untutored “natural” authors enjoyed a vogue from the mid-eighteenth century on, supported by readers’ growing curiosity and appreciation and the willingness of some to exchange literary refinement for homely vigor.  The issue was under witty and spirited discussion as early as 1714 when Gay published his “Six Pastorals” as The Shepherd's Week with a preface ridiculing the artificiality of pastoral conventions.  He promised that his poem would be a “right simple eclogue after the true ancient guise of Theocritus,” unlike the productions of “certain young men of insipid delicacy.”  “It is my purpose, gentle reader, to set before thee, as it were a picture, or rather lively land- scape of thy own country, just as thou mightest see it, didest thou take a walk into the fields at the proper season.” [6]  Gay then proceeded with richly artificial rhetorical poems ornamented with allusions both ancient and modern with as little reference to actual farmworkers as any of his predecessors.   

     The fact is, of course, that Gay lacked the experience to write as an authentic rustic.  Among the most celebrated of the “natural” writers who did actually belong to the working-class who benefited from this trend was Stephen Duck, the agricultural worker whose most well-known poem today is “The Thresher’s Labour.” [7]  Even before his own publication of Poems on Several Occasions (1736), as many as ten pirated editions of Poems on Several Subjects (1730) appeared, signaling the public’s eager curiosity.  His oddity was highlighted on the title page which not only prominently identified the poet as “a poor Thresher” but even specified his wages: “Four Shillings and Six Pence per Week.”  These surprising facts are made even more impressive by adding the circumstance that the poems were “publickly read” by the Earl of Macclesfield to “Her Majesty” who thereupon deigned to offer the writer a home and an annuity.  Though George II had scant literary interests, his wife Caroline indeed so favored Duck that she made him keeper of her private library in a fanciful grotto called Merlin’s Cave where a journalist said “the work of the Learned surrounded him [Merlin], and the celebrated Stephen Duck is both his House-keeper and his Poet Laureat.” [8]   Thus both Duck’s rusticity and his acceptability were proven before the reader had perused a line.

     The early pension was one of many signs of his popular success.  He was the talk of the town.  Satires of his biography and his poetry appeared. [9]  He was introduced to London’s beau monde in the eighteenth-century version of radical chic.  Joseph Spence, at the time Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote a biography to preface Duck’s first book and recommended it to all, including his friend Pope to whom he wrote that Duck was “an Excellent Poet” “of particular good sense.”  Both Pope and Swift were subscribers to Duck’s Poems on Several Occasions (as was the Prince of Wales), though the two poets were less impressed than the Rev. Spence. 

     Pope, for instance, though finding Duck “an honest man,” sniffed that “most villages could supply verses of equal force” and mocked Duck’s role with the Queen’s library, in a satiric picture of modern poetasters artificially boosting each other’s reputation

 

Call Tibbald Shakespear, and he'll swear the Nine

Dear Cibber! never match'd one Ode of thine.

Lord! how we strut thro' Merlin's Cave, to see

No Poets there, but Stephen, you, and me.        [10]

 

 

     Swift for his part griped about Duck’s pension in letters to Pope and Gay and published his reaction publically as well.

 

 

On Stephen Duck, the Thresher and Favourite Poet.

A quibbling epigram. 1730.

 

THE thresher Duck could o'er the queen prevail,

The proverb says, "no fence against a flail."

From threshing corn he turns to thresh his brains;

For which her majesty allows him grains:

Though 'tis confest, that those, who ever saw

His poems, think them all not worth a straw!

⁠Thrice happy Duck, employed in threshing stubble!

Thy toil is lessen'd, and thy profits double.

 

 

In representing Duck’s mind as worthless straw or stubble, Swift deftly associates the poet’s rural occupation with stupidity, quite naturally concluding that Duck’s poems are “all not worth a straw!”

     While estimations of its value might differ, Duck clearly offered a voice hitherto little-heard in literature, a working man speaking from a class perspective.  [11]  From this perspective the traditional  pastoral conventions seem inappropriate.  In  the tumult of his work poetry, indeed, language at all, becomes inaudible.

 

The Voice is lost, drown'd by the louder Flail.

But we may think — Alas! what pleasing thing,

Here, to the Mind, can the dull Fancy bring?

(51-3)

 

Even could the Muses be heard, their songs would be out of place on a working farm.

 

’Tis all a gloomy melancholy Scene

Fit only to invoke the Muse’s Spleen

                                                         (60)

 

 

       In the morning voice of the “Master” the reader hears not a joyful anticipation of plenty but an irritable foreman: “Sure large Days-works I well may hope for now.” (27)  And in the afternoon he is never satisfied: “Ye scatter half your Wages o’er the Land” (244), denouncing the laborers as “Rogues.” (74)

     Duck appeals to the reader who is presumed never to have been in his position.

 

Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare

Pity the Reapers who their Feasts prepare”

(246)  

 

“Think what a painful Life we daily lead,” (251) he cries out, with “toils scarce ever ceasing.” (248)  As for beauty the workers are said to destroy the landscape, turning “pleasant Prospects” to “a gloomy Waste.” (231).  Their reaping turns the “Beauties” of the field to “Ruin” (223) and “sure Desolation.” (229)  In a bathetic burlesque of heroic war-making in which the field workers resemble a troop of marauding Muslims. (230)

    Duck’s voice is far from consistent, however.  As one of the poem’s most acute critics has noted, the variation in voice is one of the most striking aspects of “The Thresher’s Labour.” [12]  When the first person plural is used, it is the workers speaking collectively, Duck among them, while it is clearly a disciple of Pope who opens the piece and ornaments it throughout, and every now and then the supervisor or “Master” rails to the laborers with consistent antagonism.  While the first and third of these foreground the socio-economic relationships of the actors, it is the second that reveals most about Duck and his use of Augustan convention.

     The first lines of the opening address to both Muse and patron establish the verses’ bona fides in poetic discourse, indicating familiarity with Classical lore and by patronage a connection to the respectable world.  He does insert a mention of his own goddess’s “Poverty” (6) and he goes on to mention the “Toils of each revolving Year;/ Those endless Toils, which always grow anew,” (8-9) striking a note that must have jarred his genteel audience while perhaps delighting the more fanciful among them with its very novelty.

     In what might be considered the central image of the poem – the thresher threshing – the heroic epic tone strains against the insistently bathetic realistic details.  Almost as though he had intended to illustrate Pope’s 1728 essay "Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry" [13], Duck mixes here the lofty and the familiar in the most provocative manner.  Though the grain is “Ceres’ Gifts” (14), to the farmer it brings only intimations of ”the Profits of the Year” (16).  The threshers who work “Divested of [their] Cloathes” wield their flails like “Weapons” (36) of war, momentarily resembling valiant warriors.

 

 

The CYCLOPS' Hammers could not truer chime;

Nor with more heavy Strokes could Aetna groan,

When VULCAN forg'd the Arms for THETIS' Son.

In briny Streams our Sweat descends apace,

Drops from our Locks, or trickles down our Face.

                                                                            (39-43)

 

References to Cyclops, Aetna, and Vulcan, then, are deployed in order to introduce the sweat “in briny Streams” running down the workers’ faces. [14]  Bathos could hardly be more audacious. 

     The intentional mingling of high and low strains might produce comedy (as in Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week), but here the principal effect is simply incongruity.  Cyclops and Vulcan have little relevance to the scene, nor do they play a role in a greater mythological structure shaping the poem, and when the passage culminates in sweat, the effect is inevitably ridiculous.  Duck is only too clearly straining to establish his own Classicism, imitating his university-educated fellow poets by decorating his lines with adventitious learned references. 

     Throughout the poem the comparison of the workers to ancient martial heroes enables the allusive machinery to operate though it is regularly ambiguous.  While their implements are called weapons (36), and the workers are themselves are “Hero-like” (114), they resemble Muslim not Christian warriors (230).  This denigrating qualification is intensified with their later identification with “Ethiopians” (65) not to mention “Rogues” (74) and “School-boys” (78). 

     Duck testifies from years of experience when he calls the field-workers occupation a “dull Task” (68), deserving of “Pity” (247).  The contests of Achilles and Hector or Aeneas and Turnus had a victor and of nations, too, to the winner goes the glory, but on the farm, there is no triumph no matter how dedicated the worker.

 

 

All strive to vanquish, tho' the Victor gains

 No other Glory, but the greatest Pains.

                                                                   (118-9)

 

 

For this reason the entire enterprise seems in the end a “Cheat.” (277)  Facing the challenge before him, the thresher responds soldier-like with energy and dedication, but the fact that he never gets anywhere, that the same tasks must be endlessly repeated, renders his occupation ignoble.

     Duck’s biography leaves little doubt that he himself escaped sweating in the fields as soon as he was able.  He had not even wished to write about the work experience that in his day and yet today endows his poetry with particular interest and he never returned to the topic.  Becoming a priest, he was first chaplain to a courtier and then pastor of a church in Surrey. [15]  He surely adopted the most prestigious literary practices of his day with the hope that he might thereby gain acceptance, and chance brought him extraordinary success.  His use of Classical references in spite of having through no fault of his own failed to receive the thorough education in Greek and Latin poets then standard for the wealthy must always seem factitious, tentative.  He was an expressive enough poet that his dubious status as an outsider is always evident.  He genuflects before the names of ancient mythology as one would before a patron.

     When directly commenting on his work experience, Duck never softens or deceives.  He cannot, like some socialist writers, conceive of labor as itself heroic; it is for him merely a harsh reality.  The closing lines of “The Thresher’s Labour” figure the farm hand not as a valiant warrior but as Sisyphus, a vicious man undergoing eternal punishment.

 

 

THUS, as the Year's revolving Course goes round,

No Respite from our Labour can be found:

Like SISYPHUS, our Work is never done;

Continually rolls back the restless Stone.

New-growing Labours still succeed the past;

And growing always new, must always last.

                                                                       (281-286)

 

 

This choice of Sisyphus, which casts the collective “our Work” as a meaningless grind, leading only to fatigue, harmonizes oddly with Camus’ image for the absurdity of human life in the twentieth century.  Though the reader may not share Duck’s ambition to find acceptance in proper society, his suffering and alienation are universal.  His own wish to rise in status prevented his critiquing the system he sought to enter and thus qualifying for the role of proto-radical some would like to give him.  Nonetheless, writing about rural life was never again so wholly imaginary as it had been for his predecessors.  Varying degrees of country realism may be traced in Thomson, Crabbe, Wordsworth, and the Tennyson of Enoch Brand and the Northern Farmer (both Old and New) as the influence of Classical poets and the use of ancient references has faded. 

     The tension between the learned gentility of the poetic conventions and unpretty facts like sweat and economic exploitation is the wellspring of Duck’s poem.  Using the heroic couplets associated with Dryden’s Aeneid and Pope’s Homer the very name of which implies grandeur, aristocratic values, and war, Duck produced a poetic chimera compounded of high and low, with attitudes from either end of the social scale mingled with little design and suggesting no new synthesis

     Duck was able to hone his own poetic skills sufficiently to accomplish his goals.  He impressed the Queen and the Oxford Professor of Poetry with his pastiche of successful Augustan poets, but he also gained readers, both then and now, by recording a genuine worker’s voice.  If the high-flown rhetoric and gritty detail never really work together, “The Thresher’s Labour” nonetheless provides the reader with a sympathetic experience of the rigor and hopelessness of manual labor, little unchanged for the greater part of humanity yet today.  For that alone it remains worth reading.

 

 

 

 

1.      1.  George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie I.18.

2.      2.  Puttenham, Arte I.11.

3.      3.  The Guardian No. 22, 6 April 1713.  The essay was long attributed to Addison.

4.      4.  The first two quotations are from Spectator 70 (May 21, 1711).  The theme continued in Spectator 74 (May 25, 1711).  Then in Spectator 85 (June 7, 1711) he continued the theme with an account of the sentimental broadside  ballad “Two Children in the Wood” in which, though the song was “a plain simple Copy of Nature, destitute of the Helps and Ornaments of Art,” he found “a most exquisite Pleasure.”

5.      5.  Spectator 160 (Sept. 3, 1711).

6.      6.  "Proeme,” The Shepherd’s Calendar.  The immediate target is Ambrose Philips, whose eclogues rivaled Pope’s in popularity for a time.

7.      7.  His other poems are nearly all occasional or religious.  Duck had written about his agricultural work only at the suggestion of his patron, Rev. Stanley.  In his own time his Biblical “The Shunammite” was widely applauded.  Having acquired a late education, Duck became a priest.

8.      8.  Country Journal, No. 15, 1735, issue 489.

9.      9.  The Thresher’s Miscellany: or, Poems on Several Subjects, Written by Arthur Duck appeared even before the real Duck’s work.

10  10.  Alexander Pope, “The Second Epistle Of The Second Book Of Horace,” 137-140.  In the dense semantic underbrush Pope constructs he cleverly played on Dryden’s translation of Virgil Eclogue III 162 with his l. 146 "And you shall rise up Otway for your pains."  With even greater subtlety Pope set a line from Horace (Epistles II.2) as epigraph: “Ludentis speciem dabit, et torquebitur” (“he will give the appearance of playing and be turned”) which implies the decline of letters and plays on the original sense of “turning,” meaning the poet’s ability to assume different moods and voices.

11    11.  Though not educated in the conventional school curriculum, Duck aspired to the same stylistic ideals as the accepted culture of the day.  In this he differs from those today called “outsider” artists.  His class viewpoint was prudentially softened in the authorized edition, most dramatically by eliminating the lines (17-18 in the 1730 edition) referring to the landlord.

1      12.  Bridget Keegan, “Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck's ‘The Thresher's Labour’", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 41, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 2001).

1      13.  Pope had recommended that the poet prepare “by familiarizing his mind to the lowest objects” (Ch. 7) by that means developing a style “frothy, pert, and bouncing” (Ch. 4).

14    14.  Sweat, clearly a strong marker of outdoor labor, reappears four other times in Duck’s poem.

15    15.  His apparent suicide has by some over the years been ascribed to his rise in social standing though without evidence.

Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe]

Country of the Pointed Firs [Jewett]

     Reading Jewett one thinks of William Carlos Williams’ line in “To Elsie”: “The pure products of America/ go crazy—“ Though Jewett’s bona fides as an old-line downeaster are impeccable, she writes as though the region was populated entirely by eccentrics with the exception of the normative detached narrator. Just as pastoral poetry was originally written by urbanites amusing themselves with a mythological projection of country life, the late nineteenth century regional American writers virtually all wrote from a doubled perspective: familiar with the local culture yet not contained within it.
     Indeed, Jewett marvels at what she sees of “the waste of human ability” along the Maine coast where individuals are stranded like sea-wrack. A person in a small town may have “a fine able character” yet feel “caged” by “a narrow set of circumstances.” (467) A devolution has occurred: the earlier generations were “more vigorous.” (473) When the chunky Mrs. Todd is compared to Antigone (417), Jewett is plainly playing an endgame of belated epigones. The poignancy of her one romance and the dull marriage that followed is sentimental rather than tragic. Her plodding tidy decent endurance, however admirable, falls far short of heroic.
     In historic terms, many of the odd characters that populate Dunnet’s Landing testify to the passing of the old order in which sea captains not only commanded a prosperous industry but also brought a cosmopolitan viewpoint to an otherwise small and isolated seacoast town. Travelers know that the economic backwaters are always the most colorful tourist destinations, and, in spite of her own Maine origins, Jewett, like her narrator from Boston, was just passing through.


Cato [Addison]

     Joseph Addison’s play was a hit when it premiered in 1713. Written to conform to the neoclassical literary theory of the sort advocated by Thomas Rymer, it set the standard for a generation of tragedies and maintained its popularity on the stage well into the nineteenth century. Since that time, despite academic interest and occasional revivals, it has lingered in some obscurity while the author’s marvelous essays, casual and elegant at once, have always commanded readers.
     Addison’s blank verse is pallid compared to Shakespeare, but whose is not? Cato the Stoic (great-grandson of the Censor) speaks in a rhetoric that is nothing if not dignified, uplifted with sublime sentiment. The listener can only be charmed by the self-abnegating virtues of the hero. The love interests of Marcus, Portius, and Juba are adventitious; what the play presents is the grandeur of tragic submission, contemptuous of mere passion. Though Cato must argue himself into acceptance of immortality, noting, in a line later quoted by the pleasant Mr. Micawber, “Plato, thou reasonest well,” his detachment from desire and devotion to others are exemplary.
     The more-or-less “natural religion” of Stoicism was not the only reason Cato was the rage in the Enlightenment era. Addison was an active Whig, and participated in the struggle to decrease the prerogatives of the monarchy. His play was read as part of a developing critique of tyranny that impressed both American and French revolutionaries. George Washington, in fact, had the play performed for the troops at Valley Forge. Cato himself had been elected plebian tribune and had, with Cicero, opposed the patrician Catiline conspiracy, and so might be regarded as something of a progressive. At any rate the old Stoic is surely innocent of the fact that his name is used today by rightwing sycophants of our own tyrannical Caesar, the corporate dollar.


Collected Poems [Crabbe]

     We tend to accept the idea of the penniless poet as natural, though the poor had little voice until the Romantic movement created a new interest in the lives of the humble and an audience for poets like Burns, Crabbe, and Clare who had themselves experienced real privation. For a man like Crabbe, the English countryside inspired neither the confectionary fantasies of classical pastoralism nor the mystical afflatus of Wordsworth. Like American writers a hundred years or so later such as Edwin Arlington Robinson or Edgar Lee Masters, he described struggles and dramas taking place far from the centers of power, often with a dark or tragic tone.
     In Byron’s phrase, Crabbe was “Nature’s severest painter, yet her best,” and The Borough, The Village, and “Sir Eustace Grey” remain worth reading for their psychology and pathos. The tales in verse are well-shaped and satisfying, even if most would agree with Émile Legouis’ observation that “His ear has no fastidious requirement.”
     As much a poet of depression as of rural life, it is no wonder that some categorize him as a pre-Romantic, yet Leavis places him last of the Augustan Tradition, and Horace Smith called him “Pope in worsted stockings.” Though he says he “sought the simple life that Nature yields” it was in fact his circumstance from birth, and it is to his credit that he set down as much of its horror as of its picturesque charm. He was a competent craftsman, and in his often easy-going heroic couplets (sometimes ballad-like stanzas), if he rarely comes up with striking images or thrilling thoughts (we are no longer impressed with his sententiae), he sustains a consistent simmer of interest and generally hits his mark. While he rarely soared, he regularly looked closely at his surroundings, material and emotional, and recorded what he saw in carefully wrought language.