Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper

An English Genre and Discourse

Richard Terry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351917117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Mock-heroic is the exemplary genre of the English Augustan era: it is one of the few genres that the Augustans invented themselves, and it stands in a symbolic relation to a culture still reverential of the grandeurs of the classical past and uneasy about its ability to emulate them. Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper shows the protean nature of mock-epic at this time. It recounts the rise of mock-heroic, discusses the properties of the form, and explores its relation both to classical epic and to contemporary genres such as the poetic travesty and the novel. It also tracks the relation of mock-heroic to the concept to the sublime, especially to the low sublime unwittingly perfected by Richard Blackmore. Terry goes beyond previous commentators in arguing that mock-heroic was not merely a conventional genre, but also provided a supple discourse through which writers could represent a range of personal and social issues. He identifies mock-heroic properties in the Mandevillian discourse of economics and in the rhetoric of male gallantry towards women, in which women were simultaneously elevated and put down. He also sees mock-heroic as informing the idea of divine grace in the poetry and letters of William Cowper. Mixing a historical approach with incisive close readings, Terry provides a powerful re-evaluation of the form.

Chapter 1

Mock-Heroic in the English Augustan Era

I

The genre of mock-heroie spread to England from Italy and France: the earliest instance of the kind is probably Alessandro Tassoni’s La Secchia Rapita, published pseudonymously (and under a slightly different title) in 1622, and depicting a feud, fomented by the seizure of a bucket, between two thirteenth-century Italian peoples: the Modenese and Bolonians. The poem went through numerous editions in the next century and a half, and was translated into English in 1710 by John Ozell, who inserted into his long title the annotative detail: ‘A Mock-Heroic Poem, The First of the Kind’. The earliest work to capitalize on Tassoni’s seems to have been the French poet Boileau’s heroi-comical poem Le Lutrin (from 1674), which recounts a feud between the priest and choir-master of a French church, in which the former tries to reinstall an old reading-desk expressly so as to obscure his rival from the sight of the congregation. There were several early translations into English: an incomplete one by N.O. in 1682; a loose rendering by John Crowne entitled Daeneids, or the Noble Labours of the Great-Dean of Notre-Dame in Paris (1692); and a full translation by Ozell in 1708.¹

The translation into English of these early mock-epics was accom-panied by a recognition of the newness of the kind of writing which they exemplified. Sir William Temple’s essay ‘Of Poetry’, for example, identifies La Secchia Rapita as the fountainhead of a type of writing that has ‘helpt to Corrupt our modern Poesy’, seeing its English exponents as consisting of the likes of Sir John Mennes, Samuel Butler and Charles Cotton.² A critical discussion of mock-heroic by Nicholas Rowe appended to Ozell’s translation of Le Lutrin also emphasizes the relatively recent inception of the form, with Rowe expressing reluctance to attempt a ‘Critical Account’ of a mode of writing ‘that is so new in the World, and of which we have had so few Instances’. Moreover, like Temple before him, what instances there are he sees as standing in a direct line of descent from La Secchia Rapita, which is ‘the first of this Sort that was ever written’.³ The foreign extraction of the mock-heroic kind forms the basis of a rather self-serving anecdote recorded by Francis Lockier (later Dean of Peterborough) about his first brush with the famous poet Dryden. As a seventeen-year–old, Lockier was in the habit of visiting Will’s coffee house so as to rub shoulders with the literary eminences who gathered there. Happening to hear Dryden injudiciously talking up his Mac Flecknoe as ‘the first piece of ridicule written in heroics’, the young Lockier summoned up the pluck to object that Boileau’s Lutrin and Tassoni’s Secchia Rapita better deserved the title of originals, being poems from which Dryden had himself borrowed. “Tis true’, replied Dryden, ‘I had forgot them’.⁴

The essential technique of mock-heroic consists of a contravention of the canon of fit style, the principle, that is, that the content and style of a work should be in sympathy with each other: Dryden, for example, praises Horace on just this account when noting that he writes in a style ‘constantly accommodated to his subject, either high or low’.⁵ Early usages of the actual term ‘mock-heroic’ emphasize that works belonging to the form set style and subject-matter at variance from each other. John Ozell, for example, in the dedication to his translation of Le Lutrin, defines mock-heroic as ‘a Ridiculous Action made considerable in Heroic Verse’; and John Quincy, in the Preface to his translation of Edward Holdsworth’s Muscipula (second edn, 1714), cites Le Lutrin and The Dispensary as representative examples of mock-heroic, defining their technique as ‘raising the Diction, and labouring the Poetry most, where the Matter is lowest, and most proper for Ridicule’.⁶ The achievement of a conspicuous elevation of style could best be achieved by mimicking the conventions of epic, or by adopting what, within the confines of vernacular literary culture, passed for an ‘heroic style’, this being equated alternatively with the closed decasyllabic couplet practised by Pope in his translation of Homer’s Iliad or with the sprawling grandiloquence of Paradise Lost. However, mock-heroic effects were never seen as the preserve solely of works that made a close reference to an epic original: the constitutive fact of mock-heroic was a particular brand of irony; epic poems themselves provided only one place from which this irony could be procured.

As a way of examining the properties inhering in mock-heroic, it might be useful to focus on some lines from a single poem, one not of any particular note other than being by an author who will figure later in this book as a writer of (what might be called) mock-heroic novels, Henry Fielding’s ‘A Description of U—n G—[Upton Grey]’. It takes the form of a poetic letter penned to a city belle by a frustrated suitor pent up in the country, much of it consisting of an exaggerated description of the longueurs of rural living:

On the House-Side a Garden may be seen,

Which Docks and Nettles keep for ever green.

Weeds on the Ground, instead of Flowr’s, we see,

And Snails alone adorn the barren Tree.

Happy for us, had Eve’s this Garden been;

She’d found no Fruit, and therefore known no Sin.

Nor meaner Ornament the Shed-Side decks,

With Hay-Stacks, Faggot Piles, and Bottle-Ricks;

The Horses Stalls, the Coach a Barn contains;

For purling Streams, we’ve Puddles fill’d with Rains.

What can our Orchard without Trees surpass?

What, but our dusty Meadow without Grass?

I’ve thought (so strong with me Burlesque prevails,)

This Place design’d to ridicule Versailles;

Or meant, like that, Art’s utmost Pow’r to shew,

That tells how high it reaches, this how low.⁷

The humiliation that the beau feels at his unsalubrious dwelling is made clear not by stylistic emphases but by the counterpointing of its rustic details against idealized opposites. The ‘Puddles’, for example, clash with the ‘purling Streams’ that figure as a traditional component of pastoral landscaping; snails here slither in the ‘barren Tree’ in an image that parodies Milton’s serpent wreathing and coiling itself in the paradisal tree; and at the end of the passage quoted, the narrator rests his aversion to ‘This Place’ on its being a sort of burlesque of Versailles: the garden at Versailles being the finest amongst imaginable landscapes, Upton Grey the worst.

The technique that Fielding applies in the passage is apt to confuse or alienate the modern reader. The humour of the poem lies in the intransigently humdrum details of the rural setting – a garden fallen to seed, tumbledown outhouses, a treeless orchard, brimming puddles and so on – and the wounded dignity that we sense in the narrator’s attitude towards them. The poem devotes some space to simply listing the various items of rustic unkemptness (‘Hay-Stacks, Faggot Piles, and Bottle-Ricks’), but also sets them in antithesis to images drawn from a much higher cultural register. What separates the poem from the literary sensibility of our own day is its internalized conviction that realism by itself would be inadequate to show the full unsalubriousness of Upton Grey. For this to be done requires instead an infusion of ‘Burlesque’, which allows us to envisage Upton Grey by imagining what it is expressly unlike or rather by imagining to what it stands as an opposite extreme. Only by having summoned to our minds the tidy iridescence of the traditional pastoral landscape can we appreciate Upton Gray’s full seediness; only by thinking about the universality of the Fall can we gauge its rustic obscurity; only in comparison with the splendour of Versailles do we appreciate its withering inelegance.

Fielding’s resourcefulness in discovering for each realistic image a burlesque, countervailing one, as well as his sensitivity to how images of all kinds can be assigned within registers of politeness or cultural elevation, are part and parcel of an Augustan literary sensibility. The same sensibility expresses itself elsewhere in lines such as these from Swift’s ‘A Description of a City Shower’:

Meanwhile the south, rising with dabbled wings,

A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings;

That swilled more liquor than it could contain,

And like a drunkard gives it up again.⁸

Swift’s poem is an exercise in urban realism, describing how street-wise Londoners prognosticate, and then take cover from, a rain shower, and then following the rain-water as it sluices through the city’s primitive drainage system before debauching into ‘the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge’. The poem ends with a gruesome census on the various types of ‘filth’, ‘Sweep-ings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood’, that surge through the open sewers. It might be thought that the poem’s technique of realistic itemization would be enough to capture the rancidness of city life, but, as in Fielding’s poem about rural seediness, this objective seems unrealizable without some intervention of burlesque. Each one of Swift’s verse paragraphs accordingly begins by consciously evoking the atmosphere and language of pastoral, as if to lay down a benchmark against which the obscenity of urban life can be seen for what it is. In the passage quoted, the opening couplet anticipates the onset of rain in a way in which the same prefiguration could occur in a pastoral poem; the second couplet then translates this into a familiar street idiom in which sudden flows of liquid inescapably call to mind the vomit of drunkards. In ‘Upton Grey’, the high element imported into the poem is a matter of imagery; in ‘A Description of a City Shower’, it is mainly idiomatic, achieved though the heightening effect of terms of poetic diction (‘dabbled’, ‘sable’, ‘welkin’). From the combination of these high and low elements, a versatile range of effects can arise. In the poems by Swift and Fielding, the low thing is rebuked by association with the high one whose image it signally fails to live up to. But, in the hands of a different kind of poet (such as William Cowper), the low thing can find itself raised or celebrated by being broached in the context of images drawn from the higher register.

II

That mock-heroic poems set style and content at loggerheads brought the form close to, indeed led sometimes to its being conflated with, another type of poem, the travesty, which specialized in treating elevated subject-matter in a degrading way. As a result, when early critics tried to define the properties of mock-heroic, this very often entailed their drawing a distinction between it and the travesty. An early, translucent statement of their interrelation is given by Peter Motteux in the Gentleman’s Journal of January 1693, in which he throws both together under the generic label of ‘Burlesque’:

the Grace and Beauties of Burlesque do not consist only in a disproportion between the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Mock-Heroic in the English Augustan Era
• 2. Butler’s Hudibras: Heroic Impertinence
• 3. Blackmore and the Low Sublime
• 4. Mock-Heroic and Luxury: The Heroi-Comical Poem
• 5. Mock-Heroic and Gallantry: Pope’s Rape of the Lock
• 6. The Rhetoric of Augustan Mockery
• 7. Mock-Heroic and Grace: The Case of Cowper
• 8. On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition
• Bibliography
• Index