Passion and Language in Eighteenth-Century Literature

The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke

Earla Wilputte

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137442055
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Providing imaginatively contextualized close readings, this study focuses on three key eighteenth-century writers - Haywood, Hill and Fowke. Wilputte traces the development of the passionate language of these writers whose lives, writing careers, and interests intersected from 1720 to 1724 in the "Hillarian" coterie.

CHAPTER 1

THE NEED FOR A LANGUAGE FOR THE PASSIONS

Our Discourse is imperfect, unless it carry with it the marks of the Motions of our Will: It resembles our Mind (whose Image it ought to bear) no more than a dead Carkass resembles a living Body.

—Bernard Lamy, The Art of Speaking

[W]ords give way, like quicksand, beneath too weighty a pile of building.

—Aaron Hill to Martha Fowke

The ability of discursive language to communicate the passions begins to be questioned in the early eighteenth century. Are words “a dead Carkass,” lacking life, soul, and essence, “like quicksand,” an easily shifting, yielding mass engulfing and entrapping meaning? Some eighteenth-century philosophers thought that, with its gradual secularization, poetic language had become emasculated and weak, bereft of its ability to express and incite the passions. Conversely, literary critics such as John Dennis theorized that “never any one, while he was wrapt with Enthusiasm or ordinary Passion, wanted either Words or Harmony.”1 A growing ambivalence over the ability of words to relate effectively one’s passions, and hence one’s subjectivity, develops over the eighteenth century, with some believing that literature too blithely elicits passions from readers and others contending that language has lost its efficacy. The purpose of this study is to explore how three authors—Aaron Hill, Eliza Haywood, and Martha Fowke, making up the nucleus of the London literary group, the Hillarian circle, from 1720 to 1724—attempt to develop a language for the passions that clearly conveys the deepest felt emotions. In essence, these three authors endeavor to transcend human separateness and bind one soul to another through words.

Hill, Haywood, and Fowke and their personal and professional relationships with each other within Hill’s literary circle afford an intriguing and problematic context in which to study the passions and their communication in the first half of the eighteenth century. Writers in a variety of forms (periodicals, poetry, letters, plays, essays, and novels) over a long period of productive years, Hill, Haywood, and Fowke engage in a progressive and reactionary debate over how to express and write the passions. Whereas recent criticism notes “a clear intersection between the perceived crisis in the management of the passions and the emerging mission of the novel,”2 in the Hillarian circle we witness intelligent, passionate minds grappling with finding a language for the passions that can imaginatively convey one’s innermost feelings before the novel’s “agenda” of reforming and restraining those passions can be effectively put into action.

The Hillarian circle is beginning to attract serious scholarly attention in the wake of high-quality bibliographical, biographical, and critical work. Foundational studies on Hill, Fowke, and Haywood by Christine Gerrard, Phyllis Guskin, Patrick Spedding, and Kathryn R. King all reference the complex relationships among these three writers within the larger Hillarian circle and present significant scholarship to which I am especially indebted. Guskin’s Clio: The Autobiography of Martha Fowke Sansom, 1689–1736, the first modern edition of Clio: or, A Secret History of the Life and Amours of the Late Celebrated Mrs. S–n—m, provides a detailed examination of Fowke’s life and her role in the Hillarian coterie; Gerrard’s biography Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685–1750 devotes two chapters to the making and the breaking of the Hillarian circle, including the part that the Fowke–Haywood dispute played in that breakup; Spedding’s A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood is indispensable for linking biographical information with the publishing history of Haywood’s works; and King has authored several influential articles exploring the literary and personal relationships of Haywood with the Hillarians, including “The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–1725” and “When Eliza Met Aaron: A Story of Sublime Sensation,” as well as, most recently, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. Each of these critical studies dedicates attention to the relationships and influences, the friendships and shifting alliances among the most famous Hillarians. My intention here is to focus specifically on Hill’s, Haywood’s, and Fowke’s experimentation with and attempts at the development of a language for the passions in their poetry and prose.

As these studies have shown, the possible relationships among Haywood, Hill, and Fowke (her married name is Sansom but she established her poetic reputation under her maiden name) are collaborative, competitive, and often eroticized. From 1720 to 1724, Haywood reveres Hill as a poet and as a man; once friends, Haywood and Fowke become bitter and vengeful enemies; Fowke and Hill engage in a clandestine extramarital affair; Fowke uses her sexuality unabashedly with men; and Haywood is scorned by the circle after publishing a scandal novel that includes a vicious personal exposé of her former friend. All three write, discuss, and theorize about the passions and their passions for each other. As a literary coterie of young men and women, the Hillarians are fascinated with the passions—excessive emotions like love, sorrow, fear, anger, envy—and how they can be best expressed in social relationships and in writing. My study of works by these three writers traces their experimentation with philosophical and linguistic theories, including the aesthetic sublime. The members of the Hillarian circle variously argue in their individual works for the validity of a language built on experience, specifically a sensory, sensual, and passionate experience. This argument aligns them with the empiricist project but insists on the place of the passions in a discussion of knowledge gained through experience. Suspended somewhere between the spiritual and the physical, the passions seem to elude any but abstract, poetic description. Hill often complains that “words give way, like quicksand” or “fall feath’ry like dew.” Hill, Haywood, and Fowke seek to develop a language that ensures not only a sympathetic comprehension of the excessive emotions that we all undergo but an understanding of the three writers’ own passionate subjectivity.

Eliza Haywood, author of many novels about love, lust, abandonment, and revenge, was recognized by James Sterling in 1725 as the “Great Arbitress of Passion.” From 1719 with the appearance of her first novel, Love in Excess, Haywood had captured the attention of readers by arousing their passions and vicariously involving them in the adventures of her beleaguered heroines, sexually predatory villainesses, and intriguing—both in the sense of carrying on a secret amour or illicit intimacy and in the sense of exciting interest or curiosity—female protagonists. By the 1740s, Haywood adopted a new persona from that of the amatory novelist, with a more specific mandate: she became arbitress of all the passions, a philosopher of human nature and explorer of interiority. From 1744 with her periodical The Female Spectator, she not only wrote about how passion could victimize individuals through society’s ability to read emotions’ physical manifestations but focused on the mind itself, the “secret springs” of human actions. Philosophy and reflection were what she intended to stir in her readers: encouraging a meditation on their own passions as instigators of action, on the passions of others to elicit sympathy, on human nature and what it means to be human. Her understudied novel Life’s Progress through the Passions: or, The Adventures of Natura (1748), with its deliberate choice of a male hero rather than a female to avoid her culture’s prejudicial association of the passions with women, traces the life of its main protagonist from infancy to his death at age 63, analyzing each stage and predominant passion he experiences. In addition to examining the passions as natural elements of humanity, the novel’s combination of philosophical discourse and the amorous language of her early novels explores modes of self-knowledge and subjectivity, as well as exposes the inadequacy of so-called objective, religious, and philosophical discourses to fully comprehend the passions.

Aaron Hill was also known for his studies of the passions, though his later work is primarily concerned with how they could be best portrayed in stage performance through physical gesture and voice. His Essay on the Art of Acting, poems such as “The Actor’s Epitome” and “The Art of Acting” (1746), and his 1734 theatrical periodical The Prompter explicitly address how an actor must conjure up the emotions and deliberately, physically, and vocally convey them to an audience. In his 1724–25 periodical The Plain Dealer, coedited with William Bond (chief author of a continuation of The Spectator [1715] that occasioned Fowke’s correspondence with him), Ned Blunt the Plain Dealer and his friend, poet Tony Jyngle, devise a system of “Mind Midwifery” wherein the passions can be successfully cured or delivered. Passions are regarded here, in the language of the classicists, as a “Disease,” a “Small-Pox of the Mind” in need of a “moral Draught.”3 Meanwhile, through the course of the periodical’s publication, Mr. Plain Dealer himself, a man in his “grand Climacterick” or sixty-third year, finds himself unreasonably falling in love with Patty Amble, a young coquette in his social circle. His inability to follow his own therapy for the passions imbues his educative system with a certain irony that his readers could not fail to miss.

While Haywood’s Life’s Progress is intent on demonstrating the naturalness and humanity of the passions and the need for social sympathy with them, Hill’s and Bond’s Plain Dealer delineates the need to moderate the passions and regulate them to accommodate society’s agenda even while questioning it. Haywood and Hill appear to be at odds with one another in their passion theory; however, upon closer examination, their views do share significant similarities. Both are concerned with controlling the physical manifestations of the passions to gain the sympathy of others by communicating specific emotions or to protect the person experiencing the passions by impeding others’ reading them on his or her body. Both authors are intrigued by the relation between passion and personal identity: the need to express the passions in order to express the individual. Finally, throughout their works, both Haywood and Hill are interested in how the passions can be translated into language, and both experiment specifically with concepts of the sublime to communicate to others the physical and psychological effects of personal feelings.

Martha Fowke, a poet and a free spirit, seems little affected in her work or life with the need to conform to society’s demands for feminine decorum. As she details in Epistles of Clio and Strephon, her early poetic collaboration with William Bond, she yearns for public acclaim for her writing; she strives to be another Shakespeare, and in her autobiographical Letter to Hillarius (Aaron Hill), she wants to be recognized first and foremost as a talented poet, not an inspiring muse. Never one to moderate the expression of her passions to protect her reputation, Fowke uses her writing as a means to many ends—love, fame, revenge, and communicating her philosophy of life and how she perceives the world.

Eighteenth-century empiricist theory of the mind “stressed the radical individuality of perception”: that all people experienced and viewed the world uniquely. Because this account of perception held the danger of “solipsistic skepticism,” it was also believed that there was a “uniformity of human nature”—a community of experience shared by all. Poets, authors, and painters struggled to find the appropriate mode for communicating an individual’s passions and ideas so that people could share in and understand the feelings of others. “It was a commonplace of empiricist theory that words were arbitrary counters used to represent ideas, but that pictorial images have a closer relationship to the objects they imitate.”4 Yet words, arbitrary though they may be, are the instruments of choice for authors. Where painter Joshua Reynolds could confidently state that the “internal fabrick” of men’s minds and the “external form of . . . bodies” were “nearly uniform” with one another—that there was an “agreement in the imaginations as in the senses of men”5—writers struggling to find an adequate language for the passions so as to express and externalize specific states of interiority were less sure. Poetry attempting to imitate the visual concreteness and precision of the pictorial arts—poems such as Aaron Hill’s “The Picture of Love” and Martha Fowke’s “Clio’s Picture”—strive to impress how and what they felt on their readers’ imaginations by using what Locke called “external sensible Signs” standing for “invisible Ideas.”6 Eighteenth-century science, with its increasing interest in investigating the mind and brain, is also at this time developing the field of psychology, for which a discourse for interiority had to be invented.

By examining various aspects of eighteenth-century passion theory through the cultural and literary lenses of these three members of the Hillarian circle, we can discover not only their own ruminations and speculations about the passions but examples of the passions themselves. Rather than clouding the issue, the personal and professional connections among Haywood, Fowke, and Hill intensify the discussion. The Hillarian circle was a coterie of authors pulled in by Aaron Hill’s creative energies and dynamic personality. Brean Hammond has called Hill “the cultural glue” of the period because of his involvement in theater, poetry, critical correspondence, and moral and technical support for young writers, as well as his entrepreneurial ventures in business and publishing.7 Not only Haywood and Fowke, but Richard Savage, John Dyer, James Thomson, David Mallet, and Edward Young, among others, were at times part of Hill’s literary coterie, benefiting from Hill’s finding subscribers for their works and his writing epilogues, poems, and essays in their support, as well as providing an intellectual and creative venue in which they could interact personally and in writing. Apart from Haywood (“Eliza”), Fowke (“Clio”), Hill’s wife, Margaret (“Miranda”), and Mrs. Joseph Mitchell (“Ophelia”), the women members of the circle are known to us only by their poetic pseudonyms: “Aurelia,” “Daphne,” “Evandra,” and “Diana.” The Hillarians, almost all under the age of thirty in the early 1720s (except for Hill himself and Fowke; Haywood, by our best guess, would turn thirty in 1723), shared their works in manuscript and exchanged ideas about poetry, authorship, and aesthetics. They would meet at Aaron and Margaret Hill’s home in Petty France, Westminster, and in the Temple lodgings of Arnold Sansom and his poet wife, Martha Fowke. The group served as the prototype for the fictional “Assembly, of both Sexes, very numerous and diversified” that meets twice a week in The Plain Dealer8 and later in Haywood’s The Tea-Table (1725–26). Though no detailed descriptions of any of the Hillarian circle’s specific meetings have come to light, we can reconstruct some of their discussions and themes from these fictional depictions, from the poems within Savage’s Miscellaneous Poems and Translations by Several Hands (participants in the coterie; 1726), and from occasional references in some members’ letters and poems. In a 1729 poem by Mitchell, he remembers looking forward to “enjoy[ing] the Hours of Tea / In CLIO and MIRANDA’s Company,”9 and in a letter to John Dyer, Benjamin Victor recalls “[h]ow many delightful hours [they] enjoyed with that elegant lover [Hill], and his charming Clio! how like those scenes we read in our youthful days, in Sir Philip Sidney’s Pastoral Romance!”10 As fondly remembered by its members years after the fact, the real-life circle was a crucible from which various writings, collected miscellanies, and sometimes intimate relationships were generated.

Passion was definitely in the air in the early 1720s circle—passion in our modern sense of the word: volatile, sexually charged emotions. Such was the stuff of Haywood’s early novels as well as Fowke’s poetry. Haywood became connected with the Hillarians probably around the time the first part of Love in Excess was published in 1719; Fowke, about a year later, also entered as a publicly recognized author, having published poems as early as 1711 and in 1720 The Epistles of Clio and Strephon, a poetic dialogue with Bond. Fowke was apparently friends with Haywood before their association with the circle, from the time they both attended meetings “at the house of the widely celebrated deaf and dumb celebrity fortune-teller Duncan Campbell.”11 If Haywood’s A Spy upon the Conjurer (1724) is to be believed, the strained relationship between her and Fowke stemmed from Haywood’s seeing the fortune Campbell predicted for Fowke:

A Time will shortly come, when it will be evident you will be so [...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Need for a Language for the Passions
• 2. Life’s Progress through the Passions
• 3. “Give Me a Speaking and a Writing Love”: Passionate Letters
• 4. The Miscellany’s Picture Poems and Haywood’s Poems on Several Occasions
• 5. The Plain Dealer’s Progress from the Garrison to the Midwife
• 6. The Dangers of Giving Way to Language
• Conclusion: Hill’s, Fowke’s, and Haywood’s Progress through the Passions
• Notes
• Bibliography