15 - Theories of Style

Summary

Whilst recognizing the need to avoid crude evolutionary formulas, a volume of this kind must chart broad patterns and large-scale movements of thought. It is therefore a useful simplification, rather than a savage caricature, to describe the development of theorizing about literary style in this period as following a fairly steady progression. At the end of the seventeenth century, the prime centre of influence in European criticism remained France. Equally, the main attention still concentrated on epic and, to a slightly lesser extent, tragedy. Stylistic issues were derivative from broader moral questions about the import and bearing of a text, conceived as an exemplary and instructive (if not always precisely didactic) statement. In this phase of critical history, poetic language was not the heart of poetics – rather an instrument of a higher ordonnance which privileged doctrine and form.

All this is true despite the fact that the greatest practising critic of the later seventeenth century was an Englishman, John Dryden, who was himself a great master of language and a thinker about literature with no excessive reverence for neo-Aristotelian pieties. It is also true despite the fact that the famous quarrel of Ancients and Moderns dominated the last decade of the century, and here the Moderns seemed ready to overturn those traditional pieties which included a ranking of elocutio well beneath inventio and even dispositio. It is true despite the fact that Boileau himself had translated Longinus in 1674 and begun the meteoric ascent of ‘sublimity’ as a critical watchword.