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Burke's Theory Concerning Words, Images, and Emotion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Dixon Wecter
Dixon Wecter*
Affiliation:
Henry E. Huntington Library
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Extract

Edmund Burke's youthful essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, first published in 1757, sets forth a theory that the impassioned language of poetry and oratory may rouse emotion without the entry of any clear images into the mind. This proposal—audacious if read by the light of the Augustan sunset, but prophetic of romanticism—has received occasional notice from historians of criticism because it anticipates Lessing's brilliant attack upon Wortmalerei in Laokoon (1766). But the way in which Burke seems to have invented his theory from scraps of Locke and Berkeley, left on the battlefield where the contest over abstract ideas had once been waged, has gone apparently unnoticed.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 1940 , pp. 167 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940

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References

1 See ii, xiii and v, ii in particular. Unless otherwise noted, references are to the text and section-numbering of the Second Edition (1759), whose amplifications make it more satisfactory for general citation.

2 Burke's assumption of emotional appeal is shown in iii, vii and throughout his essay. Professor F. Mirabent Vilaplana, La Estêtica Inglesa del Sigh XVIII (Barcelona, 1927), p. 98, notes a lax and apparently interchangeable use of ‘passion,’ ‘emotion,’ and ‘affection’ throughout Burke's essay, but adds: “De nuestro estudio hemos desprendido que, a pesar del uso indistinto de estos términos, Burke habla de afiección cuando quiere significar la simple receptión en el espiritu; emotión, cuando se refiere a la reactión fisiológica y mental del individuo; pasión, cuando significa lo que en términos actuales llamariamos sentimientos.” In discussing the effect of words upon the auditor, Parts ii and v, Burke employs all three terms, but in v, iv specifically describes the result of sound or mental image as affection. For the sake of simplicity I think we may here speak solely of emotion.

3 See v, vii. In Addison's papers on “Pleasures of the Imagination” in The Spectator in 1712 (to which Burke refers in i, x and ii, ix) we find a significant parallel: “Words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them that a Description often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sight of Things themselves” (Spectator, ed. Henry Morley [London, 1889–91], p. 601).

4 iii, vii. In ii, xiii Burke observes: “I should imagine, that the influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.” At several points Burke's speculation comes close to the viewpoint of modern behaviorism, and in iv, iii he anticipates the James-Lange theory of the emotions, “when the body is disposed, by any means whatsoever, to such emotions as it would acquire by the means of a certain passion, it will of itself excite something very like that passion in the mind.” Cf. James, Principles of Psychology (New York, 1896), ii, ch. xxv. Lucretius appears to have had an inkling of the same theory in De rerum natura, iii, 152–160—a passage from which this entire Section in The Sublime and Beautiful seems to be loosely adapted. Lessing drew the same inference from his knowledge of the theatre in Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Werke, ed. Goering, i, 113.

5 The Sublime: A study of critical theories in XVIII-century England, MLA General Series (1935), p. 84. It is somewhat confusing that on p. 63 the author still gives 1756 as the publication date of The Sublime and Beautiful —a long-persistent error, as has now been shown beyond reasonable doubt and as Dr. Monk himself implies, p. 85, n. 3, in citing recent investigation. In Dr. Monk's discussion of oratory one notes as a trivial slip that the name of John Lawson, lecturer on oratory at Burke's alma mater (cf. D. N. B,), appears throughout (pp. 24, 107, 250) as Lanson. One might also challenge Dr. Monk's suggestion, p. 92, that Burke's definition of ‘astonishment’ is paraphrased from Johnson's Dictionary. The verbal correspondence is not close, and in view of Burke's own statement in his Preface to the First Edition (in 1757; dropped from all subsequent editions which I have ever seen) that “It is four years now since this enquiry was finished,” it seems unlikely that Johnson's lexicon, published 15 April 1755, furnished Burke with any fresh clues about “that state of the soul, in which all the motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (ii, i). This theory of the sublime and its emotional state was essential to Burke's whole system of aesthetics. On the other hand the final part of Burke's essay, dealing with words and images, does bear evidence of some revision shortly before 1757. In v, v he alludes to Spence's Preface to Blacklock's Poems, published 13 November 1754, as we learn from Ralph Straus, Dodsley (London, 1910), p. 352.

6 PQ, xv (1936), 165–167. Crane names Hume, Akenside, Baillie, Gerard, and Reid as sharing Burke's attitude in this respect.

7 v, ii. He introduces the third category as “compound abstracts,” but thereafter speaks of them as “compound abstracts.” Among early attempts to classify words with which Burke was certainly familiar, should be noted the twofold system of Aristotle in Poetics, xxi. Although his ἁπλoνû and διπλoûν may suggest Burke's ‘simple’ and ‘aggregate,‘ the resemblance is only superficial; Aristotle's division is merely a linguistic convenience, with no reference to psychology.

8 Burke himself in ii, [iv] cites the opinion of Du Bos, “wherein he gives painting the preference to poetry in the article of moving the passions, principally on account of the greater clearness of the ideas it represents.” Cf. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, trans. Nugent (London, 1748), i, 321. By his paradoxical theory Burke converts this apparent shortcoming into the chief glory of poetry. For the traditional parallel in this regard between poetry and painting, see W. G. Howard, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” PMLA, xxiv (1909), 40–123, and Cicely Davies, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” MLR, xxx (1935), 159–169.

9 For the history of this grievance, with the various proposals to create a scientific lingua franca, see R. F. Jones, “Science and Language in England of the Mid-17th Century,” JEGP, xxxi (1932), 315–331.

10 Cf. Fulton H. Anderson, The Influence of Contemporary Science upon Locke's Method and Results (University of Toronto, 1923).

11 See Locke's Essay, ed. Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894), Bk. ii, xxix, 3. Kenneth MacLean, Locke and English Literature of the 18th Century (New Haven, 1936), Bk. iii, summarizes Locke's doctrine about words and his rebuke of obscure imagery and muddy thinking—with the response which it drew from Addison, Bolingbroke, Fielding, and others. No attempt is here made to connect Locke with The Sublime and Beautiful.

12 Burke's essay contains four direct references to Locke's treatise. His section “On Taste,” first added in the Second Edition, refers to Locke's Essay, ii, ix; Burke in a note to i, iii disagrees with the pleasure and pain theory of Locke, ii, xx; Burke in iv, xiv again mentions Locke only to disagree with the Essay, ii, vii; his final reference in v, iii, praising Locke's “usual sagacity” as shown in the Essay, i, iii, occurs in the midst of Burke's theorizing about ideas—the discussion in which I am here suggesting a larger and unacknowledged debt.

13 See the Essay, iii, iii, §15–18 and vi, §6. Real essence is “the being of any thing” apart from all exterior relationships, while nominal essence is “the artificial constitution of genus and species” which changes as the observer increases his knowledge or accuracy. So far as I know, the only critic who hitherto has suggested Locke's influence upon Burke's aesthetic theories is Mirabent, op. cit., p. 93: “Observamos, también, que la palabra ideas tiene la significatión lockiana que traducida en términos de la psicología equivale aproximadamente a presentaciones. Además, el concepto de la imaginatión es de evidente estructura lockiana.” It should be added that Burke is of course conscious of the traditional bond between word and idea, and between idea and image —and in a qualifying clause added to v, vii in the Second Edition explains his novel “ideas not presentable but by language” by saying, “if they may properly be called ideas which present no distinct image to the mind.” Burke may have in mind Berkeley's denial of the existence of general abstract ideas; see below.

14 David Hartley, Observations on Man (London, 1749), i, 276–279, discusses the relation of words to ideas, but I find no conclusive bond with Burke's essay. Hartley divides words into four classes: (1) such as have ideas only, (2) such as have both ideas and definitions, (3) such as have definitions only, (4) such as have neither ideas nor definitions. Although his system grows a little muddled in the exposition, one is reminded of Burke in Hartley's remark that the second class “excite aggregates of simple ideas,” and in regard to the third that “mental emotions are apt to attend some of these even in passing slightly over the ear; and these emotions may be considered as ideas belonging to the terms respectively. Thus the very words, gratitude, mercy, cruelty, treachery, &c. separately taken affect the mind.” On pp. 287–288 he suggests that persons born blind come to use words “as algebraists do the letters that represent quantities,” in much the same way as that by which Burke had accounted for the blind poet and physicist in v, v. But Hartley's curt dismissal of aesthetics in ii, 253–254, precludes any sympathetic analysis of poetry or impassioned rhetoric.

15 For these quotations see Burke, ii, iii and ii, [iv]; ii, iv; ii, [iv]; ii, iii.

16 W. Rhys Roberts in his edition of Longinus (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1907), p. 260, carelessly avers that “Burke's Sublime and Beautiful has no manner of connexion with the De Sublimitaie, if indeed it contains a single reference to it.” But Burke refers to Longinus by name in his Preface to the First Edition and also in i, xvii. His treatise was on the required reading-list for Trinity College Sophisters in Burke's time, and with obvious interest Burke mentions Longinus twice in undergraduate letters to Shackleton; cf. A. P. I. Samuels, Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of Burke (Cambridge, 1923), pp. 178, 109–110, 126.

17 Longinus, xv, 1–2. Admitting that the aim of such language is to communicate the speaker's emotion, Longinus stresses the need for clarity in the images which achieve this purpose: It may be worth noting that Dugald Stewart, in challenging Burke's theory of non-visual language in poetry, cites this particular dictum from Longinus; see Collected Works, ed. Sir W. Hamilton (Edinburgh, 1850), ii, 447. Furthermore, Longinus—showing that simple heliotropism which one associates with the outdoor life and lucid thought of ancient Greece—tends always to symbolize his sublime in terms of radiance, whether he is citing the fiat lux of Genesis as the supreme verbal instance, or comparing the “pervading splendor of sublimity” to the blazing sun (xvii, 2). Burke's praise of obscurity in natural objects and in the imagistic quality of poetry, and his contention that “darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light” (ii, xiv), indeed would have puzzled his Greek mentor.

18 Essays, ed. Ker (Oxford, 1926), i, 186.

19 R. D. Havens, “Changing Taste in the 18th Century,” PMLA, xliv (1929), 528.

20 “Burke among the Forerunners of Lessing,” PMLA, xxii (1907), 609. In J. G. Cooper's Letters concerning Taste (London, 1755), pp. 46–47, there is at least a possible anticipation of Burke's theory. After quoting with rapture

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon that bank,”

Cooper repeats the comment of a friend that “this adventitious beauty of Shakespear's seizes the Imagination at once, before we can reduce the Image to a sensible Object, which every meer Picture in Poetry ought for a Test of its Truth to be reduc'd to.”

21 For Goldsmith's disagreement see The Monthly Review, May 1757, p. 477: “Distinction of imagery has ever been held productive of the sublime. The more strongly the poet or orator impresses the picture he would describe upon his own mind, the more apt will he be to paint it on the imagination of his reader.” Murphy in The Literary Magazine, ii (1757), 188, denied the truth of Burke's psychology: “It is a disposition to feel the force of words, and to combine the ideas annexed to them with quickness, that shows one man's imagination to be better than another's.” Burke's rebuttal in the Second Edition consists of the distinction between “a clear expression, and a strong expression,” and in the argument stressing the sympathetic rather than the visual potency of words (v, vii). For a summary of Burke's debate with his critics see H. A. Wichelns, “Burke's Essay and its Reviewers,” JEGP, xxi (1921), 645–661. Gibbon, an interested reader of The Sublime and Beautiful in November 1762, summarizes Burke's theory about words and images, but with scant comment, in his Journal (ed. Lowe), pp. 179–181. This theory was pointed out as one of the prime absurdities of Burke's essay in F. Plumer's anonymous Letter from a Gentleman to his Nephew at Oxford (1772), p. 9 el seq.

22 Berkeley's Works, ed. Fraser (Oxford, 1901), i, 252.

23 Ibid., pp. 274 and 276. See also Fraser's note on ‘ideas’ in the passage cited above, p. 252.

24 Ignoring the residue of emotion assumed by Berkeley—which of course is essential to Burke's æsthetic theory—David Hume writes in terms which are hardly an advance upon Locke: “I believe every one, who examines the situation of his mind in reasoning, will agree with me, that we do not annex distinct and compleat ideas to every term we make use of, and that in talking of government, church, negotiation, conquest, we seldom spread out in our minds all the simple ideas, of which the complex ones are compos'd” (Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge [Oxford, 1896], p. 23).

25 Works, i, 452; the observation however verges upon the commonplace. An able discussion of seventeenth-century theories of the imagination, as the faculty and source of image-making, will be found in Donald F. Bond, “The Neo-Classical Psychology of the Imagination,” ELH, iv (1937), 245–264.

26 Burke's statements in later years to French Laurence and Edmond Malone indicate that the essay was begun during the author's undergraduate days; see Prior's Life of Burke (London, 1854), i, 47 and the same biographer's Malone (London, 1860), p. 154.

27 Berkeley died in Oxford in 1753 and was buried beneath an inscription written by Dr. William Markham, Burke's early London friend and a critic of The Sublime and Beautiful; cf. Sir C. Markham, Memoir of Archbishop Markham (Oxford, 1906), p. 13.

28 Letter of 5 July, 1744, in Samuels, op. cit., p. 49. Late in life, in the Fourth of his Letters on a Regicide Peace, Works (London, 1815), ix, 24, Burke refers to “the excellent queries of the excellent Berkeley.”

29 Burke's ideas about optics in iv, ix, with his assumption of “a vast number of distinct points” of radiation acting upon the retina, recall Berkeley's “visible points or minima visibilia” in the Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (Berkeley's Works, i, 169), although the idea later becomes trite. Burke's discussion of the smoothness of oils as the vehicles of salts, and even his application of the rare word “vellicate” (iv, xx–xxi), may be compared with Siris, in Works, iii, 164.

30 For Burke's study of Berkeley see Life of Johnson, Hill-Powell ed., i, 471–472. From such biographers as Bisset, Life of Burke, 2nd ed. (1800), i, 33, and Prior, Burke, i, 72–73, we hear that Burke had made his careful study of Berkeley in hope of being appointed circa 1752 to the chair of logic at Glasgow, vacated by Adam Smith. In “The Missing Years in Burke's Biography,” PMLA, liii (1938), 1109, I have discussed the evidence for this highly doubtful rumor.

31 Letter of 5 March, 1747, in Samuels, op. cit., p. 126. An account of this new speculation on sense-perception will be found in E. von Erhardt-Siebold, “Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romanticism,” PMLA, xlvii (1932), 577–592. In the same speculative vein Burke had written in iii, xxiv: “But there is such a similitude in the pleasures of these senses, that I am apt to fancy, if it were possible that one might discern colour by feeling (as it is said some blind men have done), that the same colours, and the same disposition of colouring, which are found beautiful to the sight, will be found most grateful to the touch.” Burke probably had in mind Spence's Preface to Blacklock's Poems (1754), p. xlv (a work to which he refers by name in v, v), and in Locke he must have come upon the celebrated story of the blind man who thought scarlet “was like the sound of a trumpet.”

32 Upon Locke's anticipation of this point see MacLean, op. cit., Bk. iii.

33 In ii [iv], he refers to Du Bos, Réflexions critiques (1719), which however had been translated in 1748 by Thomas Nugent. In iv, iv he tells a story about Campanella which he had read in Spon, Recherches curieuses d'antiquité (Lyon, 1683). Under Burke's editorship the Annual Register for 1758 contained a translation of part of Montesquieu's article ‘Goût’ in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie; in later life Burke is found reading French fluently; cf. Madame D'Arblay, Memoirs of Dr. Burney (London, 1832), iii, 171).—In respect to The Sublime and Beautiful, Diderot anticipates in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets some of Burke's conclusions—e.g., “que le beau moment du poète n'est pas toujours le beau moment du peintre,” “que la poésie nous fait admirer des images dont la peinture serait insoutenable.” See Œuvres complètes: Philosophie II (Paris, 1821), p. 95; cf. Burke, v, v–vii. It seems to me very likely that Diderot in turn read The Sublime and Beautiful and incorporated Part n into his Salon de 1767; a long rhapsody on the sublime appears to be little more than a précis of this portion of Burke's essay— in three pages I note at least twenty-seven parallels of imagery and phrase (Œuvres [Paris, 1876], xi, 146–148). According to Morley's Burke (London, 1879), p. 66, Diderot and Burke first met in Paris in 1773.

34 Letter of 25 November, 1757 to Nicolai, Sämtliche Schriften (Leipzig, 1900), xiv, 220. Burke's essay had been published in the preceding April.

35 M. Mendelssohn, Schriften zur Philosophie und Aesthetih (Berlin, 1929), vol. iii, “Anmerkungen über das englische Buch: On the Sublime and the [sic] Beautiful.” That Mendelssohn was still using the First Edition is patent from his references to Burke's treatment of music in iii, xxv and xxvi; in the Second Edition these sections were joined together, and xxvi was devoted to ‘Taste and Smell.’ Hence, in his criticism of Burke's non-imagistic psychology, Mendelssohn lacks the benefit of Burke's rebuttal in 1759. He writes, p. 251: “Der fünfte Theil gefällt mir am wenigsten. Weil wir mit gewissen abstracten Worten nicht allezeit deutliche Begriffe verbinden; so glaubt der Verfasser, wir bedienen uns derselben bloss als Töne, ohne irgend einen Begriff damit zu verknüpfen.” And after a brief summary he asks somewhat testily, “Hat man jemals gezweifelt, dass die Worte gemeiniglich nur eine symbolische Erkenntniss gewähren?” Professor W. G. Howard, PMLA, xxii, 616, n. 1, has a query on this point: “If by ‘symbolische Erkenntniss’ he means recognition through images formed in the imagination, the answer must be that the greatest number of contemporary writers on poetry escaped doubt by taking the thing for granted. If he does not mean this, then the question is out of order. Mendelssohn had before him a copy of the first edition, without Burke's Introduction on Taste. Since this first edition is inaccessible to me, I cannot say to what extent the second, the basis for all subsequent ones, may have been less open to criticism than the first.” A collation of the two texts by the present writer shows that the relevant addition is not the essay “On Taste,” but Burke's fuller exposition of v, v and his new distinction between “a clear expression and a strong expression” in v, vii; these perhaps would have placated his German critic.

36 Bistoria de las Ideas Estéticas, iv, 330.

37 Laokoön, xvi–xvii.

38 Lessing, as has been noted, came upon the book within seven months after the appearance of the First Edition, reading and beginning his translation of it at that time; it seems improbable that he followed it through successive editions. It did not appear in German until Christian Garve's translation (Riga and Leipzig, 1773). Cf. J. W. Draper, 18th Century English Aesthetics: a Bibliography (Heidelberg, 1931), p. 15; Draper, by the way, omits a French translation of it published in London in 1765, listed in the Auction Catalogue of Burke's own library, dispersed in 1833 under the hammer of R. H. Evans; if one may judge by the title, this was also the French translation Herder read in November 1767; cf. Kant, Werke, ed. Cassirer, ix, 65.

39 Laokoön, xii.

40 Ibid., xvi. Varchi in 1546 strikingly anticipated Burke and Lessing in his assertion that actions are fit subjects for poetry, bodies for painting; cf. Howard, PMLA, xxiv, 40 ff. For much the same conclusion, though timidly expressed, see Daniel Webb, The Beauties of Poetry (London, 1762), pp. 82–83, 95.

41 “Psychological Reasons for Lessing's Attitude toward Descriptive Poetry,” PMLA, xxvi (1911), 593–603.

42 See Burke's essay, v, iii; he declares in v, vii, “Now, as there is a moving tone of voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture, which affect independently of the things about which they are exerted, so there are words, and certain dispositions of words, which … touch and move us more than those which far more clearly and distinctly express the subject matter.”

43 Burke's treatment of music, iii, xxv, is hasty and perfunctory. His early mentor W. G. Hamilton once remarked, “Burke understands everything but gaming and music” (Prior, Burke, i, 484).

44 See ii, xvii–xx, with his closing observation, “The modifications of sound, which may be productive of the sublime, are almost infinite.”

45 See ii, vii–x and iv, ix–xviii. He had Newton's Opticks, as indicated in iv, xix, and Cheselden's Anatomy, cited in iv, xv; his earlier interest in optics is shown in letters to Shackleton, 31 January and 25 February, 1746, in Leadbealer Papers (1862), ii, 62 and 37, the latter being placed in incorrect sequence because of the editor's failure to note that 1745 is O. S.

46 The abstract, philosophic mind seems often to reveal the same preference, as illustrated in Kant's Kritik der Urlheilskraft, with its elaborate speculation upon the mathematical and dynamic sublime, and the short shrift which it accords the subject of beauty. Hegel was also keenly attracted to the sublime; in the Aesthetik his long discussion of the sublime as the half-articulate which despises the amenities of the senses, offers interesting comparison with the irritant qualities—angularity, harshness, disorder, obscurity, and tension of the perceptive eye—which Burke ascribes to it.

47 Collation of the texts of 1757 and 1759 shows that in v, vii Burke drops, perhaps intuitively, his earlier attempt to include “words which are used to express the objects of love and tenderness,” and turns his attention exclusively to the rhetorical sublime in these revised passages.

48 Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, ed. Barrett, ii, 528.

49 “The Rights of Man,” Works, ed. Conway, ii, 425. A discussion of the rhetorical beau ideal of the latter eighteenth century will be found in H. F. Harding, English Rhetorical Theory, 1750–1800, summarized in “Cornell University Abstracts of Theses, 1937.”

50 The Sublime and Beautiful, v, vii. Unsympathetic comment on the florid and confused oratory of Burke in his less happy moments, could easily be multiplied from Horace Walpole, John Wilkes, Sir Francis Baring, and others. Burke's rhetorical progression from a restrained style to one “ungracefully gorgeous”—perhaps the result of his attempting to sway an apathetic Parliamentary audience for more than a quarter century—was remarked by Macaulay, Essays (London, 1889), p. 436.