Addison's Classical Criticism and the Origins of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

Addison's Classical Criticism and the Origins of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics Paul Davis Joseph Addison's fame as a critic—like his literary reputation in general—rests on The Spectator. In particular, his series of Spectator papers on "The Pleasures of the Imagination" (June-July 1712) is widely recognised as marking the epochal transition from the author-centered neoclassical poetics of England's Augustan age to the new reader-centered, psychological mode of eighteenth-century aesthetics. But long before he became Mr. Spectator, during the first phase of his literary career as a scholar-poet at Oxford in the 1690s, Addison produced two substantial critical works about classical poets: "An Essay on the Georgics," prefixed to the translation of the poem in John Dryden's complete Works of Virgil (1697); and what I'll refer to as his "Notes on Ovid," notes Addison appended to his translations from Books II and III of the Metamorphoses published in the fifth instalment of Jacob Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies (1704). These works were much admired in Addison's lifetime and for generations afterwards: Samuel Johnson found in the Ovid notes "specimens of criticism sufficiently refined and subtle," while the "Essay" "set the terms for discussion of georgic poetry for over a century."1 Today, though, they are little known, even to specialists in the period. What scholarly discussion they have received has sought to establish how far they anticipate Addison's later aesthetic principles. However, all these existing accounts are marred to a greater or lesser extent by mistakes and misconceptions about Addison's early career carried over from nineteenth-century sources. The first half of this article corrects these errors, particularly regarding the composition dates of the two works and the order in which they were written. The date usually given for the "Essay" is 1693 and for the "Notes" 1697. Drawing on a wealth of hitherto unreported evidence, I show that these dates are back to front: in fact, Addison wrote the "Notes on Ovid" in 1693–94 and the "Essay on the Georgics" in 1696–97. In the second half of the article, I use that revised chronology to offer a new account of the place of Addison's classical criticism [End Page 693] in his personal development as a critic and the history of criticism more generally around the turn of the eighteenth century. The five years from 1693 to 1697, often dismissed as the juvenile or student stage of Addison's career by commentators for whom everything he wrote before The Spectator is mere prelude, were in fact a richly productive and pivotal period in Addison's writing life, his heyday as a classical scholar-poet. Before 1693, he was indeed a novice writer, with only a couple of neo-Latin panegyrics to his name; but by 1697 he had produced all but one of his major classical translations, which won the respect of Dryden, and the set of eight boldly innovative neo-Latin imitations of Virgil and Horace which made his name in learned circles across Europe. Situating Addison's classical criticism correctly within this period of rapid creative growth is vital. Backdating the "Notes on Ovid" to 1693–4 does not make them juvenile works; on the contrary, as I suggest in a brief discussion, the earlier dating serves to reveal the full extent of their originality. But correcting the date of the "Essay on the Georgics" from 1693 to 1696–97 has more far-reaching implications, explored at length here. The mid-1690s were especially fertile years for critical thinking about Virgil in England, spurred by the great project of Dryden's Virgil. Addison capitalised on this boom in his "Essay," drawing in particular on two works translated into English in 1694 and 1695 which offered advanced variants of neoclassical ideas about the Aeneid. In the final section of the article, by tracing Addison's debts to these works, and pinpointing where he went beyond them, I read the "Essay on the Georgics" as a watershed in his evolution as a critic and in the wider transition from neoclassicism to the psychological aesthetics of the coming age. I explain how it was that Addison effectively...