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Optimism and Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2021

Arthur O. Lovejoy
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Extract

The purpose of this paper is, first, to attempt to correct a still rather widely prevalent error concerning the logical import and the usual emotional temper of eighteenth-century optimism, and, second, to point out that the significance in the history of ideas of the multiplication and the popularity of theodicies in the first half of that century consisted less in the tendency of these arguments to diffuse optimistic views of the nature of reality than in their tendency to procure acceptance for certain new ideas of the nature of the good, which the logical exigencies of the optimistic argument involved—ideas pregnant with important consequences for both ethics and aesthetics, since they were to be among the most distinctive elements in what perhaps best deserves to be named “Romanticism.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , December 1927 , pp. 921 - 945
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1927

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References

1 See, for an example, the writer's paper “Rousseau's Pessimist,” Mod. Lang. Notes, XXXVIII (1924), 449; and for an earlier one, Prior's Solomon (1718), a poetical elaboration of the thesis that “the pleasures of life do not compensate our miseries; age steals upon us unawares; and death, as the only cure of our ills, ought to be expected, not feared.”

2 A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), 60–2. Jenyns for the most part merely puts into clear and concise form the arguments of King, Leibniz and Pope; but he differs from these in unequivocally and emphatically rejecting the freedomist solution of the problem of moral evil. His book had a considerable vogue, went into numerous editions, and was translated into French.

3 Ibid., 104, where the curious reader may, if he will, find why this option was “necessary,” and how “Infinite Wisdom” made the best of it.

4 Voltaire, however, is arguing in the poem against two distinct and essentially opposed types of theodicy: the philosophical and necessitarian type, which endeavored to explain such a thing as the Lisbon earthquake as

l'effet des étemelles lois
Qui d'un Dieu libre et bón nécessitent le choix,

and the theological and indeterminist type, which saw in such catastrophes special interpositions of deity in punishment of men's free choice of moral evil. The reasonings aimed at these two opposite objectives Voltaire confusingly runs together.

5 Ethtca, V., Prop. 6.

6 An Essay on the Origin of. Evil by Dr. William King, translated from the Latin with Notes and a Dissertation concerning the Principle and Criterion of Virtue and of the Passions; By Edmund Law, M. A., Fellow of Christ College in Cambridge. I quote from the second edition, Lond., 1732, here referred to as “Essay.”

7 The dates are 1731, 1732, 1739, 1758, 1781.

8 Stephen, English Thought, p. 406.

9 Bolingbroke in the Fragments quotes King frequently and with respect; he recognizes in him the one theologian who “saw plainly” the truth of the thesis which Bolingbroke devotes scores of pages to developing and defending, viz., that man is not the final cause of the creation; and his own argument for optimism, though less methodically stated, follows in great part the same line as King's (see references below). I can see no reason for doubting that in the Fragments as printed we have, as Bolingbroke asserted, in a somewhat expanded form “the notes which were communicated to Mr. Pope in scraps, as they were written,” and utilized by the latter in writing the Essay on Man; the numerous and exact verbal parallels between passages in the Fragments and the Essay are not susceptible of any other probable explanation. (See Bolingbroke's Works, 1809 ed., VII, 278 and VIII, 356). Law wrote in the preface to the 1781 edition of the Essay on the Origin of Evil: “I had the satisfaction of seeing that those very principles which had been maintained by Archbishop King were adopted by Mr. Pope in the Essay on Man.” When this was challenged by a brother-bishop, Pope's truculent theological champion Warburton, Law replied by referring to the testimony of Lord Bathurst, “who saw the very same system in Lord Bolingbroke's own hand, lying before Mr. Pope while he composed his Essay;” and added: “The point may also be cleared effectually whenever any reader shall think it worth his while to compare the two pieces together, and observe how exactly they tally with one another” (op. cit., p. xvii). Such a comparison seems to me to give reason to believe that Pope made use of King's work directly, as well as of Bolingbroke's adaptation of a part of it. Since it was in 1730 that Pope and Bolingbroke were “deep in metaphysics,” and since by 1731 the first three Epistles seem to have been completed (cf. Courthope, V, 242), it must have been from the Latin original, not Law's translation, that the poet and his philosophic mentor drew. Thus essentially the same theodicy appeared almost simultaneously in Law's English prose rendering and in Pope's verse. On the relation of King's work to Haller's Ueber den Ursprung des Uebels (1734) cf. L. M. Price in PMLA, XLI (1926), 945–8.

10 Essay, I, 103.

11 Ibid., 109–113.

12 Ibid., XIX. This argument remained as the usual starting point of a numerous series of subsequent theodicies, some of which have a place in literature: e. g., Victor Hugo still thought it needful to devote a number of lines to the exposition of it in Les Contemplations (“Ce que dit la Bouche d'Ombre,” 350 ff.).

13 See the patristic authorities cited by Sumner in his tr. of Milton's Christian Doctrine, 187, n. 4. The view adopted by Miltqn, however, was of dubious orthodoxy. It had been rejected by Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol., I, q. 61, a. 3; and by Dante, Paradiso XXIX, 37.

14 King, op. cit., I, 116 f. For the same conception of the Scale of Being and its necessary completeness in a well-ordered universe, cf. Bolingbroke, Fragments (Works, 1809, VIII, 173, 183, 186, 192, 218 f., 232, 363, 364–5).

15 Op. cit., 137f, 129–131f, 156. Both King and Law fell into curious waverings, and in the end into self-contradiction, when the question was raised whether the number of degrees in the scale of being is actually infinite. Into this it is unnecessary to enter here.

16 TimįEus, 29.

17 Cf., e. g., Plotinus, Enn. V, 4, 1; IV, 86.

18 Introd. ad Theologiam, III; in Migne, Patrol. Lat., CLXXVIII, cols. 1093–1101.

19 Summa contra Gentiles, I, 75; II, 45; II, 68; II, 71.

20 Liber Sent., I, 442.

21 Essay I, 131. The argument may already be found in Plotinus, Enn. III, 2, 11.

22 Op. cit., 137.

23 For the same argument in Bolingbroke, see Fragments (Works, 1809 ed., VIII, 233, 287, 363, 364–5).

24 Essay on Man, Ep. I, 48, 193–4, 241–4.

25 Essay, I, 147–8; cf. Essay on Man, I: 169:

But all subsists by elemental Strife,
And passions are the elements of life.

26 Ibid., I, 134.

27 Ibid., I, 176. The argument for the necessity of natural evils based upon the principle of plenitude is supplemented by that drawn from the indispensability of uniform general laws; e. g. I, 150–3, 196–7, cf. Essay on Man, I, 145 ff. This part of King's reasoning does not fall within the theme of the present paper.

28 Ibid., I, 184–5.

29 J. Clarke, Discourse concerning Natural Evil, 1719; the same argument in Plotinus, Enn. III, 211. Goldsmith, among others, was still repeating it later in the eighteenth century; v. his Essays (1767), 132.

30 It is only fair to add that King is equally ready to view as “necessary,” and consequently to approve and justify, specific evils less remote from archiépiscopal experience, such as “gout, one of the most tormenting diseases that attend us”—by which, in fact, this resolute optimist was cruelly harassed for nearly half a century, and from an attack of which, according to his biographer, he died. (See Sir C. S. King's volume, 1906, p. 14 and passim). Gout, the archbishop observes, in a sportsmanlike if not wholly edifying vein, has compensations which, on the whole, outweigh its pains: “Who would not rather endure it than lose the pleasure of feeling? Most men are sensible that eating certain meats, and indulging ourselves in the use of several drinks, will bring it; and yet we see this doth not deter us from them, and we think it more tolerable to endure the gout, than lose the pleasure that plentiful eating and drinking yields us.” (I., 177). Why it was “necessary” a priori that these pleasures should be purchasable only at that price remains, in the end, somewhat obscure.

31 Essay, I, 176; cf. also 148–9.

32 Fragments or Minutes of Essays, Sec. XVI.

33 Ethics, I, ad. fin.

34 There is no question of any influence of King upon Leibniz or of Leibniz upon King. Though the Théodicée was not published until 1710, eight years after the De origine mali, the greater part of it was written between 1697 and the beginning of 1705; and the ideas it contains had long been familiar to Leibniz. Cf. Gerhardt's preface to Leibniz's Philosophische Schriften, vol. VI, 3–10.

35 “Remarques sur le livre sur l'origine du mal publié depuis peu en Angleterre,” appended to the Théodicée; Philos. Schriften, VI, 400, ff. Leibniz observes that he is in agreement with King “only in respect to half of the subject;” the disagreement relates chiefly to King's chapter on liberty and necessity, which (quite inconsistently with the implications of his argument for optimism) asserts that God exercised a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae in creating the world.

36 Théodicée, § 124.

37 Théodicée, § 118.

38 Ibid., §§120, 10, 124; cf also 213.

39 On the ambiguities of the term, cf. the writer's “The Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA, XXXIX (1924), 299 ff.

40 A part of Milton's argument in the Areopagitica is perhaps the most remarkable seventeenth-century exception to this universalism.

41 The rôle of the principle of plenitude, as it had been presented by the optimistic writers, in bringing about this transition may most clearly be seen in Schiller's Philosophische Briefe, especially the Theosophie des Julius and the concluding letter; in the passages in the Athenaeum in which Friedrich Schlegel developed the conception of romantische Poesie (on which see the writer's papers, Mod. Lang. Notes, 1916 and 1917); and in Schleiermacher's Reden (especially II and V) and Monologen. I cite only the following: “So ist mir aufgegangen, was jetzt meine höchste Anschauung ist, es ist mir klar geworden, dass jeder Mensch auf eigne Art die Menschheit darstellen soil, in einer eignen Mischung ihrer Elemente, damit auf jede Weise sie sich offenbare, und wirklich werde in der Fiille der Unendlichkeit alles was aus ihrem Schosse hervorgehen kann …. Allein nur schwer und spät gelangt der Mensch zum vollen Bewusstein seiner Eigentumlichkeit; nicht immer wagt ers drauf hinzusehn, und richtet lieber das Auge auf den Gemeinbesitz der Menschheit, den er so liebend and so dankbar festhält; er zweifelt oft, ob er sich als ein eignes Wesen wieder aus ihm ausscheiden soli…. Das eigenste Bestreben der Natur wird oftmals nicht bemerkt, und wenn am deutlichsten sich ihre Schranken offenbaren, gleitet an der Scharfen Ecke das Auge allzuleicht vorbei, und hält nur das Allgemeine fest, wo eben in der Verneinung sich das Eigne zeigt.” (Monologen, ed. Schiele, 1914, p. 30).