John Ogilvie (1733-1813), Presbyterian divine and author, was one of a
group of Scottish literary clergy and a fellow of the Edinburgh Royal
Society. Chambers and Thomson print the following generous estimation of
his work:
Of all his books, there is not one which, as a whole, can be
expected to please the general reader. Noble sentiments, brilliant
conceptions, and poetic graces, may be culled in profusion from the
mass; but there is no one production in which they so predominate,
(if we except some of the minor pieces,) as to induce it to be
selected for a happier fate than the rest. Had the same talent which
Ogilvie threw away on a number of objects, been concentrated on one,
and that one chosen with judgment and taste, he might have rivalled
in popularity the most renowned of his contemporaries.[1]
The present letters reproduced here, along with the two volumes of his
_Philosophical and Critical Observations on Composition_ (London, 1774),
are Ogilvie’s major contributions to literary criticism. The remainder
of his work, which is extensive, is divided almost equally between
poetry and theological inquiry. At least one of his poems, “The Day of
Judgment” (1758), was known to Churchill, Boswell, and Johnson, but
unfortunately for Ogilvie’s reputation Johnson “saw nothing” in it.[2]
I shall attempt no special pleading for Ogilvie here; he is and shall
remain a minor neoclassic theorist. At the very least, however, it can
be said that his methods are reasonably various and that, while his
general critical assumptions are not unique, his control is strong. The
fluidity with which he moves from one related position to another
indicates a mind well informed by the critical tenets of his own time.
If he does not surprise, he is nevertheless an interesting and worthy
exemplar of the psychological tradition in later eighteenth-century
criticism; and his historicism provides, and is intended to provide,
an extensive field for the workings of psychological inquiry.
Thus his initial inquiry, in the first letter, into the Aristotelian
principles of imitation and harmony establishes each as “natural” to the
mind, and his distinctions between the separate provinces of reason and
imagination are for the purpose of assigning to each its separate
intellectual capacities. From these orderings follows his idea that
poetry is of an earlier date than philosophy, the product of an
irregular faculty, less governable than the reason and of swifter
development. In turn, these assumptions lead into a form of historical
primitivism in which the products of the first poets were “extemporary
effusions,” rudely imitative of pastoral scenes or celebratory of the
divine being. Thus the first generic distinction Ogilvie makes is
between pastoral poetry and lyric; the function of the former is to
produce pleasure, the latter to raise admiration of the powers presiding
over nature. As poetry is more natural to the young mind than
philosophy, so is the end of pastoral poetry more easily achieved than
that of the lyric. The difference resides essentially in Ogilvie’s
notion that the pastoral poet contemplates “external objects,” while the
lyric poet regards that which is not immediately available to the senses
and consequently requires a more exuberant invention. What follows upon
these reflections is a rather ingenious form of historical progressivism
in which the civilizing powers of the poet provide the principal
justification for lyric poetry. At work in Ogilvie’s thought is a
conception of the mythopoeic function of the earliest poets whose names
have come down to us. Such poets, however, did not create their mythos,
but imbibed it from the earlier Egyptian civilization and formed
disguised allegorical poems. Here the instructive function of the first
poets is related to the enlarging of the reader’s imagination, so that
Ogilvie’s rather shrewd defense of lyric poetry is based upon the
civilizing effects of imaginative appeal.
The infancy of poetry is related to the infancy of civilization, and the
analogical possibilities of the one to the other sustain his argument at
every point. If his historicism is dubious, his discourse is neatly
illustrative of a neoclassic critical method and of the kind of
psychological assumptions upon which such arguments could proceed. From
the rather copious use of allegory and metaphor, as civilizing
instruments, Ogilvie traces the rise of the religious fable as part of
the inevitable sequence of imaginative development. To account,
therefore, for the irregularity of the ode, for the “enthusiasm,
obscurity and exuberance” (p. xxiv) which continue to characterize it,
he refers to its anciently established character, a character not
susceptible to amelioration by speculative rules. He allows, however,
that both the “Epopee” (or epic) and the drama were gradually improved,
and the informing principle of his historical progressivism is again
patent.
The modifications of the ode are from the fictitious theology of Orpheus
and Museus to the elegance and grace of Anacreon, Horace, and Sappho. It
is mainly Horace whom Ogilvie has in view as the exemplar of the lyric
poet, though “a professed imitator both of Anacreon and Pindar”
(p. xxx). We can distinguish, therefore, several different criteria
which contribute to Ogilvie’s criticism: (1) a unity of sentiment
consistent with a variety of emotions; (2) a propriety of the passions
in which vivacity is controlled by the circumstances of character; (3) a
just relation between language and sentiment; (4) elegant and pointed
expression (“sallies and picturesque epithets” [p. xxxi.]) both to
heighten the passions expressed and to draw from them their less obvious
effects. Such distinctions define Ogilvie’s typical insistence upon
copying Nature, by which he means that the lyric poet’s task is not only
to follow the workings of the mind, but to heighten passion in a way
that is more consistent with the nature of the passion itself than with
its action in any particular mind. His criticism looks to the
representation of “the internal movements of the mind warmed by
imagination,” yet “exposed in the happiest and most agreeable attitudes”
(p. xxxv). The relation between the empirical and the ideal is a crux
common to Ogilvie and neoclassic theory, not entirely resolved here by
the practical and referential method of citing Horace’s shorter odes.
But it is a subject which comes in for more extended treatment in his
second letter, in my judgment a far more critically ambitious letter and
one in which his very fair critical abilities are more conspicuously
apparent.
The second letter undertakes to explain the rules of lyric poetry, even
as the first was concerned with the defects and causes of the poetry.
Ogilvie rehearses a characteristic later eighteenth-century view of the
imagination and makes again the conventional distinctions between
faculties appropriate to philosophy and to poetry. His discussion of the
function of judgment is, if anything, more conventional within the
boundaries of neoclassic criticism than is his view of the imagination.
Its typical role as concerned with the “disposition of materials” has a
pedigree extending backward to Hobbes and the critical climate of the
early years of Restoration England. Principally, Ogilvie is eager to
assert that the poet is as judicious as the philosopher, by which,
however, he does not intend to put forth a view of the cognitive
function of the poet, but rather the justice with which he paints the
passions. Essentially, therefore, Ogilvie’s distinction between poet and
philosopher is for the sake of distinguishing between the former’s
greater interest in the passions, the latter’s more proper concern with
the reason. Once again there is nothing unusual in his treatment of the
subject at this time, with the possible exception that Ogilvie’s
conception of the imagination is not so comprehensive as that being
developed by Alexander Gerard, William Duff, and some of the other
contemporary associationists. In order, however, to
emphasize the importance of imagination, by which he largely means the
imagistic liveliness of the poet’s mind, he allows that the imagination
is secondary only in didactic or ethical poetry. Such forms are perhaps
best understood as hybrid, a kind of poetizing of philosophy, a sort of
reasoning in verse, and therefore forms in which the imagination is not
given full exercise. Given his premises it is not surprising that
Ogilvie often emphasizes ornamentation or imagistic display and supports
his position by conceiving of the modern lyric as descended from the
religiously consecrated ode. The sublime and exuberant imagery of the
latter exists reductively as an important virtue of the present lyric.
As Ogilvie develops his argument in the second letter, it is apparent
also that the imagination functions as that faculty which best
contemplates the sublime and the wonderful. The imagination is thus
contemplative and expressive, and both functions are justified through
the passions that admiration evokes. In sum, the imagination is evoked
by the passions, a proposition which suggests why, for Ogilvie, the
characteristic mark of genius is a highly animated sensibility. It is
apparent also that Ogilvie’s criteria include sympathy, for sympathy is
that which compels the transmission of the poet’s sentiments to his
readers. What is dimly present here is a theory of the poetic occasion,
an occasion brought about by the poet’s participation in a common
cultural condition which inspires the communication of sentiments, both
common and important, from one person to another. Corollary to this
proposition is the notion that the poetic achievement is measured by the
uniqueness of the poet’s invention. Thus, it is not merely the poet’s
choice of a sublime subject that is important, but also the excellence
with which he treats an unpromising subject. Ogilvie’s criteria demand
not merely a celerity of imagining, or a facility for the sublime, but a
degree of innovativeness which wins the highest regard.
To follow the argument is to realize that his conception of the
imagination includes judgment, celerity, and innovation. All three
functions are basic to the imaginative act. It is the last, however,
which he most emphasizes; and it is apparent, I think, that one
intention of his argument is to refute the assumption that the sublime
is the principal object of the poetic imagination. It is clear also that
Ogilvie is attentive to the excesses of imagism, even as he makes the
variety of a poet’s images (along with the boldness of his transitions
and the picturesque vivacity of his descriptions) one of the major terms
of critical assessment. Especially, he is attentive to that which
detracts from the principal object, and thus a kind of concentration of
purpose emerges as a tacit poetic value, a concentration to which he
refers as a “succession of sentiments which resemble ... the subject of
his Poem” (lii). Here again Ogilvie has not so much a unity of structure
in view as a unity of the passions, and it is this particular theme
which generally guides his discourse; it is the general premise upon
which his inquiry depends and on which his major justification of lyric
poetry is based. In more modern terms we might here speak of the
principle of the correlative, which Ogilvie rehearses in his treatment
of the correspondence of subject and metaphor, and even indeed of
metaphor as a mode of vision. Poetic discourse, for Ogilvie, does not
depend upon metaphor, but without metaphor such discourse would be
impossible.
What is important, then, is the principle of propriety, a neat accord
between the figure and the subject, a kind of aperçu. Thus, metaphors
properly employed are “generally short, expressive, and fitted to
correspond with great accuracy to the point which requires to be
illustrated” (pp. liii-liv). Second only to this consideration is that
of color, by which he means tone or emphasis, and here again with a view
toward the overall unity of the passions. It is perhaps worth noting
that both considerations are relevant to Ogilvie’s sense of the
imagination as a judicious faculty operating independently of the
reason, but nevertheless obedient to the laws of logical form, organic
relationships, and proper successions, all of which imply an idea of
structure.
Much of the time Ogilvie is occupied with quite familiar and
conventional critical problems. The relation between regularity and
irregularity is one that he particularly stresses, and his resolutions
tend to allow a certain wildness as natural to the imagination, even as
evidence of the faculty. He is, however, more inclined to permit bold
and spirited transitions in the shorter ode than in the longer ode. As
usual Ogilvie’s critical principles are related to the nature of the
work in question, and a greater irregularity is natural to the shorter
ode since it presumes the imitation of the passions. But it is important
to recognize that Ogilvie stresses not only the imitation of the
passions, but the exercise of them as well; and the relation between the
one and the other forms at bottom the larger principles on which his
second letter is based. We might wish to say that he has in view the
education of the passions, not merely by imitating them, but, as it
were, by drawing from the reader his own possibilities for sensible
response. It does not at all imply pre-romantic values to suggest that
Ogilvie’s criticism is directed toward a frank exploitation of the
reader’s emotion. As Maclean makes clear,[3] such interests are hardly
unique to romantic criticism. Bishop Lowth, for example, distinguished
between the internal source and the external source of poetry,
preferring the former because through it the mind is immediately
conscious of itself and its own emotions.[4] Ogilvie does not quite make
the same statement, but his position easily coincides with it; and if,
with John Crowe Ransom,[5] we consider romantic poetry as uniquely
directed toward the exploitation of the feelings, we shall be surprised
by any number of minor eighteenth-century critics who are unabashedly
interested in similar values. Ogilvie’s position very much resembles
Thomas Twining’s view that the “description of passions and emotions by
their sensible effects ... [is what] principally deserves the name of
imitative.”[6]
In accord with the psychological bias informing his essay, Ogilvie tends
to reduce the importance of narrative events in favor of vivid and
picturesque descriptions, for the latter most immediately communicate
themselves to the reader and most expressly realize the translation from
thought to feeling. Once again it is the uniqueness of rendering that he
has in mind, the innovative cast of the poet’s mind which transforms the
familiar and by so doing gives it a newly affective power. It is
important to recognize that Ogilvie shares with his contemporaries a
more limited sense of the varieties of subject-matter than we are likely
to grant. But as this is so for him, and as indeed this condition is a
function of eighteenth-century historiography, it helps to explain the
emphasis he places upon the uniqueness with which the subject is
realized. Over and again such an interest shapes his inquiries and
becomes both an attribute and a test of a poet’s capacity. These remarks
need to be qualified only by his inquiry into personification: for here
it is the expectation of the mind that must not be disappointed, and
that which is iconographically established (the figure of Time, for
example) should not be violated.
While Ogilvie is not a major critic a good part of his charm and
interest for us stems from a mind that is not in the least doctrinaire.
His method is inductive, his appeal is always to the human psychology as
that can be known experientially, and his standards are Aristotelian (if
by such a reference we mean to signify a procedure based upon the known
effects of known works). While there is nothing in these letters that
deviates from the psychological tradition in later eighteenth-century
criticism, it is also evident that Ogilvie is not really an
associationist, and that he is less interested in the creative
functioning of the poet’s imagination than in the precepts of a
psychological humanism which underscore his criteria and give validity
to his remarks on the range and appeal of lyric poetry. In sum, his
historicism exists as a justification for his defense of lyric poetry
and is intended to provide a basis for the psychological bias of his
argument.