Wishing a festive holiday to everyone who is celebrating today.In class today, we explored the cultural and political climate which surrounded the English Jacobins. In reaction to The Terror which followed in the wake of the French Revolution, many liberally minded Britons were branded as French-sympathizing traitors and their beliefs were cast as anti-British. Specifically, Canning's Anti-Jacobin poetry played heavily on this France-England divide by presenting Jacobinism as diametrically opposed to English nationalism.
In searching for source material, it was much easier to find expressly Anti-Jacobin texts. This is due in part to the fact that the Jacobins were less of a cohesive group than the Anti-Jacobins. That is, many people wrote on certain social issues but did not necessarily identify as Jacobins. On the other hand, Anti-Jacobins tended to oppose such progressive writers by grouping them together and attacking them as pro-French or anti-British. In many instances, such as in Canning's Ode to Jacobinism, Anti-Jacobins simply painted a gross caricature of the Jacobins. In class, it was suggested that, by doing so, the Anti-Jacobins were guilty of a kind of fear mongering by suggesting that progressive writers would lead England and its people to hell.
The Anti-Jacobins tended to write off Jacobins as undereducated. This attitude is evident in Canning's works when he attacks the "philosophic train" of the Jacobins, which included the works of writers such as Paine and Rousseau. In contrast, Paine's writing is rather respectful of Edmund Burke and maintains a fairly professional air throughout.
Question: To what extent were the English Jacobins a real threat to English nationalism? Conversely, to what extent did the Anti-Jacobins overreact? Consider the way in which Canning's poetry addresses Jacobin texts such as Paine's essay.
Many of you may have heard of the Jacobins before in other English or history courses. During the French Revolution, Jacobins were members of the Jacobin Club. The Jacobin Club was arguably the most notorious political club during the Revolution largely due to their radical support of the Revolution. The term Jacobin assumed a larger context, eventually applied to anyone in support of revolutionary opinions. The term manifested in English culture upon the creation of George Canning’s newspaper “The Anti-Jacobin.” Much like the French who supported the French Revolution were labeled Jacobins, so were British citizens who shared this sentiment.
In Canning’s poem “New Morality” he writes “Condorcet filter’d through the dregs of Paine, each pert adept disowns a Briton’s part, and plucks the name of England from his heart” (3). Canning specifically mentions Thomas Paine, one of the primary influences of the English Jacobins. He connects Paine with this anti-nationalistic sentiment that embodies the arguments leveled against the Jacobins. Paine’s “Rights of Man” argued that political revolutions are acceptable when a government ceases protecting the individual and natural rights of its citizens.
After reading both Canning’s poem and “Ode to Jacobinism”, how do these texts frame the Jacobins? Are they seen as a threat or just a temporary fad? Also, what do these texts suggest about the political culture in England?
During our discussion today, we looked at several different perspectives on the sublime and its interpretations. To begin with, we noted the similarities and differences between Burke’s and Kant’s ideas of the sublime. In doing so, we established some binaries that most scholars consider to be important to the understanding of the sublime: order vs. chaos, pleasure vs. terror, confined vs. boundless, and the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.
Next, we split into groups to discuss some specific questions from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. We found a tremendous amount of sublime imagery, from the vastness of the night sky to comparisons between God and worms. Through attempts to illustrate Young’s sublime mentalities, we began to explore the impossibility of truly conveying and quantifying a sublime experience. Additionally, we considered the concept of time and its use as a both a rational tool of order and an apparatus derived from the sublime.
Finally, we perused Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” to push our understanding of the sublime into the realm of gendered differences. These differences in experience between a “male” and a “female” sense of the sublime hearken back to the binaries considered at the beginning of class. We concluded by analyzing the difference between an unrestrained sublime that is impossible to account for and a more reassuring definition of the sublime in which we are able to rationalize the infinite and terrifying aspects of a sublime experience.
These final thoughts bring us to an interesting impasse. In order to discuss the sublime in class today, we followed an assignment with ordered instructions, posted questions, and attempted to reach finite conclusions about a subject that, by definition, is supposed to be too large to understand or quantify. Is this the proper way to go about studying the sublime? Can an author (or in the case of William Blake, an artist of any kind) really convey a sublime experience for readers to fully grasp? Or should a different approach be taken? What might that approach be?
The Sublime as we understand it today wasn’t conceptualized until the 18th century. Up until this point it had been scantly examined and was understood apart from the aesthetic context of which it is now inherently linked. During the 18th century, perhaps precipitated by the enlightenment agenda, examination of the Sublime garnered the attention of many prominent philosophers and intellectuals of relevant disciplines. The foremost contributors were philosophers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Both offered unique interpretations, which, though momentarily conflict, are for the most part mutually supportive and concerted.
The primary distinction they agreed upon, and that which is contemporarily most attributed to the notion of the Sublime, is its dissimilarity with beauty. Despite the likeness of the pleasure they induce, beauty and the Sublime are distinct from each other. Whereas beauty is the result of form, continuity and limitation, sublimity is the result of chaos, uncertainty and infinity. The sublime has a power incomprehensible to the observer in both range and force. This uncertainty elicits a particular terror, akin to the pleasure incited by beauty.
Kant and Burke, however, do differ on additional points of emphasis. Burke believes the observer’s particular terror is simply a heightened sense of fear in the face of something far more powerful than himself. Kant focuses not on the individual’s physical awareness, but on her spiritual awareness. He says that when people are confronted with the sublime, their resultant fearfulness stems from the sense of an unrestrained, unintentional magnificence,. This sense of unhindered might is due to the absence of an artist. Therefore, Kant’s Sublime can only be natural, not synthetic. The observance of manmade objects can’t but be affected by the artist’s intent. The observer simply can’t help but infer the artwork’s purpose. It’s purposefulness in the absence of intended purpose that elicits fear within the observer of the sublime. Therefore the sublime is strictly subjective. The observer instinctively assumes purpose in something so immense and grand, in spite of the absence of an actual creator. This condition engenders fearfulness in the observer, but it’s not a physical fear; it’s a spiritual one.
After perusing Anna Laetitia Barbauld's “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” and Edward Young’s“Night Thoughts,” which understanding of the Sublime would you attribute to each author?