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Unit 11: Addison-Pleasures of Imagination ...

No pleasing Intricacies intervene; Notes
No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
Grove nods at grove, each Alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
Although the Chinese influence is reflected in Addison’s account of the influence of natural
beauty in artistic construction, can it be effectively argued against Addison that the Chinese
influence would not endure since historically those pleasures depended upon the factor of
novelty more so than those of greatness or æsthetic beauty?
10. Addison writes, “We are pleased as well with comparing their Beauties [of works of nature], as
with surveying them, and can represent them to our Minds, either as Copies or Originals.
Examine closely whether or not Addison views beauty as resulting from nature or from the
recognition of the originality of nature. Does the delight stem from the imposition of pattern
and order from the mind upon nature or from the effects of the natural form and arrangement
of natural objects upon the attentive mind?

11.6 Critical Appreciation

One of the dominant practices in contemporary eighteenth-century literary studies is reading art
and aesthetics as ideology. This practice commonly issues in the specific claim that eighteenth-
century literary writing and aesthetics serve the interests and values of the middle class or
bourgeoisie, which is understood to be the rising or emerging group within a society whose
economic structure can reasonably be referred to as “capitalism.” Indeed, as Lisa von Sneidern
puts it in a recent article in Eighteenth-Century Studies, a journal that has encouraged and welcomed
this approach, “it has become nearly commonplace to disclose how complicit the belles lettres
were with the emergence of bourgeois capitalism and colonialism.”
Since Addison’s essays on the pleasures of the imagination are, if not the origin of eighteenth-
century English aesthetics as some have argued, then at least of central importance to English
speculation about art during the period, it is not surprising to find that both they and the periodical
in which they appeared are exhibits in the case for eighteenth-century aesthetics as bourgeois
ideology. In what, for those engaged in this project, was an extremely influential book published
in 1962 but not translated into English until 1989, Jurgen Habermas identifies The Spectator as a
major institution of “the bourgeois public sphere,” which he sees emerging in eighteenth-century
western Europe. Following Habermas, Robert Holub discussed Addison’s aesthetics and “its place
in this atmosphere of bourgeois justification and preparation,” while Terry Eagleton discussed his
literary criticism as part of “a project of a bourgeois cultural politics.” Carole Fabricant, unhappy
with the way in which literary critics were ignoring social and political history, then tried to give
some textual support to the argument by citing and commenting on Addison’s essays on the
pleasures in her essay, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century.”
Though Eagleton passes over Addison’s aesthetics in his later major treatment of the subject, The
Ideology of the Aesthetic, Erin Mackie has recently reaffirmed, with some adjustments, Habermas’
view of Addison’s periodical as “an exemplary organ of the bourgeois public sphere” and proceeded
to discuss Addison’s aesthetics as a contribution to the “cultural aesthetic of bourgeois ideology.”
That this case is untenable becomes clear, I propose, as soon as we begin to take into account some
of the work that has been done by historians of eighteenth-century society and historians of post-
Renaissance political thought since Habermas presented his vision of eighteenth-century English
society and ideology thirty-eight years ago. By doing so, we can see not just that the understanding
of Addison’s aesthetics as bourgeois ideology is misguided, but also that the commitment to
interdisciplinary studies that is supposedly a hallmark of the criticism supporting this understanding
is weak. That the case is untenable is further evident once we consider those passages from

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