Introduction

i

To anyone who reads these essays, it will be obvious that the arguments rest on a central principle of judgment and interpretation; I assume that for most literature produced more than a hundred years ago, the aesthetic value is best approached by way of the meaning—i.e., that meaning, implicit, plain, or explicit, which the author invites the reader to share with him.^[1] "Es gibt kein Verstehen ohne Wertgefühl," says Dilthey; but the maxim may be reversed.^[2]

In this spirit I have tried to survey methods of implying or suggesting meaning in literary works attached to a tradition loosely named Augustan. Critics often talk as if English authors of the period 1660–1820 who are morally didactic and who strive for an air of clarity cannot also imply meanings with the utmost subtlety. Or they talk as if implication and covert meaning, to interest us, have to disagree with the more open pronouncements of an author.

[1] Generally, in my use of "meaning" and "implication," I follow the analysis of E. D. Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 49–51, 61–67, 89–102.

[2] Wilhelm Dilthey, "Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik," Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1957), V, 336.

I wish to show that subtlety and indirection do not by their nature work against didacticism or an apparently lucid style. To illustrate generic differences within the common techniques, I have chosen a playwright, an essayist, a poet, and a novelist. I assume throughout that in all genres certain themes (politics, religion, sexual passion) are more likely to call for implication than others. I also assume that authors normally indicate their views on such themes by the moral judgments they implicitly pass on the people (real or fictitious) who figure in their stories or expositions. So the concept of heroism naturally becomes a focus for the elaboration of the themes.

If four such different authors can fit inside the same program, one reason is that they share an acquiescent view of the social order and a distrust of courtiers and of courtly aristocrats. Dryden arrived at this outlook after the Glorious Revolution. But in his earlier, heroic plays, I think one may find him already uneasy with the notions of heroism expected by the court that patronized him. Near the end of his career, in the poem addressed to his cousin, John Driden of Chesterton, he sketched a social and political philosophy which was, I believe, more natural to him, and the lineaments of which can still be traced in the novels of Austen. Swift mouthed a reverence for the crown, the court, and the aristocracy while his friends directed the government of England. But after they fell, his intuitive suspicion of unearned power displayed itself in his greatest works. Although Pope flirted with courtliness in Windsor Forest , his mature poems glisten with political alienation and scorn for the highest social classes.

In dealing with English literature of the period 1660–1820, therefore, a critic can discover general grounds for drawing out the covert or indirect meanings of accomplished authors. The institutions which provide the closest context of high literary functions are social. For artists and audiences of the years I survey, the theory or myth of a social hierarchy which was rational and enduring remained central to a view of the common weal. At first, the reaction against civil war, then the threat of

Jacobitism, then the expansion of industry and trade during a series of imperialist wars, turned intellectual effort away from disruptive speculations about the social organism. The cause of national unity against enemies like Jacobitism, France and Popery, or France and revolution discouraged the promoters of constitutional reform. Men like Mandeville, Wilkes, Fox, and Godwin did not unite behind them the section of the people that supplied the creators and patrons of imaginative literature.

In religious doctrine, during these years, the community of the Established Church softened its challenge to Dissent until specific articles of faith had little bearing on the religious principles of the literary population. "I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals," said Austen.^[3] Swift's venom against Presbyterianism, Fielding's distrust of Methodism, Scott's sympathetic critique of both Roman Catholicism and the narrowness of the Covenanters, Coleridge's doubts about the divinity of Christ, represent stages illustrating a gradual expansion of the idea of Christianity for those who delighted in poems, novels, and plays. But attitudes toward coarseness and obscenity remained stable.

In all genres the virtues of the hero of romance—honor, physical courage, the exaltation of personal fame over the common weal—gave way to varieties of Christian morality. Even more important, the ideal of the landed country gentleman as the exemplary social type persisted in the literary imagination.

With such common elements in mind I suggest that the ideological context within which poetic implication^[4] does its main work was easy to define from the accession of Charles II to the death of George III. Even after we establish that context, some critics doubt that interpretations can be valid without reference to the individual interpreter. But I believe we can arrive at sound interpretations if we keep inside a proper frame-

[3] Letters , ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 410.

[4] I use "poetry" in the sense of imaginative literature, whether prose or verse, lyric or epic, drama or novel.

work and limit our terms. Instead of seeking to demonstrate my case to all nations in all ages of the world, I wish to persuade listeners who already care about the free aesthetic experience of literature and who have a fair knowledge of works in various genres produced during the centuries from Chaucer to Tennyson.

I also take a narrow view of the terms "imply" and "implication." It is easy but dangerous to assume that polarities in literary terminology refer to mutually exclusive divisions which encompass the whole of a literary realm. If we employ words like "explicit" and "implicit," or "statement" and "suggestion," a reader may suppose that all discourse must belong to one or the other department.

Actually, however, most discourse is neither explicit nor implicit. The speech of an author cannot belong to either of these categories unless he seems aware of the fact. We do not apply the terms "implicit" and "explicit" to apparently unintentional effects. To be more precise, I suggest that in most speech we do not consciously or deliberately either speak out or veil our meaning. We merely say what we have to say in a context that supports, directs, and limits meaning. Between the two extremes of "implicit" and "explicit" lies a broad zone of speech that does not pretend to be deliberate.

If I seem confident in elucidating the works I examine, one reason is that I conceive of my problem not in terms of a general theory of hermeneutics but as centered on particular acts of literary interpretation. These acts take place between a speaker and a listener preoccupied with meanings controlled by art. One of the skills of literary genius is finding verbal equivalents for the gestures or vocal emphases which frame or focus acts of implication in conversation. Poetry differs from talk, confession, psychoanalytical sessions, etc., in that its meaning cannot be verified by spontaneous self-correction or impromptu cross-questioning in response to immediate evidence of misconstruction.^[5]

[5] Cf. Roman Jakobson on everyday phatic function and metalan-"Linguistics and Poetics," in T. A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (New York: Technology Press, 1960), pp. 355–56.

Here, like most analysts of artful implication, I do not start from an infinite number of possibilities. In normal acts of literary interpretation we select one alternative from among several—often only two. Is Defoe ironical (we ask), in a scene from Moll Flanders , or is he not? The question we ask is seldom which is the perfect and irrefutable interpretation but rather which of two interpretations is the more probable. Now the choice among two, three, or four interpretations can be argued more convincingly than the absolute demonstration of a single one as quite perfect.

So also we do not address all possible listeners. In normal acts of interpretation we select an audience concerned with and prepared for the argument which we produce; and we judge that argument to be adequate if we can bring over this audience. When one claims that Austen implies a distrust of the peerage in Mansfield Park , one does not try to persuade listeners who have read no English novels of the nineteenth century. The chosen audience, to be persuaded of one out of two or three possible interpretations, constitutes a simpler, easier challenge than the human mind under the aspect of eternity searching for the absolutely true, undeniable explication of a crux in the Gospel according to St. John.

In choosing among several interpretations, I work from Dilthey's premise that context is normally the best guide—e.g., when one tries to decide whether or not a sentiment expressed by a character in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe is implicitly recommended by the play.^[6] Sometimes, internal or rhetorical analysis can be determinate. Far more often, however, an interpretative critic sways his chosen audience by considering the actual,

[6] Dilthey, "Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik," p. 331. Cf. E. H. Gombrich, "The Priority of Context over Expression," in C. S. Singleton, ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 68–104; also Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), passim. The example of Aureng-Zebe is of course my own.

shared world to which the literary work refers—perhaps by recalling the occasion which gave rise to the work, perhaps by sketching the circumstances which the work invites the reader to take for granted. It is largely by such means that one decides whether or not Swift was satirizing all "projectors" (i.e., all advocates of schemes for relieving human misery) in A Modest Proposal .

Finally, the drawing out of implications depends on imaginative sympathy. The listener must feel he can put himself in the place of the poet (known or unknown) as the subject of an imaginatively shared experience. He must, as Dilthey says, penetrate the inner creative process itself and then proceed to the outer and inner form of the literary work.^[7] For example, when one elucidates a poem by Pope, one starts from a confidence that the author was supremely aware of the implications of his words, that he foresaw what readers might make of his innuendoes; the poet—we therefore feel—must have known that the audience of The Dunciad might associate the goddess Dulness with Queen Caroline herself as the corrupt zenith of a corrupt civilization. In drawing out the implications of Goldsmith's "The Traveller," one lacks such assurance.

Sympathetic penetration is a mystery, and can be an object of skepticism. Yet it is easy enough to defend. As Schleiermacher observed, we perform the act incessantly during routine communications with others, and human life would be impossible if we did not.^[8] We verify the act by the consensus of our chosen audience—the person we are talking to, or the listeners whom we try to persuade of an interpretation. There is a mystery in one person's intuitively grasping what another means when he says, "I see something green," or "I am hungry," or in a woman's understanding of a child who complains, "I feel

[7] Selected Writings , trans. and ed. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 259.

[8] "The Hermeneutics" (originally 1819), in New Literary History 10 (1979): 14–15.

lonely." These mysteries are no smaller than the leap of imagination demanded of us when Wordsworth or Stevens responds to a woman's song, or when T. S. Eliot responds to Sappho. For the purpose of establishing the context of meaning is, as Eliot says,

not primarily that we should be able to think and feel, when reading the poetry, as a contemporary of the poet might have thought and felt, though such experience has its own value; it is rather to divest ourselves of the limitations of our own age, and the poet, whose work we are reading, of the limitations of his age, in order to get the direct experience, the immediate contact with his poetry.^[9]

ii

The contrast between theory and practice calls for detailed examination. Scholars who wish to establish the general principles underlying the techniques of creative genius are ill-advised when they draw their evidence from the pronouncements of the artists without an exact analysis of their works. The practice of irony and satire is peculiarly subject to this caveat. Poets of the Restoration and the eighteenth century inherited a tradition of apologizing for satirical thrusts, and they invoked that tradition even when it was inappropriate. During the same period, a standard of lucidity existed which writers normally respected but which they also undermined, covertly, for special purposes.

Dryden liked to define "wit" as "a propriety of thoughts and words"^[10] —i.e., lucidity and decorum combined. At least, this is how Swift enlarged a parallel definition: "When a man's thoughts are clear, the properest words will generally offer themselves first; and his own judgment will direct him in what order to place them, so as they may be best understood."^[11] It

[9] "The Frontiers of Criticism," penultimate paragraph, in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), pp. 130–31.

[10] "Apology for Heroic Poetry" and preface to Albion and Albanius , in Essays , ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), I, 190, 270.

[11] Letter to a Young Gentleman , in Prose Works , IX, 68.

is in fact fair to say that Lord Kames spoke for his age when he declared that "perspicuity ought not to be sacrificed to any other beauty whatever."^[12]

If we doubted these witnesses, we should still find the authors themselves complaining that often when they tried to speak clearly, evil misinterpreters distorted their meaning. "Many an honest, well-meaning text has met with a wicked comment," said John Dennis.^[13] In An Essay on Criticism , Pope echoed Dryden and Congreve, blaming those who, "scandalously nice , / Will needs mistake an author into vice " (ll. 556–57). The writer of The Craftsman , no. 2, remarked, "[No] man is safe against the subtleties and finesses of lawyers and state chymists , who can extract poison out of the most innocent things. . . . We have seen, in some reigns, remote allegories , ironical expressions , and the most distant innuendo's explain'd . . . to a man's destruction."^[14] So also Gulliver cried out, in blazing innocence, to his cousin Sympson,

[You said] that you were afraid of giving offence [i.e., by publishing Gulliver's Travels ]; that people in power were very watchful over the press; and apt not only to interpret, but to punish every thing which looked like an inuendo (as I think you called it). But pray, how could that which I spoke so many years ago, and at above five thousand leagues distance, in another reign, be applyed to any of the Yahoos, who now are said to govern the herd. . . .^[15]

The author of The Doctrine of Innuendo's Discuss'd registered a similar protest. Defending the transparently allusive and polemical history of England by "Mr. Oldcastle," he wrote:

These remarks are laid down in such a plain and ingenuous manner, that one would imagine they could give no offence to

[12] Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (Edinburgh and London: A. Millar, 1762), II, 256 (chap. 18, sect. 2, para. 3).

[13] The Impartial Critick , in Critical Works , ed. E. N. Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939), I, 31.

[14] London, Dec. 12, 1726.

[15] Prose Works , XI, 6.

any one; and as they are matters of fact extracted from the best historians, of things transacted some ages ago, how invidious is it in any man to wrest an author's meaning, and draw parallels where none were design'd?^[16]

The Doctrine of Innuendo's Discuss'd is a whole pamphlet in which the author plays the game of pretending to be clear, candid, and straightforward while producing implicit condemnations of the persons he claims to be disregarding. His fundamental position is an irony much enjoyed by Swift and Pope:

[That] a person entirely innocent of any crime should be ruffled at the mentioning of any villain who had happened ages before to be in the same post with himself, and construe every reflection upon him as a satyr upon himself, must seem very unaccountable to mankind, and make them imagine that he is conscious to himself of some secret guilt.^[17]

Applying the supposed principle to Walpole, the author denies that "all the people in England" read the parallels and allegories of the opposition writers as allusions to the court:

Did they [i.e., the ministerial spokesmen] ever consult all the people in England, to know in what sense they understood these papers? . . . Nay, were they ever inform'd that that upright and incorrupt gentleman, their patron, was imagin'd by the nation to be alluded to, whenever a Sejanus, a Wolsey, a Menzikoff, or a Cascia was mention'd? . . . For my part, I can't conceive how such an absurd notion could enter into their heads, as to think that a person of his uncommon abilities and integrity . . . could be designed under the characters which are the very reverse of him in every particular.^[18]

Even the king and queen could be maligned by this trick; so the author laments that whenever The Craftsman , in citing passages from history,

happens to mention a weak or bad prince, or a queen, it is unfairly and basely asserted by his antagonists that he alludes to

[16] London, 1731, p. 6.

[17] Ibid., pp. 7–8.

[18] Ibid., pp. 13–14.

our most gracious sovereign and his consort. If this method of construction be allowed, what writer can be safe?^[19]

Trustful moderns might presume, from such cris de coeur , that devious intentions were uncharacteristic of the eighteenth century.

Of course, the complaints authors made of being read wrong were often false, and the claim of lucidity was often a blind. Sometimes an essayist would pretend to be misunderstood in order to screen himself from punishment for having hurt the sensibilities of a great man. Sometimes a poet was jocular or sarcastic in his protests, teasing the reader into finding fresh innuendoes among the very disclaimers of old ones. We can learn a little about methods of implication by examining some particular examples of such devices and some general reflections on allegedly false reading. Even an informed modern critic does not always understand how self-conscious eighteenth-century writers were about their techniques of indirection.

In his "Apology" for A Tale of a Tub , Swift requested that his faults should not be "multiply'd by the ignorant, the unnatural, and uncharitable applications of those who have neither candor to suppose good meanings, nor palate to distinguish true ones."^[20] As a clergyman (though anonymous) he protested furiously against the interpretations of three or four passages "which prejudiced or ignorant readers have drawn by great force to hint at ill meanings; as if they glanced at some tenets in religion"; and he insisted that he "never had it once in his thoughts that any thing he said would in the least be capable of such interpretations."^[21] So he complained that irony had been mistaken for straightforward speech.^[22]

Yet in the body of the Tale itself the author anticipated the perils he had finally to endure. "Nothing is more frequent," he said, "than for commentators to force [interpretations], which the author never meant."^[23] Given such warnings, and accus-

[19] Ibid., p. 11.

[20] Prose Works , I, 2.

[21] Ibid., p. 4.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., p. 118n.

tomed as one is to Swift's practice of subtlety and indirection, a critic must believe that Swift really hoped to shock readers by his rash language in the body of the Tale , but that he also refused to accept responsibility for his boldness. It is hardly credible that a man so deeply aware as Swift was, of the import that might be found in his words, would use dangerous expressions unwittingly.

Political themes fed the same equivocation as the religious themes. In the fifth Drapier's Letter , Swift declared bitterly that a judge had misinterpreted one of his essays as "reflecting" on George I and the royal ministers, and as trying to "alienate the affections" of the people of Ireland from those of England.^[24] Yet we know that the Drapier was working toward precisely those ends, and that Swift simply dodged the legal consequences of his rhetoric.

Pope's work glitters with hypocritical complaints of being misunderstood. The Dunciad alone is a storehouse of specimens. Here when the poet describes his hero as supperless, a note reproaches "former commentators" for idly supposing that Cibber lacked a supper (I, 115). When the poem alludes to Hoadly's notorious sermon on "The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ," a note insists that the reference is to a "public orator," and not a clergyman (II, 368, in the 1729 edition). When a line implies that collaboration with Broome in translating the Odyssey was a painful ordeal, a note declares that the irony represents a "stroke" against Pope himself (III, 328, in the 1729 edition). Yet all of these together do not come up to the pseudonymous defense that Pope composed for his Epistle to Burlington . There he goes over the censorious, ironical lines following the denunciation of Timon's Villa—

   Yet hence the poor are cloath'd, the hungry fed;
Health to himself, and to his infants bread
The lab'rer bears: What his [i.e., Timon's] hard heart denies,
His charitable vanity supplies—

[24] Drapier , p. 101.

and interprets them not as accusing Timon's extravagant bad taste but as making an apology for it: "'Tis an innocent folly and much more beneficent than the want of it," says the poet.^[25] Clarity and explicitness were not the only virtues to which Pope aspired.

A special mark of the awareness these authors had of their indirections is the way they apologized for satires or censures that seemed to strike at identifiable individuals. (So-called "general" satire was commonly acceptable; "particular" was not.) As P. K. Elkin says, when authors of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries wrote as critics, they advocated general satire; but when they were reproached for writing personal satire themselves, they felt obliged to offer a defense, "or to insist that they had been misinterpreted, that they had not for one moment intended slighting anyone in particular."^[26] So also when an author used pseudonyms or initials for identifiable persons, "he could plead with some plausibility that he meant to hurt no one, and at the same time privately congratulate himself on having bagged . . . a brace of victims."^[27]

Thus The Craftsman , no. 31, offers us two, mutually inconsistent replies to the charge of disingenuousness.^[28] One defense is that the writer was being not devious but straight-forward, in the passages singled out for condemnation. The other is that a political journalist must be devious when exposing the crimes of men in power.

So the Craftsman opens the topic by mentioning an objection to his style of blaming public officials, viz.

that I am guilty of disingenuity and a mean design of calumniating men in high stations under feigned characters , and by other indirect methods, such as ironies, allegories, parallels, and remote innuendoes ; which are called low arts. . . .

[25] Pope, Correspondence , III, 255.

[26] The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 139.

[27] Ibid., p. 122.

[28] London, Mar. 24, 1727.

The accusers (he reports) say that an honorable critic of the government would name his targets and produce verifiable evidence of misdoings. In reply, the Craftsman offers his pair of ill-matched statements. First he claims that in his discussions of politics he has no specific persons in mind. His aim is to "expose vice in general":

But if two cases happen to be so much alike, that the generality of the world will compare what I relate of former times to the present; or any great men will apply bad characters to themselves, I do not think my self answerable for such applications . . . .

(Readers who take this remark seriously will not be challenged by me.)

Secondly, the Craftsman does not agree that one ought to accuse great men only in a judicial manner. When handling charges against private persons, the law—he says—can operate normally. But public figures resist the process:

. . . Great men have frequent opportunities of screening themselves, in such a manner, by cabals, alliances, corruption , or the favour of an indulgent prince, that it is commonly very difficult to bring them to condign punishment, even when they are guilty of the most notorious oppressions, and are publicly complained of as the nuisances of their country.

Since everyone knew The Craftsman was established to oppose Walpole's government, and since the words "great" and "screen" were familiar expressions for the prime minister, an ironic innuendo is palpable here. But the general argument remains significant:

[It] has always been a practice, under the most corrupt administrations, to quote examples and draw parallels out of history, in order to prove what effect the same male-practices have had on different states, or on the same states in former ages; nor can this be looked upon as disingenuous or a libel on the present ministers of any kingdom, any more than a comment on the ten commandments can be called a libel on every notorious sinner in the parish.

I grant, indeed, that it would be more honourable, as well as more useful, to write without disguise , provided it were equally safe . But would not any man be esteemed a lunatick , who should, in plain terms, attack such a monster as Wolsey or Buckingham, in the plenitude of their power; especially, if he has any parallel instances at hand, or can throw the same thoughts under shades and allegories ?

About the time this number of The Craftsman appeared, Swift was composing similar remarks about an attack he had made on a dead judge who behaved himself unpatriotically and illegally. Some people, Swift said, thought the author had been too severe on the reputation of a man who after all was dead. The satirist replies to them with an argument like that of The Craftsman :

What an encouragement to vice is this! If an ill man be alive and in power, we dare not attack him; and if he be weary of the world or of his own villainies, he has nothing to do but die, and then his reputation is safe. For these excellent casuists know just Latin enough to have heard a most foolish precept, that de mortuis nil nisi bonum ; so that if Socrates and Anytus his accuser had happened to die together, the charity of survivors must either have obliged them to hold their peace or to fix the same character on both.^[29]

Although it was conventional to declare that the only legitimate form of satire was general satire (i.e., attacks on types of men or kinds of vice, rather than on identifiable individuals), nevertheless, personal satire remained a common practice of disinterested writers; and their grounds for using it, as well as their methods of attack, were traceable to arguments like those offered by Swift.

So the place we arrive at seems almost an inversion of our first position. If clarity is accepted by one's readers as the mark of an excellent style, a subtle writer may convey eccentric meanings by affecting plainness and candor when he is in fact complex and indirect. The appeal to clarity then becomes a

[29] Swift, Prose Works , XII, 24.

method of teasing the reader into thinking dangerously. As we have seen, a clever rhetorician will declare that obviously personal attacks are aimed at no individual, that thinly screened allusions are not allusions. After bringing out a passage that bristles with veiled, mutinous meaning (an allegory, a bit of parallel history), he may offer to explicate it, but then do so by giving an absurdly remote interpretation which still manages to point at the true sense.

A refinement of the scheme is a mock-defense. One opens with solemn, if misleading, apologies, supports these with unpersuasive reasons, and ends with a burlesque of the process of self-defense—in effect, showing off one's real animus. Thus Swift repudiates the view that Gay's fables point at living courtiers; but in developing his statement, he arrives at the ironic admission,

[Although] it be highly probable, he [i.e., Gay] meant only the courtiers of former times, yet he acted unwarily, by not considering that the malignity of some people might misinterpret what he said, to the disadvantage of present persons and affairs.^[30]

In the opposite way, a literary critic could deliberately miss the point of an allusive passage in order to insinuate the dullness of the author. Thus John Dennis has a long argument demonstrating that in Prince Arthur , Blackmore did not refer to William III. Of course, the poem is a transparent allegory of William's career; and Dennis is only concerned to reveal how badly the poet has misrepresented the character of the king.^[31]

Craftsman 75 provides an elaborate instance of consciously false explication.^[32] In an earlier paper the author had given an account of how "R——e" established himself as the corrupt governor of a city. Now the author proceeds to explain the dark story. To start, he discusses "allegories, allusions and fables,"

[30] Ibid., p. 35.

[31] Preface to Remarks on Prince Arthur , in Critical Works , I, 53–55.

[32] London, Dec. 9, 1727.

and how "the learned" hide important meanings under such devices. He then moves on to an illuminating declaration:

As therefore this allegorical way of writing is certainly the most learned as well as the most antient , so I hold it likewise to be the safest in all modern performances ; especially if an author is, in any wise, addicted to writing on political subjects .

So he now undertakes to give the "whole meaning" of his allegory of the R——e.

In the explanation the Craftsman never mentions Walpole, who is certainly the "rogue" alluded to. Instead, he refers the allegory to the Knez Menzikoff (i.e., Alexander Menshikov, a favorite of Peter the Great, disgraced in 1727). Most people, he says, "discovered easily enough that the Knez Menzikoff was the person, whom I had in view; though possibly they might not understand every particular hidden stroke of satire that I intended." To elucidate these hidden strokes, he goes through the allegory of R——e point by point, treating each detail as an allusion to "the Knez Menzikoff," but employing expressions that direct us to Walpole. Once more, the pretence of lucidity has become a means of being covert and ambiguous.

So far from suffering unhappy misinterpretation, a polished writer could go even beyond the devices I have analyzed; for he could trick the reader into looking for secrets where there were none. Writing to Pope about the commentary on The Dunciad , Swift wondered whether the mock-editor should not "refine in many places, when you meant no refinement,"^[33] and of course both A Tale of a Tub and The Dunciad exemplify this practice.

So also the ingenuity of the author could finally outrun the wit of even his most acute readers. Contemporary "keys" to Gulliver's Travels were inaccurate, clumsy, and dim-sighted. Swift in turn told Gay he had not realized that the quarrel between Peachum and Lockit in The Beggar's Opera alluded to the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius.^[34] In an oft-quoted

[33] Pope, Correspondence , II, 505.

[34] Ibid., p. 482.

letter Swift told Pope that he found The Dunciad obscure: "I have long observ'd that twenty miles from London no body understands hints."^[35] Meanwhile, his own French translator wrote to Swift that he had suppressed many of the allusions in Gulliver's Travels because "les allusions et les allégories, qui sont sensibles dans un pays, ne le sont dans un autre."^[36]

I have been dwelling on political implications. But sexual themes lead us to the same principles. Seldom indeed would an author admit pointblank that he had indulged in pornography. Wolseley was remarkable, in his encomiastic preface to Rochester's Valentinian (1685), for openly describing that noble author's obscene verses as indeed obscene.^[37] The normal response to such a charge was to deny it, and to complain that the poet's sense had been distorted. Yet even while engaging in this ritual, the superior genius insinuated new improprieties.

One of the cleverest complaints is Wycherley's, in the dedication of The Plain Dealer (1677). The playwright scolds those who have discovered obscene innuendoes in The Country Wife . That he was perfectly serious one doubts. His real case is against persons proficient in finding and enjoying obscenity elsewhere and hypocritical in sounding disturbed by his comedy. He says that such readers "make nonsense of a poet's jest, rather than not make it bawdy."

A striking feature of Wycherley's discussion is the mixture of lubricity with wordplay. The dedication itself abounds in double meanings, many of them springing from the fact that the dedicatee was a procuress. Having started the infection, Wycherley soon makes it general. Innocent nouns and verbs are contaminated by their corrupt neighbors until the reader's mind exerts itself to invent pornographic hints. This stimulation of wordplay appears to be a special feature of sexual themes. Molière is remarkable for avoiding such wit, while his English imitators practice it.

[35] Ibid., p. 504.

[36] Swift, Correspondence , III, 217.

[37] J. E. Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), III, 18–29.

With sexual themes, then, as with political and religious themes, writers often invited readers to expect an unorthodox or subversive meaning behind a veil of conventionality. And here too they seldom enjoyed being blamed for the accomplishment. When Jeremy Collier denounced Dryden for obscenity and profaneness, the victim said that he did retract all thoughts and expressions truly guilty of those faults. But he also declared that Collier, in many places, had "perverted my meaning by his glosses; and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty."^[38] Yet the volume to which Dryden prefaced these remarks included not only "Sigismonda and Guiscardo" but also "Cinyras and Myrrha," in both of which the poet hardly restrained his knack for indecency.

Collier also drove Congreve into the task of defending himself against charges of obscenity and irreligion. In his reply Congreve complained of "malicious and strain'd interpretations." He blamed these upon Collier's own "impurity," and said the condemned passages only contracted their alleged filth by "passing thro' his very dirty hands." Where an expression itself was "unblameable in its own clear and genuine signification," said Congreve, Collier made it "bellow forth his own blasphemies."^[39]

It is true that Collier regularly exaggerated the bawdiness and irreligion of his victims' language. But the proper defense (if a modern critic wants one)^[40] is—as Congreve also says—that one cannot represent vicious and foolish characters without making them speak viciously and foolishly. This principle goes back to Aristotle and was expounded by Dennis.^[41] Nevertheless, the question how far Congreve's works sanction the amorality they display remains an issue for his admirers.^[42]

[38] Preface to the Fables , last paragraph, in Essays , II, 272.

[39] Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations , in Complete Works , ed. Montagu Summers (London: Nonesuch Press, 1923), III, 172.

[40] Cf. L. C. Knights, "Restoration Comedy: The Reality and the Myth," Explorations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), pp. 131–49.

[41] A Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter , in Critical Works , II, 241–50.

[42] Cf. Aubrey Williams, "Poetical Justice, the Contrivances of Providence, and the Works of William Congreve," ELH 35 (1968): 540–65;and Maximillian Novak, William Congreve (New York: Twayne, 1971), pp. 58–71. Professor Williams carries his argument further in An Approach to Congreve (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

I have illustrated the gap between theory and practice so profusely because it demonstrates the deep awareness these writers had of their methods of implication. A reader not familiar with their deviousness might underestimate their subtlety. I hope my range of examples will sharpen such a reader's expectations.

Besides, even a careful scholar sometimes leans too heavily on the generalizations which eighteenth-century authors give us concerning their aims and techniques.^[43] In my view they are often least direct when they sound direct, and most artful when they sound artless. In the studies that follow, I generally trust the poet's text rather than his commentary on it; and I try to show that the four talents examined here deserve the closest attention to their secondary meanings.

[43] P. K. Elkin, in his chapter on "Personal Reference" (The Augustan Defence of Satire , pp. 118–45), seems to me over-ready to take literally the assurances of Dryden, Swift, and Pope.