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.
Duke University