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ONE THE ETHICAL-AESTHETIC CHALLENGE TO EPIC pope, gibbon, and scott This chapter will move from the seventeenth-century origins of the liberal critique of war, through the rise of liberal epic and its enabling device, poetic diction, on to its triumph in the works of the leading poet of the eighteenth century, then to its greatest, most popular, and most influential historian. It will conclude with the poet, historian, and novelist central in establishing the preeminence of the novel early in the nineteenth century. In his Iliad preface, Pope acknowledges the influence of Fénelon’s French modernization and Bossu’s French rules, but gives his highest praise to Dryden for rendering portions of Homer and all Vergil: “the most noble and spirited translation I know in any language” (20). This chapter will in turn demonstrate Gibbon’s indebtedness to Pope’s practices for his translation and modernization of classical warfare. Scott’s most famous novel, Ivanhoe (1819), repeatedly signals its dependence upon both Pope and Dryden—in the form of epigraphs from their Homer, Vergil, and Chaucer along with battles in his main text directly modeled after theirs—for its own efforts to adapt medieval heroic warfare to the tastes of his contemporary audiences. Old Mortality (1816), his starkest war novel, expressly thematizes the transition from an aristocratic culture of martial heroism to a middle-class world of democratic and capitalist peacefulness. His epic history of Napoleon is similarly shaped by the sanitized warfare and refined heroics of Gibbon. All three of these figures, though Gibbon most of all, have remained important, though largely unacknowledged, influences upon modern war epics—whether in the form of poetry, history , or the novel. In sum, this chapter will transition into the nineteenth century, where the phenomenon of liberal epic reached its climax, and it will establish that this tradition is a highly self-conscious one that spread from poetry to history to the novel. Lastly, it will frame this analysis of a stylistic and narrative evolution with a demonstration of how, parallel to it, the aesthetic and ethical discourse of the sublime went through a similar liberalization that theorized, justified, and exploited what the poets and historians were doing. 60 THE ETHICAL-AESTHETIC CHALLENGE TO EPIC the homer problem: the liberal sublime from hume and burke to ruskin The close connection between the good and the beautiful has been always felt. . . . We all feel that there is a strict propriety in the term moral beauty. . . . Poems like the Iliad or the Psalms, springing in the most dissimilar quarters, have commanded the admiration of men, through all the changes of some 3,000 years. The charm of music, the harmony of the female countenance, the majesty of the starry sky. . . . And in the same way types of heroism, and of virtue, descending from the remotest ages, command the admiration of mankind. —W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals Numerous cultural, philosophical, artistic, and literary developments, some trivial and some momentous, measure the growing intensity of early modern liberal distress over the glorification of war and heroic violence . It was, first, this ethical discomfort and, later, intellectual doubts that drove traditional epic into its post-Miltonic crisis.¹ David Friedrich Strauss’s groundbreaking survey of the evolution of biblical scholarship, for example, shows how Enlightenment critics grew increasingly restive over the illiberal, indeed newly illegal, actions of God’s chosen people in the book of Joshua. Their exhibit A was the Bible’s closest approach to a classical epic: “According to Chubb, the Jewish religion cannot be a revelation from God, because it debases the moral character of the Deity by attributing to him arbitrary conduct, partiality for a particular people, and above all, the cruel command to exterminate the Canaanitish nations” (Strauss 45). Strauss notes how the ironic rhetoric of various Deists and humanists used the ethical paradoxes provoked by the book of Joshua, particularly due to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s influential legal writings, to disturb their readers and advance their agendas. Lord Bolingbroke, who affected a potent combination of liberal humanism and religious skepticism , compared Attila to Joshua: “Attila extended his conquests farther than Joshua; but it may be doubted whether he shed more blood. . . . Attila gave quarter often, Joshua never. . . . It was criminal among the Israelites . . . to show mercy to those they had robbed” (4:210). It is in what I call the Homer problem, however, that the most telling...

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