Aaron Hill: The Muses’s Projector, 1685–1750 by Christine Gerrard (review)

93 CHRISTINE GERRARD. Aaron Hill: The Muses’s Projector, 1685–1750. Oxford: Oxford, 2003. Pp. 280. $74. Hill was an innovator, formidable theatrical impresario, and poet—for Ms. Gerrard, an anti-Augustan one. The literary circle that Hill fashioned—Hillarians (Dennis, Thomson, Mallet, Savage , and Martha Fowke)—opposed the flashy couplets of ‘‘Tuneful Alexis.’’ Because of his appearance in The Dunciad , Hill has gotten a bum rap. Against the claim that ‘‘the Hillarian circle was nothing but a vapid mutualadmirationsociety whose members suck on sugared words,’’Ms. Gerrard argues a strong case for a Whig style of art that was not necessarily inferior to the satirical mannerism of Pope and his allies. Hill’s group appealed to the heart, embraced enthusiasm , ransacked the Bible for the religious sublime (following the theories of Dennis), and enacted Enlightenment optimism about human reason, or the essential goodness of mankind. Hillarians stressed a lofty conceptionofthepoetthat looks forward to Shelley. ‘‘The Hill circle also sought to create a public space for a civilized relationship between men and women untainted by outmoded rituals of female coquetry and male pursuit.’’ Ms. Gerrard’s subtext to this biographyshows countervailing trends to the Tory satirists now requiring a hearing. Hill is her vehicle . This work is not a polemic inbiographical disguise. Her magisterial examination of Hill covers every aspect of his existence , as adventurer (his first work was a travelogue, written at age twenty-three, through the Middle East), married man, father, lover, entrepreneur, financier, politician , and finally valetudinarian. Not as well-known is his and his daughters’help in the writing of Clarissa. Hill, who was an enthusiast of sentimental fiction, and his ‘‘girls’’ collaborated with Richardson in offering suggestions for changes and cuts in the slow evolution of Clarissa. For Ms. Gerrard, this also underscoreshis protofeminist leanings. Hill put his hand to every sort of enterprise except novel-writing. Why is this period not called the Age of Hill? In spite of his beliefs in the Republic of Letters and his seemingly international outlook, Hill ‘‘had fixed ideas about genre and genre hierarchies, and blamed foreign forms for their mixing of generic conventions .’’ Where Pope dared to stretch forms, taking the reader’s breath away, Hill plodded in establishedmodes.Onthe surface, he was anti-Pope, but he really admired and tried to imitate the wasp of Twickenham. Hill was obsessively jealous of Pope’s popularity. Ms. Gerrard writes of the ‘‘almost sado-masochistic nature of their relationship.’’ Somethingofaprig,HilldisdainedThe Beggar’s Opera, which ‘‘brought on a deprivation of Taste, Corruption of manners , and Encouragement of Levity and Immorality’’ (The Prompter, 1735). Still, he is worth remembering, at the least, for his role in bringing opera to the theater; for example, he collaborated on Handel’s Rinaldo, the first opera specially designed for the English stage. Other English operas followed. He was hostile to Italian operas especially with eunuchs singing major roles (Hill was a dashing over six-footer with masculine charm). He pioneered a theatrical magazine, The Prompter (1734–1736), and wrote The Art of Acting (1746) and a hundred other things, very few of which are read today. Arthur Weitzman Northeastern University ...