Welsh Journals

by the late Professor Arthur Humphreys in an essay on the arts in eighteenth-century Britain; section two is devoted to studies of individual art-forms; and section three offers a reference section including short biographies and further reading. It is not easy to succeed with a Guide of this sort-not quite fish nor flesh. It is not quite a reference book or encyclopaedia, but neither can the contributors afford to be too personal or quirky. They must cover the ground while gesturing towards areas of live debate, avoiding the impression that everything said has lapidary significance. This volume tackles the problem at the structural level by including in the section on individual arts essays that treat their subjects in synoptic 'long-shot' and punctuating these with shorter pieces that go into 'close-up' on the individual enthusiasms of their authors. So we have essays on the decorative arts (Geoffrey Beard), the visual arts (David Mannings), literature (Pat Rogers), architecture (Sally Jeffery) and music (Nicholas Anderson), and in the latter category, folk-song (Raymond O'Malley). Holkham Hall, Norfolk (Cinzia Maria Sicca), Vauxhall Gardens (T. J. Edelstein), gardening (Michael Symes) and Augustan Bath (Bryan Little). The Guide's first problem is to recover from its opening section, in which the late Professor Humphreys gives an insufferably one-sided view of the period as one in which harmony, order and benevolence prevailed. The novel 'steered coherently towards plausible ends', politics and religion were 'ideologies of consensus', society was an elite but open and absorbent, London was a place of marvellous and opulent growth, and so on. To be fair, Professor Humphreys does say at one point that 'a diametrically opposed portrait of London could certainly be drawn', to which one wants to reply 'not half. One might stomach this whiggish optimism if it were accurately rendered, but what are we to make of the following sentence: In the True Patriot of 1745 Fielding, though strongly anti-Walpole, said he was 'of no party' and hoped to eradicate the very idea out of political life. He wrote during the second Jacobite incursion from Scotland, directed to restoring the Stuart line in the person of the soi-disant James III (exiled in France since 1688) [p. 9]. By the time Fielding wrote this, Walpole was dead and had anyway retired three years earlier. Fielding's claim to be against party was itself a partisan statement. And as everyone knows, the Jacobite concerned in the '45 rebellion was Charles Stuart. not James. On the next page, we have the incomprehensible definition 'stabilizer' given for the word 'trimmer', the whig newspaper Daily Courant given as Daily Courier. and so it goes. But the volume does recover, though it also retains its establishment bias. This is very much the Cambridge Guide, so that neither the regions nor women receive much attention. Pat Rogers raises the issue to consciousness in his coverage of the period literature, but (disappointingly for one who has done so very much to extend our knowledge of the period's thick literary undergrowth) he seems disinclined to do much about it. His chapter is nevertheless very good, especially on Johnson and his circle where he conveys the excitement attaching to a period unrivalled in intellectual brilliance. Rogers's prose style is constantly arresting: Thomson 'writes as an impresario for the large theatrical events within creation' (p. 167); Sterne 'anticipates