A LETTER CONCERNING ENTHUSIASM1

Sept. 1707.

MY LORD, Now you are returned to .. and before the season comes which must engage you in the weightier matters of state, if you care to be entertained a while with a sort of idle thoughts, such as pretend only to amusement, and have no relation to business x or affairs, you may cast your eye slightly on what you have before you; and if there be anything inviting, you may read it over at your leisure.

It has been an established custom for poets, at the entrance of their work, to address themselves to some muse: and this practice of the ancients has gained so much repute that even in our days we find it almost constantly imitated. I cannot but fancy, however, that this imitation, which passes so currently with other judgments, must at some time or other have stuck a little with your lordship, who is used to examine things by a

1 [The words "enthusiasm" and "enthusiast" normally carried in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the significance of "fanaticism" and "fanatic," especially of the emotionally demonstrative kind. Churchmen and Deists alike disparaged all such manifestations. Compare Locke, Essay, bk. iv. ch. xix. § 7. Shaftesbury accepts the normal sense of the terms, but endeavours in this Letter and elsewhere to widen and elevate their application. Compare the end of the present Letter with the Moralists, part iii. § 2, and the Miscellaneous Reflections, Misc. ii. ch. i. Dr. Henry More had previously urged such a modification; but Shaftesbury appears to have given the first effective lead to the modern and commendatory use of the terms.]

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better standard than that of fashion or the common taste. You must certainly have observed our poets under a remarkable constraint, when obliged to assume this character: and you have wondered, perhaps, why that air of enthusiasm, which sits so gracefully with an ancient, should be so spiritless and awkward in a modern. But as to this doubt, your lordship would have soon resolved yourself; and it could only serve to bring across you a reflection you have often made on many occasions besides, that truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance. The appearance of reality is necessary to make any passion agreeably represented; and to be able to move others we must first be moved ourselves, or at least seem to be so, upon some probable grounds. Now what possibility is there that a modern, who is known never to have worshipped Apollo, or owned any such deity as the muses, should persuade us to enter into his pretended devotion and move us by his feigned zeal in a religion out of date? But as for the ancients, 'tis known they derived both their religion and polity from the muses' art. How natural therefore must it have appeared in any, but especially a poet of those times, to address himself in raptures of devotion to those acknowledged patronesses of wit and science? Here the poet might with probability feign an ecstasy, though he really felt none: and supposing it to have been mere affectation, it would look however like something natural, and could not fail of pleasing.

But perhaps, my lord, there was a further mystery in the case. Men, your lordship knows, are wonderfully happy in a faculty of deceiving themselves, whenever they set heartily about it and a very small foundation of any passion will serve us, not only to act it well, but even to work ourselves into it beyond our own reach. Thus, by a little affectation in lovematters, and with the help of a romance or novel, a boy of fifteen, or a grave man of fifty, may be sure to grow a very natural coxcomb, and feel the belle passion in good earnest.

A

man of tolerable good-nature, who happens to be a little piqued, may, by improving his resentment, become a very fury for revenge. Even a good Christian, who would needs be over-good, and thinks he can never believe enough, may, by a small inclination well improved, extend his faith so largely as to comprehend in it not only all scriptural and traditional miracles, but a solid system of old wives' stories. Were it needful, I could put your lordship in mind of an eminent, learned, and truly Christian prelate you once knew, who could have given you a full account of his belief in fairies. And this, methinks, may serve to make appear how far an ancient poet's faith might possibly have been raised together with his imagination.

But we Christians, who have such ample faith ourselves, will allow nothing to poor heathens. They must be infidels in every sense. We will not allow them to believe so much as their own religion; which, we cry, is too absurd to have been credited by any besides the mere vulgar. But if a reverend Christian prelate may be so great a volunteer in faith, as beyond the ordinary prescription of the catholic church to believe in fairies, why may not a heathen poet, in the ordinary way of his religion, be allowed to believe in muses? For these, your lordship knows, were so many divine persons in the heathen creed, and were essential in their system of theology. The goddesses had their temples and worship, the same as the other deities and to disbelieve the Holy Nine, or their Apollo, was the same as to deny Jove himself, and must have been esteemed equally profane and atheistical by the generality of sober men. Now what a mighty advantage must it have been to an ancient poet to be thus orthodox, and by the help of his education, and a good-will into the bargain, to work himself up to the belief of a divine presence and heavenly inspiration? It was never surely the business of poets in those days to call revelation in

1 Dr. Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester. [Note to ed. of 1733. One of the replies to the Letter deals excitedly with this passage, and is plausibly ascribed to Bishop Fowler.]

question, when it evidently made so well for their art. On the contrary, they could not fail to animate their faith as much as possible; when by a single act of it, well enforced, they could raise themselves into such angelical company.

How much the imagination of such a presence must exalt a genius we may observe merely from the influence which an ordinary presence has over men. Our modern wits are more or less raised by the opinion they have of their company, and the idea they form to themselves of the persons to whom they make their addresses. A common actor of the stage will inform us how much a full audience of the better sort exalts him above the common pitch. And you, my lord, who are the noblest actor, and of the noblest part assigned to any mortal on this earthly stage, when you are acting for liberty and mankind;' does not the public presence, that of your friends, and the wellwishers to your cause, add something to your thought and genius? Or is that sublime of reason, and that power of eloquence, which you discover in public, no more than what you are equally master of in private, and can command at any time, alone, or with indifferent company, or in any easy or cool hour? This indeed were more godlike; but ordinary humanity, I think, reaches not so high.

For my own part, my lord, I have really so much need of some considerable presence or company to raise my thoughts on any occasion, that when alone I must endeavour by strength of fancy to supply this want; and in default of a muse, must inquire out some great man of a more than ordinary genius, whose imagined presence may inspire me with more than what

1 [The high eulogy here passed on Somers was not overstrained, according to the literary standards of the time. Addison dedicated to him the Spectator in nearly as high a strain; and Swift's humorous dedication of the Tale of a Tub goes as far; though on changing parties Swift changed his tone. The detailed estimate in Macaulay's twentieth chapter substantially bears out all these panegyrics on the great Whig statesman. In religion he seems to have been nearly if not quite as advanced as Shaftesbury, for whom he had a great regard.]

I feel at ordinary hours. And thus, my lord, have I chosen to address myself to your lordship; though without subscribing my name: allowing you as a stranger the full liberty of reading no more than what you may have a fancy for; but reserving to myself the privilege of imagining you read all, with particular notice, as a friend, and one whom I may justifiably treat with the intimacy and freedom which follows.

SECTION II

If the knowing well how to expose any infirmity or vice were a sufficient security for the virtue which is contrary, how excellent an age might we be presumed to live in! Never was there in our nation a time known when folly and extravagance of every kind were more sharply inspected, or more wittily ridiculed. And one might hope, at least from this good symptom, that our age was in no declining state; since whatever our distempers are, we stand so well affected to our remedies. To bear the being told of faults is in private persons the best token of amendment. 'Tis seldom that a public is thus disposed. For where jealousy of state, or the ill lives of the great people, or any other cause, is powerful enough to restrain the freedom of censure in any part, it in effect destroys the benefit of it in the whole. There can be no impartial and free censure of manners where any peculiar custom or national opinion is set apart, and not only exempted from criticism, but even flattered with the highest art. Tis only in a free nation, such as ours, that / imposture has no privilege; and that neither the credit of a court, the power of a nobility, nor the awfulness of a Church can give her protection, or hinder her from being arraigned in every shape and appearance. 'Tis true, this liberty may seem to run too far. We may perhaps be said to make ill use of it. So every one will say, when he himself is touched, and his opinion freely examined. But who shall be judge of what may be freely examined and what may not? Where liberty