Robert Lowth

Although he is mostly known in rhetorical and literary circles for his profound influence on hermeneutics and key elements of Romantic theories of the poetic through the Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, in A Short Introduction to English Grammar, Lowth presents a positive valuation of an instrumental clarity for the purposes of instruction. Indicating its association with the radical politics of grammar and language discussed by Olivia Smith (according to whom Lowth’s is ‘the first comprehensive grammar’ published in this tradition⁴³), Brian Hepworth has argued for the secular and modern influence of the Short Introduction by claiming that it was a ‘major factor in a huge liberalizing movement in which [Lowth] inculcated the adoption of English in all its traditional, Northern integrity and in which he rejected Classical models’.⁴⁴ Lowth’s goal in the Short Introduction is to elucidate to the public the ‘general principles of Grammar as clearly and intelligibly as possible’⁴⁵ and, as Hepworth points out, he attempts to do so even in the ‘large type and paper’⁴⁶ format of his textbook. Errors are throughout characterized as ‘obscure’ or ‘ambiguous’ and he even sacrifices logical exactness for the sake of ‘easiness and perspicuity’.⁴⁷ The language of prose and ordinary speech is therefore opposed to the language of poetry and rhetoric, insofar as the use of figures (including personification or prosopopoeia) is licensed by the different goals of the latter.⁴⁸ Perspicuity is described as one of the greatest beauties of style, and well adapted to the instruction not only of ‘the Learner even of the lowest class’, but also of ‘the greatest Critic and most able Grammarian of the last age’, whose classical education left him ‘at a loss in matters of ordinary use and common construction in his own Vernacular Idiom’.⁴⁹ Though Carol Percy has shown that Lowth’s self-representation as a paragon of clarity was both a failure and somewhat disingenuous,⁵⁰ and Olivia Smith has argued that Lowth ultimately perpetuated traditional class divisions,⁵¹ it is clear that, however he may have failed, Lowth meant in this work to confer a positive valuation on clarity and to unmask the pretensions of classical education, uncritical deference to the dead languages, and the inaccessible styles adopted by canonical writers.

Lowth refers not only to the possibility (in poetry and rhetoric) that forms of obfuscation might serve a purpose, but also that they might be appropriated for an improper use. Thus he inserts as an example of the nine types of words the following phrase: ‘[t]he power of speech is a faculty peculiar to man, and was bestowed on him by his beneficent Creator for the greatest and most excellent uses; but alas! how often do we pervert it to the worst of purposes?’⁵² The insertion of this type of passage is clearly (and typically) intended for another level of instruction than that undertaken by the central thesis. Lowth is calling the reader’s attention to the fact that an adherence to a shared and simple standard of speech in common discourse - that is, to clarity - is a means of defence against this type of perversion, though perhaps not one which will be effective in all cases. Lowth indicates his commitment to a form of language and a consciousness of language which, as Olivia Smith states in a very different context, ‘would lessen the likelihood of imposture both by clarifying meaning and by minimizing the semantic confusion which encourages an unconscious submission to authoritative terms’.⁵³ Throughout his other works Lowth maintains this qualified ‘democratic’ and practical commitment to the aim of lifting the veils of obscurity which are the products of historical distance and poor education, and are the necessary consequence of hierarchical learning.⁵⁴

While Lowth’s promotion of clarity in instruction seems straightforward, his promotion of perspicuity in poetry is somewhat more problematic. One of the essential attributes of Hebrew poetry, he asserts throughout his Lectures, is the fact that ‘the Hebrew poets frequently make use of imagery borrowed from common life, and from objects well known and familiar’ and that the only reason they appear obscure to us is that we are unfamiliar with them.⁵⁵ The biblical scholar’s goal, therefore, must be to remove the ‘great degree of obscurity [that] must result from the total oblivion in which many sources of their imagery must be involved’ and to ‘restore their native perspicuity to such passages as appear obscure’.⁵⁶ The clarity imparted to the text by the critic is therefore a positive means of revealing what has been covered by a negative obscurity produced by the passage of time and the foreignness of biblical poetry.

Perspicuity in poetry, and especially in the historical Hebrew terra incognita of biblical poetry, is also important for the movement of the passions. Thus ‘one quality, which is indeed congenial to all the poetry of the Hebrews… [is] that brevity of diction which is so conducive to sublimity of style. Diffuse and exuberant expression generally detracts from the force of the sentiment’.⁵⁷ This ‘force’ produced by clarity is also the product of passion, for the ‘understanding slowly perceives the accuracy of the description in all other subjects… but when a passion is expressed, the object is clear and distinct at once; the mind is immediately conscious of itself and its own emotions’.⁵⁸ Poetry is the language of the passions (where it is not didactic)⁵⁹ and passion is more clearly and ‘immediately’ communicated than reason, because passion is immediately present to self-consciousness in the reader or listener. But the potential for a positive obscurity is located in poetry nonetheless, for

[t]he Orientals look upon the language of poetry as wholly distinct from that of common life, as calculated immediately for expressing the passions: if, therefore, it were to be reduced to the plain rule and order of reason, if every word and sentence were to be arranged with care and study, as if calculated for perspicuity alone, it would no longer be what they intended it, and to call it the language of passion would be the grossest of solecisms.⁶⁰

Lowth’s positive valuation of clarity in instruction must therefore be understood to be quite distinct from his positive valuation of perspicuity in poetry, which is associated with passion. And since the exploitation of the passions involves an abandonment of reason and abandonment in enthusiasm or inspiration, this contradictory form of poetic clarity functions as a means of importing obscurity into the poetic.

Poetry for all its clarity therefore has the ‘Licence’ of the obscurities of language, which are also a consequence of its ungrammatical form.⁶¹ The Hebrew word for poetry is ‘Mashal’, with which ‘chidah is frequently joined, and means, a saying pointed, exquisite, obscure’ - poetry, that is, is the ‘figurative style’.⁶² Central to its function is the enigma, or that which is only with difficulty understood, if it is understood at all.⁶³ The enigmatic is in part an expression of the boundaries of knowledge, as in the case of amplification: ‘the object is sublimity, or to impress the reader with the idea that the magnitude of the object is scarcely to be perceived’.⁶⁴ Poetry, for Lowth, is a form inherently designed for the obscure: though it may communicate passions with a form of reflexive clarity, its subject is often that which resists understanding. This resistance on the part of a subject to penetration by contemplation is precisely why Mashal is ‘expressive of power, or supreme authority’.⁶⁵ The epistemological component of the concept of obscurity, that is, is what gives it its force over the passions and its relevance in the contemplation of the most inscrutable of all objects, God, and the most powerful poetry is for this reason the prophetic.

Before I turn to a discussion of the obscurity of the prophetic, however, it is necessary to resolve, to the extent that it can be resolved, what I called above Lowth’s ‘paradox of perspicuity’.⁶⁶ Some coherence is recoverable for his confused assertions if one distinguishes between the location of obscurity in the style, in the object described, or in the subject of the poem. Of Ezekiel, for example, Lowth writes that his ‘diction is sufficiently perspicuous, all his obscurity consists in the nature of the subject. Visions… are necessarily dark and confused’.⁶⁷ While clarity is sometimes meant to signify a revelation of the meaning of the passage, it often refers merely to the style: the diction may be clear, even if the sense of the passage is not. Perspicuity produces sublimity because it gives us a clear view of the obscurity of the object, and it makes the passion produced by our confrontation with the limits of our understanding clear to us. In this sense it approximates the ‘third moment’ of the roughly Kantian sublime described by Thomas Weiskel and Tom Furniss, ‘a defensive recuperation [following a crisis which has disrupted the equilibrium of the mind and the object] in which the mind identifies itself with or attributes to itself, through a metaphorical transposition, the qualities of that which had threatened to overwhelm it’,⁶⁸ or in which ‘the mind recovers the balance of outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object such that the very indeterminacy which erupted in phase two is taken as symbolizing the mind’s relation to a transcendent order’.⁶⁹ Here, the relevance of this third phase of the sublime concerns the reflexive identification of the recipient with a potentially obscure, transcendent order reminiscent of that which guarantees elevation in Longinus.

In The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy, Ian Balfour has noted the importance of the indeterminate origin of inspiration in the concept of the prophetic:

[t]he modalities of the prophetic are complex and varied: All are beset by claims of divine inspiration whose face value is impossible to ascertain, and most are marked by obscure figuration and an unpredictable temporality, even when the temporal parameters seem clearly set out by the prophecy itself.⁷⁰

Lowth’s celebrated introduction and application of a literary hermeneutics to the Bible rests on his argument ‘that prophecy was poetry’.⁷¹ In relation to obscurity, the prophetic, or the representation of God and his word through the language of a fallen consciousness and the imagery of a fallen nature, demonstrates that obscurity on all levels can play a positive role because the subject of prophecy is in a sense obscure, as it were, all the way down. Perspicuity, therefore, must at some level merge with obscurity. Perhaps the best reconciliation of this strained interrelation of perspicuity and passion, perspicuity and power, and indeed of perspicuity and obscurity, may be Lowth’s concept of the ‘ideal shadow’:

for when simply and abstractedly mentioned, without the assistance and illustration of any circumstances whatever, it [the ‘object’ under discussion, specifically the human representation of the attributes of God] almost wholly evades the powers of the human understanding. The sacred writers have, therefore, recourse to description, amplification, and imagery, by which they give substance and solidity to what is in itself a subtile [sic] and unsubstantial phantom; and render an ideal shadow the object of our senses.⁷²

This ‘ideal shadow’, which is produced precisely where the language of abstraction or reason fails, functions as a sort of suspension of disbelief which represents the obscure object well precisely because we are conscious of this representation as a suspension, and one that will necessarily collapse, since ‘[t]he understanding is continually referred from the shadow to the reality’.⁷³ This is the basis for Lowth’s claim that it is in the use of common, everyday objects in poetry that perspicuity and sublimity merge.⁷⁴ In the contemplation of that which is constitutionally beyond us, clarity is capable of positive valuation precisely because it results in our consciousness of obscurity. Paradoxically enough, then, we may at least imagine a reconciliation of Lowth’s apparent contradictions through an awareness of the different modes of clarity and obscurity and their complex interaction.

Lowth’s discussion of the obscurity of prophecy introduces two new functions of obscurity which have interesting implications for the interrelation of interpretation and knowledge. First, prophecy, as a prediction of future events, reveals the function that the indefinite delay of obscurity plays with respect to temporality:

[f]or some degree of obscurity is the necessary attendant upon prophecy; not that, indeed, which confuses the diction, and darkens the style; but that which results from the necessity of repressing a part of the future, and from the impropriety of making a complete revelation of every circumstance connected with the prediction.⁷⁵

On this level, prophecy, like the ‘mystical allegory’, is fittingly represented in relation to the difficulty we confront in the interpretation of meaning expressed ‘in a dark, disguised, and intricate manner’.⁷⁶ Thus prophecy, at least initially, ‘in its very nature implies some degree of obscurity’.⁷⁷ But because the meaning of the text is in the future at the time of writing, there is a promise that ‘veil of obscurity’ will eventually be lifted: ‘[t]he prophetic, indeed, differs in one respect from every other species of the sacred poetry: when first divulged it is impenetrably obscure; and time, which darkens every other composition, elucidates it’.⁷⁸ As Balfour has observed, ‘prophecy is the one and only type of poetry that time illuminates rather than obscures’.⁷⁹ In this sense, the prophetic offers the promise of future illumination; the indeterminacy of the text is not entirely indeterminable.⁸⁰ But ‘[i]t is just at the moment when prophetic speech should be clear and precise – so runs the paradox of Lowth’s argument – that it risks being most clearly fictional…. That the past can refer to the future and the future to the past means that one cannot decide simply from the surface of a given text whether it is prediction or history’.⁸¹ This invokes the Romantic obscurity of indefinite delay, where the temporality of interpretation is related to the indeterminacy and historicity of reading, and it is ‘in part this indeterminacy of historical reference – history as prophecy, prophecy as history – that accounts for the power and the citability of the prophetic text’.⁸² The obscurity of prophetic texts opens the possibility for multiple interpretations in particular historical contexts, presenting a productive obscurity in which the reader experiences in the prophecy a historicized conception of the limits of knowledge.

In Isaiah: A New Translation, Lowth even claims that by virtue of his investigations he has himself gained the authority to interpret certain prophecies,⁸³ and indeed one of the basic goals of the Lectures is to educate his readers so that they too will be capable of just interpretations of the scriptures. But this agenda, which is informed by the Protestant experience of the Reformation and by Lowth’s own Enlightenment-inspired commitments, would later present him with some problematic consequences, as the authority to interpret the indeterminacy of the prophetic text became a site not only of scholarly and religious but also of political importance in the later eighteenth century. Lowth’s subsequent anxiety about the importunate appropriation of this power mirrors later conservative anxieties about the proliferation of interpretation with the growth of a working-class and radicalized readership.

The second form of obscurity which is introduced by the prophetic does not allow for the freedom of determination in any sense, and is associated with a pre-reflective, obfuscating power of persuasion related to the above discussion of Longinus and Quintilian. Prophecy, Lowth claims, as the most powerful form of poetry, makes use of all the instruments of amplification and is even given a license of excess denied to other poetic forms, being ‘more ornamented, more splendid, and more florid than any other’.⁸⁴ It is prophetic poetry that ‘bears away the mind with irresistible violence… from human to divine’.⁸⁵ Once brought under this power, the judgment and the understanding of the reader fail utterly to determine the prophet-poet’s subject:

it is plain from the general tenour [sic] of the sacred volume, that the indications of future events have been, almost without exception, revealed in numbers and in verse; and that the same spirit was accustomed to impart, by its own energy, at once the presentiment of things, and to cloath [sic] it in all the magnificence, in all the elegance of Poetry, that the sublimity of the style might consist with sentiments so infinitely surpassing all human conception.⁸⁶

The power of prophetic obscurity is twofold: it moves us to a contemplation of the truth of God in a manner beyond our control, and at this point of contemplation it confronts us with our utter failure to comprehend that which has carried us away. Thus

[t]he narrowness and imbecility of the human mind being such, as scarcely to comprehend or attain a clear idea of any part of the Divine nature by its utmost exertions; God has condescended, in a manner, to contract the infinity of his glory, and to exhibit it to our understandings under such imagery as our feeble optics are capable of contemplating.⁸⁷

Significantly, the reference to our ‘feeble optics’ in the context of a discussion of understanding inscribes an obscurity in our epistemological constitution which collapses together the perceptual and the figurative meanings of obscurity.

The limitations of perception, in other words, are not merely figures for the limitations of knowledge: they are simply another manifestation of our limitation with respect to the all-seeing and all-knowing God. We experience our fallenness not only in the boundaries of thought but also in the boundaries of vision. Thus Newlyn remarks that poetic language, ‘grand or humble, [is] inadequate to the purpose of describing God; and [Lowth] sees sublimity as consisting in the acknowledgment of our human inadequacy, in the face of supersensible ideas. Here, as in Burke and Cowper, humiliation of the subject is built into the structure of the sublime’.⁸⁸ In other words, it is poetry’s essential inadequacy that makes it suitable for generating a clear conception of the obscurity of the sublime, and God. Obscurity as darkness and obscurity as ignorance are, on this level of analysis, the same thing, and this is one of the reasons that there is in Lowth a troubled relation between obscurity as a figure and obscurity as a concept. It is also one of the reasons that the figurative nature of ‘obscurity’ hides itself so well. The complexities and confusions of the rhetoric of obscurity are a product of its own structure.