26 November 2009

Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, excerpts from The Spectator

Then I read some of The Spectator, parts where they wrote about taste and imagination and making things up and why Chinese gardens are prettier than English ones (it's because English gardens are obviously fake, and so can't be imagined as much) and also on how Locke says that everything you see is just your brain making it up anyway because you don't really see with your eyes but with your brain. They do this after they spend four or five very boring essays writing about Paradise Lost, which they discuss in terms of character and passion and other things that were boring. In retrospect, though, the PL stuff is a good case-study for the taste/imagination stuff—because what they like about Milton is his tendency to make you see things that can't exist or were never there or are too big to be really contemplated by a single viewpoint. The point is that you're putting together the fall of the rebel angels and the war between Hell and Heaven and whatever only in your brain, and the poem's ability to make you do that is what makes it so special.
They seem to be boosting Paradise Lost because it's in English—it may not be better than The Aeneid, but it's more accessible. But more accessible to whom? In the taste and imagination stuff, they leave bits of Greek untranslated, as though their general readership should be able to figure that out. But in the Milton stuff, they mention "English readers" as readers of the English language exclusively, not as readers who happen to live in England. I didn't know that The Spectator was aiming at people who couldn't read Latin—and, by aiming at them, sort of tacitly admitting that it's okay that they can't. I wasn't expecting to find that from Mr. Spectator.