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| English Poetry Special Lecture I(2020) |
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1. Roger Sales, "George Crabbe's Reverence for Realism" from English Literature in History 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics, 36-51. 1983.
Historians, then, tend to mistake an official version of rural England for the official, or accurate, account. This is probably why they often quote Crabbe's famous description of the workhouse in Book One of The Village (1783) as an example of what conditions were really like. This description may tell us what 'overseers' like Crabbe felt about workhouses, but it does not provide evidence about what conditions were really like for the overseen or observed. Clare, like Hazlitt, felt that Crabbe should not be allowed to fool most of the people for most of the time into believing that his descriptions were documentary or realistic ones:
Crabbe writes about the peasantry as much like the Magistrate as the Poet. He is determined to show you their worst side: and as to their simple pleasures and pastoral feelings, he knows little or nothing about them.
His poetry, as Clare suggests, is at best one-sided and highly selective. Mrs Gaskell, who was disposed to be more charitable towards him, also felt that he was unable to perceive that life need not necessarily always be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. His concentration on the 'worst side' of rural society does provide information about and insights into the bureaucratic mind. ... Crabbe's obsession with the 'worst side' of rural society was just as selective, polemical and distorting as, say, what John Constable used to refer to as opera-house pastoral.
2. Varley Lang, "Crabbe and the Eighteenth Century" from ELH 5-4(1938) 305-33. The importance, for us, of the town eclogue(Gay's Beggar's Opera) is that it associates realism in character and surroundings with the Pastoral form, though its purely destructive side is also interesting. Crabbe must have read many of these poems for they not only were composed by such prominent figures as Swift, Gay, and Pope but were quite popular in the seventies, the decade before the publication of The Village. But changes were taking place within the Pastoral itself which pointed in the same direction. Ramsay and Gay have already been noticed, and here, again, Swift is in the van with his "A Pastoral Dialogue" in which two rustics, in the traditional antiphonal verse, make love to each other. It is a real love scene between real rustics in real surroundings and engaged in a real occupation(308). In practice, Crabbe adheres far more to his conception of the moral values of poetry as here shown than his critics recognize. The most notable commentators upon Crabbe are wrong on this subject-for example, Huchon: For Crabbe almost always, instead of making himself one with his heroes by force of sympathy, stands aside from them and loads them with reproaches, like a judge delivering a pitiless sentence. This is a misleading statement, for his unfailing humor, his sympathy, even tenderness, and his shrewd, kindly understanding leave no such total impression as Huchon would have us believe. This is not to deny that Crabbe is sometimes didactic; but finger-shaking is far less characteristic of him than the tone of deep but quiet indignation which warms the lines of The Village. He is usually content with keeping outside and letting the picture speak for itself, as in the terrible delineations of misery occurring in his street scenes(325). 3. Rose Marie Thale, ""Crabbe's "Village" and Topographical Poetry" from The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 55-4(Oct., 1956) 618-23. The moralizing, a notable topographical characteristic, is at once a digression and a link. Crabbe interposes an abstract paragraph about the frailty of joy between his very concrete description of Sunday recreations and his exemplifications of the village vices. And, as in a bad sermon that could logically end long be fore it does, the moralizing leads to the irrelevant last 120 lines of the poem. After discussing the village vices, Crabbe stops short to say, Yet, why, you ask, these humble crimes relate,Why make the poor as guilty as the great?To show the great, those mightier sons of pride,How near in vice the lowest are allied. (11, 87-90) He urges the rich to reflect on this: then he goes on to exhort the poor to "forbear to envy those you call the great. . . . They are, like you, the victims of distress." And to exemplify the distresses of the rich, he tells about the death of Lord Robert Manners; then he eulogizes him and addresses the Duke of Rutland, praising him and offering him the comfort of further moralizing. Not only are there separate paragraphs of moralizing in The Village, but its manner is magisterial, didactic throughout, and this again is typical of the topographical genre. Crabbe does not suggest; he tells people what to think, what to feel. He makes statements positively, dogmatically; his evidence is presented as illustration rather than proof. And Crabbe talks at people, as a preacher does; he has lines of direct address to the villagers, to rich readers who think rural life is pleasant, to a hypochondriac, to Death, to readers in general, to peasants, to the rich, to the Duke of Rutland(622-23). 4. Ronald B. Hatch, "George Crabbe and the Tenth Muse" from Eighteenth-Century Studies 7-3(Spring, 1974), 274-94.
If Crabbe intended to give “the real picture" then there must also have been a false picture. This false picture, largely but not entirely a literary creation, rested on the assumption that a pastoral life of ease and pleasure existed in England. Crabbe’s first job was to demolish this pastoral myth(277).
It is hardly necessary to observe that Crabbe was by no means the first to criticize the pastoral... However, Crabbe’s main argument is not with classical poetry per se, but with the inclusion of classical subject matter in descriptions of English country life. Crabbe no doubt realized as well as we do that the landscape of the traditional pastoral was meant to symbolize a state of innocence, and not to represent a physical environment. Yet the pastoral underwent some extremely curious changes in the eighteenth century, first when Pope altered the tradition by including "the best side only of a shepherd’s life," and later when poets such as William Shenstone and his friend Richard Jago introduced classical shepherds into their poems of topographic description. The result, a curious mixture of myth and geography, was neither symbolic nor naturalistic. It is this eighteenth-century development of the pastoral which Crabbe is denouncing(279).
To understand Crabbe’s attitude one should recognize that The Village was written in protest against a particularly obnoxious version of sentimentalized humanitarianism which was rife in the period 1740-1790. Very often throughout the century when the poor were discussed the emphasis fell not on the condition of the poor, but on the feelings of the observer. ...Had Crabbe made a simple plea for the reader's sympathy toward the poor, he would inevitably have fallen into a series of those stock epithets which one finds attributed to any member of the leisured class claiming to fulfill Shaftesbury’s ideal of the man of taste, humanity, and culture. It was standard procedure to include in poems as widely different as Pomfret’s The Choice, John Philip’s Cyder, and James Thomson's Winter an acknowledgement that the true gentleman and humanitarian remembered and pitied the poor....but when they expressed these feelings in verse, the stress fell on the act of charity, on the way this act placed the "good man" in harmony with nature and God, rather than on the plight of the poor man(279-80).
One can understand better Crabbe's vehement dislike of pastoral when it is realized that as a result of the emphasis placed on the feelings of the philanthropist, the poor were no longer described as distressed people, but pastoral shepherds idling in a green and merry land. Since poets wished to emphasize the beauty of the act of charity, they found it necessary to describe beautiful surroundings and not empty commons. The countryside in The Pleasures of Imagination(Mark Akenside) contains “every charm." Its beauty is an emblem of the good life nature intends for the villagers. All too frequently the idea of picturesque poverty is conjured up in order to feel a glow at the thought of relieving it. And since poverty is always there, the glow is always possible. Once one sees the connection between the pastoral and humanitarian poetry, Crabbe’s attack on “sleepy bards" should be all the more understandable and his purpose in The Village easier to define. He is not developing the idea that the poor should be helped (the humanitarians had made this theme appear trite), but rather that one must learn to recognize the poor and their conditions before attempting to help them. In many ways, Crabbe’s The Village is anti-humanitarian, because in the 1780s "humanitarian" entailed a sentimental attitude to the poor(281).
Whereas Thomson believed that Newton’s “intellectual eye" gave man insight into the hierarchical laws by which God harmonizes the universe, Crabbe’s “horizontal Eye" led to empirical observations that did not assume a moral universe. Thomson began with the assumption that Newton had been able to give a reason for everything, including, in his words, "the yellow waste of idle sands." This traditional view in which man was seen as a unique creation with an immortal soul participating in an ethically organized universe is implicitly challenged by Crabbe’s "scientific" method, where he begins by describing the particular, the barren soil of Aldborough, and from this particular attempts to draw conclusions. The difference is crucial and it should be no surprise to find that Crabbe draws the conclusion that man, like all other living things, has to battle in order to live. As an amateur scientist, Crabbe has offered a picture of man in terms of his observed outward actions with no mention of the usual moral and spiritual dimensions. He is explained in terms of natural phenomena(286).
It should be emphasized that Crabbe is not saying that the rich cause the poverty of the poor; he is not blaming the rich. Rather he seems to be pointing out the much more subtle implication that the existence of brutal servants necessitates the existence of brutal masters. Physical poverty in one class is inevitably linked to moral and spiritual poverty in other classes. It is against this background that Crabbe's introduction of Robert Manners with his Christ-like associations should be viewed. In a world of self-interest, Manners, the one noble man, brings everyone of the village-rich and poor alike-the evidence that man can rise above himself. Manners, it should be stressed, is necessary not simply because he was generous or happy, or even virtuous, but because he did not bow down to circumstances. He chose to die for the cause he believed in. Thus Manners' way of death offers proof that man is not merely the product of outside forces, but can himself shape his own destiny. But the introduction of Robert Manners also signals that Crabbe is now interpreting the Hobbesian world of the earlier part of the poem in terms of the Christian view of history where man is in a fallen state to be saved only by the intercession of a man-god. It will be recalled that many writers since the time of Pascal have been motivated to a belief in God because a Godless world seemed so unbearable. Christ is not actually introduced into The Village, but Robert Manners is clearly an analogue. Crabbe’s difficulty in managing the transition is seen most clearly in his imagery. While he does not forsake the nature imagery of the first part of the poem-Manners is likened to a “tall oak"-nature is no longer amoral, but ethical and protective. The "tall oak" is the "guard and glory" of the trees below. Although this Christ-like figure, so suddenly and preposterously introduced, strikes almost all modern readers as vestigial, one can see how Crabbe’s concern with "the real," which generated a description of man’s condition extraordinarily similar to that of the Christian view of fallen man, left him with only the Christian solution as a means of escape from the labyrinth of Hobbes' world. Crabbe has posited a static world where man and society do not change, where in fact man’s behavior can be described in terms of unchanging natural phenomena. Under such conditions, the artist can describe man only as he was and always will be(290-91). 5. Jerome J. McGann, "The Anachronism of George Crabbe" from ELH 48-3(Autumn 1981) 555-72. For the Romantics, Crabbe's work was a peculiarly depressing form of art. Written in the face of the same severe realities which Crabbe saw, Romantic poetry attempted to formulate a positive and, above all, a final solution to the recurrent problems of human change and suffering. Reading Crabbe, however, we clearly see that the Romantic solution-which Wordsworth and Coleridge call Imagination-is regarded as no more than yet another final solution; indeed, under the circumstances, is regarded as something worse, as a sort of final or grand illusion. The sign of Crabbe's attitude is to be traced in his "figures of imagination": in every case these are desperate and incapable figures, lost souls whose final place of refuge is with fantasm, pathetic dreams and memories, or mere nightmare visions. The Romantic revulsion from Crabbe's poetry is entirely understandable, then, since the truths to which he is devoted institute a devastating critique upon the Truth which the Romantics sought to sustain. Crabbe's poetry takes up its traditional human materials but delivers them to us under the sign not of Imagination but of Science. He accumulates his material, he distinguishes it into various parts, he particularizes. Furthermore, he adds that last, crucial scientific dimension by historicizing his materials at all points. Finality, in the philosophic sense, does not govern Crabbe's tales, which emphasize relative creatures, human time, and a continuous movement of accumulation that marks out not a Romantic form of process but a scientific form of addition(563). The Romantic-prototypically Coleridgean-concept of poetic pleasure is a philosophic category of human Being. Though a subjective experience, it is metaphysically transcendent; indeed, the individual's experience of such an aesthetic pleasure is a felt apprehension (rather than an understood cognition) of the persistent reality of that transcendent Form of Being. Poetry is a vehicle which induces the experience of such pleasure, thereby reaffirming the reality of the ultimate Form of Pleasure in the act of reading the poem. What Crabbe called, in the "Preface" to the Tales (1812), the "painful realities" of existence are revealed, through Romantic Imagination, to be "passing shows" and temporal illusions. Romantic Imagination creates a "world elsewhere" which corresponds to whatever the heart desires; it substitutes an Eden of Imagination for the lost Edens of the past. Crabbe does not undertake to offer such acts of final substitution. His poetic pleasures deal with more limited values in a world which, to Crabbe's experience, seems more various, complex, and unknown than is often realized by himself or his middle and upper class readers. He is especially interested in the "painful realities of actual existence" among which he includes-indeed, emphasizes-the realities of the Romantic Imagination. His work endeavors to create, via the illusion of art, a peculiar place of disinterested repose by substituting [for our perpetually-occurring vexations" of life] objects in their place which [the mind] may contemplate with some degree of interest and satisfaction(564)": |
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1. Roger Sales, "George Crabbe's Reverence for Realism" from English Literature in History 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics, 36-51. 1983.
Historians, then, tend to mistake an official version of rural England for the official, or accurate, account. This is probably why they often quote Crabbe's famous description of the workhouse in Book One of The Village (1783) as an example of what conditions were really like. This description may tell us what 'overseers' like Crabbe felt about workhouses, but it does not provide evidence about what conditions were really like for the overseen or observed. Clare, like Hazlitt, felt that Crabbe should not be allowed to fool most of the people for most of the time into believing that his descriptions were documentary or realistic ones:
Crabbe writes about the peasantry as much like the Magistrate as the Poet. He is determined to show you their worst side: and as to their simple pleasures and pastoral feelings, he knows little or nothing about them.
His poetry, as Clare suggests, is at best one-sided and highly selective. Mrs Gaskell, who was disposed to be more charitable towards him, also felt that he was unable to perceive that life need not necessarily always be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. His concentration on the 'worst side' of rural society does provide information about and insights into the bureaucratic mind. ... Crabbe's obsession with the 'worst side' of rural society was just as selective, polemical and distorting as, say, what John Constable used to refer to as opera-house pastoral.
2. Varley Lang, "Crabbe and the Eighteenth Century" from ELH 5-4(1938) 305-33. The importance, for us, of the town eclogue(Gay's Beggar's Opera) is that it associates realism in character and surroundings with the Pastoral form, though its purely destructive side is also interesting. Crabbe must have read many of these poems for they not only were composed by such prominent figures as Swift, Gay, and Pope but were quite popular in the seventies, the decade before the publication of The Village. But changes were taking place within the Pastoral itself which pointed in the same direction. Ramsay and Gay have already been noticed, and here, again, Swift is in the van with his "A Pastoral Dialogue" in which two rustics, in the traditional antiphonal verse, make love to each other. It is a real love scene between real rustics in real surroundings and engaged in a real occupation(308). In practice, Crabbe adheres far more to his conception of the moral values of poetry as here shown than his critics recognize. The most notable commentators upon Crabbe are wrong on this subject-for example, Huchon: For Crabbe almost always, instead of making himself one with his heroes by force of sympathy, stands aside from them and loads them with reproaches, like a judge delivering a pitiless sentence. This is a misleading statement, for his unfailing humor, his sympathy, even tenderness, and his shrewd, kindly understanding leave no such total impression as Huchon would have us believe. This is not to deny that Crabbe is sometimes didactic; but finger-shaking is far less characteristic of him than the tone of deep but quiet indignation which warms the lines of The Village. He is usually content with keeping outside and letting the picture speak for itself, as in the terrible delineations of misery occurring in his street scenes(325). 3. Rose Marie Thale, ""Crabbe's "Village" and Topographical Poetry" from The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 55-4(Oct., 1956) 618-23. The moralizing, a notable topographical characteristic, is at once a digression and a link. Crabbe interposes an abstract paragraph about the frailty of joy between his very concrete description of Sunday recreations and his exemplifications of the village vices. And, as in a bad sermon that could logically end long be fore it does, the moralizing leads to the irrelevant last 120 lines of the poem. After discussing the village vices, Crabbe stops short to say, Yet, why, you ask, these humble crimes relate,Why make the poor as guilty as the great?To show the great, those mightier sons of pride,How near in vice the lowest are allied. (11, 87-90) He urges the rich to reflect on this: then he goes on to exhort the poor to "forbear to envy those you call the great. . . . They are, like you, the victims of distress." And to exemplify the distresses of the rich, he tells about the death of Lord Robert Manners; then he eulogizes him and addresses the Duke of Rutland, praising him and offering him the comfort of further moralizing. Not only are there separate paragraphs of moralizing in The Village, but its manner is magisterial, didactic throughout, and this again is typical of the topographical genre. Crabbe does not suggest; he tells people what to think, what to feel. He makes statements positively, dogmatically; his evidence is presented as illustration rather than proof. And Crabbe talks at people, as a preacher does; he has lines of direct address to the villagers, to rich readers who think rural life is pleasant, to a hypochondriac, to Death, to readers in general, to peasants, to the rich, to the Duke of Rutland(622-23). 4. Ronald B. Hatch, "George Crabbe and the Tenth Muse" from Eighteenth-Century Studies 7-3(Spring, 1974), 274-94.
If Crabbe intended to give “the real picture" then there must also have been a false picture. This false picture, largely but not entirely a literary creation, rested on the assumption that a pastoral life of ease and pleasure existed in England. Crabbe’s first job was to demolish this pastoral myth(277).
It is hardly necessary to observe that Crabbe was by no means the first to criticize the pastoral... However, Crabbe’s main argument is not with classical poetry per se, but with the inclusion of classical subject matter in descriptions of English country life. Crabbe no doubt realized as well as we do that the landscape of the traditional pastoral was meant to symbolize a state of innocence, and not to represent a physical environment. Yet the pastoral underwent some extremely curious changes in the eighteenth century, first when Pope altered the tradition by including "the best side only of a shepherd’s life," and later when poets such as William Shenstone and his friend Richard Jago introduced classical shepherds into their poems of topographic description. The result, a curious mixture of myth and geography, was neither symbolic nor naturalistic. It is this eighteenth-century development of the pastoral which Crabbe is denouncing(279).
To understand Crabbe’s attitude one should recognize that The Village was written in protest against a particularly obnoxious version of sentimentalized humanitarianism which was rife in the period 1740-1790. Very often throughout the century when the poor were discussed the emphasis fell not on the condition of the poor, but on the feelings of the observer. ...Had Crabbe made a simple plea for the reader's sympathy toward the poor, he would inevitably have fallen into a series of those stock epithets which one finds attributed to any member of the leisured class claiming to fulfill Shaftesbury’s ideal of the man of taste, humanity, and culture. It was standard procedure to include in poems as widely different as Pomfret’s The Choice, John Philip’s Cyder, and James Thomson's Winter an acknowledgement that the true gentleman and humanitarian remembered and pitied the poor....but when they expressed these feelings in verse, the stress fell on the act of charity, on the way this act placed the "good man" in harmony with nature and God, rather than on the plight of the poor man(279-80).
One can understand better Crabbe's vehement dislike of pastoral when it is realized that as a result of the emphasis placed on the feelings of the philanthropist, the poor were no longer described as distressed people, but pastoral shepherds idling in a green and merry land. Since poets wished to emphasize the beauty of the act of charity, they found it necessary to describe beautiful surroundings and not empty commons. The countryside in The Pleasures of Imagination(Mark Akenside) contains “every charm." Its beauty is an emblem of the good life nature intends for the villagers. All too frequently the idea of picturesque poverty is conjured up in order to feel a glow at the thought of relieving it. And since poverty is always there, the glow is always possible. Once one sees the connection between the pastoral and humanitarian poetry, Crabbe’s attack on “sleepy bards" should be all the more understandable and his purpose in The Village easier to define. He is not developing the idea that the poor should be helped (the humanitarians had made this theme appear trite), but rather that one must learn to recognize the poor and their conditions before attempting to help them. In many ways, Crabbe’s The Village is anti-humanitarian, because in the 1780s "humanitarian" entailed a sentimental attitude to the poor(281).
Whereas Thomson believed that Newton’s “intellectual eye" gave man insight into the hierarchical laws by which God harmonizes the universe, Crabbe’s “horizontal Eye" led to empirical observations that did not assume a moral universe. Thomson began with the assumption that Newton had been able to give a reason for everything, including, in his words, "the yellow waste of idle sands." This traditional view in which man was seen as a unique creation with an immortal soul participating in an ethically organized universe is implicitly challenged by Crabbe’s "scientific" method, where he begins by describing the particular, the barren soil of Aldborough, and from this particular attempts to draw conclusions. The difference is crucial and it should be no surprise to find that Crabbe draws the conclusion that man, like all other living things, has to battle in order to live. As an amateur scientist, Crabbe has offered a picture of man in terms of his observed outward actions with no mention of the usual moral and spiritual dimensions. He is explained in terms of natural phenomena(286).
It should be emphasized that Crabbe is not saying that the rich cause the poverty of the poor; he is not blaming the rich. Rather he seems to be pointing out the much more subtle implication that the existence of brutal servants necessitates the existence of brutal masters. Physical poverty in one class is inevitably linked to moral and spiritual poverty in other classes. It is against this background that Crabbe's introduction of Robert Manners with his Christ-like associations should be viewed. In a world of self-interest, Manners, the one noble man, brings everyone of the village-rich and poor alike-the evidence that man can rise above himself. Manners, it should be stressed, is necessary not simply because he was generous or happy, or even virtuous, but because he did not bow down to circumstances. He chose to die for the cause he believed in. Thus Manners' way of death offers proof that man is not merely the product of outside forces, but can himself shape his own destiny. But the introduction of Robert Manners also signals that Crabbe is now interpreting the Hobbesian world of the earlier part of the poem in terms of the Christian view of history where man is in a fallen state to be saved only by the intercession of a man-god. It will be recalled that many writers since the time of Pascal have been motivated to a belief in God because a Godless world seemed so unbearable. Christ is not actually introduced into The Village, but Robert Manners is clearly an analogue. Crabbe’s difficulty in managing the transition is seen most clearly in his imagery. While he does not forsake the nature imagery of the first part of the poem-Manners is likened to a “tall oak"-nature is no longer amoral, but ethical and protective. The "tall oak" is the "guard and glory" of the trees below. Although this Christ-like figure, so suddenly and preposterously introduced, strikes almost all modern readers as vestigial, one can see how Crabbe’s concern with "the real," which generated a description of man’s condition extraordinarily similar to that of the Christian view of fallen man, left him with only the Christian solution as a means of escape from the labyrinth of Hobbes' world. Crabbe has posited a static world where man and society do not change, where in fact man’s behavior can be described in terms of unchanging natural phenomena. Under such conditions, the artist can describe man only as he was and always will be(290-91). 5. Jerome J. McGann, "The Anachronism of George Crabbe" from ELH 48-3(Autumn 1981) 555-72. For the Romantics, Crabbe's work was a peculiarly depressing form of art. Written in the face of the same severe realities which Crabbe saw, Romantic poetry attempted to formulate a positive and, above all, a final solution to the recurrent problems of human change and suffering. Reading Crabbe, however, we clearly see that the Romantic solution-which Wordsworth and Coleridge call Imagination-is regarded as no more than yet another final solution; indeed, under the circumstances, is regarded as something worse, as a sort of final or grand illusion. The sign of Crabbe's attitude is to be traced in his "figures of imagination": in every case these are desperate and incapable figures, lost souls whose final place of refuge is with fantasm, pathetic dreams and memories, or mere nightmare visions. The Romantic revulsion from Crabbe's poetry is entirely understandable, then, since the truths to which he is devoted institute a devastating critique upon the Truth which the Romantics sought to sustain. Crabbe's poetry takes up its traditional human materials but delivers them to us under the sign not of Imagination but of Science. He accumulates his material, he distinguishes it into various parts, he particularizes. Furthermore, he adds that last, crucial scientific dimension by historicizing his materials at all points. Finality, in the philosophic sense, does not govern Crabbe's tales, which emphasize relative creatures, human time, and a continuous movement of accumulation that marks out not a Romantic form of process but a scientific form of addition(563). The Romantic-prototypically Coleridgean-concept of poetic pleasure is a philosophic category of human Being. Though a subjective experience, it is metaphysically transcendent; indeed, the individual's experience of such an aesthetic pleasure is a felt apprehension (rather than an understood cognition) of the persistent reality of that transcendent Form of Being. Poetry is a vehicle which induces the experience of such pleasure, thereby reaffirming the reality of the ultimate Form of Pleasure in the act of reading the poem. What Crabbe called, in the "Preface" to the Tales (1812), the "painful realities" of existence are revealed, through Romantic Imagination, to be "passing shows" and temporal illusions. Romantic Imagination creates a "world elsewhere" which corresponds to whatever the heart desires; it substitutes an Eden of Imagination for the lost Edens of the past. Crabbe does not undertake to offer such acts of final substitution. His poetic pleasures deal with more limited values in a world which, to Crabbe's experience, seems more various, complex, and unknown than is often realized by himself or his middle and upper class readers. He is especially interested in the "painful realities of actual existence" among which he includes-indeed, emphasizes-the realities of the Romantic Imagination. His work endeavors to create, via the illusion of art, a peculiar place of disinterested repose by substituting [for our perpetually-occurring vexations" of life] objects in their place which [the mind] may contemplate with some degree of interest and satisfaction(564)":
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