The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

128 those who (following George Lord, for example) stress the centrality of a ‘‘quiescent and cool’’version of conservatism in Absalom and Achitophel and find the poem urging ‘‘passive acceptance,’’ Mr. Yu argues that ‘‘complacency is the very mood of thinking against which the poem aims to warn Charles and, implicitly, the reader.’’Thus‘‘Dryden’s‘cool’demeanor . . . represents not the smugness of social privilege but the discipline of critical intelligence reasoning in the teeth of an emergency.’’At the conclusion of a finely circumspect chapter on Pope, Mr. Yu writes that ‘‘the British Augustan temperament takes for granted the idea, which may scandalize more modern dispositions , that what shapes moral choice is artistic or poetic skill in its barest state: an equipoise that grows out of a commitment to self-cultivation at the expense of self-interest, a commitment gradually solidified through repeated trial and error .’’ Whether this sums up Augustanism in generalmaybedebated,butitgetsright to the heart of the sense of many ofPope’s readers that stylistic rigor is not merely a vehicle for ethics but part of their embodiment , and that revision is a moral imperative . Through such liberalizing efforts come, here and there, possibilities of finding or making something to admire . My one complaint is that the book lacks a conclusion. (That our discipline would be taken more seriously if readers of dissertations and manuscripts insisted that works are not complete without at least a few pages confronting What It All Means appears increasingly to be a minority opinion.) I would like to hear more from acriticasthoughtfulasMr.Yuabout how one’s interpretations of Dryden, Pope, Byron, Auden, and Merrill modify each other and make a difference in the imaginative life of the reader who undertakes to hold them in mind together. Mr. Yu is a reader of rare capacity and his book a rich contribution to the poetic commerce of old and new. John Sitter University of Notre Dame PAUL BAINES. The Long 18th Century. London: Arnold, 2004. Pp. xii ⫹ 188.£14.95; $24.95. My favorite part of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan has always been the scene in which Tom Townsend, an earnest newcomer to the world of Manhattan debutantes , confesses that he has never actually read Mansfield Park, despite the disparaging things he has said about it: ‘‘I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelist ’s idea as well as the critic’s thinking .’’In the film, such a confessionmakes for delightful comedy. But the joke hinges upon the ways in which Tom has utterly missed the point of reading Austen . Alas, Mr. Baines’s new book, a contribution to Arnold’s‘‘Contexts’’seriesof companions to various periods of literary history, seems to anticipateandevencater to readers remarkably like less winning versions of Tom. That is, Mr. Baines provides just enough summary and passing commentary to give students a sense of what most of the canonical texts of the eighteenth century are ‘‘about’’ without ever making it clear why anyone might actually want to read the texts themselves (much lesswhy the contextswithinwhich he is somewhat sketchily placing them might matter). Not surprisingly, this makes for a rather maddening readingexperience not only for anyone already familiar with the period, but also, I suspect, for the undergraduates to whom this series is directed. Essentially, Mr. Baines’s book reads 129 like an extended version of some of the more pedestrian headnotes in a Norton anthology—full of useful information, some quickly rendered stock interpretations , and a few gestures toward whatelse is going on. In an anthology, this works because there is a strong (and reasonable) expectation that students will use headnotes as a way to orient themselves with respect to a primary text, not as a surrogate for it. No doubt much the sameend is intended here, but the overall effect of reading Mr. Baines’s book makes me wonderwhethersurrogacyisnotthemore likely result. Certainly what is presented here is both copious and uninspired enough that a dishonest student could parrot it back in a plausible-sounding essay or exam without ever having read anything other than The Long 18th Century . Mr. Baines’s approach takes the form of offering a...