THIS PAPER IS NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THE EXAMINATION HALL

EN2035
BA/DIPLOMA OF HE EXAMINATION
COMBINED DEGREE SCHEME

ENGLISH

Group B Advanced Unit/Level 5 Course: Augustans and Romantics

Friday 3 May 2019 : 10.00 – 13.15

Time allowed: 3 hours and 15 minutes

DO NOT TURN OVER UNTIL TOLD TO BEGIN

[Including15 minutes’ reading time, during which students may write notes in the
answer book but not on the question paper. Any notes in the answer book(s) should
be crossed out.]

Answer THREE questions, ONE from EACH section (all three questions carry equal
marks). Candidates may NOT discuss the same text in more than one answer, in this
examination or in any other Advanced Level Unit/Level 5/Level 6 examination.

© University of London 2019

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 SECTION A

1. Write on ONE of the following passages, indicating those qualities which you think
make it characteristic of the period. Pay particular attention to the subject, the
form, and the use of language and image.

a) From The Spectator, No.185, Tuesday, October 2, 1711.

—Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ?—Virg. Æn. i. 15

And dwells such fury in celestial breasts?

There is nothing in which men more deceive themselves than in what the world
call zeal. There are so many passions which hide themselves under it, and so
5 many mischiefs arising from it, that some have gone so far as to say it would
have been for the benefit of mankind if it had never been reckoned in the
catalogue of virtues. It is certain, where it is once laudable and prudential, it is
a hundred times criminal and erroneous: nor can it be otherwise, if we consider
that it operates with equal violence in all religions, however opposite they may
10 be to one another, and in all the subdivisions of each religion in particular.
We are told by some of the Jewish rabbins, that the first murder was
occasioned by a religious controversy; and if we had the whole history of zeal
from the days of Cain to our own times, we should see it filled with so many
scenes of slaughter and bloodshed, as would make a wise man very careful
15 how he suffers himself to be actuated by such a principle, when it only regards
matters of opinion and speculation.
I would have every zealous man examine his heart thoroughly, and, I
believe, he will often find, that what he calls a zeal for his religion, is either
pride, interest, or ill-nature. A man who differs from another in opinion, sets
20 himself above him in his own judgment, and in several particulars pretends to
be the wiser person. This is a great provocation to the proud man, and gives a
keen edge to what he calls his zeal. And that this is the case very often, we
may observe from the behaviour of some of the most zealous for orthodoxy,
who have often great friendships and intimacies with vicious, immoral men,
25 provided they do but agree with them in the same scheme of belief. The reason
is, because the vicious believer gives the precedency to the virtuous man, and
allows the good Christian to be the worthier person, at the same time that he
cannot come up to his perfections. This we find exemplified in that trite
passage which we see quoted in almost every system of ethics, though upon
30 another occasion:

—Video meliora proboque,

Deteriora sequor—Ovid, Met. Vii, 20
I see the right, and I approve it too:
Condemn the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue.—TATE1

1 TATE: Restoration poet and dramatist.

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35 On the contrary, it is certain, if our zeal were true and genuine, we should be
much more angry with a sinner than a heretic; since there are several cases
which may excuse the latter before his great Judge, but none which can
excuse the former.
(JOSEPH ADDISON, from The Spectator, 1711)

b) From The Hilliad: an Epic Poem2

Say, Muse, what demon, foe to ease and truth,

First from the mortar dragg’d th’ adventurous youth,
And made him, ’mongst the scribbling sons of men,
Change peace for war, the pestle for the pen? […]
5 Such was the group—they bow’d and they ador’d,
And hail’d Hillario for their sovereign lord.
Flush’d with success, and proud of his allies,
Th’ exulting hero thus exultant cries. […]
“No foreign aid my daring pen shall chuse,
10 But boldly versify without a Muse.
I’ll teach Minerva, I’ll inspire the Nine,
Great Phœbus shall in consultation join,
And round my nobler brow his forfeit laurel twine.” […]
But now the harbingers of fate and fame
15 Signs, omens, prodigies, and portents came.
Lo! (though mid-day) the grave Athenian fowl,
Eyed the bright sun, and hail’d him with a howl,
Moths, mites, and maggots, fleas, (a numerous crew!)
And gnats and grubworms crouded on his view,
20 Insects! without the microscopic aid,
Gigantic by the eye of Dulness made! […]
On an high dome a damsel took her stand,
With a well freighted Jordan3 in her hand,
Where curious mixtures strove on every side
25 And solid sounds with laxer fluids vied—
Lo! On his crown the lotion choice and large,
She soused—and gave at once a full discharge.
Not Archimedes, when with conscious pride,
“I’ve found it out! I’ve found it out!” he cry’d,
30 Not costive4 bardlings, when a rhyme comes pat,
Not grave Grimalkin when she smells a rat:
Not the shrewd statesman when he scents a plot,
Not coy Prudelia, when she knows what’s what,
2 The Hilliad: the work is Smart’s derisive response to some allegedly hostile criticism of his poetry by
John Hill, a writer, botanist, and something of a ‘quack’ doctor. As the poem opens, Hill has been
persuaded by ‘a tawny Sybil’ to leave his menial trade as an apothecary, and to launch himself on the
world as a poet. His ‘coronation’ is heralded by a mob of personified flatterers – Petulance, Dulness,
Malice, Scandal, Nonsense etc.
3 Jordan: chamber-pot.
4 costive: constipated, reticent.

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 Not our own hero, when (O matchless luck!)
35 His keen discernment found another Duck;5
With such ecstatic transports did abound,
As what he smelt and saw, and felt and found.
“Ye gods, I thank ye, to profusion free,
Thus to adorn, and thus distinguish me,
40 And thou, fair Cloacina, whom I serve,
(If a desire to please is to deserve,)
To you I’ll consecrate my future lays,
And on the smoothest paper print my soft essays.”
(CHRISTOPHER SMART, from The Hilliad: an Epic Poem, 1753)

c) From A Summer Evening’s Meditation

Seized in thought,
On fancy’s wild and roving wing I sail,
From the green borders of the peopled earth
And the pale moon, her duteous fair attendant;
5 From solitary Mars; from the vast orb
Of Jupiter, whose huge gigantic bulk
Dances in ether like the lightest leaf;
To the dim verge, the suburbs of the system6
Where cheerless Saturn midst her wat’ry moons,
10 Girt with a lucid zone,7 majestic sits
In gloomy grandeur, like an exiled queen
Amongst her weeping handmaids. Fearless thence
I launch into the trackless deeps of space
Where, burning round, ten thousand suns appear
15 Of elder beam, which ask no leave to shine
Of our terrestrial star, nor borrow light
From the proud regent of our scanty day—
Sons of the morning, first-born of creation,
And only less than Him who marks their track
20 And guides their fiery wheels. Here must I stop,
Or is there aught beyond? What hand unseen
Impels me onward through the glowing orbs
Of habitable nature far remote,
To the dread confines of eternal night,
25 To solitudes of vast unpeopled space,
The deserts of creation, wide and wild,
Where embryo systems and unkindled suns
Sleep in the womb of chaos?

5 Duck: Stephen Duck, an untutored farm labourer, who, as ‘the thresher poet’, was lionized at Court in
the eighteenth century.
6 suburbs of the system: outer reaches of the solar system.
7 zone: belt – as in the rings of Saturn.

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 Fancy droops,
And thought astonished stops her bold career […]
30 But now my soul, unused to stretch her powers
In flight so daring, drops her weary wing
And seeks again the known accustomed spot
Dressed up with sun and shade, and lawns and streams,
A mansion fair and spacious for its guest,
35 And full replete with wonders. Let me here,
Content and grateful, wait th’ appointed time
And ripen for the skies: the hour will come
When all these splendours bursting on my sight
Shall stand unveiled, and to my ravished sense
40 Unlock the glories of the world unknown.
(ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD, from Poems, 1773)

d) From Suspiria De Profundis: The Affliction of Childhood8

I stood checked for a moment—awe, not fear, fell upon me—and whilst I stood,
a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ear ever heard. Mournful!
That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for
a hundred centuries. Many times since, upon a summer day, when the sun is
5 about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same
hollow, solemn, Memnonian,9 but saintly swell; it is in this world the one sole
audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life I have happened to hear
the same sound in the same circumstances, viz. when standing between an
open window and a dead body on a summer day.
10 Instantly, when my ear caught this vast Æolian intonation, when my eye
filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps and glory of the heavens
outside, and turning when it settled upon the frost which overspread my sister’s
face, instantly a trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of
the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I in spirit rose as if on billows
15 that also ran up the shaft for ever, and the billows seemed to pursue the throne
of God—but that also ran before us and fled away continually. The flight and
the pursuit seemed to go on for ever and ever. Frost, gathering frost, some
sarsar10 wind of death, seemed to repel me. I slept, for how long I cannot say;
slowly I recovered my self-possession, and found myself standing as before,
20 close to my sister’s bed.
Oh flight of the solitary child to the solitary God—flight from the ruined
corpse to the throne that could not be ruined! How rich wert thou in truth for
after-years! Rapture of grief that, being too mighty for a child to sustain,
foundest a happy oblivion in a heaven-born sleep, and within that sleep didst
25 conceal a dream whose meanings in after-years, when slowly I deciphered,

8 Suspiria De Profundis: ‘sighs from the depths’. De Quincey’s sister, Elizabeth, aged nine, had died in
1792 when he was six years old.
9 Memnonian: the Romantics believed that the statue of Memnon, King of Ethiopia, held a lute which

produced music when struck by the rays of the sun.

10 sarsar: cold

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 suddenly there flashed upon me new light—and even by the grief of a child, as
I will show you reader hereafter, were confounded the falsehoods of
philosophers […] As in starry fields one computes by diameters of the earth’s
orbit, or of Jupiter’s, so in valuing the virtual time lived during some dreams,
30 the measurement by generations is ridiculous, by millennia is ridiculous—by
aeons, I should say (if aeons were more determinate), would be also ridiculous.
On this single occasion, however, in my life, the very inverse
phenomenon occurred […] Instead of a short interval expanding into a vast
one, upon this occasion a long one had contracted into a minute. I have reason
35 to believe that a very long one had elapsed during this wandering or
suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned to myself, there was a foot (or
so I fancied) on the stairs.
(THOMAS DE QUINCEY, from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 57, 1845)

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SECTION B

Answer ONE question. For the purposes of this examination, Jane Austen will be
deemed a nineteenth-century author.

2. [Man] hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err.
(ALEXANDER POPE)

Consider the work of one eighteenth-century satirist who confronted some of the
antitheses that Pope suggests inhabit the nature of man.

3. According to GEORG LUKACS, the works of the eighteenth-century novelists are

characterized by ‘an atmosphere of stability and security and also a certain
complacent shortsightedness’. Assess the merits of this view with reference to the
prose fiction of one author writing during the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth
centuries.

4. Discuss the ways in which a writer’s exploitation of structure may enhance the
reader’s understanding of a text. You should refer to the work of one author.

5. ‘Whatever is familiar, or in any way reminds us of what we see and hear every day,
perhaps does not belong to the higher provinces of art, either in poetry or painting’
(SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS). Discuss the verse of one poet whose work confirms or
challenges such a thesis.

6. Consider the ways in which ‘the Age of Sensibility’ prompted an amiably ironic
response. Refer to the work of one or more authors.

7. Write an essay which explains why one of the following poets sustained their
popularity into the nineteenth century: Thomas Gray, William Collins, William
Cowper.

8. ‘The [Romantic] movement is filled with the praise of ignorance, and of those who
still enjoy its inappreciable advantages,—the savage, the peasant, and above all the
child’ (IRVING BABBIT). In a discussion of the work of one writer, mount a defence
against this hostile critique.

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9. ‘[T]here is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind
must be false as a system’ (SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE). How important to
ideas about the Romantic imagination is this rejection of the ‘passiveness of the
mind’? Refer to the writings of one author.

SECTION C

Answer ONE question.

Your answer in this section should refer to AT LEAST TWO authors. For the
purposes of this examination, Jane Austen will be deemed a nineteenth-century
author.

10. ‘Art is the sum of every human virtue: it is the affirmation of civilization in the face of
vulgarity and savagery; it is the hard-earned means by which the man of reason and
sensibility […] disciplines the wilderness in nature and in himself’ (MARTIN C.
BATTESTIN). How convincingly does this proposition describe the impetus behind
eighteenth-century satirical writing? Refer to the work of at least two authors.

11. Write a critical account of the ways in which any two of the following have been
deployed in the poetry and/or prose of at least two writers of the period:
(a) architecture
(b) garden design
(c) urban locations.

12. ‘Many novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries treat the dilemma of an
individual in a society in which traditional and corporate values are giving way, or felt
to be giving way, to new economic and individualistic ones’ (ALISTAIR
DUCKWORTH). In the light of this suggestion, discuss the prose fiction of at least
two writers of the period.

13. Discuss the nature and treatment of melancholia in the writings of at least two
authors.

14. ‘With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as
having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart
from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school
have I grasped a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality’
(WILLIAM WORDSWORTH). With this quotation in mind, consider the relationship
between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ in the work of at least two Romantic writers.

15. In the face of Thomas Love Peacock’s utilitarian attack on poetry and poets, Percy
Bysshe Shelley defended his craft by insisting that ‘whatever strengthens and
purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful’.

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 Discuss the work of at least two authors whose writings might be called by the
defence in the debate over poetry’s ‘utility’.

16. Write an essay which considers the nature and treatment of one of the following in
the work of at least two writers:
(a) the scatological and the obscene
(b) the Ancients and the Modern
(c) the Sublime in Nature.

17. Compare the ways in which one poet and one prose writer have exploited the Gothic
mood.

END OF PAPER

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