Nation and Narration by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1433545
Publisher: Routledge

Serious reform is to be undertaken only when its beneficial outcome is certain — which, granted the uncertainty of all human affairs, will be rarely if ever the case. The basis of social affiliation is to be the established, the customary, the national: the way things are in Britain, and allegedly always have been, however things may be elsewhere, or however reason suggests that they should be.

Because, in the 1770s, the discourse of custom is directed primarily against the political theories produced by a democratic reading of Locke, Reynolds is able to employ the discourse in the belief that his defence of the customary is directed solely against a pedantically rationalist theory of painting, and not against the civic humanist theory of his earlier addresses, which indeed he seems to believe will be strengthened rather than challenged by his new concern for the customary. To ensure the compatibility of the customary and the civic discourse, all he needs to do, it seems, is to redefine the 'universal principles of human nature' so as to allow human nature to include whatever in second nature could be described as universal and invariable. Opinions and prejudices which have no basis in nature, but which command universal credit, are thus made part of an enlarged idea of human nature, which could still be regarded as uncontaminated by the merely local or temporary.

Reynolds borrows an example from Lord Karnes to explain what he means. In all countries, he argues, the manner of showing respect to one's superiors is different — this is done in one country by bowing, in another by kneeling, in a third by prostration, in a fourth by removing the hat. But in all countries respect is shown by the attempt to make oneself less than the recipient of that respect.29 The particular means by which respect is shown is an accident of place, a local custom, but the general principle is universal; and a painter who wishes, in conformity still with the civic humanist theory of painting, to represent an enlarged idea of universal human nature, may represent not merely the central forms of mankind, but also those manners and customs so universal as to be, always and everywhere, second nature. Painting may not represent local customs, but it should represent general customs; criticism may not base its principles on temporary or local prejudices, but it should include among its principles opinions and prejudices which, though not in conformity with the original frame of human nature, are always and everywhere the same.

The difficulty of applying this new position to painting would have been obvious to Bishop Berkeley: a painter cannot represent the abstract idea of showing respect, but only one or another of the local modes of doing so. Thus to admit custom into the realm of the paintable may be of necessity to admit local customs. Reynolds never acknowledges this difficulty explicitly, but that it was somehow present to him is suggested by the continuation of his argument in the

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