A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings

Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings, A

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Title: A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725)
Author: Henry Gally
Editor: Alexander H. Chorney
Release Date: July 15, 2005 [EBook #16299]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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The Augustan Reprint Society
HENRY GALLY
A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings
from his translation of
The Moral Characters of Theophrastus
(1725)

With an Introduction by Alexander H. Chorney
Publication Number 33
Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California 1952
* * * * *
GENERAL EDITORS
H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial Library RICHARD C. BOYS, University of Michigan ROBERT S. KINSMAN, _University of California, Los Angeles_ JOHN LOFTIS, _University of California, Los Angeles_
ASSISTANT EDITOR
W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
ADVISORY EDITORS
EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington BENJAMIN BOYCE, Duke University LOUIS BREDVOLD, University of Michigan JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago EDWARD NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_ LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas JAMES SUTHERLAND, _University College, London_ H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
EDNA C. DAVIS, Clark Memorial Library
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
Henry Gally's _A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings_, here reprinted, is the introductory essay to his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725). Of Gally's life (1696-1769) little is known. Apparently his was a moderately successful ecclesiastical career: he was appointed in 1735 chaplain-in-ordinary to George II. His other published works consist of sermons, religious tracts, and an undistinguished treatise on the pronunciation of Greek.
His essay on the character, however, deserves attention because it is the first detailed and serious discussion by an Englishman of a literary kind immensely popular in its day. English writers before Gally had, of course, commented on the character. Overbury, for example, in "What A Character Is" (_Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife..._ 1616) had defined the character as "wit's descant on any plain-song," and Brathwaite in his Dedication to _Whimzies_(1631) had written that character-writers must shun affectation and prefer the "pith before the rind." Wye Saltonstall in the same year in his Dedicatory Epistle to Picturae Loquentes had required of a character "lively and exact Lineaments" and "fast and loose knots which the ingenious Reader may easily untie." These remarks, however, as also Flecknoe's "Of the Author's Idea of a Character" (Enigmaticall Characters, 1658) and Ralph Johnson's "rules" for character-writing in _A Scholar's Guide from the Accidence to the University_ (1665), are fragmentary and oblique. Nor do either of the two English translations of Theophrastus before Gally--the one a rendering of La Bruyère's French version,[1] and the other, Eustace Budgell's The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1714)--touch more than in passing on the nature of the character. Gally's essay, in which he claims to deduce his critical principles from the practice of Theophrastus, is both historically and intrinsically the most important work of its kind.
Section I of Gally's essay, thoroughly conventional in nature, is omitted here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked up, and brought upon the British theatre, they could not fail of Success."[3] Gally similarly held that a dramatic character and Theophrastan character differ only in
the different Manner of representing the same Image. The Drama presents to the Eyes of a Spectator an Actor, who speaks and acts as the Person, whom he represents, is suppos'd to speak and act in real Life. The Characteristic Writer introduces, in a descriptive manner, before a Reader, the same Person, as speaking and acting in the same manner.
Section III of Gally's essay, like Section I thoroughly conventional, is also omitted here. Gally attributes to Theophrastus the spurious "Proem," in which Theophrastus, emphasizing his ethical purpose, announces his intention of following up his characters of vice with characters of virtue. At one point Gally asserts that Theophrastus taught the same doctrine as Aristotle and Plato, but
accommodated Morality to the Taste of the Beau Monde, with all the Embellishments that can please the nice Ears of an intelligent Reader, and with that inoffensive Satir, which corrects