The Anthologised Romance of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda

William Gifford's intemperate responses to English Della Cruscanism, The Baviad and Maeviad, have influenced readers of this poetry ever since—or rather, non-readers, since Gifford's jeremiad has taken the place of the original for most. As Jerome McGann points out, however, Gifford's condemnation rests on a more thorough understanding of the dynamics of the poetry than its deeply negative, scurrilous, and potentially libellous tone makes enlightened modern readers comfortable acknowledging. Amid Gifford's indignant reactionism, in his descriptions of poetic cuckolding, 'obscene' imagery and 'crude conception[s]', his completely accurate statement stands out: 'the two "great luminaries of the age" [Della Crusca and Anna Matilda], as Mr. Bell calls them, fell desperately in love with each other' (Baviad and Maeviad, p. xii). Della Cruscan poetry, in its English incarnation, charts a romance in terminology that offends the sensibilities of sensibility: it is too physical, too open, too desiring, too expressive. Most dangerously, it allows for, even encourages, the poeticising of erotic attraction. Readers of The World in 1787-8 watched breathlessly as Della Crusca and Anna Matilda fell in, and then out of, love; the serialisation of their romance was then packed up and produced in book form in The British Album, first in 1788 but going through several editions until 1794. Gifford's horror arises as much from the lasting spectacle of men and women openly declaring love and physical desire as it does from aesthetic concerns: poetry itself was being violated, its classical purity put in the service of a pornographic emphasis on the passions. Gifford's chivalric attitude towards a helpless genre functions as an instance of critical chivalry; the Baviad and Maeviad resounds with outrage at the 'false glare, [and] incongruous images' (p. 43) that deface Della Cruscan poetry. When poetry is put to the service of conveying physical desire, we infer, it is inevitably tainted, while romance loses any claim to protection once it descends to the level of sex. Readers of The World and The British Album, however, were transfixed by the romance between Della Crusca and Anna Matilda; it offered the promise of a 'real-life' exploration of the heights and depths of fantasy—of romance. The last few decades of the eighteenth century found the romance ceaselessly interesting; repeatedly, writers attempted to define and dismiss the genre, the resilience of which showed in their periodic critical returns. Consensus was found in the decision that the romance was unreal: its purity, its unworldliness, the prominence that it gave to a love which conquered all, lent it a lustre not found in 'real life'. Although the romance owed more to the world than many commentators gave it credit for, nonetheless its immediate appeal was seen to be its blissful sojourning in the vales of true love. Sensibility, familiar to novel-readers in the 1780s, was romance intensified, a celebration of emotional attachment between lovers, of female endurance, and of the triumph of love over lust. For Gifford, a signal crime of Della Cruscanism was its contradictory devotion to sensibility; even as its sensual language fell foul of sensibility's celebration of virtue, its plotline depended heavily on a scenario of love deferred, a plotline eventually exploded, as I will discuss later in this essay. Gifford's view is endorsed by McGann, who situates Della Cruscanism as exemplifying 'the poetics of sensibility'. But Gifford's visceral hatred indicates what McGann, despite his description of the erotics of the poetry, successfully elides: the romance between Della Crusca and Anna Matilda offends sensibility exactly because it is sexual, rather than sensual. The ordered and balanced purity of romance is conquered by the fiery passions …