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NOTES AND
COMMENTARY
Adapted by Dr. G from David Damrosch, et al.,
Teaching
British Literature
(New York: Longman, 2003)
.gif) That Hot Cover
If
the Renaissance is "early modern," then the
Restoration to
Eighteenth-Century era is more modern. It used to be
called "the Enlightenment" or "Age of Reason" or "Neo-Classical Age," in
reference to the notion that serious thinking emerged or re-emerged at this time from
past "middle" ages that had been based on faith or superstition. It was a great
age of discovery and science, and yet this new
period was by no means an entirely serious time.
I might call it the Age of Irreverence. Some reverent things happened (the development of Methodism and natural
religion, for example), and it was thought at this time that the new
science would lead to real knowledge of God's plan for the universe.
Nevertheless, the questioning of authority begun with the printing press in the Renaissance
reached its full flower in the 18th century. Results included an overhaul of religion
and government, the economy and work, technology and science,
fashion
and art.
Our textbook catches the spirit of this refined and
deliciously scandalous
time with its cover portrait, Reynolds' "Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue," showing the famous actress
 both elegantly and provocatively
posed.
Most telling about this period are the pictures, as
captured in the frontispiece of the book. (How does it differ from the
earlier frontispieces? what does it show and suggest about the culture
it depicts?) Have a look at the century-spanning portraits of women
that punctuate the general introduction. (What changes do they trace?)
See above all
Hogarth's A Rake’s Progress, which tracks one fop's demise through
the culture's eight
most central places (home, salon, tavern, square, church,
gambling den, Newgate,
Bedlam).
Compare this progression to the medieval stations of the cross!
As the textbook introduction (volume 1C) points out, people in this period began to
think of the past as ignorant, unpleasant and uninspiring times. Change began to be seen as
progress rather than decay. Free thinking and tolerance came into vogue, and the
personal quest for pleasure, wealth and political freedom lost much of
its stigma. The new age saw the introduction of
the industrial
revolution and world trade, the construction of coffeehouses and public
transportation, the rise of scientific method and banking, the decline
of the monarchy and Anglicanism, and the burgeoning of novels, satires,
diaries, and self-expression in general. It was the time of
the
Glorious Revolution and
the
American Revolution.
Most significantly, the social
class system was transformed. In the middle ages, society had
consisted of "the three estates": those who fought (the aristocracy or
landed gentry), those who prayed (the church), and those who worked (the
peasants). This had come down from the ancient British culture of
warriors, Druids and commons observed by Caesar. By the Restoration, however, society was less organized by division of
labor than by money. The new orders were upper class, middle class, and
lower class, as described in general by wealth--a system more rigid
than ours today but much more fluid than the ages that went
before it.
Slavery was questioned and finally in 1772 declared contrary to
English law. All in all, the age of irreverence is a world that is much
less foreign to us.
The New Science
 Irreverence
begins with the belief that we can learn more from nature than from our
forefathers and mothers, even the great sagacious ones who lived in
ancient Israel, Greece or Rome. Experimental method accorded new
centrality to the data supplied by the senses. The fellows of the Royal
Society, observes
Sprat at one point in his History, feel surest when
inquiring into “things” that can “be brought within their own touch and
sight.” They feel less secure about evidence for which they are
“forced to trust the reports of others.”
How can a writer, a maker of mere "reports," engage readers' senses? One obvious answer appears
in Hooke’s
Micrographia,
where our eyes take in directly the drawn-up data—even as the data,
obtained by means of microscope, alert us to the inadequacy of human
vision heretofore. A somewhat more subtle answer appears in
Aubrey's
Brief Lives,
biographies that deal so abundantly in things touched, smelled, tasted,
counted (it is worthwhile, perhaps, to compile a quick catalog:
Bacon’s aversion to neat’s leather, his strong beer, his snowstuffed
goose . . .). Sprat
himself returns repeatedly to the ideal (to be savagely mocked by
satirist Jonathan Swift) that words can attain the “nakedness,”
specificity, and palpability of things. Throughout this period, writers
of various kinds sought to close the gap between their report and the thing itself.
Another literary question is also intrinsic to the
Society’s agenda. In phrases key to this "Perspectives" section of our
anthology, Sprat emphasizes the importance of incompletion in the
Fellows’ work: “their purpose was to heap up a mixed mass of
experiments, without digesting them into any perfect model,” and to
present their reports “not as complete schemes of opinions, but as bare,
unfinished histories” (2127). How does each of these writers in the
writing itself--its structure, diction, style--attempt to convey the
sense of a heap, a mixed mass, an unfinished history, an unsolved puzzle? In what ways—and
for what reasons—do the writers complicate this agenda by insinuating
order, hypothesis, point, and rhetorical flourish in their prose?
Thomas Sprat and the Royal Society
A theologian hired to defend the Royal Society's
scientific project from religious attacks, Sprat writes in a style at odds with his
message. He is
at his most ornately rhetorical when denouncing ornate rhetoric. His
scornful rejections of “this vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of
metaphors, this volubility of tongue,” and of “all the amplifications,
digressions, and swellings of style,” are both instances of the
Ciceronian tricolon (or three-parter), that amplification and swelling
of style that had long afforded writers and orators the kind of
prefabricated grandeur that putatively prompts Sprat’s rage. Sprat is conscious
that he is trapped by the ways in which he is accustomed to write: “The
style in which [this history] is written,” he confesses in his preface,
“is larger and more contentious than becomes that purity and shortness
which are the chief beauties of historical writings.” For this fault he
blames the Society’s detractors. So severe are their attacks, Sprat
argues, that he must use all the rhetorical resources available to
him.
In Philosophical Transactions
(a scientific journal established in 1665 and still published today)
the newly developing genre of the periodical provided a near-perfect
implementation of the “mixed mass” and the “unfinished history.” The
table of contents for each number blazoned an ostentatious variety of
topics. In the matter of “the monstrous calf,” erroneous observations in
the first number are comfortably corrected in the second.
Boyle’s
conjectures about ambergris, though erroneous in themselves, fulfill
flawlessly the Society’s agenda for inquiry: its proud dependence on
information gathered by merchants and “mechanicks” engaged with the real
world; its use of a manuscript “journal” (another mode of periodical) in
which the data are recorded fresh, at the time and place of their first
gathering.
Robert Hooke
 Rhetorically,
Hooke sustains a continual traffic between small things and great: he
presents (in the first dedication) a “small present” to a great king;
apologizes (in the second) for his own “faults” before an “illustrious
assembly.” Yet he makes clear, throughout his text that the microscope’s
minutiae have much to teach us about Creation and about the “true
philosophy” in which Hooke and his colleagues are engaged. Hooke
repeatedly confesses his subordinate social status (real enough at the
Royal Society), which probably made it seem to his aristocratic bosses
that they were the discoverers, and yet they were often annoyed that
Hooke went off on his own priorities. One discovery they were making is
that the world of science belongs to those who do it.
Hooke’s preface highlights the double status of the human senses in the
Society’s agenda: the senses are all-important, and they are woefully
inadequate. New instruments must be used to extend their reach and
refine their grasp. Hooke promptly remakes this point, with subtle
visual force, by showing us a printed period (or full stop) many times
magnified in the book’s first illustrative plate. In the text that
accompanies the picture (indeed in every text we read) we have beheld
numberless periods of ordinary size. The plate inducts us deftly into
the book’s central revelation: that the things we have looked at all our
days, we have not fully seen. We are alerted both to the insufficiency
of our senses, and (as Hooke emphasizes) to the inferiority, the
imperfection, of works of “art” (human artifice) in contrast with works
of nature. Once having seen the magnified period in the plate, we cannot
look at the periods on the page in quite the same way again, and so we
advance a little way into that collaborative process of skeptical
inquiry which the Society so prized. Hooke draws us thither again and
again by inviting us to do our own “work” on the plates he presents, as
at the end of the commentary on the flea.
Hooke’s depiction of the flea seems to have produced the
most shock and fascination of any of his plates, partly because of the
implicit violence of the image (see the metaphors of armor and weaponry
that Hooke deploys in his description) but partly too because the
picture was a foldout, glued into the book but four times the size of
the book’s normal page. Having perhaps become accustomed to the
magnifications on early pages, the reader was confronted, here at the
very end of the book, with expansion expanded—and with the implication
that Micrographia and
its attendant inquiries would prove an unending program, of which this
first installment was a bare, unfinished history.
John Aubrey
 Aubrey’s
Lives are unfinished history incarnate: even
in this copious array of notes towards biography, he leaves blanks that
he never gets around to filling in. The real question is what makes them
so pleasurable as prose and so persuasive, in their own way, as
biography. It may be best to hear a few items read aloud, some short
(Bacon’s “hazel eye,” Harvey’s “young wench”) and some longer (Harvey’s
involvement at Edgehill, with its striking train of narrative thought),
and to ask, one by one, what effects Aubrey achieves in these items and
how he achieves them. One key may lie in Sprat’s recurrent praise of
“naked” language (and “bare” history).
Aubrey’s anecdotes seem unadorned, unmediated, as though rawly reported
in accord with the credo, “first thought, best thought.” At the same
time, Aubrey is conspicuously and pervasively present, as gatherer (“Mr.
Hobbes told me. . .”) and as shaper: it seems clear, for example, that
with a few reservations Aubrey admires both these men tremendously,
though he does not directly say so. How, then, can we tell?
Yet Aubrey is showing his subjects warts and all. His
biographies are entirely new in their realism--or scandal or gossip or
whatever. Before Aubrey with some exceptions, biography normally was
used for moral teaching. Characters exemplified good or bad conduct. In
most cases, the biographer did not know the subject personally or
through acquaintances but only through books and imagination. Which is it:
does Aubrey apply scientific method in attempting to get the facts
straight, or is he merely a gossip collector showing how well connected
he is to important people of the day?
Aubrey's Lives
can be contrasted with the selections in our anthology from Dr.
Samuel Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
(closer in time) or
Edward Hyde’s
True
Historical Narrative of the Rebellion. Aubrey
offers informal, clipped, simple sentences (and sentence
fragments), but Johnson and Hyde use formal Ciceronian periods. The
formal and informal, high and middle styles convey separate world-views. The periodic sentence expresses, as
syntax, those “perfect [i.e., polished, completed] models” of thought
that Sprat rejected but could not resist writing. On the other hand, the
informal, running Senecan
style embodies the provisional, the observed, the sense of history unfinished,
which Sprat celebrated. The
high and
middle styles do battle throughout much of eighteenth-century writing.
Novelist Henry Fielding’s periodic sentences
and narrative structures work to heighten humor with respect to lowly
subjects; reporter Daniel Defoe’s running
sentences and provisional, improvisatory narratives provide a sense of
objectivity.
Writers tended to use the two modes on different occasions.
For instance, Samuel Pepys wrote ornate Ciceronian “public prose”
(letters, speeches), but chose a far plainer style for his informal data-driven
diary. It is an age of self-conscious style.
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Left: another portrait
of Mrs. Abington by Sir Joshua Reynolds (cir. 1764-73).
Left: The first British Libertine
poet,
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), crowns a monkey.
Left: the microscope used for the Royal
Society of London by Robert Hooke.
Left: Hooke's flea. The Brits
looked closer than ever at things.
Aubrey inaugurates the scandal
sheet that has become the standard fare in popular English media.
Below: Frontispiece to the History
of the Royal Society. Crowning King Charles II are the first president
of the society Christopher Wren (left) and the Elizabethan philosopher
of science Francis Bacon (right) |
