humanities

11 Enlightenment and Rococo: The Claims of Reason and the Excesses of Privilege

THINKING AHEAD

What was the English Enlightenment?

Who were the philosophes and what was their relation to Rococo art and culture?

What was the result of cross-cultural contact between Europeans and peoples of the South Pacific and China?

London, the city of elegance and refinement painted in 1747 by Venetian master of cityscapes Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal; 1697–1768), was rivaled only by Paris as the center of European intellectual life in the eighteenth century (Fig. 11.1). The painting offers no hint that the city had been devastated by fire 80 years earlier. Before dawn on the morning of September 2, 1666, a baker’s oven exploded on Pudding Lane in London. A strong east wind hastened the fire’s spread until, by morning, some 300 houses were burning. In his private diaries, Samuel Pepys [peeps] (1633–1703) recorded what he saw on that fateful day:

I rode down to the waterside, . . . and there saw a lamentable fire. . . . Everybody endeavoring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another.... [I hurried] to [Saint] Paul’s; and there walked along Watling Street, as well as I could, every creature coming away laden with goods to save and, here and there, sick people carried away in beds. Extraordinary goods carried in carts and on backs. At last [I] met my Lord Mayor in Cannon Street, like a man spent, with a [handkerchief] about his neck. . . . “Lord, what can I do? [he cried] I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.” ... So... I... walked home; seeing people all distracted, and no manner of means used to quench the fire. The houses, too, so very thick thereabouts, and full of matter for burning, as pitch and tar, in Thames Street; and warehouses of oil and wines and brandy and other things. From Samuel Pepys, Diary (September 2, 1666)

The fire in these warehouses so fueled the blaze that over the course of the next two days it engulfed virtually the entire medieval city and beyond. Almost nothing was spared. About 100,000 Londoners were left homeless. Eighty-seven churches had burned. Businesses, particularly along the busy wharves on the north side of the Thames, were bankrupted. Further taking into account the Great Plague that had killed some 70,000 Londoners just the year before, John Evelyn, one of the other great chroniclers of the age, summed up the situation in what amounts to typical British understatement: “London was, but is no more.”

Fig. 11.1 Canaletto, London: The Thames and the City of London from Richmond House (detail). 1747.

Oil on canvas, 44⅞″ 39⅞″. Trustees of the Goodwood House, West Sussex, UK. From May 1746 until at least 1755, interrupted by only two visits to Venice in 1750 to 1751 and 1753 to 1754, the Venetian painter Canaletto occupied a studio in Beak Street, London. The geometric regularity and perspectival inventiveness of his paintings reflect the Enlightenment’s taste for rationality. But his sense of grandeur and scale is, like Louis XIV’s Versailles (see Chapter 10), purely aristocratic.

Listen to the chapter audio on myartslab.com

Such devastation was both a curse and a blessing. While the task of rebuilding London was almost overwhelming, the fire gave the city the opportunity to modernize its center in a way that no other city in the world could even imagine. By 1670, almost all the private houses destroyed by the fire

had been rebuilt, and businesses were once again thriving. Over the course of the next century, the city would prosper as much or more than any other city in the world. “London,” as one writer put it, “is the centre to which almost all the individuals who fill the upper and middle ranks of society are successively attracted. The country pays its tribute to the supreme city.”

This chapter surveys developments in London and Paris, the literary centers of what would come to be known as the Age of Enlightenment. Across Europe, intellectuals began to advocate rational thinking as the means to achieving a comprehensive system of ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge. The rationalist approach owed much to scientist Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who in 1687 demonstrated to the satisfaction of just about everyone that the universe was an intelligible system, well-ordered in its operations and guiding principles. The workings of human society—the production and consumption of manufactured goods, the social organization of families and towns, the functions of national governments, even the arts—were believed to be governed by analogous universal laws. The intellectuals of Enlightenment England and France thought of themselves as the guiding lights of a new era of progress that would leave behind, once and for all, the irrationality, superstition, and tyranny that had defined Western culture, particularly before the Renaissance. Still, recognizing that society was deeply flawed, they also satirized it, attacking especially an aristocracy whose taste for elaborate ornamentation and the seemingly frivolous pursuit of pleasure seemed to many not just decadent but depraved. At the same time, an expanding publishing industry and an increasingly literate public offered Enlightenment writers the opportunity to instruct their readers in moral behavior, even as they described vice in often prurient detail. And in music, the intricate and sometimes confusing compositions of the Baroque gave way to a more rational, and classical, form and structure.

THE ENGLISH ENLIGHTENMENT

After the Great Fire, architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723) proposed a grand redesign scheme that would have replaced the old city with wide boulevards and great squares. But the need to rebuild the city’s commercial infrastructure quickly made his plan impractical, and each property owner was essentially left to his own devices.

Nevertheless, certain real improvements were made. Wood construction was largely banned; brick and stone were required. New sewage systems were introduced, and streets had to be at least 14 feet wide. Just a year after the fire, in a poem celebrating the devastation and reconstruction, “Annus Mirabilis” (“year of wonders”), the poet John Dryden (1631–1700) would equate London to the mythological Phoenix rising from its own ashes, reborn: “a wonder to all years and Ages . . . a Phoenix in her ashes.” Moved by the speed of the city’s rebuilding, Dryden is sublimely confident in London’s future. Under the rule of Charles II, the city would become even greater than before (Reading 11.1):

Fig. 11.2 Christopher Wren, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, western facade. 1675–1710.

A statue of St. Paul stands on top of the central portico, flanked by statues of St. John (right) and St. Peter (left). The sculptural detail in the portico pediment depicts the conversion of Paul following his vision on the road to Damascus.

READING 11.1 from John Dryden, “Annus Mirabilis” (1667)

More great than human, now, and more august,1

New-deified she from her fires does rise:

Her widening streets on new foundations trust,

And, opening, into larger parts she flies....

Now like the maiden queen, she will behold

From her high turrets, hourly suitors come:

The East with incense, and the West with gold,

Will stand like suppliants, to receive her doom.

1 Augusta, the old name of London.

For Dryden, the Great Fire was not so much a disaster as a gift from God. And Charles II must have thought so as well, for as a way of thanking Dryden for the poem, the king named him poet laureate of the nation in 1668.

Although Christopher Wren’s plans to redesign the entire London city center after the Great Fire proved impractical, he did receive the commission to rebuild 52 of the churches destroyed in the blaze. Rising above them all was Saint Paul’s Cathedral (Fig. 11.2), a complex yet orderly synthesis of

the major architectural styles of the previous 150 years. In its design, architect Christopher Wren drew on classical, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements. Its imposing two-story facade is crowned by symmetrical twin clock towers and a massive dome. The floor plan—an elongated, cruciform (crosslike) design—is Gothic. The dome is Renaissance, purposefully echoing Bramante’s Tempietto (see Fig. 7.20) but maintaining the monumental presence of Michelangelo’s dome for Saint Peter’s (see Fig. 7.21). The facade, with its two tiers of paired Corinthian columns, recalls the French Baroque Louvre in Paris. And the two towers are inspired by a Baroque church in Rome. Wren manages to bring all these elements together into a coherent whole.

According to Wren’s son, “a memorable omen” occurred on the occasion of his father’s laying the first stone on the ruins of the old cathedral in 1675:

When the SURVEYOR in Person [Wren himself, in his role as King’s Surveyor of Works] had set out, upon the Place, the Dimensions of the great Dome and fixed upon the centre; a common Labourer was ordered to bring a flat stone from the Heaps of Rubbish... to be laid for a Mark and Direction to the Masons; the Stone happened to be a piece of Grave-stone, with nothing remaining on the Inscription but the simple word in large capitals, RESURGAM [the Latin for “REBORN”].

“RESURGAM” still decorates the south transept of the cathedral above a figure of a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Something of the power of Wren’s conception can be felt in Canaletto’s view of The Thames and the City of London from Richmond House (see Fig. 11.1). The cathedral does indeed rise above the rest of the city, not least because, in rebuilding, private houses had been limited to four stories. Only other church towers, almost all built by Wren as well, rise above the roof lines, as if approaching the giant central structure in homage.

The New Rationalism and the Scientific Revolution

The new London was, in part, the result of the rational empirical thinking that dominated the Western imagination in the late seventeenth century. Newly invented instruments allowed scientists to observe and measure natural phenomena with increasing accuracy, and, perhaps more significantly, new methods of scientific and philosophical investigation provided scientists with the theoretical means to exploit the capabilities of these instruments. According to these new ways of reasoning, Scientia, the Latin word for “knowledge,” was to be found in the world, not in religious belief.

Francis Bacon and the Empirical Method

One of the most fundamental principles guiding the new science was the proposition that, through the direct and careful observation of natural phenomena, one could draw general conclusions from particular examples. This process is known as inductive reasoning, and with it, scientists believed they could predict the workings of nature as a whole. When inductive reasoning was combined with scientific experimentation, it produced a manner of inquiry that we call the empirical method. The leading advocate of the empirical method in the seventeenth century was the English scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626). His Novum Organum Scientiarum (New Method of Science), published in 1620, is the most passionate plea for its use. “One method of delivery alone remains to us,” he wrote, “which is simply this: we must lead men to the particulars themselves, and their series and order; while men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.” The greatest obstacle to human understanding, Bacon believed, was “superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion.” For Bacon, Aristotle represented a perfect example (see Chapter 2). While he valued Aristotle’s emphasis on the study of natural phenomena, he rejected as false doctrine Aristotle’s belief that the experience coming to us by means of our senses (things as they appear) automatically presents to our understanding things as they are. Indeed, he felt that reliance on the senses frequently led to fundamental errors.

A proper understanding of the world could only be achieved, Bacon believed, if we eliminate the errors in reasoning developed through our unwitting adherence to the false notions that every age has worshipped. He identified four major categories of false notion, which he termed Idols, all described in his Novum Organum Scientiarum. The first of these, the Idols of the Tribe, are the common fallacies of all human nature, derived from the fact that we trust, wrongly, in our senses. The second, the Idols of the Cave, derive from our particular education, upbringing, and environment—an individual’s religious faith or sense of his or her ethnic or gender superiority or inferiority would be examples. The third, the Idols of the Market Place, are errors that occur as a result of miscommunication, words that cause confusion by containing, as it were, hidden assumptions. For instance, the contemporary use of “man” or “mankind” to refer to people in general (common well into the twentieth century), connotes a worldview in which hierarchical structures of gender are already assumed. Finally, there are the Idols of the Theater, the false dogmas of philosophy—not only those of the ancients but those that “may yet be composed.” The object of the empirical method is the destruction of these four Idols through intellectual objectivity. Bacon argued that rather than falling back on the preconceived notions and opinions produced by the four Idols, “Man, [using the last idol] being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of Nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”

Bacon’s insistence on the scientific observation of natural phenomena led, in the mid-1640s, to the formation in England of a group of men who met regularly to discuss his new philosophy. After a lecture on November 28, 1660, by Christopher Wren, the Gresham College Professor of Astronomy and architect of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, they officially founded “a College for the Promoting

of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning.” It met weekly to witness experiments and discuss scientific topics. Within a couple of years, the group became known as “The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge,” an organization that continues to the present day as the Royal Society. It is one of the leading forces in international science, dedicated to the recognition of excellence in science and the support of leading-edge scientific research and its applications.

René Descartes and the Deductive Method

Bacon’s works circulated widely in Holland, where they were received with enthusiasm. As one seventeenth-century Dutch painter, Constantijm Huygens [HOY-guns] (1596–1687), put it in his Autobiography, Bacon offered the Dutch “most excellent criticism of the useless ideas, theorems, and axioms which, as I have said, the ancients possessed.” But equally influential were the writings of the French-born René Descartes [day-CART] (1596–1650). Descartes, in fact, lived in Holland for over 20 years, from 1628 to 1649, moving between 13 different cities, including Amsterdam, and 24 different residences. It was in Holland that he wrote and published his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences (1637). As opposed to Bacon’s inductive reasoning, Descartes proceeded to his conclusions by the opposite method of deductive reasoning. He began with clearly established general principles and moved from those to the establishment of particular truths.

Like Bacon, Descartes distrusted almost everything, believing that both our thought and our observational senses can and do deceive us. In his Meditations on the First Philosophy, he draws an analogy between his own method and that of an architect (Reading 11.2):

READING 11.2 from René Descartes, Meditations, (1641)

Throughout my writings I have made it clear that my method imitates that of the architect. When an architect wants to build a house which is stable on ground where there is a sandy topsoil over underlying rock, or clay, or some other firm base, he begins by digging out a set of trenches from which he removes the sand, and anything resting on or mixed in with the sand, so that he can lay his foundations on firm soil. In the same way, I began by taking everything that was doubtful and throwing it out, like sand.

He wants, he says, “to reach certainty—to cast aside the loose earth and sand so as to come upon rock and clay.” The first thing, in fact, that he could not doubt was that he was thinking, which led him to the inevitable conclusion that he must actually exist in order to generate thoughts about his own existence as a thinking individual, which he famously expressed in Discourse on Method in the Latin phrase “Cogito, ergo sum” [KOH-guh-toh er-goh sum] (“I think, therefore I am”).

At the heart of Descartes’s thinking—we refer to Descartes’s method as Cartesian—is an absolute distinction between mind and matter, and hence between the metaphysical soul and the physical body, a system of oppositions that has come to be known as Cartesian dualism. The remarkable result of this approach is that, beginning with this one “first principle” in his Discourse on Method, Descartes comes to prove, at least to his own satisfaction, the existence of God. He would repeat this argument many times, most formally in his 1641 Meditations, but the logic, simply stated, is as follows: (1) I think, and I possess an idea of God (that is, the idea exists in me and I can be aware of it as an object of my understanding); (2) The idea of God is the idea of an actually infinite perfect being; (3) Such an idea could only originate in an actually infinite perfect being (“it had been placed in me by a Nature which was really more perfect than mine could be, and which had within itself all the perfections of which I could form any idea”); and (4) Therefore, there is an infinitely perfect being, which we call God. This line of thinking established Descartes as one of the most important founders of deism (from the Latin dues [DAY-us], “god”), the brand of faith that argues that the basis of belief in God is reason and logic rather than revelation or tradition. Descartes did not believe that God was at all interested in interfering in human affairs. Nor was God endowed, particularly, with human character. He was, in Descartes’s words, “the mathematical order of nature.” Descartes was himself a mathematician of considerable inventiveness, founding analytic geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus. The same year that he published Discourse on Method, Descartes also published a treatise entitled Optics. There, among other things, he used geometry to calculate the angular radius of a rainbow (42 degrees).

Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and the Telescope

Descartes’s Optics was built upon the earlier discoveries in optics of the German mathematician Johannes Kepler [KEP-lur] (1571–1630). Kepler had made detailed records of the movements of the planets, substantiating Copernicus’s theory that the planets orbited the sun, not the Earth. The longstanding tradition of a geocentric (Earth-centered) cosmos was definitively replaced with a heliocentric (sun-centered) theory. Kepler also challenged the traditional belief that the orbits of the planets were spherical, showing that the five known planets moved around the sun in elliptical paths determined by the magnetic force of the sun and their relative distance from it.

Meanwhile, in Italy, Kepler’s friend Galileo Galilei [gal-uh-LAY] had improved the design and magnification of the telescope (invented by a Dutch eyeglass-maker, Hans Lippershey). Through the improved telescope, Galileo saw and described the craters of the moon, the phases of Venus, sunspots, and the moons of Jupiter. Galileo also theorized that light takes a certain amount of time to travel from one place to the next, and that either as a particle or as a wave, it travels at a measurable uniform speed. He proposed, too, that all objects, regardless of shape, size, or density, fall at the same rate of acceleration—the law of falling bodies, or gravity.

Inspired by Galileo’s discoveries, Kepler wrote a study on the optical properties of lenses, in which he detailed a design for a telescope that became standard in astronomical research. Kepler’s and Galileo’s work did not meet with universal approval. The Church still officially believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around it. Protestant churches were equally skeptical. The theories of Kepler and Galileo contradicted certain passages in the Bible. Joshua, for instance, is described in the Old Testament as making the sun stand still, a feat that would be impossible unless the sun normally moved around the Earth: “So the sun stood still in the midst of the heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it” (Joshua 10:13–14). Furthermore, it seemed to many that the new theories relegated humankind to a marginal space in God’s plan. Thus, in 1615, when Galileo was required to defend his ideas before Pope Paul V in Rome, he failed to convince the pontiff. He was banned from both publishing and teaching his findings. When his old friend Pope Urban VIII was elected pope, Galileo appealed Paul’s verdict, but Urban went even further. He demanded that Galileo admit his error in public and sentenced him to life in prison. Through the intervention of friends, the sentence was reduced to banishment to a villa outside Florence. Galileo was lucky. In 1600, when the astronomer Giordano Bruno had asserted that the universe was infinite and without center and that other solar systems might exist in space, he was burned at the stake.

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke, and the Microscope

In the last decade of the sixteenth century, two Dutch eyeglass-makers, Hans Lippershey and Zaccharias Janssen, discovered that if one looked through several lenses in a single tube, nearby objects appeared greatly magnified. This discovery led to the compound microscope (a microscope that uses more than one lens). Early compound microscopes were able to magnify objects only about 20 or 30 times their natural size. Another Dutch lens maker, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek [vahn LAY-ven-hook] (1632–1723), was able to grind a lens that magnified over 200 times. The microscope itself was a simple instrument, consisting of two plates with a lens between, which was focused by tightening or loosening screws running through the plates. Two inches long and one inch across, it could easily fit in the palm of one’s hand. Leeuwenhoek was inspired by the publication of English Royal Society Curator of Experiments Robert Hooke’s Micrographia in 1665. It was illustrated by drawings of Hooke’s observations with his compound microscope: a flea that he said was “adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suite of sable Armour, neatly jointed,” and a thin slice of cork, in which he observed “a Honey-comb [of]. . . pores, or cells”—actually, cell walls (Fig. 11.3).

Leeuwenhoek wrote letters to the Royal Society of London to keep them informed about his observations. In his first letter, of 1673, he described the stings of bees. Then, in 1678, he wrote to the Royal Society with a report of discovering “little animals”—actually, bacteria and protozoa—and the society asked Hooke to confirm Leeuwenhoek’s findings, which he successfully did. For the next 50 years, Leeuwenhoek’s regular letters to the Royal Society, describing, for the first time, sperm cells, blood cells, and many other microscopic organisms, were printed in the society’s Philosophical Transactions, and often reprinted separately. In 1680, Leeuwenhoek was elected a full member of the Society.

Isaac Newton: The Laws of Physics

With the 1687 publication of his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, more familiarly known as the Principia [prin-CHIP-ee-uh], from the first word of its Latin title, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) had demonstrated to the satisfaction of almost everyone that the universe was an intelligible system, well-ordered in its operations and guiding principles. First and foremost, Newton computed the law of universal gravitation in a precise mathematical equation, demonstrating that each and every object exerts an attraction to a greater or lesser degree on all other objects. Thus, the sun exercises a hold on each of the planets, and the planets to a lesser degree influence each other and the sun. The Earth exercises a hold on its moon, and Jupiter on its several moons. All form a harmonious system functioning as efficiently and precisely as a clock or machine. Newton’s conception of the universe as an orderly system would remain unchallenged until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the new physics of Albert Einstein and others would once again transform our understanding.

Newton’s Principia marked the culmination of the forces that had led, earlier in the century, to the creation of the Royal Society in England and the Académie des Sciences in France. Throughout the eighteenth century, the scientific findings of Newton and his predecessors—Kepler and Galileo, in particular—were widely popularized and applied to the problems of everyday life. Experiments demonstrating

the laws of physics became a popular form of entertainment. In his Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump (Fig. 11.4), the English painter Joseph Wright (1734–97) depicts a scientist conducting an experiment before the members of a middle-class household. He stands in his red robe behind an air pump, normally used to study the properties of different gases but here employed to deprive a white cockatoo of oxygen by creating a vacuum in the glass bulb above the pump. The children are clearly upset by the bird’s imminent death, while their father points to the bird, perhaps to demonstrate that we all need oxygen to live.

Fig. 11.3 Robert Hooke, Illustrations from Micrographia: a flea (top), and a slice of cork (bottom). London. 1665.

Courtesy of the University of Virginia Library. Hooke was the first person to use the word cell to describe the basic structural unit of plant and animal life.

Wright had almost certainly seen such an experiment conducted by the Scottish astronomer James Ferguson, who made scientific instruments in London and toured the country, giving lectures. However, Ferguson rarely used live animals. As he explains in the 1760 edition of his lecture notes:

If a fowl, a cat, rat, mouse or bird be put under the receiver, and the air be exhausted, the animal is at first oppressed as with a great weight, then grows convulsed, and at last expires in all the agonies of a most bitter and cruel death. But as this experiment is too shocking to every spectator who has the least degree of humanity, we substitute a machine called the “lung-glass” in place of the animal; which, by a bladder within it, shows how the lungs of animals are contracted into a small compass when the air is taken out of them.

Wright illustrated the crueler demonstration, and the outcome is uncertain. Perhaps, if the bird’s lungs have not yet collapsed, the scientist can bring it back from the brink of death. Whatever the experiment’s conclusion, life or death, Wright not only painted the more horrific version of the experiment but drew on the devices of Baroque painting—dramatic, nocturnal lighting and chiaroscuro—to heighten the emotional impact of the scene. The painting underscores the power of science to affect us all.

Fig. 11.4 Joseph Wright, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump. 1768.

Oil on canvas, 6’ × 8’. The National Gallery, London. The resurrection of apparently dead birds was a popular entertainment of the day, a trick usually performed by self-styled magicians. In this painting, however, Wright takes the idea seriously, demonstrating to his audience the power of science.

The Industrial Revolution

Among Wright’s closest friends were members of a group known as the Lunar Society. The Society met in and around Birmingham each month on the night of the full moon (providing both light to travel home by and the name of the society). Its members included prominent manufacturers, inventors, and naturalists. Among them were Matthew Boulton (1728–1809), whose world-famous Soho Manufactury produced a variety of metal objects, from buttons and buckles to silverware; James Watt (1736–1819), inventor of the steam engine, who would team with Boulton to produce it; Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), whose writings on botany and evolution anticipate by nearly a century his grandson Charles Darwin’s famous conclusions; William Murdock (1754–1839), inventor of gas lighting; Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), who was a corresponding member; and Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95), Charles Darwin’s other grandfather and the inventor of mass manufacturing at his Wedgwood ceramics factories. From 1765 until 1815, the group discussed chemistry, medicine, electricity, gases, and any and every topic that might prove fruitful for industry. It is fair to say that the Lunar Society’s members inaugurated what we think of today as the Industrial Revolution. The term itself was invented in the nineteenth century to describe the radical changes in production and consumption that had transformed the world.

Wedgwood opened his first factory in Burslem, Staffordshire, on May 1, 1759, where he began to produce a highly durable cream-colored earthenware (Fig. 11.5). Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, was so fond of these pieces that Wedgwood was appointed royal supplier of dinnerware. Wedgwood’s production process was unique. Instead of shaping individual pieces by hand on the potter’s wheel—the only way ceramic ware had been produced—he cast liquid clay in molds and then fired it. This greatly increased the speed of production, as did mechanically printing decorative patterns on the finished china rather than painting them. The catalog described Queen’s Ware, as it came to be known, as “a species of earthenware for the table, quite new in appearance . . . manufactured with ease and expedition, and consequently cheap.” It was soon available to mass markets in both Europe and America, and Wedgwood’s business flourished.

Wedgwood’s Queen’s Ware is an exemplary product of the Industrial Revolution. New machinery in new factories created a supply of consumer goods unprecedented in history, answering an ever-increasing demand for everyday items, from toys, furniture, kitchen utensils, and china, to silverware, watches, and candlesticks. Textiles were in particular demand, and in many ways, advances in textile manufacture could be called the driving force of the Industrial Revolution. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, textiles were made of wool from sheep raised in the English Midlands. A thriving cottage industry, in which weavers used hand-looms and spinning wheels, textile manufacture changed dramatically in 1733 when John Kay in Lancashire invented the flying shuttle. Using this device, a weaver could propel the shuttle, which carries the yarn that forms the weft through the fibers of the warp, beyond the weaver’s reach. Cloth could be made both wider and more rapidly. Invention after invention followed, culminating in 1769 when Richard Arkwright patented the water frame, a waterwheel used to power looms. With their increased power, looms could operate at much higher speeds. Arkwright had duped the actual inventors out of their design, and in 1771 installed the water frame in a cotton mill in Derbyshire, on the river Derwent. These first textile mills, needing water power to drive their machinery, were built on fast-moving streams like the Derwent. But after the 1780s, with the application of Watts’s steam power, mills soon sprang up in urban centers. In the last 20 years of the eighteenth century, English cotton output increased 800 percent, accounting for 40 percent of the nation’s exports.

Fig. 11.5 Transfer-printed Queen’s Ware. ca. 1770.

The Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, England. Elaborate decorations such as the one on this coffee pot were mechanically printed on ceramic tableware at Wedgwood’s factory. Queen’s Ware became so popular that pattern books, showing the available designs, were available across Europe by the turn of the century.

Another important development was the discovery of techniques for producing iron of unprecedented quality in a cost-effective manner. Early in the century, Abraham Darby (1678–1717) discovered that it was possible to fire cast iron with coke—a carbon-based fuel made from coal. Darby’s grandson, Abraham Darby III (1750–91), inherited the patent rights to the process; to demonstrate the structural strength of the cast iron he was able to manufacture, he proposed to build a single-arch cast-iron bridge across the

River Severn, high enough to accommodate barge traffic on the river. The bridge at Coalbrookdale (Fig. 11.6) was designed by a local architect, while its 70-foot ribs were cast at Darby’s ironworks. The bridge’s 100-foot span, arching 40 feet above the river, demonstrated once and for all the structural potential of iron. A century later, such bridges would carry railroad cars, as the need for transporting new mass-produced goods exploded.

Fig. 11.6 Thomas Farnolls Pritchard, Iron Bridge, Coalbrookdale, England. 1779.

Cast iron. Pritchard was keenly aware that the reflection of the bridge would form a visual circle, a form repeated in the ironwork at the corners of the bridge.

Absolutism versus Liberalism: Thomas Hobbes and John Locke

Following the Civil War and the Restoration, one of the most pressing issues of the day was how best to govern the nation, and one of the most important points of view had been published by Thomas Hobbes [hobz] (1588–1679) in 1651, in Leviathan; or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil. His classical training had convinced Hobbes that the reasoning upon which Euclid’s geometry was based could be extended to political and social systems. A visit to Galileo in Italy in 1636 reaffirmed that Galileo’s description of the movement of the solar system—planets orbiting the central sun—could be extended to human relations—a people orbiting their ruler. Hobbes argued that people are driven by two things—the fear of death at someone else’s hands and the desire for power—and that the government’s role is to check both of these instincts, which if uncontrolled would lead to anarchy. Given the context in which Leviathan was written—the English Civil War had raged throughout the previous decade—Hobbes’s position is hardly surprising. Most humans, Hobbes believed, recognize their own essential depravity and therefore willingly submit to governance. They accept the social contract, which means giving up sovereignty over themselves and bestowing it on a ruler. They carry out the ruler’s demands, and the ruler, in return, agrees to keep the peace. Humankind’s only hope, Hobbes argued, is to submit to a higher authority, the “Leviathan” [luh-VY-uh-thun], the biblical sea monster who is the absolutist “king over all the sons of pride” (Job 41:34).

Watch an architectural simulation of the round arch on myartslab.com

John Locke (1632–1704) disagreed. In his 1690 Essay on Human Understanding, Locke repudiated Hobbes, arguing that people are perfectly capable of governing themselves. The human mind at birth, he claimed, is a tabula rasa, a “blank slate,” and our environment—what we learn and how we learn it—fills this slate (Reading 11.3):

READING 11.3 from Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1690)

1. Idea is the object of thinking. Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas—such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them?. . .

2. All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas—How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence
has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.

3. The objects of sensation, one source of ideas. First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things . . . [and] thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities. . . .

4. The operations of our minds, the other source of them. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got; which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without. And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds. . . .

Given this sense that we understand the world through experience, if we live in a reasonable society, it should follow, according to Locke’s notion of the tabula rasa, that we will grow into reasonable people. In his Second Treatise of Government, also published in 1690, Locke went further. He refuted the divine rights of kings and argued that humans are “by nature free, equal, and independent.” They agree to government in order to protect themselves, but the social contract to which they submit does not require them to surrender their own sovereignty to their ruler. The ruler has only limited authority that must be held in check by a governmental system balanced by a separation of powers. Finally, they expect the ruler to protect their rights, and if the ruler fails, they have the right to revolt in order to reclaim their natural freedom. This form of liberalism—literally, from the Latin, liberare, “to free”—sets the stage for the political revolutions that will dominate the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost

The debate between absolutism and liberalism also informs what is arguably the greatest poem of the English seventeenth century, Paradise Lost by John Milton (1608–74). Milton had served in Oliver Cromwell’s government during the Commonwealth. (He had studied the great epics of classical literature, and he was determined to write his own, one which would, as he puts it in the opening verse of the poem, “justifie the wayes of God to men.”) In 12 books, Milton composed a densely plotted poem with complex character development, rich theological reasoning, and long, wavelike sentences of blank verse. The subject of the epic is the Judeo-Christian story of the loss of Paradise by Adam and Eve and their descendants. As described in the Bible, the couple, enticed by Satan, disobey God’s injunction that they not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Satan had revolted against God and then sought to destroy humanity.

While occasionally virulently anti-Catholic, the poem is, among other things, a fair-minded essay on the possibilities of liberty and justice. In many ways, God assumes the position of royal authority that Hobbes argues for in his Leviathan. In Book 5 of Milton’s poem, God sends the angel Raphael to Adam to warn him of the nearness of Lucifer (Satan) and to explain how Lucifer became God’s enemy. Raphael recounts how God had addressed the angels to announce that he now had a son, Christ, whom all should obey as if he were God, and he did so with the authority of hereditary kingship (Reading 11.4a):

READING 11.4a from John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 5 (1667)

“Hear all ye angels, Progeny of Light,

Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,

Hear my Decree, which unrevoked shall stand.

This day I have begot whom I declare

My only Son, and on this holy hill

Him have anointed, whom ye now behold

At my right hand; your head I him appoint;

And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow

All knees in heav’n, and shall confess him Lord.”

Lucifer, formerly God’s principal angel, is not happy about the news of this new favorite. Motivated by his own desire for power, he gathers the angels loyal to him, and addresses them in terms more in the spirit of Locke than Hobbes. He begins his speech as God had begun his, invoking the imperial titles of those present; he reminds them, “which assert / Our being ordain’d to govern, not to serve” (Reading 11.4b):

READING 11.4b from John Milton,Paradise Lost, Book 5 (1667)

Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,

If these magnific titles yet remain

Not merely titular, since by decree

Another now hath to himself engrossed

All power, and us eclipsed under the name

Of King anointed. . . .

Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend

The supple knee? ye will not, if I trust

To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves

Natives and sons of heav’n possessed before

By none, and if not equal all, yet free,

Equally free; for orders and degrees Jar not with liberty . . . .

Who can in reason then or right assume

Monarchy over such as live by right

His equals, if in power and splendor less,

In freedom equal?

Lucifer’s is a “reasonable” argument. Like Locke, he thinks of himself and the other angels as “by nature free, equal, and independent.” The battle that ensues between God and Lucifer is reminiscent of the English Civil War, with its complex protagonists, its councils, and its bids for leadership on both sides. It results in Lucifer’s expulsion from Heaven to Hell, where he is henceforth known as Satan. While many readers understood God as a figure for the Stuart monarchy, and Satan as Cromwell, it is not necessary to do so in order to understand the basic tensions that inform the poem. The issues that separate God from Satan are clearly the issues dividing England in the seventeenth century: the tension between absolute rule and the civil liberty of the individual.

Satire: Enlightenment Wit

Not every Englishman was convinced that the direction in which England was heading in the eighteenth century was for the better. London was a city teeming with activity; Canaletto’s painting (see Fig. 11.1) was an idealized view of city life. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the rich and the middle class largely abandoned the city proper, moving west into present-day Mayfair and Marylebone, and even to outlying villages such as Islington and Paddington. At the start of the century, these villages were surrounded by meadows and market gardens, but by century’s end they had been absorbed into an ever-growing suburbia.

In the heart of London, a surging population of immigrants newly arrived from the countryside filled the houses abandoned by the middle class, which had been subdivided into tenements. The very poor lived in what came to be called the East End, a semicircle of districts surrounding the area that extended from Saint Paul’s in the west to the Tower of London in the East (the area contained by the old London Wall). Here, in the neighborhoods of Saint Giles, Clerkenwell, Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, and Wapping, the streets were narrow and badly paved, the houses old and constantly falling down, and drunkenness, prostitution, pickpocketing, assault, and robbery were the norm. On the outer edges, pig keepers and dairymen labored in a landscape of gravel pits, garbage dumps, heaps of ashes, and piles of horse manure.

Fig. 11.7 William Hogarth, Gin Lane. 1751.

Engraving and etching, third state, 14” × 11⅞”. Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum, London/Art Resource, New York. In his Autobiographical Notes, Hogarth wrote: “In gin lane every circumstance of its [gin’s] horrid effects are brought to view; nothing but Idleness, Poverty, misery, and ruin are to be seen . . . not a house in tolerable condition but Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop.”

Whatever the promise offered by the social order established by Robert Walpole and the Georgian government, thoughtful, truly enlightened persons could look beneath the surface of English society and detect a cauldron of social ferment and moral bankruptcy. By approaching what might be called the “dark side” of the Enlightenment and

exposing it to all, dissenting writers and artists like William Hogarth (1697–1764) and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) believed they might, by means of irony and often deadpan humor that marks their satire, return England to its proper path.

Hogarth and the Popular Print

By 1743, thousands of Londoners were addicted to gin, their sole means of escape from the misery of poverty. In 1751, just four years after Canaletto painted his view of London, William Hogarth published Gin Lane, a print that illustrated life in the gin shops (Fig. 11.7). In the foreground, a man so emaciated by drink that he seems a virtual skeleton lies dying, half-naked, presumably having pawned the rest of his clothes. A woman takes snuff on the stairs as her child falls over the railing beside her. At the door to the thriving pawnshop behind her, a carpenter sells his tools, the means of his livelihood, as a woman waits to sell her kitchen utensils, the means of her nourishment. In the background, a young woman is laid out in a coffin, as her child weeps beside her. A building comes tumbling down, a man parades down the street with a bellows on his head and a child skewered on his staff—an allegorical if not realistic detail. In the top story of the building on the right, another man has hanged himself. At the lower left, above the door to the Gin Royal, one of the only buildings in good condition, are these words: “Drunk for a penny / Dead drunk for two pence / Clean Straw for Nothing.”

In Gin Lane, Hogarth turned his attention, not to the promise of the English Enlightenment, but to the reality of London at its worst. He did so with the savage wit and broad humor that marks the best social satire. And he did so with the conviction that his images of what he called “modern moral subjects” might not only amuse a wide audience, but would influence that audience’s behavior as well. Hogarth usually painted his subjects first, but recognizing the limited audience of a painting, he produced engraved versions of them for wider distribution. Hogarth recognized that his work appealed to a large popular audience, and that by distributing engravings of his works he might make a comfortable living entertaining it.

The Satires of Jonathan Swift

Perhaps the most biting satirist of the English Enlightenment was Jonathan Swift. In a letter to fellow satirist and friend Alexander Pope, Swift confided that he hated the human race for having misused its capacity for reason simply to further its own corrupt self-interest. After a modestly successful career as a satirist in the first decade of the eighteenth century, Swift was named Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 1713, and it was there that he wrote his most famous works, Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, and the brief, almost fanatically savage A Modest Proposal in 1729. There, reacting to the terrible poverty he saw in Ireland, Swift proposed that Irish families who could not afford to feed their children breed them to be butchered and served to the English. With a tongue perhaps never before so firmly lodged in his cheek, Swift concludes (Reading 11.5):

READING 11.5 from Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” (1729)

I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion as to reject any offer proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy and effectual. But before something of that kind shall be advanced in contradiction to my scheme, and offering a better, I desire the author or authors will be pleased maturely to consider two points. First, as things now stand, how they will be able to find food and raiment for 100,000 useless mouths and backs. And secondly, there being a round million of creatures in human figure throughout this kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common stock would leave them in debt 2,000,000£ sterling, adding those who are beggars by profession to the bulk of farmers, cottagers, and labourers, with the wives and children who are beggars in effect; I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.

Such a solution to the problem of starving Irish families—they would, as it were, breed for profit—is meant to be understood as the symbolic equivalent of what was actually happening to Irish families and their children. In fact, many Irishmen worked farms owned by Englishmen who charged them such high rents that they were frequently unable to pay them, and consequently lived on the brink of starvation. As Dean of the cathedral in Dublin, Swift was in a position to witness their plight on a daily basis. For all practical purposes, Swift believed, England was consuming the Irish young, if not literally then figuratively, sucking the lifeblood out of them by means of its oppressive economic policies.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s satire is less direct. Europeans were familiar with the accounts of travelers’ adventures in far-off lands at least since the time of Marco Polo, and after the exploration of the Americas, the form had become

quite common. Swift played off the travel adventure narrative to describe the adventures of one Lemuel Gulliver as he moves among lands peopled by miniature people, giants, and other fabulous creatures. But Swift employs his imaginary peoples and creatures to comment on real human behavior. In Book 1, the Lilliputians, a people that average 6 inches in height, are “little people” not just physically but ethically. In fact, their politics and religion are very much those of England, and they are engaged in a war with a neighboring island that very closely resembles France. Swift’s strategy is to reduce the politics of his day to a level of triviality. In Book 4, Gulliver visits Houyhnhnms, a country of noble horses whose name sounds like a whinnying horse and is probably pronounced hwinnum. Gulliver explains that “the word Houyhnhnm, in their tongue, signifies a horse, and, in its etymology, the perfection of nature.” Their ostensible nobility contrasts with the bestial and degenerate behavior of their human-looking slaves, the Yahoos. Of course, Gulliver resembles a Yahoo as well. At one point, Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm host compliments him, saying “that he was sure I must have been born of some noble family, because I far exceeded in shape, colour, and cleanliness, all the Yahoos of his nation.” Gulliver’s response is a model of Swift’s satiric invective (Reading 11.6): Gulliver’s Travels was an immediate best-seller, selling out its first printing in less than a week. “It is universally read,” said his friend, Alexander Pope, “from the cabinet council to the nursery.” So enduring is Swift’s wit that names of his characters and types have entered the language as descriptive terms—“yahoo” for a coarse or uncouth person, “Lilliputian” for anything small and delicate.

READING 11.6 from Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Book 4, Chapter 6 (1726)

I made his Honour my most humble acknowledgments for the good opinion he was pleased to conceive of me, but assured him at the same time, “that my birth was of the lower sort, having been born of plain honest parents, who were just able to give me a tolerable education; that nobility, among us, was altogether a different thing from the idea he had of it; that our young noblemen are bred from their childhood in idleness and luxury; that, as soon as years will permit, they consume their vigor, and contract odious diseases among lewd females; and when their fortunes are almost ruined, they marry some woman of mean birth, disagreeable person, and unsound constitution (merely for the sake of money), whom they hate and despise. That the productions of such marriages are generally scrofulous, rickety, or deformed children; by which means the family seldom continues above three generations, unless the wife takes care to provide a healthy father, among her neighbours or domestics, in order to improve and continue the breed. That a weak diseased body, a meager countenance, and sallow complexion, are the true marks of noble blood; and a healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality, that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality, and pride.

Literacy and the New Print Culture

Since the seventeenth century, literacy had risen sharply in England, and by 1750 at least 60 percent of adult men and between 40 and 50 percent of adult women could read. Not surprisingly, literacy was connected to class. Merchant-class men and women were more likely to read than those in the working class. And among the latter, city dwellers had higher literacy rates than those in rural areas. But even the literate poor were often priced out of the literary marketplace. Few had enough disposable income to purchase even a cheap edition of Milton, which cost about 2 shillings at mid-century. (At Cambridge University, a student could purchase a week’s meals for 5 shillings.) And even though, by the 1740s, circulating libraries existed in towns and cities across Britain, the poor generally could not afford the annual subscription fees. Nevertheless, libraries broadened considerably the periodicals and books—particularly, that new, increasingly popular form of fiction, the novel—available to the middle class. Priced out of most books and libraries, the literate poor depended on an informal network of trading books and newspapers. Sharing reading materials was so common, in fact, that the publisher of one popular daily periodical estimated “twenty readers to every paper.”

The Rise of the English Novel

The novel as we know it was not invented in eighteenth-century England—Cervantes’s Don Quixote, written a century earlier, is often considered the first example of the form in Western literature (see Chapter 10). But the century abounded in experiments in fiction writing that anticipated many of the forms that novelists have employed down to the present day. Works that today are called novels (from the French nouvelle and Italian novella, meaning “new”) were rarely called “novels” in the eighteenth century itself. That term did not catch on until the very end of the century. Typically, they were referred to as “histories,” “adventures,” “expeditions,” “tales,” or—Hogarth’s term—“progresses.” They were read by people of every social class. What the novel claimed to be, and what appealed to its ever-growing audience, was a realistic portrayal of contemporary life. It concentrated almost always on the trials of a single individual, offering insight into the complexities of his or her personality. It also offered the promise, more often than not, of upward social mobility through participation in the expanding British economy and the prospect of prosperity that accompanied it. As London’s population swelled with laborers, artisans, and especially young people seeking fame and fortune, and as the Industrial Revolution created the possibility of sudden financial success for the inventive and imaginative, the novel endorsed a set of ethics and a morality

that were practical, not idealized. Above all, the novel was entertaining. Reading novels offered some respite from the drudgery of everyday life and, besides, was certainly a healthier addiction than drinking gin.

One of the most innovative experiments in the new novelistic form was devised by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761). He fell into novel writing as the result of his work on a “how-to” project commissioned by two London booksellers. Aware that “Country Readers” could use some help with their writing, the booksellers hired Richardson to write a book of “sample letters” that could be copied whenever necessary. Richardson was both a printer and the author of a history based on the letters of a seventeenth-century British ambassador to Constantinople and India. He had never written fiction before, but two letters in his new project suggested the idea of a novel—“A Father to a Daughter in Service, on hearing of her Master’s attempting her Virtue,” and “The Daughter’s Answer.” Richardson wrote Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, in just over two months. It is the first example of what we have come to call the epistolary novel—that is, a novel made up of a series of “epistles,” or letters. It was published in two volumes in 1740.

The morality of Richardson’s Pamela was praised from church pulpits, recommended to parents skeptical of the novel as a form, and generally celebrated by the more Puritan elements of British society, who responded favorably to the heroine’s virtue. Pamela herself asked a question that women readers found particularly important: “How came I to be his Property?” But the novel’s smug morality (and the upward mobility exhibited by the novel’s heroine) offended many, most notably Richardson’s contemporary Henry Fielding (1707–54), who responded, a year after the appearance of Pamela, with Shamela. Fielding’s title tips the reader off that his work is a parody, a form of satire in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or ridicule. In Fielding’s parody, his lower-class heroine’s sexual appetite is every bit a match for her Squire Booby’s—and from Fielding’s point of view, much more realistic. Fielding presents Pamela’s ardent defense of her chastity against her upper-class seducer as a sham; it is simply a calculated strategy, an ambitious hussy’s plot to achieve financial security.

One of the first great novels written in English is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe [dih-FOH] (1660–1731). Published in 1719, the full title of this sprawling work is The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner; Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oronoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pirates. Written by Himself. The last three words are crucial, for they establish Defoe’s claim that this novel is actually an autobiography.

Defoe’s audience was used to reading accounts of real-life castaways that constituted a form of voyage literature. But far from falling into the primitive degradation and apathy of the average castaway, Robinson Crusoe rises above his situation, realizing, in his very ability to sustain himself, his God-given human potential. So many of Defoe’s readers felt isolated and alone, like castaways, in the sea of London. For them, Crusoe represented hope and possibility.

This theme of the power of the average person to survive and flourish is what assured the novel’s popularity and accounted for four editions by the end of the year. Defoe followed Robinson Crusoe with a series of other fictitious autobiographies of adventurers and rogues—Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and Rox-anna (1724). In all of them, his characters are in one way or another “shipwrecked” by society and as determined as Crusoe to overcome their situations through whatever means—not always the most virtuous—at their disposal.

Not all readers were charmed and entertained by Fielding’s lavish portraits of vice. Many found his narratives deplorable. These readers found an antidote to Fielding in the writings of Jane Austen (1775–1817). Although Austen’s best-known novels were published in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, she was more in tune with the sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, especially with Enlightenment values of sense, reason, and self-improvement.

None of Austen’s heroines better embodies these values than the heroine of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Bennet, one of five daughters of a country gentlemen whose wife is intent on marrying the daughters off. The novel famously opens (Reading 11.7):

READING 11.7 from Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 1 (1813)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

The level of Austen’s irony in these opening sentences cannot be overstated, for while she describes the fate that awaits any single, well-heeled male entering a new neighborhood, these lines are a less direct, but devastating reflection upon the possibilities for women in English society. Their prospect in life is to be married. And if they are not themselves well-heeled and attractive—that is, marriageable—their prospects are less than that.

Austen first told this story in First Impressions (1796–97), in the form of an exchange of letters between Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy, an English gentleman. When we first meet him in Pride and Prejudice, Austen describes him as follows: “He was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the

tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance. . . .” The novel’s plot revolves around the two nouns of its title, “pride” and “prejudice.” Where Elizabeth at first can only see Darcy’s pride, she comes to realize that her view is tainted by her prejudice. Darcy’s disdain for country people and manners is a prejudice that Elizabeth’s evident pride helps him to overcome. Together, they come to understand not only their own shortcomings but their society’s.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE

Until his death in 1715, Louis XIV had opened his private apartments in Versailles three days a week to his courtiers, where they entertained themselves by playing games. After his death such entertainments continued, only not at Versailles but in the hôtels—or Paris townhouses—of the French nobility, where the same crowd who had visited the king’s apartments now entertained on their own. The new king, Louis XV, was only five years old, and so there was no point in staying so far out of town in the rural palace where the Sun King had reigned supreme.

The hôtels all had a salon, a room designed especially for social gatherings. Very soon the term “salon” came to refer to the social gathering itself. A number of these rooms still survive, including the Salon de la Princesse, which was designed by Germain Boffrand to commemorate the 1737 marriage of the 80-year-old prince of Soubise to the 19-year-old Marie-Sophie de Courcillon (Fig. 11.8). Decorated around the top of the room with eight large paintings by Charles-Joseph Natoire [nah-TWAHR] (1700–77) depicting the story of Cupid and Psyche from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Fig. 11.9), the room embodies the eroticism that dominated the art of the French aristocracy in the eighteenth century.

These salons became the center of French culture in the eighteenth century, and by 1850 they were emulated across Europe. The new princess de Soubise was perhaps too young to be herself an active salonnière [sah-lohn-YAIR], one of the hostesses who presided over the weekly gatherings that soon dominated Parisian social life. Among the most popular salons were those of Jeanne-Julie-Eleonore de Lespinasse [deh less-peen-AHSS] (1732–76). In his memoirs, Friederick Melchior, Baron von Grimm (1723–1807), a frequent guest, recalls the ambiance:

Fig. 11.8 Germain Boffrand, Salon de la Princesse de Soubise (Salon oval), Hôtel de Soubise, Paris. ca. 1740.

Oval shape, 33’ × 26’. Photo: Bulloz. Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. In his 1745 Livre d’architecture (Book on Architecture), Boffrand compared architecture to theater, arguing that it had both a tragic and pastoral mode. In the lightness of its ornament and the eroticism of its paintings, the Salon de la Princesse is an example of the pastoral mode.

Her circle met daily from five o’clock until nine in the evening. There we were sure to find choice men of all orders in the State, the Church, the Court—military men, foreigners, and the most distinguished men of letters. Every one agrees that though the name of M. d’Alembert [an intellectual who lived with Julie de Lespinasse, and who is discussed later in the chapter] may have drawn them thither, it was she alone who kept them there. Devoted wholly to the care of preserving that society, of which she was the soul and the charm, she subordinated to this purpose all her tastes and all her personal intimacies. She seldom went to the theatre or into the country, and when she did make an exception to this rule it was an event of which all Paris was notified in advance. . . . Politics, religion, philosophy, anecdotes, news, nothing was excluded from the conversation, and, thanks to her care, the most trivial little narrative gained, as naturally as possible, the place and notice it deserved. News of all kinds was gathered there in its first freshness.

Fig. 11.9 Charles-Joseph Natoire, Cupid and Psyche, Salon de la Princesse, Hôtel de Soubise, Paris. 1738.

Oil on canvas, 5’7¾” × 8’6⅜”. Peter Willi/The Bridgeman Art Library. Here Psyche has been brought to the palace of Love where Cupid, under cover of darkness, has consummated their union. Psyche had promised never to seek to know his identity but she breaks her oath by lighting her lamp to reveal Cupid’s face.

The baron numbered among his friends many of the most influential Parisian thinkers of the day, the so-called philosophes [FILL-loh-sof], “philosophers,” who frequented the salons and dominated the intellectual life of the French Enlightenment, a movement that emphasized reason and rationality and sought to develop a systematic understanding of divine and natural law. Not philosophers in the strict sense of the word because they did not concentrate on matters metaphysical, but turned their attention to secular and social concerns, the philosophes were almost uniformly alienated from the Church, despising its hierarchy and ritual. They were also, if not totally committed to the abolition of the monarchy, which they saw as intolerant, unjust, and decadent, then at least deeply committed to its reform.

The philosophes, who aspired to establish a new social order of superior moral and ethical quality, and the French courtiers, whose taste favored a decorative and erotic excess that the philosophes abhorred, often collided at the salons. Consider, for instance, the salons of Madame de Pompadour [mah-DAHM deh pohm-pah-DOOR] (1721–64), born into a middle-class family involved in Parisian financial circles. She was a great defender of the philosophes, but she was also mistress to Louis XV after he assumed full power in 1743. She blocked efforts to have the works of the philosophes suppressed by censors and was successful in keeping works attacking the philosophes out of circulation. And yet, she was also the king’s trusted advisor and the subject of many erotic paintings done at court depicting her as Venus. The competing styles of Louis XIV’s Baroque court survived into the eighteenth century, but now were no longer united or comfortable together. Whereas at Versailles essentially Classical architecture was embellished with Baroque ornamentation, the nobility now appreciated only an ever-more-elaborate decoration and ornament, while the philosophes shunned ornamentation altogether, preferring the order, regularity, and balance of the Classical tradition.

The Rococo

The decorative style fostered by the French court in the eighteenth century and quickly emulated by royal courts across Europe was known as the Rococo [ruh-KOH-koh]. The term is thought to derive from the French word rocaille [roh-KYE], a type of decorative rockwork made from round pebbles and curvilinear shells. But it also derives from barocco, the Italian word for “baroque.” In fact, the Rococo style is probably best understood as the culmination of developments in art and architecture that began in the late work of Michelangelo and progressed through Mannerism and the Baroque into the eighteenth century. Along the way, the style became increasingly elaborate, with architectural interiors employing a vocabulary of S- and C-curves, shell, wing, scroll, and plant tendril forms, and rounded, convex, often asymmetrical surfaces.

Jean-Antoine Watteau

The Rococo found its most eloquent expression in France in the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau [wah-TOH] (1684–1721). This is ironic because he did not have aristocratic patrons and was little known during his lifetime beyond a small group of bourgeois buyers, such as bankers and art dealers. One of his most famous paintings in fact served as a signboard for the shop of a Paris art dealer (see Closer Look, pages 362–363). In a very short time, however, Watteau’s works became favorites of the Prussian ruler Frederick the Great, and a great many of his paintings entered Frederick’s collection.

Fig. 11.10 Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Embarkation from Cythera. ca. 1718–19.

Oil on canvas, 50¾” × 76 38;”. Staatliche Museen, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. This painting and the one in Closer Look (pages 362–363) were purchased by Frederick the Great of Prussia for his own collection. Frederick often staged fêtes galantes at his country palace of Sanssouci near Potsdam.

Watteau was best known for his paintings of fêtes galantes [fet gah-LAHNT]—gallant, and by extension amorous, celebrations or parties enjoyed by an elite group in a pastoral or garden setting. The erotic overtones of these fêtes galantes are immediately apparent in The Embarkation from Cythera in the pedestal statue of Venus at the right side of the painting and the flock of winged cupids darting about among the revelers (Fig. 11.10). The scene is the island of Cythera, the mythical birthplace of the goddess. Below her statue, which the pilgrims have decked with garlands of roses, a woman leans across her companion’s lap as three cupids try to push the two closer together. Behind them, a gentleman leans toward his lady to say words that will be overheard by another woman behind them, who gathers roses with her lover as she leans over them both. Further back in the scene a gentleman helps his lady to her feet while another couple turns to leave, the

woman looking back in regret that they must depart the garden island.

François Boucher

Madame de Pompadour’s favorite painter was François Boucher [BOO-shay] (1703–70), who began his career, in the mid-1720s, copying the paintings of Watteau owned by Jean de Jullienne, the principal collector of Watteau’s works in France. Jullienne, a manufacturer of dyes and fine fabrics, had conceived the idea of engraving Watteau’s work so that a wider public could enjoy it, and Boucher was easily the best of Jullienne’s copyists. Boucher himself felt he needed more training, so he set off for Rome with his profits from Jullienne. Once there, he found the work of Raphael “trite” and that of Michelangelo “hunchbacked,” perhaps a reference to the well-developed musculature of his figures. By the time Madame de Pompadour established herself as Louis XV’s mistress, Boucher had returned from Rome and was firmly established as Watteau’s heir, the new master of fêtes galantes.

In the 33 years since the death of Louis XIV, the court had enjoyed relatively free reign, and the younger king, Louis XV, essentially adapted himself to its carefree ways. He felt free to take a mistress. Madame de Pompadour was by no means the first, though by 1750 the king had apparently left her bed because, so the story went, her health was frail. But she remained his closest and probably most trusted advisor, and she happily arranged for other women to take her place in the king’s bed. Given this context, it is hardly surprising that many of Boucher’s portraits of Madame de Pompadour are like the portrait of 1756, which portrays her as an intellectual supporter of the French Enlightenment, reading a book, her writing table nearby with her quill inserted in the inkwell (Fig. 11.11). What is somewhat surprising are his many paintings of nude goddesses in which the nude bears a striking resemblance to the king’s mistress. (Boucher was notoriously famous for such nudes.) The Toilet of Venus, for instance, was commissioned by Madame de Pompadour for the bathing suites of the château of Bellevue, one of six residences just outside Paris that Louis built for her (Fig. 11.12). She had played the title role in a production called La Toilette de Vénus staged at Versailles a year earlier, and evidently this is a scene—or more likely an idealized version—of one from that production. The importance of the work is that it openly acknowledges both Madame de Pompadour’s sexual role in the court and the erotic underpinnings of the Rococo as a whole.

Fig. 11.11 François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour. 1756.

Oil on canvas, 79⅛” × 61⅞”. The Bridgeman Art Library. Bayerische Hypo und Vereinsbank, Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. Boucher’s playful and fragile imagery, evident here in the elaborate frills decorating Madame’s dress and in the decorative details on the column behind her, was miniatured within gold cartouches on the surfaces of the vases and urns of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Sevres, Madame de Pompadour’s pet project.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Boucher’s student Jean-Honoré Fragonard [frah-goh-NAHR] (1732–1806) carried his master’s tradition into the next generation. Fragonard’s most important commission was a series of four paintings for Marie-Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du Barry [kohn-TESS dew bah-REE], the last mistress of Louis XV. Entitled The Progress of Love, it was to portray the relationship between Madame du Barry and the king, but in the guise of young people whose romance occurs in the garden park of the countess’s château at Louveciennes, itself a gift from Louis.

Fig. 11.12 François Boucher, The Toilet of Venus. 1751.

Oil on canvas, 42⅝” × 33⅛”. Signed and dated (lower right): f-Boucher-1751. Bequest of William K. Vanderbilt, 1920 (20.155.9). Photograph © 1993. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Boucher’s contemporaries likened his palette, which favored pinks, blues, and soft whites, to “rose petals floating in milk.”

CLOSER LOOK Watteau’s The Signboard of Gersaint

Jean-Antoine Watteau’s The Signboard of Gersaint [zhair-SAHNT], painted in about 1721, is quite literally a signboard. A little over five feet high and 10 feet long, it was commissioned to hang outside Gersaint’s art gallery in Paris, and later, in about 1744, it entered the collection of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Gersaint called his gallery Au Grand Monarque (“At the Sign of the Great King”), and in this painting the artist alludes to the recently departed Sun King by showing gallery workers putting a portrait of Louis XIV, probably painted by Hyacinthe Rigaud, into a box for storage. A woman in a pink satin gown steps over the threshold from the street, ignoring, for a moment, her companion’s outstretched hand to gaze down at the portrait as it descends into its coffinlike confines. It is as if she is taking one last look at the fading world of Louis XIV before turning her back on it once and for all. In fact, just one day after Louis’s death, the aristocracy abandoned the palace and returned to Paris.

Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Signboard of Gersaint. ca. 1721. Oil on canvas, 5’4” × 10’1”. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Verwaltung der Staatl, Schlösser und Gärden Kunstsammlungen. After it was sold, the work was cut in two halves and displayed as two separate paintings. Its two halves were reunited in the twentieth century.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Coronation of Marie de’ Medici. 1622–25. Oil on canvas, 12’11” × 23’10”. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Something to Think About . . .

What do the dog, on the far right side of the painting, and the working-class passerby, on the far left, have in common? How do they frame, both literally and figuratively, the world of the painting?

View the Closer Look for Watteau’s The Signboard of Gersaint on myartslab.com

Fig. 11.13 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing. 1767.

Oil on canvas, 32⅝” × 26”. Wallace Collection, London. Contributing to the erotic overtones of the composition is the lush foliage of the overgrown garden into which the male lover has inserted himself.

The most famous painting in the series, The Swing, suggests an erotic intrigue (Fig. 11.13) between two lovers. It implies as well the aesthetic intrigue between the artist and the patron, a conspiracy emphasized by the sculpture of Cupid to the left, holding his finger to his mouth as if to affirm the secrecy of the affair. The painting’s subject matter was in fact suggested by another artist, Gabriel-François Doyen, who was approached by the baron de Saint-Julien to paint his mistress “on a swing which a bishop is setting in motion. You will place me in a position in which I can see the legs of the lovely child and even more if you wish to enliven the picture.” Doyen declined the commission but suggested it to Fragonard.

Much of the power of the composition lies in the fact that the viewer shares, to a degree, the voyeuristic pleasures of the reclining lover. The entire image is charged with an erotic symbolism that would have been commonly understood at the time. For instance, the lady on the swing lets fly her shoe—the lost shoe and naked foot being a well-known symbol of lost virginity. The young man reaches toward her, hat in hand—the hat that in eighteenth-century erotic imagery was often used to cover the genitals of a discovered lover. Even more subtly, and ironically, the composition echoes the central panel of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, the Creation of Adam (see Fig. 7.25). The male lover assumes Adam’s posture, and the female lover God’s, although she reaches toward Adam—to bring him to life, as it were—with her foot, not her hand.

The English Garden

The landscapes of Watteau’s fêtes galantes and Fragonard’s The Swing were inspired by a new kind of garden that became very popular in England beginning in about 1720 and that aspired to imitate rural nature. Instead of the straight, geometrical layout of the French garden, the walk-ways of the English garden are, in the words of one garden writer of the day, “serpentine meanders . . . with many twinings and windings.” The English found precedent for this new garden in the pastoral poetry of Virgil and Horace (see Chapter 3) and, especially, in Pliny’s descriptions of the gardens of his Roman contemporaries, translated in 1728 by Robert Castell in Villas of the Ancients Illustrated. According to Castell, Pliny described three styles of Roman garden: the plain and unadorned; the “regular,” laid out “by the Rule and Line”; and the Imitatio Ruris, or the imitation of rural landscapes. This last consisted of “wiggly” paths opening on “vast amphitheaters such as could only be the work of nature.” But Castell understood that such landscapes were wholly artificial. For him, the Imitatio Ruris was

. . . a close Imitation of Nature; where, tho’ the Parts are disposed with the greatest Art, the Irregularity is still preserved; so that their Manner may not improperly be said to be an artful Confusion, where there is no Appearance of that Skill which is made use of, their Rocks, Cascades, and Trees, bearing their natural Forms.

Fig. 11.14 Henry Flitcroft and Henry Hoare, Park at Stourhead, Wiltshire, England. 1744–65.

Each vista point along the Stourhead path looks over an artificial ruin that tells the story of Aeneas’s visit to the underworld in Books 3 through 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid.

The ideal estate was to be “thrown open” in its entirety to become a vast garden, its woods, gardens, lakes, and marshes all partaking of a carefully controlled “artificial rudeness” (in the sense of raw, primitive, and undeveloped).

Prior to about 1730, most gardens in England were composed of straight pathways bordering geometrically-shaped woods and by lakes with clearly defined linear forms. These more regular gardens were adorned by artificial Greek temples. But after about 1740, gardens inspired by those at Stourhead, built in the 1740s by wealthy banker Henry Hoare (Fig. 11.14), came to dominate English taste. Hoare had built dams on several streams to raise a lake, around which he created a serpentine path offering many views and vistas. These included a miniature Pantheon that he probably modeled after similar buildings in the landscape paintings of the seventeenth-century French artist Claude Lorrain [klohd loh-REHN]. His Italian pastoral landscapes, with their winding streams and arched bridges framed by ruins and deftly placed trees, were widely popular in England (Fig. 11.15).

Aristocratic visitors at such an estate would have arrived at the estate with their special “Claude” glasses, tinted yellow so that the landscape would glow with the same warmth as a Claude painting. On the one hand, they would have admired the Classical ruins and the Classical facade of the manor house itself. On the other, they would have discovered, in the grounds, a space in which they might escape emotionally from the very civilization that Classical architecture symbolized. The English garden, in other words, embodied many of the same contradictions as the Parisian salon, where the demands of reason championed by the philosophes confronted the excesses of the French court.

Fig. 11.15 Claude Lorrain, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Noon). 1661.

Oil on canvas, 45⅝” × 62⅞”. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia. The Bridgeman Art Library. Collection of Empress Josephine, Malmaison, 1815. Note how the artist makes the viewer’s eye move through the painting from the grouping at the lower right diagonally, across the bridge (following the shepherd boy and his dog) toward the ruin at the left, then in a zigzag down the road and over the arched bridge into the hazy light of the distant landscape. This serpentine organization directly inspired English garden design.

Art Criticism and Theory

One of the “gardens” most carefully cultivated by the French intellectuals (and those with intellectual pretensions) was art. By the last half of the eighteenth century, it was becoming

increasingly fashionable for educated upper-class people to experience what the English called the “Grand Tour” and the French and Germans referred to as the “Italian Journey.” Art and architecture were the focal points of these travels, along with picturesque landscapes and gardens. A new word was coined to describe the travelers themselves—“tourist.”

Tourists then, as they do today, wanted to understand what they were seeing. Among the objects of their travel were art exhibitions, particularly the Paris Salon—the official exhibition of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. It took place in the Salon Carré [kah-ray] of the Louvre, which lent the exhibition its name. It ran from August 25 until the end of September almost every year from 1737 until 1751, and every other year from 1751 to 1791. But few visitors were well-equipped to appreciate or understand what they were seeing, so a new brand of writing soon developed in response: art criticism.

The philosophe Denis Diderot [deh-NEES deed-ROH] (1717–83) began reviewing the official exhibitions of the Paris Salon in 1759 for a private newsletter circulated to a number of royal houses outside France. Many consider these essays (there are nine of them) the first art criticism. Boucher and his fellow Rococo artists were the object of his wrath. In 1763, Diderot asked, “Haven’t painters used their brushes in the service of vice and debauchery long enough, too long indeed?” Painting, he argued, ought to be “moral.” It should seek “to move, to educate, to improve us, and to induce us to virtue.” And in his Salon of 1765, Diderot would complain about Boucher:

I don’t know what to say about this man. Degradation of taste, color, composition, character, expression, and drawing have kept pace with moral depravity. . . . And then there’s such a confusion of objects piled one on top of the other, so poorly disposed, so motley, that we’re dealing not so much with the pictures of a rational being as with the dreams of a madman.

An artist who did capture his imagination was the stilllife and genre painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin [shar-DEHN)] (1699–1779). Considering the small Chardin still life The Brioche (Fig. 11.16), a painting of the famous French bread or cake eaten at the breakfast table, Diderot in the Salon of 1767 wrote: “One stops in front of a Chardin as if by instinct, as a traveler tired of his journey sits down almost without being aware of it in a spot that offers him a bit of greenery, silence, water, shade, and coolness.” What impressed Diderot most was Chardin’s use of paint: “Such magic leaves one amazed. There are thick layers of superimposed color and their effect rises from below to the surface.... Come closer, and everything becomes flat, confused, and indistinct; stand back again, and everything springs back into life and shape.” What Diderot valued especially in Chardin’s work was its detail, what amounts to an almost encyclopedic attention to the everyday facts of the world. As opposed to the Rococo artists of the court, whose fêtes galantes, he complained, conveyed only the affected and therefore false manners and conventions of polite society, Chardin was able to convey the truth of things. “I prefer rusticity to prettiness,” Diderot proclaimed.

Despite Diderot’s preference for subject matter of a “truthful” kind, he was fascinated with the individual work of art. He expressed this fascination in his description of its painterly surface beyond whatever “subject matter” it might possess. This fascination was part of a broader change in the way that the eighteenth century approached the arts in general.

The Philosophes

When in 1753 Chardin exhibited his Philosopher Occupied with His Reading in Paris, one French commentator described the painting (Fig. 11.17) as follows:

This character is rendered with much truth. A man wearing a robe and a fur-lined cap is seen leaning on a table and reading very attentively a large volume in bound parchment. The painter has given him an air of intelligence, reverie, and obliviousness that is infinitely pleasing. This is a truly philosophical reader who is not content merely to read, but who meditates and ponders, and who appears so deeply absorbed in his meditation that it seems one would have a hard time distracting him.

In short, this is the very image of the French philosophe.

Fig. 11.16 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Brioche (The Dessert). 1763.

Oil on canvas, 18½” × 22”. Photo: Hervè Lewandowski. Musee du Louvre/RMN Reunion des Musees Nationaux, France. SCALA/Art Resource, New York. Chardin painted from dark to light, the brightest parts of the canvas coming last.

Most philosophes were deists [DEE-ists], who accepted the idea that God created the universe but did not believe he had much, if anything, to do with its day-to-day workings. Rather, the universe proceeded according to what they termed natural law, law derived from nature and binding upon human society. In Newtonian terms, God had created a great clock, and it ran like clockwork, except for the interference of inept humanity. So humans had to take control

of their own destinies. Deists viewed the Bible as a work of mythology and superstition, not the revealed truth of God. They scoffed at the idea of the divine right of kings. The logic of their position led the philosophes to a simple proposition, stated plainly by the philosophe Denis Diderot (1713–84): “Men will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

Fig. 11.17 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, A Philosopher Occupied with His Reading. 1734.

Oil on canvas, 54⅜” × 41⅜”. Photo: Hervè Lewandowski/Musee du Louvre/RMN Reunion des Musees Nationaux, France. SCALA/Art Resource, New York. This is actually a portrait of Joseph Aved, a painter who was a friend of Chardin’s.

Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédie

The crowning achievement of the philosophes was the Encyclopédie [on-see-klohpay-dee], begun in 1751 and completed in 1772. Its editors were the teacher and translator Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert [DAHL-ohm-behr] (1717–1783), a mathematician who was in charge of the articles on mathematics and science. Both were active participants in salon society, and d’Alembert in fact lived with the great hostess Julie de Lespinasse. The work was unpopular in the French court: Louis XV claimed that the Encyclopédie was doing “irreparable damage to morality and religion” and twice banned its printing. If, in fact, the Encyclopédie was rather innocently subtitled a Classified Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades, the stated intention of the massive 35-volume text, which employed more than 180 writers, was “to change the general way of thinking.” Something of the danger that the Encyclopédie presented to the monarchy is evident in the entry on natural law written by French lawyer Antoine-Gaspart Boucher d’Argis [boo-SHAY dar-ZHEES] (1708–91) (Reading 11.8):

READING 11.8 from “Law of Nature or Natural Law,” from Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–72)

LAW OF NATURE, OR NATURAL LAW, in its most extended sense, refers to certain principles inspired only by nature that are common to men and to animals: on this law are based the union of male and female, the procreation of children and concern for their education, the love of liberty, the conservation of one’s own person, and the effort each man make to defend himself when attacked by others.

But it is an abuse of the term natural law to use it to refer to the impulses that govern the behavior of animals; for they have not the use of reason and are therefore incapable of perceiving any law or justice.

More frequently, we mean by natural law certain rules of justice and equity, which natural reason alone has established among men, or to put it better, which God has engraved in our hearts.

Such are the fundamental precepts of law and of all justice: to live honestly, to offend no one, and to render unto every man what belongs to him. From these general precepts are derived many other particular rules, which nature alone, that is to say reason and equity, suggests to men.

Such thinking was fundamental to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human liberty and would fuel revolutions in both America and France. Freedom of thought was, in fact, fundamental to the transmission of knowledge, and any state that suppressed it was considered an obstacle to progress. So when Louis XV’s censors halted publication of the Encyclopédie in 1759, the philosophes affirmed the despotism of the French state, even if other government officials, prompted by the salon hostesses, secretly worked to ensure the work’s continued viability.

Funded by its 4,000 subscribers, the Encyclopédie was read by perhaps 100 times that many people, as private circulating libraries rented it to customers throughout the country. In its comprehensiveness, it represents a fundamental principle of the Enlightenment—to accumulate, codify, and preserve human knowledge. Like the Histoire Naturelle (Natural History) of Georges-Louis Leclerc [leh-kler], published in 36 volumes from 1749 to 1788, which claimed to include everything known about the natural world up to the moment of publication, the Encyclopédie claimed to be a collection of “all the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth.” The principle guiding this encyclopedic impulse is rational humanism, the belief that through logical, careful thought, progress is inevitable.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cost of the Social Contract

Another contributor to the Encyclopédie was Jean-Jacques Rousseau [roo-SOH] (1712–78), an accomplished composer originally hired by Diderot to contribute sections on music. Rousseau had been born Protestant, in Geneva, was orphaned early in life, and converted to Catholicism while wandering in Italy. He eventually arrived in Paris. Published after his death, the Confessions is an astonishingly frank account of his troubles, from sexual inadequacy to a bizarre marriage, including his decision to place each of his five children in an orphanage soon after birth. More forthcoming and revealing than any autobiography previously written, it explains in large part the origins of Rousseau’s tendency to outbursts of temper and erratic behavior, and makes it very clear why he eventually fell out with the other philosophes. Rousseau was not a social being, even though his writings on social issues were among the most influential of the age.

Rousseau believed in the natural goodness of humankind, a goodness corrupted by society and the growth of civilization. Virtues like unselfishness and kindness were inherent—a belief that gives rise to what he termed the “noble savage”—but he strongly believed that a new social order was required to foster them. In The Social Contract, published in 1762, Rousseau describes an ideal state governed by a somewhat mystical “General Will” of the people that delegates authority to the organs of government as it deems necessary. In Chapter 4, “Slavery,” Rousseau addresses the subjugation of a people by their monarch (Reading 11.9): This passage explains the famous opening line of The Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” What Rousseau means is that humans have enslaved themselves, and in so doing have renounced their humanity. He is arguing here, in many ways, against the precepts of the Enlightenment, for it is their very rationality that has enslaved humans.

READING 11.9 from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book 1, Chapter 4 (“Slavery”) (1762)

No man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right. . . .

If an individual ... can alienate his liberty and make himself the slave of a master, why could not a whole people do the same and make itself subject to a king?...

It will be said that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquility. Granted; but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, his insatiable avidity, and the vexatious conduct of his ministers press harder on them than their own dissensions would have done? What do they gain, if the very tranquility they enjoy is one of their miseries? Tranquility is found also in dungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable places to live in? . . .

To say that a man gives himself gratuitously, is to say what is absurd and inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, from the mere fact that he who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness creates no right.

Even if each man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they has the right to dispose of it. Before they come to years of discretion, the father can, in their name, lay down conditions for their preservation and well-being, but he cannot give them irrevocably and without conditions: such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature, and exceeds the rights of paternity. It would therefore be necessary, in order to legitimize an arbitrary government, that in every generation the people should be in a position to accept or reject it; but were this so, the government would be no longer arbitrary.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

Even though he was a contributor to it, Rousseau came to reject the aims of the Encyclopédie, especially its celebration of manufacturing and invention. In his 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men, he argues that so long as men tried to do what they could do alone, by themselves, without the help of others, “they lived as free, healthy, good and happy men.” But when men found themselves in need of working with others (Reading 11.10):

READING 11.10 from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men (1755)

. . . equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became necessary, and vast forests were transformed into pleasant fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and flourish with the crops.

Given such thinking, it is hardly surprising that Rousseau ultimately withdrew from society altogether, suffering increasingly acute attacks of paranoia, and died insane.

Voltaire and French Satire

The third great figure among the Parisian philosophes was François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire (1694–1778). So well-schooled, so witty, and so distinguished was Voltaire that to many minds he embodies all the facets of a very complex age. He wrote voluminously—plays, novels, poems, and history. More than any other philosophe, he saw the value of other, non-Western cultures and traditions and encouraged his fellow philosophes to follow his lead. He was a man of science and an advisor to both Louis XV and Frederick the Great of Prussia. He believed in an enlightened monarchy, but even as he served these rulers, he satirized them. This earned him a year in the

Bastille prison in 1717–18, and later, in 1726, another year in exile in London.

Voltaire’s year in England convinced him that life under the British system of government was far preferable to life under what he saw as a tyrannical French monarchy. He published these feelings in his 1734 Philosophical Letters. Not surprisingly, the court was scandalized by his frankness, so in order to avoid another stint in prison, Voltaire removed himself to the country town of Cirey, home of his patroness the Marquise du Châtelet [dew SHAHT-lay], a woman of learning who exerted an important intellectual influence on him. In 1744 he returned once again to court, which proved tedious and artificial, but in 1750 he discovered in the court of Frederick the Great what he believed to be a more congenial atmosphere. While there he published his greatest historical work, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (The Century of Louis XIV) (1751). In four brief years he wore out his welcome in Prussia and had to remove himself to the countryside once again. From 1758 to 1778, he lived in the village of Freney in the French Alps. Here he was the center of what amounted to an intellectual court of artists and intellectuals who made regular pilgrimages to sit at his feet and talk.

Voltaire did not believe in the Bible as the inspired word of God. “The only book that needs to be read is the great book of nature,” he wrote. He was, more or less, a deist. What he championed most was freedom of thought, including the freedom to be absolutely pessimistic. This pessimism dominates his most famous work, Candide [kahn-DEED], or Optimism (1758). A prose satire, it tells the tale of Candide, a simple and good-natured but star-crossed youth, as he travels the world struggling to be reunited with his love, Cunegonde. Although Candide survives his adventures—a testament to human resilience—and eventually finds his Cunegonde, the book concludes with the famous sentiment: “We must cultivate our garden.” We must, in other words, give up our naïve belief that we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” tend to the small things that we can do well—thus keeping total pessimism at bay—and leave the world at large to keep on its incompetent, evil, and even horrific way.

CROSS-CULTURAL CONTACT

When Captain James Cook (1728–29) set sail from Plymouth, England on his ship Endeavor on August 26, 1768, both his sponsors, the Royal Society and the British Admiralty, and Cook himself believed the enterprise to be consistent with the aims of the Enlightenment. While Cook would claim new territories for the British crown, his primary mission was to extend human knowledge: to map the South Seas, record his observations, and otherwise classify a vast area of the world then unknown to European civilization. Although he was careful to document the lives of the people he encountered, his primary mission was to visit Tahiti in order to chart the transit of Venus, that moment in time when the planet Venus crosses directly between the sun and the Earth. This phenomenon occurs twice, eight years apart, in a pattern that repeats every 243 years; in the eighteenth century, that was in 1761 and 1769. (Astronomers around the world watched in fascination when it occurred in June 2004, and will study it again in June 2012.) The measurement of the transit of Venus was understood to be useful in calculating the size of the solar system.

The South Pacific

The Royal Society knew of Tahiti because one of its members, the Frenchman Louis-Antoine de Bougainville [deh boo-gahn-VEEL] (1729–1811), had landed on its shores just months before, in April 1768. Bougainville’s descriptions of Tahitian life, published in 1771 as Voyage around the World, captured the Enlightenment’s imagination. Denis Diderot quickly penned a Supplement to Bougainville’s text, arguing that the natives of Tahiti were truly Rousseau’s “noble savages.” They were free from the tyrannical clutches of social hierarchy and private property—in Diderot’s words, “no king, no magistrate, no priest, no laws, no ‚mine’ and ‚thine.’” All things were held for the common good, including the island’s women, who enjoyed, in Diderot’s eyes, the pleasures of free love. By following their natural instincts, these people had not fallen into a state of degradation and depravity, as Christian thinkers would have predicted, but rather formed themselves into a nation of gentleness, general well-being, and harmonious tranquility.

Cook, upon his return, took exception to Diderot’s picture of Tahitian life. The careful observer would have noticed, he pointed out, a highly stratified social hierarchy of chiefs and local nobility, that virtually every tree on the island was the private property of one of the natives, and that the sexual lives of the Tahitians were in general as morally strict as those of the English (although women in port were as likely in Tahiti as in Plymouth to sell their sexual favors to visiting sailors). But if Cook’s position seems at odds with that of the Enlightenment, it was, in its way, also consistent. Enlightenment philosophers had argued that human nature and behavior were the same all over the world, and in his view the Tahitians proved that point. In addition, Enlightenment economists had argued that private property and social stratification were the basic features of a complex and flourishing society. Cook found both in Tahitian society, and this accounted for the general well-being of their society, he believed.

One of the most distinctive art forms that Cook and his crew encountered in Polynesia was tattooing, a word derived from tatau [ta-ta-OO], the Tahitian term for the practice. One of Cook’s crew, Sydney Parkinson, a young draftsman on board to record botanical species, captured the tattooed face of a Maori warrior during the first voyage (Fig. 11.18). The Maori had imported the practice from the Polynesian islands to the north.

Tattooing is an aspect of complex sacred and ritual traditions found throughout the Pacific Islands. The islanders believed that individuals, many places, and a great many objects are imbued with mana [MAH-nah], a spiritual substance that is the manifestation of the gods on earth. Chiefs,

considered descendants of the gods, were supposedly born with considerable quantities of mana, nobility with less, and commoners with almost none. Anything or anyone possessing mana was protected by tapu, a strict state of restriction indicating that an object or person cannot be touched or a place entered. A chief’s food might be protected by tapu. A person might increase his or her mana by skillful or courageous acts, or by wearing certain items of dress, including tattoos. Thus, the warrior depicted by Parkinson possesses considerable mana. This derives from the elegance of his tattoo, from his headdress and comb, his long earring, probably made of greenstone (a form of jade), and his necklace. From it hangs a hei-tiki, a stylized carving of a human figure, a legendary hero or ancestor figure whose mana the warrior carries with him.

Cook’s exploration led him to Easter Island, where he discovered the remnants of a culture that had erected moai, monumental heads with torsos, since about 1000 CE. In the western half of New Guinea, he encountered the Asmat, headhunters who believed that in displaying the head of an enemy warrior on elaborately carved poles, they could possess that warrior’s strength. In Australia, Cook was the first to encounter Australian Aborigines, whose rock art represents the longest continuously practiced artistic tradition in the world. Finally, in Hawaii, Cook found himself in conflict with King Kamehameha I, the first Hawaiian king to consolidate the islands under one rule, and in 1779 he was killed.

China and Europe

Unlike the cultures of the South Pacific, which were unknown to Europeans until the expeditions of Cook and Bougainville, China and India were well known. The philosophes were especially attracted to China. They recognized that in many respects, China was more advanced than any society in the West. Its people were better educated, with over a million graduates of its highly sophisticated educational system, and its industry and commerce more highly developed. It was also a more egalitarian society (at least for males) than any in the West, for, although a wealthy, landed nobility did exist, it was subject to a government of scholar-bureaucrats drawn from every level of society.

The first Portuguese trading vessels had arrived in China in 1514 (see Chapter 9), and by 1715, every major European trading nation had an office in Canton. Chinese goods—porcelains, wallpapers, carved ivory fans, boxes, lacquer-ware, and patterned silks—flooded the European markets, creating a widespread taste for what quickly became known as chinoiserie [sheen-WAHZ-ree] (meaning “all things Chinese”). The vase in Johannes Goedaert’s Flowers in a Wan-li Vase with Blue-Tit (Fig. 10.14) captures the essence of chinoiserie taste. Central to the rise of chinoiserie was the trade in tea, which was dominated by the Dutch. Across Europe, tea consumption rose from 40,000 pounds in 1699 to an annual average of 240,000 pounds by 1708. The Chinese tea service, that is Liotard’s primary focus, was made in China for export to Europe.

Fig. 11.18 Sydney Parkinson. Portrait of a Maori. 1769.

Wash drawing, 15½” × 11⅝”, later engraved and published as Plate XVI in Parkinson’s Journal, 1773. The British Library, London. Add. 23920 f.55. Parkinson’s drawings provide some of the earliest archeological records of Polynesian life.