by Roy Porter
‘Does reading Novels tend more to promote or injure the Cause of Virtue?’ debated Edinburgh's Pantheon Society in 1783. Its verdict? – a narrow reprieve, which probably had much to do with the fact that Hugh Blair, Henry Mackenzie and their Mirror Club had done so much among the Edinburgh literati to promote the genre. In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, also of 1783, Blair rebutted the condemnations, holding that such ‘fictional histories’ were morally useful ‘for conveying instruction, for painting human life and manners, for showing the errors into which we are betrayed by our passions’. Trashing the old ‘romances of knight errancy’, he praised the modern ‘familiar novel’ for depicting scenes from everyday life. ‘The most moral of all our novel writers,’ he added, ‘is Richardson the Author of Clarissa.’ The status of the novel as a genre – instructive? debauching? – was endlessly debated, without resolution, not least within novels themselves, a sure sign that the public preoccupations of the first Enlightenment were yielding to more private fixations.55
Novels span ‘humanitarian narratives’, exploring moral predicaments and social dilemmas. ‘Beginning in the eighteenth century,’ Thomas Laqueur has proposed, ‘a new cluster of narratives came to speak in extraordinarily detailed fashion about the pains and deaths of ordinary people’, which engaged readers' sympathies.56 His question why the moral franchise should thereby be ‘extended at any given time to one group but not another’ – is particularly apt in respect of the judgemental, engagé novels of the sentimental era. And it is clear that, coupled with the prejudices of their plots (discussed further in chapter 18), their ‘realism’ gave them a potent middle-class appeal: ‘I have heard a party of ladies discuss the conduct of the characters in a new novel,’ divulged Robert Southey, ‘just as if they were real personages of their acquaintance.’57 Enlightened psychological writers pondered what made the products of the imagination appear so real. ‘The frequent Recurrency of an interesting Event, supposed doubtful, or even fictitious,’ reflected David Hartley, attesting the phenomenal power of the imagination, ‘does, by degrees, make it appear like a real one, as in Reveries, reading Romances, seeing Plays, &c.’ In daydreaming about fictions, brooding on a single episode could eventually make it seem true.58
David Hume tellingly called the mind ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’,59 while the sympathetic projection inherent to fiction-reading chimed with the psychology of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).60 Just as Smithian moral theory envisaged the self performing on a public stage, so novel-reading encouraged fantastic identifications. Readers were led to thrust themselves into the action, while also acting as spectators of themselves. Such a ploy was, of course, far from new, and nor was it exclusive to novel-reading. In the 1760s the young James Boswell recorded himself trying on a whole wardrobe of personae: ‘we may be in some degree whatever character we choose’.61 At times he wanted to model himself on his father, or on his acquaintances (for example, Johnson and the Corsican patriot General Paoli) and he also imagined being Aeneas, MacHeath (from The Beggar's Opera) and a ‘man of pleasure’; but the part which most drew him in the ‘play of my life’ was that of Mr Spectator. Boswell confessed to ‘strong dispositions to be a Mr Addison’, or better still to combine his ‘sentiment’ with the ‘gaiety’ of Steele: while a ‘small fortune’ was not enough to relish London, ‘a person of imagination and feeling, such as the Spectator finely describes, can have the most lively enjoyment’. A Wollstonecraftian moralist might have concluded that the tragedy of Boswell's dissolute life lay in his hopeless failure to distinguish fantasies from reality.62
Cases like Boswell's help explain the widespread fear that readers at large – especially empty-headed young women – would empathize with the characters and plots of fictions so much that they would confuse them with reality, and hence be led astray. That was, of course, an ancient theme – a topic of Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15), as is hinted in the title of Charlotte Lennox's popular The Female Quixote (1752),63 which pondered the problem at the heart of all Georgian novels: What is the truth of fiction? Thinking ‘romances were real Pictures of Life’, Lennox's heroine Arabella drew from such works ‘all her Notions and Expectations’. That was, of course, a mistake, but if novels did not, after all, supply ‘real pictures’, then why should The Female Quixote be able to?
Anxieties grew that common readers were being seduced by fiction: were they not biting their nails and wetting their cheeks over the fates of Richardsonian heroines? – Clarissa, noted Sarah Fielding, was ‘treated like an intimate Acquaintance by all her Readers’.64 And the dubious identification of the reader with the fictional, this ‘novelization of life’, brought a further enigma: the elision of the author with his or her characters. This disorientation was heightened by the appearance from 1759 of a startling first-person novel of interiority, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Its vogue depended in part on its astonishing unconventionality and on its sentimentality, notably in Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. In large measure, however, it stemmed from the slippage of authorial persona between Tristram himself, the first person singular, and his author, Sterne; as also between Sterne and Parson Yorick, subsequently cast as the hero of A Sentimental Journey.65 Gaily and daringly, Sterne smudged the distinction between character and author, while readers were invited to condone the hero's self-revelatory impulses: ‘Ask my pen, – it governs me, – I govern not it.’66
Sterne found – or rather, made – himself a celebrity, and his writing seized public attention in a manner unimaginable before the rise of a print culture sustained by a large public. Two Lyric Epistles (1760), by the author's friend John Hall-Stevenson, was but the first of an avalanche of imitations and spin-offs praising, defending, attacking, imitating and, above all, publicizing Tristram Shandy. Twenty such pieces appeared in just over a year. The Clockmaker's Outcry against the Author of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760) deplored the eroticization of clocks brought about by Walter Shandy's domestic routines, while the pseudonymous reference in the novel to the sexual perversions of Jeremiah Kunastrokius' led to the publication of ‘his’ Explanatory Remarks in 1760. Fictions begat fictions, life and invention reeled in a masquerade, and media hype was born. Brilliant at self-packaging, the flamboyant Sterne (Tristram/Yorick) turned himself into a star – an English Rousseau – in a manner unmatched before Byron.67
Tristram Shandy touched a nerve by exposing those of the hero – and by implication it served as a work of authorial exhibitionism, drawing back the drapes on Sterne's own febrile imagination. If his parodies of pedantic erudition supplied classic enlightened critiques of learned lumber, what was new were his ‘cardiographs of consciousness’.68 Interiorizing understanding, he drew extensively on fashionable psychologies, notably that of Locke. Sterne's boast – ‘I wrote not to be fed but to be famous’ – shows that he saw that the reading public might now be mesmerized by makebelieve – and how writers were now assuming the role of directors of public thinking.
Whereas Tristram Shandy was comically sentimental, later novels harped on the romantic, the melodramatic and the sexual, notably in the Gothic vogue launched by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Fascination with the subterranean depths of the emotions engaged writers at the dawn of Romantic self-expression; Coleridge and Wordsworth, whose Prelude, begun in 1798, was a meditation on ‘the growth of my own mind’, both exhaustively analysed their own poetic processes, initially through the lenses of enlightened psychologies, especially those of Locke and Hartley.
The mysteries of consciousness were psychologized and philosophized in autobiographies and diaries as well as in fiction.69 A striking instance of fiction, philosophy and life folding into each other is offered by Emma Courtney (1796), an intensely autobiographical epistolary novel written by the petty bourgeois London Dissenting intellectual Mary Hays.70 Its heroine, Emm
a, falls for Augustus Harley, a man whose very name harks back to the hero of Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. Her passion unrequited, Emma pursues him mono-maniacally, pounding him with love and self-pity, and even proposing sexual surrender (‘my friend – I would give myself to you’) since her affection ‘transcended mere custom’ – but to no avail. Tragedy then followed tragedy in a tear-jerking finale.71
What is so striking about Hays's book – and what makes it a perfect late Enlightenment cameo – is the manner in which passions and problems were couched in terms lifted from contemporary thought.72 Hays drew extensively upon the determinism of her friend William Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), as well as Hartley's associationist psychology. Her heroine was thus driven ‘irresistibly’ to her passion; what was to blame, insisted Emma in self-vindication, was that faulty sentimental childrearing, especially for girls, which Wollstonecraft had lately condemned: being ‘the offspring of sensibility’ in a nexus of necessity, her infatuation and its consequences were thus utterly beyond her control.73 ‘Enslaved by passion’, she had fallen ‘victim’ to her own ‘mistaken tenderness’. ‘Is it virtue then,’ she asked, ‘to combat, or to yield to, my passions?’ The implied answer was obvious.74
While Hays's heroine was ostensibly presented ‘as a warning’ of the mischiefs of ‘indulged passion’, she was evidently glamorized. Though the stated intention was to bolster the Wollstonecraftian exposé of exorbitant female sensibility,75 Hays combined critique with celebration. Surely aware of this double message, and anticipating charges of immorality, she pitched her appeal to the ‘feeling and thinking few’, those enlightened readers who soared above ‘common rules’.76
Hays's Bildungsroman was remarkable, but not unique, in its portrait of late Enlightenment selfhood in all its deliciously dangerous ambiguities. Her heroine was the upholder of earnest philosophical principles regarding sincerity, but also a raging emotional inferno; fiercely independent, yet a child of circumstances; strong-willed, while also the product of her environment, driven by forces beyond her control. Above all, the novel was all autobiographical. Emma's fictional miseries precisely embodied Mary Hays's own passion for her first lover, John Eccles, and then for William Frend – a considerable Enlightenment figure in his own right, newly expelled from Cambridge University for his Jacobinism. Emma's correspondence in the novel was almost a carbon copy of Hays's own love letters to Frend and also of her exchanges with Godwin.77 Thus fact and fiction merged in late Enlightenment subjectivity.
The tale also curiously echoes the life and loves of another William and Mary – Godwin and Wollstonecraft – as written up by the former in his Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) following his wife's death in childbirth. Godwin told the startled world that Mary had flung herself at the married Henry Fuseli; following this she had had a liaison with Gilbert Imlay, by whom she had borne a child out of wedlock; she had then twice attempted suicide before becoming pregnant by Godwin; and finally, she had ignored religion on her deathbed.78 Nonplussed by such a shameless rigmarole – the life of the feminist scripted as a Minerva Press heroine – Charles Lucas renamed the work ‘Godwin's History of the Intrigues of his Own Wife’, while ‘A Convenient Manual of Speculative Debauchery’ was Thomas Mathias's suggested subtitle.79 Reviewers of such works found it astonishing that authors should expose themselves (and others) so. Such literary exhibitionism, with writers washing their emotional underwear in public, shamelessly exonerating vice and sin, shocked through its subversive conflation of truth and fiction.
It is no accident in this light that in Mansfield Park (1814) Jane Austen disapprovingly depicted the morally lax younger members of the Bertram family staging a performance of August von Kotzebue's risqué Lovers' Vows, with a view to indulging in unseemly sexual play. She was probably aware of the Anti-Jacobin Review's assault on the modern German drama: The Rovers, its burlesque of Kotzebue, advocated ‘a discharge of every man (in his own estimation) from every tie which laws, divine or human… impose upon him, and to set them [sic] about doing what they like, where they like, when they like, and how they like’.80 Critics thus mocked pernicious late Enlightenment tendencies. By giving free rein to interiority and the imagination, fantasy fictions were being produced which legitimized the revolt of the breast, and challenged standards in the name of the sacred self.
Sensibility and individualism thus fired each other up. The vicarious experience offered by novels released and scripted the outpouring of feelings. Sensibility also catalysed sexual transformation. Supplanting the old Christian order in which sex had been either functional (procreative) or sinful, Eros now became expressive, the supreme secret of the inner, hidden self. In real life, and as mirrored in novels like Emma Courtney, the cry of the soul became the libidinous imagination, an erotic demon that would not be denied – be it in the wanton womanizing of Richardson's Lovelace, the yearnings of Clarissa, the sentimental philandering of Parson Yorick, or Emma's passion. Truth was subjectivized, and Eros became the idiom of the modern.81
The radicalism of these changes is revealed in the horror they provoked. Pillars of society denounced the epidemic of self-indulgence and predicted moral collapse, catastrophic enfeeblement, hysteria, diseases of civilization and the like – the later anti-Freudian backlash is brought to mind. Male chauvinists balked at the claims of ‘new women’.82
These developments had ambiguous implications, above all for women. Personal emancipation, however ‘authentic’, was often achieved at the cost of a restyling which glamorized women into sexual objects, seductively fragile, tearful victims of perilous impulses. The idealization of motherhood encouraged by sensibility likewise fostered the domestic doll's house atmosphere which threatened to smother the Victorian angel in the house.83 For men the implications were equally complex. Anxieties arose about ‘effeminacy’, and while sensibility was valued, it fuelled the growing dread of what was later known as homosexuality.84
This chapter has traced the late Enlightenment commingling of – indeed confusion between – life and art, reality and fiction. With the print boom, writing became a mirror held up to fashion self-images, as a guidebook for life; enlightened aspirations became privatized. Texts, especially fiction, designed to be read in private, loomed large in such psychological and identity transformations, creating new emotional and imaginative possibilities, further reflections upon selfhood and platforms for socio-ethical criticism. Emotional individualism came to the fore, symbolized by the Bildungsroman, and life assumed a new script – what Hazlitt meant by the ‘cant of religion’ yielding to the ‘cant of sentimentality’.85 It spelt a new and crucial phase in the dynamic enlightened quest for truth and freedom.
13
NATURE
The whole earth… is cursed and polluted.
DAVID HUME1
Take Nature's path, and mad Opinions leave All States can reach it, and all heads conceive;
ALEXANDER POPE2
Of all the terms that we employ in treating of human affairs, those of natural and unnatural are the least determinate in their meaning.
ADAM FERGUSON3
The key Enlightenment concept was Nature. Deeply enigmatic, it is most easily approached in terms of its opposites. It was an affirmation of an objective and exalted external reality, created by God, repudiating the fallen, decaying cosmos imagined by Calvinism. The natural could also serve as the antithesis of all that was confused and contorted, the deceitful and the meretricious. For early Enlightenment thinkers like Shaftesbury, Nature linked the divine (eternal and transcendental) and the human; it pointed to the purification and perfection of mankind, and extended human sympathies beyond the narrow bounds of artifice. Orderly, objective, rational, grand and majestic, Nature enshrined both norms and ideals. Through such means it was possible to sustain that religion of Nature and natural holiness which climaxed in Romanticism, while reclaiming a domain of creation which previous Christian teachings had vilified.4 No w
onder Pope enjoined ‘follow Nature’:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang'd, and Universal Light,
Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,
At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.5
Not least, the enlightened deification of Nature involved an affirmation of aesthetic norms rare heretofore in Christian discourse. As stressed in chapter 11, there had been many traditions denying or denigrating the frank gratification of the senses: Platonism, Puritanism, rationalist anti-sensualism, Protestant anti-idolatry and iconoclasm. Having climbed Mont Ventoux, Petrarch did not gaze upon the striking Provençal landscape but opened his copy of St Augustine and rhapsodized over spiritual heights.6 All that changed with the Enlightenment. It is no accident that the eighteenth century was the first great age of British landscape painting and aesthetic writings.7
The Enlightenment did not coin the term ‘environment’ – that came slightly later, with Thomas Carlyle – but its thinkers were preoccupied with rethinking man's place in Creation. With new readings of God and models of man, perceptions of the place into which God's creature had been put also inevitably changed. This happened in complex ways. Some insight into the ambiguities concerning man's rights and responsibilities towards Nature is offered by an entry in the Bath Chronicle for 30 May 1799 concerning the 139th anniversary celebrations of the Restoration of Charles II on the previous day: