Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

With murder, rapine, theft, – and call it Trade!

  – The SLAVE, in chains, on supplicating knee,

  Spreads his wide arms, and lifts his eyes to Thee;

  With hunger pale, with wounds and toil oppress'd,

  ‘ARE WE NOT BRETHREN?’ sorrow choaks the rest; –

  – AIR! bear to heaven upon thy azure flood

  Their innocent cries! – EARTH! cover not their blood!128

  ‘Let the colonists reflect upon this,’ wrote Bentham, appalled by the savage slave laws, ‘if such a code be necessary, the colonies are a disgrace and an outrage upon humanity; if not necessary, these laws are a disgrace to the colonists themselves.’129 Weighing all in his utilitarian balance, he conceded that sugar and coffee brought happiness, but ‘if they are only to be obtained by keeping three hundred thousand men in a state in which they cannot be kept but by the terror of such executions: are there any considerations of luxury or enjoyment that can counterbalance such evils?’130 Another utilitarian, the Revd William Paley, fiercely denied the old argument from ‘necessity’:

  It is said, that [the land] could not be cultivated with quite the same conveniency and cheapness, as by the labour of slaves; by which means, a pound of sugar, which the planter now sells for sixpence, could not be afforded under sixpence-halfpenny – and this is the necessity!131

  In such campaigns for the mind, rational Dissent was predictably to the fore. Defoe condemned the slave trade and pleaded for better treatment in his Life of Colonel Jacque (1722).132 Ultra-sensitive to abrogations of the ‘natural right’ to liberty, Joseph Priestley deplored slavery's reduction of men to ‘mere brutes’, ‘so that they are deprived of every advantage of their rational nature’. For his part, the progressive Baptist minister Robert Robinson of Cambridge denounced the trade as an infringement of natural rights: children should be taught about ‘the histories of consciences oppressed, property plundered, families divided and flourishing states ruined by exercises of arbitrary power’, while the radical Unitarian Thomas Cooper proclaimed opposition to the trade to be the duty of all Englishmen ‘who claim Freedom as our birth-right’.133 If it was the Evangelical lobby which in the event secured in Parliament the abolition of the trade, the groundswell of criticism owed much to enlightened liberalism.134

  Noble savages had long been romanticized. In Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, the hero, a young and handsome African prince, falls in love with Imoinda, daughter of his noble foster-father. The two are divided first by the intervention of the king, who covets Imoinda for himself, and then by their sale into slavery. Reunited in Guiana (Surinam), the British colony which Behn had visited, Oroonoko and Imoinda lead a doomed slave rebellion, before he is finally driven to his death by the colonists. The moral was plain: the African ‘royal slave’ was far nobler than the Europeans (but then he was a prince, blessed with a ‘Roman’ nose!).135

  In view of the dilemmas raised in such fictions, the question became pressing: what should be done with noble savages? Since they shared a universal human nature, was not civilization their entitlement? Should they not have the opportunity to be educated and westernized? The young Polynesian Omai provided a test case. Brought back to England, he was lionized, elevated to the status of prince by his hosts, feted at Court and subjected to the public glare, being painted by Joshua Reynolds – in classical draperies!136 Rather like Peter the ‘wild boy’ and Thomas Day's Sabrina, however, he turned out to be a let-down to wellwishers expecting him to become a paragon of improvement. He proved a slow learner, his English remained poor and, returning home on Cook's third voyage, he distressed his mentors by taking with him not ‘useful’ assets like agricultural tools but a jack-in-the-box and a suit of armour.137

  James Cook nevertheless believed he had descried among the Polynesians those features of civilized life which a Smith or a Miller would have deemed essential to progress: law, marriage, property and rank.138 For this reason, he picked a bone with the sentimentalized picture painted of them by the French commander, Bougainville: it was an insult to the Tahitians to portray them as lacking private property – they were not so primitive. The down-to-earth Yorkshireman, himself a husbandman's son, who prided himself on not being blinded by fancy, noted that almost every tree upon the islands was actually the property of one of the natives. Nor was their much-vaunted free love the result of primitivism. Far from sanctioning promiscuity, Tahitian sexual morality was not all that different from that actually practised in England or France. True, Cook admitted, when his vessel had first landed, it was besieged by loose women eager to trade their favours, but would not Tahitians find the same if they paddled into Portsmouth?

  The armchair philosophe Diderot was more of a myth-maker than the voyager, but Cook himself thought within enlightened categories of his own. His ‘defence’ (as he saw it) of Tahitian sexual mores stemmed from the widespread uniformitarian, cosmopolitan conviction that human nature was the same the whole world over. Moreover, he accepted the political economists' tenet, that private property and social differentiation were the sine qua non of any flourishing society. Unlike the naked Australian Aborigines, the Tahitians were thriving: evidently, they must possess systems of social rank and private property.

  The mere fact that the Polynesians boasted different customs and lifestyles from the Europeans did not automatically make them inferior, still less did it warrant exploiting or enslaving them. There was certainly no right of conquest: ‘to shed the blood of these peoples is a capital crime,’ held Lord Morton, writing to Cook, ‘for we are dealing with human beings from the hand of the same almighty Creator… They are the natural, and in a strict sense, the legal owners of the various territories they inhabit.’139 Cook endorsed the tolerationist maxim that one should not sit in judgement but rather seek to understand other peoples in the light of their circumstances.140 Towards the European encroachment on their lands he did so much to further he was less than affirmative:

  we debauch their morals already too prone to vice, and we introduce among them wants and perhaps disease which they never before knew, and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquillity which they and their forefathers enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.141

  Such ambiguities towards exotic peoples – rather as with peasants – characterize the noble savage as figured in late Enlightenment sentimental culture. The title of a 1779 poem about the paradise island of Tahiti speaks for itself: The Injured Islanders. Oberea, queen of Otaheite, implores its discoverer, Captain Wallis, to restore the islanders to their former peace and happiness. Contrasting the present with the island's previous state (‘Ere Lux'ry taught Ambition to be great’), she declares:

  Canst thou forget, how cheerful, how content

  Taheitee's Sons their Days of Pleasure spent!142

  Meanwhile, in his Humanity (1788), Courtney Melmoth presented a similar picture of harmless natives, so ‘peaceful and blest where rich Bananas grew’, before corruption came with the white man.143

  Modernizers were optimists; they thought in terms not of hopeless depravity but of problems to be settled. They prided themselves upon their benevolence and prized their power to bring improvement: those not yet enlightened were either innocents or victims. None was damned, none beyond rescue – education and philanthropy would allow them to enter the ranks of the civilized. Though postmodernism accuses enlightened thinkers of the ‘imperialism’ of reason, their strategies repudiated both rigid hierarchical views of differential human worth and Calvinist convictions of universal reprobation and damnation.144

  Children and animals were simple cases. As we have seen, however, non-Europeans presented more complicated moral and practical dilemmas. And there were tough nuts to crack nearer home.

  16

  THE VULGAR

  Some must think and others labour.

  ERASMUS DARWIN1

  The people were the acid tes
t. Enlightenment liberalism deemed freedom mankind's native condition: no one was lawfully born into slavery. The tabula rasa of Lockean epistemology levelled consciousness; the uniformitarian doctrine of human nature ascribed parity of endowments and needs to all; and anti-privilege arguments depicted life as a race, with all starting on the same line. Fraternity of a sort was proclaimed: ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’2

  The attitudes of enlightened élites towards the populace at large were, nevertheless, profoundly ambiguous, often implying not unity or equality but two nations, two mentalities, two sorts of men – and the irksome proximity of odorous beings who were less than fully rational, and certainly not fine Addisonian gentlemen. Horace's odi profanum vulgus et arceo (‘I hate, I scorn, the Vulgar Throng’) fell often from classically educated lips, echoing the biblical ‘many are called, but few are chosen’.3 ‘The bulk of mankind,’ opined Swift, ‘is as well qualified for flying as for thinking.’4 What then informed enlightened attitudes to the poor? And did they prove the Enlightenment's Waterloo?

  Progressive élites liked the people, selectively at least, and particular individuals were praised as diligent, deserving and devoted. Hogarth painted his domestics, while Samuel Johnson left his manservant Francis Barber an annuity of £70 in his will and Lord Chesterfield bequeathed two years' wages to his servants, ‘my equals by Nature, and my inferiors only by the difference of our fortunes'. Talented people rising from the ranks were welcomed, if condescendingly, into polite society. Thanks to the support of the local clergy, the agricultural labourer Stephen Duck gained Queen Caroline's patronage as the ‘Thresher Poet’, while Robert Burns won provisional acclaim amongst the Edinburgh literati as the ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’.5

  Baconianism prized the craft skills of the knowing hand over the cloistered academic's waffle, and in some fields village wisdom remained valued. Though the enlightened now pooh-poohed astrology and clairvoyance, physicians might still honour oral medical lore, at least once purged of its magical relics. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu picked up smallpox inoculation from Turkish folk practice, and the Gloucestershire country doctor Edward Jenner got the clue for vaccination from the gossip of dairymaids.6

  If the triumphal advance of metropolitan print culture weakened traditional oral culture, it also sparked interest in it; popular mentalities became objects of fascination, and there was a drive to pickle and preserve folklore, songs and sayings.7 Addison, for instance, in 1711 surprised Spectator readers by devoting a paper to the old ballad ‘Chevy Chase’. Convinced, like his fellow Augustans, that true literature must obey the ‘rules’, he cast it, however, as ‘an heroic poem’, likening it to the Aeneid and praising its ‘majestic simplicity’.8 The Northamptonshire clergyman Thomas Percy inspired the ballad revival in 1765 with his Reliques of English Poetry. A grocer's son who had snobbishly changed his name from ‘Pearcy’ so as to claim descent from the Earls of Northumberland, he included in these ‘reliques’ – a conscious archaism – a number of famous lyrics, such as ‘Barbara Allen’ and ‘Sir Patrick Spence’, as well as ‘Chevy Chase’. Though he did not see ballads as springing from the folk mind – they were rather the compositions of medieval minstrels enjoying Court patronage – the Reliques achieved fame, in Britain and Europe alike, as a corpus of folksongs.9

  In Scotland, interest in the people's muse led to the publication of Orpheus Caledonius (1725); Evan Evans edited Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764) and Rhys Jones brought out Gorchestion Beirdd Cymru (‘Masterpieces of the Welsh Poets’) in 1773. This recovery of popular song culminated in the Ossianic poems, the literary fraud of the century.10 Largely with a view to vindicating Celtic civilization in the post-Culloden years, James Macpherson produced his Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language (1760), verses which he claimed he had heard crofters recite, supposedly deriving from Ossian, the ‘Highland Homer’: the conviction that the poetic imagination was strongest in those ‘closest to nature’ seemed to be borne out. Admirers funded further forays to collect more Gaelic ‘fragments’, and two epics followed, also by the old bard: Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763). Despite growing misgivings about their authenticity, by 1800 there were at least ten editions of the works at home and innumerable versions in German, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Polish, and Russian.11

  Cast as the true mouthpieces of popular inspiration, Celtic bards were pictured plucking harps and chanting a popular idiom of heroism, love and death. Soon Wordsworth was to venerate the common people in the Lyrical Ballads (1798), declaring that ‘low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil… [they] speak a plainer and more emphatic language’.12

  Enlightened élites could also express sympathies towards the lower orders at large, towards the new John Bull figure (envisioned in the Georgian century as infinitely put-upon): their labours sustained the land, they bore the heat of the day with scant reward or thanks. The dignity of toil won salon sympathy,13 while the late Enlightenment wept over cottagers and carters oppressed by rapacious landlords, brutish squires and others who exploited their probity, ignorance or vulnerability. Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770) lamented the victims of enclosure: it was a bad day for Britain when its peasantry was wantonly dispossessed in order to gratify greed:

  Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

  Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.14

  While rustics could thus be cast as goodness unsullied by Quality Street depravity, educated élites overall were neither so sympathetic nor so sanguine.15 For Deists, the rabble was credulous, needing ceremonies, creeds and even clergymen to keep them in check. The Newtonian physician George Cheyne brusquely distinguished society's ‘Quick Thinkers, Slow Thinkers and No Thinkers’,16 while rusticity was always good for a laugh. ‘I remember, as my goods were once carrying into my lecture-room, at a certain town,’ recalled the itinerant lecturer Benjamin Martin, appealing to audience snobbery,

  the rabble crouded about the door, to know what it was; and one wiser than the rest immediately cries out, ‘Tis a ZHOW come to town; and what do we give to zee't? A GUINEA, replies the other. Z—nds, says the fellow, this is the D—1 of a Zhow; why Luck-man-zshure, none but he gentlevauke can see this.17

  Who, at bottom, were to be admitted through the pearly gates into the enlightened Elysium of reason? The people, of course – but that was always a slippery notion. The ‘people’, according to the Revd John Brown, writing in 1765, were ‘the landed gentry, the beneficed country clergy, many of the more considerable merchants and men in trade, the substantial and industrious freeholders or yeomen’ – evidently, some people were far more equal than others.18 Three years later, one ‘Regulus’, writing in the Political Register, excluded from the ranks of the ‘people’ the ‘illiterate rabble, who have neither capacity for judging of matters of government, nor property to be concerned for’.19 If habitually assumed, the drawing of such social discriminations required tact. ‘All men by nature are equal,’ explained Locke, but

  I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of Equality: Age or Virtue may give men a just Precedency; Excellency of Parts and Merit may place others above the Common Level; Birth may subject some, and Alliance or Benefits others, to pay an Observance to those to whom Nature, Gratitude or other Respects may have made it due.20

  The beauty of Christianity lay in its being a faith adapted for the ignorant, for ‘where the hand is used to the plough and the spade, the head is seldom elevated to sublime notions’:21 Locke's condescension – ‘the greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe’22 – sanctioned the Deist double-truth doctrine: religion for the rational, superstition for the simple.

  Some were less forbearing. In The Seasons (1730), James Thomson contrasted the ‘enlightened few’ whose ‘godlike minds Philosophy exalts’ with the stupidity of the ‘sequacious
herd’, ‘to mystic faith/ And blind amazement prone’ and terrified by comets passing across the heavens – witness the proverbial swain running ‘to catch the falling glory’ of the rainbow.23 The learned Elizabeth Carter, translator of Epictetus, was hardly amused to find she had won a reputation with Hodge not just for forecasting the weather, but even for conjuring – ‘I really thought,’ she wrote through gritted teeth, ‘there had been no such nonsense left even among the lowest of the people.’24 Popular belief in prodigies, portents and other superstitions riled the élite, if gratifying their sense of superiority: ‘The short-sighted vulgar,’ reflected Bernard de Mandeville, ‘in the Chain of Causes seldom can see further than one Link.’25 ‘Ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipresent creator of the world,’ invited Hume, ‘he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant… He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one. The fall and bruise of such another: the excessive drought of this season.’26

  Terms, in short, were tricky. Henry Fielding famously defined ‘no body’ as ‘all the people in Great Britain, except about 1200’.27 Shaftesbury praised the ‘people’ to the skies – there could be no ‘public’, except where the ‘people’ were ‘included’. Yet by that epithet he understood, in classic Polybian mode, the free citizens of a commonwealth, ‘such as have seen the World, and inform'd themselves of the Manners and Customs of the several Nations of Europe’ – the numerical majority were thereby excluded.28 Lacking a free spirit, the ‘mere Vulgar’ could act only out of ‘servile Obedience’ – and even then, they ‘often stand in need of such a rectifying Object as the Gallows before their Eyes’ – indeed ‘a devil and a hell may prevail where a gaol and a gallows are thought insufficient’.29