The Age of Louis XIV
Page 49
He had thirty-four years of life remaining to him. He nursed carefully what remained of his eyesight, and he never went completely blind. The Duke and the King gave him a long leave of absence; then he returned to work. In 1673 he was made secretary of the Admiralty. Meanwhile his wife became a Catholic. When the Popish Plot broke upon England Pepys was arrested and sent to the Tower (May 22, 1679) on suspicion of having had a hand in the murder of Godfrey. He disproved the charge and was released after nine months’ imprisonment. He remained out of office till 1684; then he was again appointed secretary of the Admiralty, and continued the reform of the navy. When his master became James II Pepys was in effect head of naval administration. But when James fled to France Pepys was imprisoned again. Soon released, he lived his final fourteen years in retirement as “the Nestor of the navy.” He died May 26, 1703, aged seventy, full of honors and washed of sin.
FIG. 47—FRANCESCO SOLIMENA: Rape of Oreithyia. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
FIG. 48—ENGRAVING AFTER A PAINTING BY WILLIAM FAITHORNE: Robert Boyle. (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 49—ENGRAVING AFTER A PAINTING BY CASPAR NETSCHER: Christian Huygens. (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 50—UNKNOWN ARTIST: Thomas Sydenham. Royal College of Physicians, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 51—UNKNOWN ARTIST: Isaac Newton. National Portrait Gallery, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 52—LOUIS GALLOCHE: Fontenelle. Château de Versailles
FIG. 53—J. GREENHILL: John Locke. National Portrait Gallery, London
FIG. 54—UNKNOWN ARTIST: Thomas Hobbes. From Abraham Wolf, A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1935)
FIG. 55—PIERRE BAYLE: Original engraving used as frontispiece to his Historical and Critical Dictionary, third edition (Rotterdam, 1715)
FIG. 56—ADRIAEN HANNEMAN: Jan de Witt. Museum Boymans, Rotterdam. Courtesy of Netherlands Information Bureau, New York
FIG. 57—MEZZOTINT BASED ON PORTRAIT SKETCH BY JOHANN GOTTFRIED AUERBACH: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 58—UNKNOWN ARTIST: Benedictus Spinoza. Gemeente Museum, The Hague. Courtesy of Netherlands Information Bureau, New York
FIG. 59—HYACINTHE RIGAUD: Louis XIV. Louvre, Paris (Bettmann Archive)
Many things in the man were likable. We have noted his love of music. He pursued science too, experimented in physics, became a member of the Royal Society, was elected its president in 1684. He was as vain as a man, he took bribes, he beat his servant till his arm hurt, 65 he was cruel to his wife, and he was an arrant rake. But what royal and ducal exemplars he had, more shameless far than he! And which of us would have a spotless fame if he left so honest a diary?
VI. DANIEL DEFOE: 1659?—1731
One of the women who escaped Pepys deserves a cautious curtsy here as the mother of the Restoration novel, and the first Englishwoman to live by her pen. Aphra Behn was remarkable in a dozen ways. Born in England, brought up in South America, she returned to England at the age of eighteen (1658), married a London merchant of Dutch descent, impressed Charles II by her shrewdness and wit, was sent on secret service to the Netherlands, accomplished her missions with skill, but was so meagerly paid that she took to writing as a means of support. She composed comedies, as obscene and successful as any. In 1678 she published Oroonoko, the story of a Negro “royal slave” and his beloved Imoinda. It was an original blend of realism and romance. The way was open for Robinson Crusoe, and for the romantic novel.
Defoe too lived by his pen, and it was one of the most versatile in history. His father was James Foe, a London butcher of strong Presbyterian doctrine. Daniel was expected to become a preacher, but he preferred marriage, business, and politics. He begot seven children, became a wholesale hosier, joined Monmouth’s army in rebellion (1685), and William’s army in overthrowing James II. In 1692 he went bankrupt, owing £ 17,000; later he paid his creditors almost in full. While making and losing money he issued pamphlets on a variety of subjects, and containing an astonishing wealth of original thought. His Essay on Projects (1698) offered practical suggestions, much in advance of his time, on banking, insurance, roads, lunatic asylums, military colleges, the higher education of women. He moved to Tilbury, where he became secretary, then manager, then owner, of a tile factory. Introduced to William III, he was appointed to a minor post in the government, and supported the King’s war policy so vigorously that he was accused of being more Dutch than English. He defended himself in a vigorous poem, The True-born Englishman (1701), reminding the English that the whole nation was of mixed origin and blood. Himself a Dissenter, he issued in 1702 an anonymous tract, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, in which, anticipating Swift’s method of stultification by exaggeration, he ridiculed the Anglican persecution of Dissent by recommending that every Dissenter who preached should be hanged, and every Dissenter who listened should be driven from England. He was arrested (February, 1703), fined, jailed, and condemned to the pillory. He was released in November, but meanwhile his tile business had gone to ruin.
The man who secured his release was Robert Harley, secretary of state. Harley recognized Defoe’s ability as a journalist; apparently he struck a bargain with him for the services of his pen, and for the remainder of Anne’s reign Defoe was in the employ of the government. Soon after his release he started a triweekly four-page periodical, The Review, which ran till 1713 and was almost entirely written by Defoe.
In 1704–5 he rode horseback through England as an election agent for Harley; en courant he picked up the data for his Tour through England and Wales. In 1706–7 he served Harley and Godolphin as a spy in Scotland. His powerful pamphlets won him many readers, but also many enemies. He was arrested again in 1713 and in 1715; and again he earned release by promising to put his pen at the service of the government.
He was full of literary devices. In 1715 he published tracts allegedly written by a Quaker, and in the same year The Wars of Charles XII as reported by “a Scots Gentleman in the Swedish Service.” In 1717 he issued letters supposedly by a Turk, ridiculing Christian intolerance; to a magazine well called Mist he contributed material signed by fictitious correspondents; rarely did he write as Defoe. To this skill in impersonation he added a wide reading in geography, especially of Africa and the Americas. He was apparently fascinated by William Dampier’s New Voyage round the World (1697). On one of Dampier’s voyages his galley, the Cinque Ports, put in at Juan Fernandez Islands, some four hundred miles west of Chile. A Scottish sailing master, Alexander Selkirk, having quarreled with his captain, asked to be left on one of the three islands, with a few necessaries. He remained alone there for four years, when he was taken back to England. He told his story to Richard Steele, who reported it in The Englishman for December 3, 1713. He told it also to Defoe, and claimed to have given Defoe a written record of his adventure in solitude. 66 Defoe transformed the account into literature, and published in 1719 the most famous of English novels.
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe caught the imagination of England, running through four editions in four months. Here was a new conception of adventure and conflict—not of man against man, nor of civilized man amid savages, but of man against nature, of man alone, frankly afraid, unaided till “Friday” came, building a life out of nature’s raw materials; this was the history of civilization in one volume and one man. Many readers took it as history, for seldom in all literature had a story been told with such verisimilitude of circumstantial detail. Defoe’s training in literary deception had lifted him out of journalism into art.
He lived now in moderate affluence in London, but he did not abate his unparalleled productivity. While still sending forth pamphlets, he turned out full-length books as if they were novelettes. In 1720 he published Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Duncan Campbell (a deaf-and-dumb conjurer); a month later The Memoirs
of a Cavalier, so ben trovato that the elder Pitt took it for history; and another month later The Life, Adventures, Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, which contained astonishing anticipations of discoveries in Africa. In 1722 he issued The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, and The History of Colonel Jacque, and The Religious Courtship, and The Impartial History of Peter Alexoivitz, the Present Czar of Muscovy—his second anticipation of Voltaire’s biographies. These substantial volumes were intended as potboilers to provide food for his family; but, by the man’s power of imagination and fluency of style, they became literature. In Moll Flanders Defoe entered into the mind and character of a prostitute, made her tell her story with apparent candor and plausibility, and dared to leave her prosperous “in good heart and health” at the age of seventy. 67 The Journal of the Plague Year was so minutely realistic and statistical that historians look upon it as tantamount to history.
The year 1724 was slightly less astonishing: Defoe published one of his major novels, The Fortunate Mistress, now known as Roxana; the first of two volumes reporting his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain; and a Life of John Sheppard, purporting to be a manuscript handed to a friend by Sheppard just before his execution. This was one of several short lives that Defoe wrote of famous criminals. One of these biographies, The Highland Rogue (1724), prepared for Scott’s Rob Roy; another, An Account of Jonathan Wild (1725), prepared for Fielding. Any popular topic drew ink from Defoe’s well and pounds from his publishers: Political History of the Devil (1726), The Mysteries of Magic (1720), Secrets of the Invisible World Discovered, or History and Reality of Apparitions (1727–28). Add to these a poem in twelve books, Jure Divino, defending every man’s natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Amid so many breadwinning condescensions to popular taste and fancies were honest contributions to serious thought: so in The Complete English Tradesman (1725–27), and A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), and the unfinished Complete English Gentleman, he offered useful information and practical advice, not always geared to Gospel morality.
We cannot recommend his literary morals, but we can admire his industry. Probably never since Rameses II’s 150 children has history seen such a prodigy of progeny. The only thing incredible in Defoe is that he wrote all that he wrote. For we marvel, too, at the quality of Defoe’s mind, in which imagination and memory, harnessed to hard labor, produced the most plausible unrealities in literature. We recognize the genius and courage of a man who, in such a mass and haste of work, could maintain so high a level of matter and style. In all his 210 volumes (if we may speak from hearsay) there is hardly one dull page; and where Defoe is dull he is deliberately so, to add to the verisimilitude of his tale. No one has surpassed him in direct and simple narrative, convincingly natural. Here his haste was his fortune: he had no time for ornament; his journalistic training and bent compelled him to brevity and clarity. He was by all means the greatest journalist of his time, though that included Steele and Addison and Swift; his Review plowed the furrow in which The Spectator planted choicer seed. That was distinction enough; but add to it the cosmic and living popularity of Robinson Crusoe, and the influence it had upon novels of adventure, even upon a story so differently motivated as Travels . . . by Lemuel Gulliver. Barring the author of that brilliant indictment of mankind, Defoe was the greatest genius of English letters in that abounding age.
VII. STEELE AND ADDISON
“Dick” Steele, more than anyone else, marks the literary transition from the Restoration to Queen Anne. His youth had all the qualities of a Restoration roisterer: born in Dublin, son of a notary; educated at Charterhouse School and Oxford; impressionable, excitable, generous; instead of taking his degree he joined the government army in Ireland. He drank like a sieve, fought a duel, and nearly killed his antagonist. The experience sobered him transiently; he began a campaign against dueling, and wrote an essay, The Christian Hero (1701), in which he argued that a man might be a gentleman while remaining a Christian. He described the corruption of the age, called his readers back to the Bible as the source of true faith and pure morality, and appealed to men to respect the charm and chastity of women.
He was now twenty-nine years old. Finding that even the middle class, to which he belonged, looked upon him as a tiresome preacher, he decided to put his message into plays. He applauded Jeremy Collier’s denunciation of theatrical obscenity, and in a succession of comedies he championed virtue and punished his villains decisively. These productions were failures. They contained some lively scenes and wit, but the audiences were skeptical of his denouements, and demanded entertainment at whatever cost to the Ten Commandments; while those solid Londoners who might have seconded his sentiments were seldom seen at the theater. How to reach these people?
He decided to try a medium that would find them in the coffeehouses. On April 12, 1709, taking a leaf from Defoe’s Review, he issued the first number of a triweekly periodical, The Tatler, editing it, and writing most of it, under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff. He aimed it at the coffeehouses by announcing:
All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment shall be under the article [be dated from] White’s chocolate house; poetry, under that of Will’s coffee-house; learning, under the title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news you will have from St. James’s coffeehouse; and what else I shall on any subject offer shall be dated from my own apartment.
It was a clever scheme: it aroused the interest of the coffeehouse frequenters, it took news and topics from the discussions there, and it allowed Steele to express his views without interruption or dispute. So, in Number 25 (June 7, 1709), he told of receiving a letter “from a young lady . . . wherein she laments the misfortune of . . . her lover, who was lately wounded in a duel”; and he went on to show the absurdity of a custom by which an injured gentleman must invite the offender to add murder to insult; for what does a challenge mean but:
“Sir, your extraordinary behaviour last night, and the liberty you were pleased to take with me, makes me this morning give you this, to tell you, because you are an illbred puppy, I will meet you in Hyde Park, an hour hence. . . . I desire you would come with a pistol in your hand. . . . and endeavour to shoot me through the head, to teach you more manners.”
Here was the voice of the middle class laughing at the aristocracy; and it was chiefly the middle class that filled the coffeehouses.
In further essays Steele made fun of aristocratic luxury, expletives, affectations, ornaments, and dress. He begged women to dress simply, and to avoid jewelry: “The cluster of diamonds upon the breast can add no beauty to the fair chest of ivory that supports it.” 68 His tenderness for women rivaled his affection for alcohol. He insisted that they had intelligence as well as texture, but he lauded most of all their modesty and purity—qualities not recognized in Restoration comedy. Of one woman he said that “to have loved her was a liberal education”—which Thackeray considered “the finest compliment to a woman that perhaps ever was offered.” 69 Steele described with emotion the joys of family life, the pleasant patter of children’s feet, the gratitude of a husband to his aging wife:
She gives me every day pleasure beyond what I ever knew in the possession of her beauty when I was in the vigour of youth. Every moment of her life brings me fresh instances of her complacency to my inclinations, and her prudence in regard to my fortune. Her face is to me much more beautiful than when I first saw it; there is no decay in any feature which I cannot trace from the very instant it was occasioned by some anxious concern for my welfare and interests. . . . The love of a wife is as much above the idle passion commonly called by that name, as the loud laughter of buffoons is inferior to the elegant mirth of gentlemen. 70
When Steele wrote this he had been twice married. His letters to his second wife are models of devotion, though they soon include excuses for not coming home to dinner. He failed to be the good bourgeois that he held up as the model of life. He drank too much,
spent too much, borrowed too much. He walked in side streets to avoid the friends who had lent him money; he went in hiding to elude his creditors; finally he was jailed for debt. Readers of The Tatler contrasted his preaching with his practice. John Dennis issued an unfeeling satire on Steele’s sentiments. Subscribers fell away, and on January 2, 1711, The Tatler expired. Its place in the history of English literature remains, for in its pages the new morality began to express itself, the short story took its modern form, and Addison developed—as in The Spectator he would perfect—the modern essay.
Addison and Steele, both born in 1672, had been friends since their days together in Charterhouse School. Joseph’s father was an Anglican minister, who gave him an inoculation of piety that resisted all Restoration infections. At Oxford his proficiency in Latin won him a scholarship. At twenty-two his talents so impressed Halifax that the Earl persuaded the head of Magdalen College to divert the youth from the ministry to the service of the government. “I am called an enemy of the Church,” said Halifax, “but I will never do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it.” 71 As the prodigy in Latin was destitute of French, and a knowledge of French was required of diplomats, Halifax secured for him an annual pension of three hundred pounds to finance a stay on the Continent. For two years Addison wandered leisurely through France, Italy, and Switzerland.