PERSONALITY AND REASON
_Prig._ _Pressure._ _Period._ _Consciousness._ _Character._
_Amusing._ _Sentimental._ _Arrange._ _Personify._
When Charles II returned from France to an England which had long
been growing more and more sullen under the reproving glances of
a middle-aged Puritanism, the suppressed thoughts and feelings
of fashionable English society evidently lost no time in rising
to the surface. The appearance in the seventeenth century of new
expressions such as to _banter_, to _burlesque_, to _ridicule_, to
_prim_, _travesty_, _badinage_, and, above all, _prig_, helps to
fill in for the imagination the deep gulf between the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ and the _Country Wife_. Even to those totally unacquainted
with the literature of the period this little archipelago of words
might betray with unmistakable solidity the moral geography of the
submerged region. For it marks a cycle of events which has been
repeated over and over again in the history of humanity, in its
families, its societies, its nations. Certain moral qualities gain
respect for themselves; the respect brings with it material benefits;
weaker brethren affect the moral qualities in order to acquire the
material benefits; hypocrisy is detected; all morality is treated as
hypocrisy. The trite little cycle spins like a whirligig round and
round the social history of the world, but this is a good place to
lay a finger on it, for it is a process in which the question of the
meanings of words takes a particularly active part. It is, in fact,
one of the few occasions upon which ordinary men, neither scientists
nor poets, will deliberately attempt to alter the meanings of the
words they must use. “Morality”, said the late Sir Walter Raleigh,
“colours all language and lends to it the most delicate of its powers
of distinction”; and so, when any significant change takes place in
the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a
general shifting of the meanings of common words.
One of the earliest recorded examples of such a shift is analysed
with sharp penetration by Thucydides in his account of the
demoralization of the Greek States during the Peloponnesian War:
Proper shame [he says] is now termed sheer stupidity:
shamelessness, on the other hand, is called manliness:
voluptuousness passes for good tone: haughtiness for good
education: lawlessness for freedom: honourable dealing is dubbed
hypocrisy, and dishonesty, good fortune.
Similar, but less conspicuous and rapid, alterations of mood must
have been at work when _silly_ lost its old meaning of ‘blessed’;
when _demure_ changed from ‘grave’ or ‘sober’ to ‘affectedly modest’;
and when the kindly _officious_ acquired its modern sense of bustling
interference. Trench regards it as a tribute to the Roman character
that theirs is the only civilized language in which the word for
‘simple’ never acquired a contemptuous signification alongside of
its ordinary one. And at the opposite pole from Thucydides we have
another Aryan historian, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, good-humouredly
suggesting what might be called a semantic method of slipping off a
Semitic incubus:
As for sin, let us call it folly and have done with it, for until
we call it folly we never shall have done with it. The conception
of sin flatters us grossly. There is something grandiose in it that
cannot but appeal to the child in every man. That we infinitesimal
creatures, scrambling like ants over the face of this minor planet
in pursuit of our personal aims—that we have it in our power
to affront the majesty of the universe is a most preposterous,
delightful fancy....
It may be remarked in passing that there is no surer or more
illuminating way of reading a man’s character, and perhaps a little
of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he
prefers to use certain words. Each of us would no doubt choose his
own list of test words—and the lists themselves, if we were foolish
enough to reveal them, would probably present a fairly accurate
diagram of our own leading propensities. Fortunately the subject is
too long to elaborate.
_Ogle_ is another new word which appeared soon after the Restoration;
and at the same time _intrigue_, which had come into the language
earlier in the century in the general sense of ‘intricacy’, was
seized upon to express an illicit love-affair. The steady growth of
“polite” society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is also—curiously enough—indicated by the gradual appearance of
_bearish_, _countrified_, _fatuous_, _flippant_, _gawky_, _mawkish_,
_prude_, and other such terms. _Hoyden_ was first used of a girl by
Wycherley in 1676.
But outside the limelit circle this period was one of rapid
intellectual development. That the novel interest in the external
world, typified in the sixteenth century by such new words as
_analyse_, _distinguish_, _investigate_[44], expanded continuously
during the next hundred years is suggested by the addition to
our vocabulary of _inspect_, _remark_, and _scrutinize_, together
with the modern meanings of _perception_ and _scrutiny_, which had
meant up till then respectively ‘the collection of rents’ and ‘the
taking of a vote.’ We also find a group of new words to describe
the inherent conditions and qualities of external objects, such as
_acid_, _astringency_, _cohesion_, _elasticity_, _equilibrium_,
_fluid_ (as a noun), _intensity_, _polarity_, _pressure_,
_spontaneous_, _static_, _temperature_, _tendency_, _tension_,
_volatile_, besides the physical and impersonal meanings of _energy_
and _force_. The old verb to _discover_, which originally signified
simply to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal,’[45] was used attributively in the
sixteenth century of travellers ‘discovering’ foreign lands and
customs. Shortly after the Restoration the new metaphor, so it
would seem, was itself applied metaphorically to the results of a
chemical experiment, and in this way the ordinary modern meaning
arose. The creation of the new word _gas_ by the Dutch chemist van
Helmont marks a definite epoch in the evolution of the scientific
outlook. He used it, however, to describe an occult principle—a
sort of ultra-rarefied water—which he supposed to be contained in
all matter. It was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth
century that the word acquired its modern meaning of ‘matter in the
condition of an aeriform fluid’, at which time the word _gaseous_
also appeared. _Ether_ (Greek ‘aithēr’, ‘the _upper_ air’ above the
clouds), which had been practically a synonym for the Aristotelian
_quintessence_[46], was now adopted to express the mechanical
substitute for that spiritual medium required by modern science in
order to explain the phenomenon of action at a distance. These are
among the first attempts which were made to describe the outer world
objectively—from its own point of view instead of from the point of
view of divinity or of human souls; it is interesting, therefore, to
reflect that the success achieved is really only a relative one, as
all the words mentioned, with the possible exception of _gas_,[47]
are in the first place metaphors drawn from human activities such as
those of ‘cutting’, ‘stretching’, and ‘pulling’.
In about the year 1660 the spirit of curious inquiry which was abroad
prompted the foundation of the Royal Society, for the purpose, as its
title announced, of “Improving Natural Knowledge,” and it is notable
that the word _improve_ should have been employed. Originating, as we
saw, in Lawyer’s French, it had been used up to about 1620 to denote
merely “the enclosure and cultivation of waste land”. So that when
we find its old meaning butchered to make a striking metaphor, it is
reasonable to assume that some new idea or feeling had come to the
front, to which men were struggling to give the outward expression
that is life, that their outlook had changed somewhat, and that they
were groping for a means of readjusting their cosmos accordingly.
We have attempted so far to trace the evolution of Western outlook
from the earliest days of Greece down to the Revival of Learning in
England. It must not be forgotten that this process is hitherto an
unconscious one. Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the
European mind upon the world, fluid as it has always been, has yet
always felt itself to be at rest, just as men have hitherto believed
that the earth on which they trod was a solid and motionless body.
The first appearance of a distinction between _ancient_ and _modern_,
and of the word _progressive_, in Bacon’s _Essays_ has already been
noted, and we find that _progress_ itself had only begun to emerge
a few years before from its relatively parochial meaning of ‘royal
journey’ or, as we still say, ‘progress’. To the seventeenth century,
as Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed out, we owe the words _antiquated_,
_century_, _decade_, _epoch_, _Gothic_, _out-of-date_, _primeval_,
and we may add to these _contemporary_, _contemporaneous_,
_synchronise_, _synchronous_, and a queer jungle-growth of words with
similar meanings which sprang up about the middle of the seventeenth
century and has since vanished: _contemporal_, _co-temporary_,
_contemporize_, _isochronal_, _synchronal_, _synchronical_,
_synchronism_, _synchronistic_. A curious feature about these latter
words is the number of them which first appeared in theological
writings, the mystic philosopher, Henry More, being alone responsible
for three. They seem to have arisen chiefly from an interest in
comparing the dates of different events recorded in Scripture, and
they may thus be placed beside the epithet _primitive_, applied by
the Reformers to the early Church, which Mr. Pearsall Smith has
pointed to as “probably the first word in which our modern historical
sense finds expression”.
When we try combing the dictionaries—Greek, Latin, English, and
others—for words expressing a sense of the “march of history”, or
indeed of a past or future differing at all essentially from the
present, we are forced to the conclusion that this kind of outlook
on time is a surprisingly recent growth. We saw how the Greek
‘historia’ could mean practically any kind of knowledge; in the
same way, when ‘periodos’ (literally ‘way round’) was used of time,
it meant a cycle, one of a recurring series; it was not till the
eighteenth century that a _period_ of history acquired its modern
sense of an indefinite portion cut from a continuous process. Labels
like _Middle Ages_, _Renaissance_, ... are none of them earlier
than the eighteenth century, which also saw the new expressions
_develop_ and _development_, and the fact that the significant words
_anachronism_,[48] _evolution_,[48] and _prehistoric_, with the new
perspectives they denote, only appeared during the nineteenth century
may make us doubtful whether the mists of time have even yet fallen
wholly from our eyes.
In order to enter sympathetically into the outlook of an educated
medieval gentleman, we have to perform the difficult feat of
undressing, as it were, our own outlook by divesting it of all those
seemingly innate ideas of progress and evolution, of a movement of
some sort going on everywhere around us, which make our cosmos what
it is. This is more difficult even than it sounds, because so many
of these thoughts and feelings have become sub-conscious. We have
imbibed them with our vocabulary and cannot without much labour and
research disentangle the part that is due to them from the rest of
our consciousness. Let us try, for a moment, to realize with our
imaginations as well as with our intellects the world in which our
fathers dwelt—a world created abruptly at a fixed moment in time,
and awaiting a destruction equally abrupt, its inhabitants for ever
to be the same, and for ever struggling, not to _progress_ or to
_evolve_ into something different, but merely to become once more
exactly like the first man and woman. Where we speak of _progress_
and _evolution_, the Middle Ages could speak only of _regeneration_
and _amendment_. Their evolution was like Alice’s race with the Red
Queen. It took all their energies to keep still; and even in this
they had very little hope of succeeding, for they believed that the
world was getting steadily worse.
But perhaps their total lack of historical imagination is brought
home to us most forcibly by the prevalent belief that—apart from the
Chosen People—all the inhabitants of the pre-Christian world were
doomed to eternal exclusion from paradise. When we recollect that for
some time the doctors of medieval universities were obliged to swear
upon oath that they would teach nothing contrary to the doctrines of
a Greek philosopher who must already have been in this situation for
three hundred years at the birth of the Redeemer, and when we further
reflect that it was the acute brains of these very doctors which were
engaged in building up our present thinking apparatus, we may well
feel inclined to give up as hopeless the task of sympathetically
recreating the medieval cosmos in our imaginations—unless we realize,
as indeed the history of meanings clearly shows, that it is not
merely ideas and theories and feelings which have changed, but
the very method of forming ideas and of combining them, the very
channels, apparently eternal, by which one thought or feeling is
connected with another. Possibly the Middle Ages would have been
equally bewildered at the facility with which twentieth-century minds
are brought to believe that, intellectually, humanity languished for
countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of
crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific
dictum of the last century.
There is another difference between the past and the present which
it is hard for us to realize; and perhaps this is the hardest of
all. For with the seventeenth century we reach the point at which
we must at last try to pick up and inspect that discarded garment
of the human soul, intimate and close-fitting as it was, into
which this book has been trying from the fifth chapter onwards to
induce the reader to re-insert his modern limbs. The consciousness
of ‘myself’ and the distinction between ‘my-self’ and all other
selves, the antithesis between ‘myself’, the observer, and the
external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of
experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting-point
of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of
training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different
kind of consciousness. Yet we can see from the history of our words
that this form of experience, so far from being eternal, is quite a
recent achievement of the human spirit. It was absent from the old
mythological outlook; absent, in its fullness, from Plato and the
Greek philosophers; and, though it was beginning to light up in the
Middle Ages, as we see in the development of Scholastic words like
_individual_ and _person_, yet the medieval soul was still felt to
be joined by all sorts of occult ties both to the physical body and
to the world. Self-consciousness, as we know it, seems to have first
dawned faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation, and
it was not till the seventeenth century that the new light really
began to spread and brighten. One of the surest signs that an idea
or feeling is coming to the surface of consciousness—surer than the
appearance of one or two new words—is the tendency of an old one
to form compounds and derivatives. After the Reformation we notice
growing up in our language a whole crop of words hyphened with
_self_; such are _self-conceit_, _self-liking_, _self-love_, and
others at the end of the sixteenth century, and _self-confidence_,
_self-command_, _self-contempt_, _self-esteem_, _self-knowledge_,
_self-pity_, ... in the next.
From a full list of such words as the above the historical student
of words and their meanings could almost predict, apart from any
other source of knowledge, the appearance at about this time of
some philosopher who should do intellectually to the cosmos what
Copernicus and Kepler had already done astronomically—that is, turn
it inside out. And in Descartes, with his doctrine of “Cogito, ergo
sum”, we do, in fact, find just such a philosopher. His influence
was immense. Practically all philosophy since his day has worked
outwards from the thinking self rather than inwards from the cosmos
to the soul. In England, not long afterwards, we find the brand-new
expressions, ‘the _ego_’ and _egoism_, coming into the language from
French philosophy, while the English thinker, Locke, adopts the new
(1632) word _consciousness_, defining it as ‘perception of what
passes in a man’s own mind’, and at the same time impresses on the
still newer _self-consciousness_[49] its distinctive modern meaning.
Though these two developments—the birth of an historical sense and
the birth of our modern self-consciousness—may seem at first sight
to have little connection with one another, yet it is not difficult,
on further consideration, to perceive that they are both connected
with that other and larger process which has already been pointed to
as the story told by the history of the Aryan languages as a whole.
If we wish to find a name for it, we should have to coin some such
ugly word as “internalization”. It is the shifting of the centre of
gravity of consciousness from the cosmos around him into the personal
human being himself. The results are twofold: on the one hand the
peculiar freedom of mankind, the _spontaneous_[50] impulses which
control human behaviour and destiny, are felt to arise more and
more from _within_ the individual, as we saw in the semantic change
of such words as _conscience_, _disposition_, _spirit_, _temper_,
... in the application to inner processes of words like _dissent_,
_gentle_, _perceive_, _religion_, and in the Protestant Reformation;
on the other the spiritual life and activity felt to be immanent
in the world outside—in star and planet, in herb and animal, in
the juices and “humours” of the body, and in the outward ritual of
the Church—these grow feebler. The conception of “laws” governing
this world arises and grows steadily more impersonal; words like
_consistency_, _pressure_, _tension_, ... are found to describe
matter “objectively” and disinterestedly, and at the same time the
earth ceases to be the centre round which the cosmos revolves. All
this time the European ‘ego’ appears to be engaged, unawares, in
disentangling itself from its environment—becoming less and less
of the actor, more and more of both the author and the spectator.
In the eighteenth century the word _outlook_ is used for the first
time in the sense in which it has been used here; in the nineteenth
_environment_ is introduced by Carlyle. And so it goes on; and as,
on the one hand, it is only when that detachment has progressed to
a certain point that man becomes able to observe the changes which
constitute history, so it is only as he begins to observe them that
he becomes fully conscious of himself—the observer.
Thus, the general process which we have called “internalization” can
be traced working itself out into all kinds of details; not only
in that intimate, metaphysical change of outlook which it is so
hard for us to realize now that the change has taken place—in the
appearance of words betokening a sharper self-consciousness—but also
in the moral and personal sphere. We could, for instance, take such
a common word as _duty_ and mark its expansion of meaning at about
the time of Shakespeare. By its derivation it carries the sense of
‘owing’ and it meant in Chaucer’s time an act of obedience which was
owed to some other person—usually to a feudal superior.[51] It is
not till the close of the sixteenth century that it begins to take
on its modern sense of a more or less _abstract_ moral obligation—an
obligation owed, if to any being, to oneself or to a sort of ideal
of manhood—such an ideal, for instance, as is expressed in the word
_gentleman_. Later on, as with _conscience_, there is a tendency to
personify it. At the beginning of the seventeenth century we first
find the word _Nature_ employed in contexts where medieval writers
would certainly have used the single word _God_. _Spontaneous_ has
already been mentioned, and it is interesting to note a certain
tendency, which seems to have been inherent, before Shakespeare’s
time, in the adjective _voluntary_, to connote disapproval when it
was applied to human actions or feelings. Later in the century the
word _character_[52] was first used in its modern personal sense by
the historian Clarendon.
Students of the period know well the sudden, extraordinary craze
for “character-drawing” which swept over France and England at
this time. In France literary “portraits” of oneself and one’s
friends were produced in hundreds, the first as a hobby, the second
actually as a round game; and Clarendon, whose _History of the
Great Rebellion_ is a string of such character-studies, was only
doing systematically what men like Hall, Overbury, Earle, and
others had already done in a more disjointed and dilettante way. To
the medieval observer a _person_ or a _soul_ had been interesting
chiefly in its relation to Society, to the Church, to the Cosmos.
“All the personality of man,” said Wyclif, “standeth in the spirit
of him.” But these new writers and their readers were interested in
_characters_ and _characteristics_ for their own sakes. We begin to
hear of people’s _autographs_, of their _foibles_ and their _fortes_;
_eccentric_ is taken from astronomy and mathematics; the Greek word
_idiosyncrasy_—signifying an ‘individual mixture’ (of ‘humours’)—is
borrowed from Galen; but with the new point of view the astrological
and physical meanings of this and other words, like _disposition_,
_humour_, _spirits_, _temperament_, ...[53] gradually fade away,
and their modern meanings arise instead. One relic of these ancient
physics, however—the _vapours_ which were supposed to rise into
the head from the region of the stomach—lingered well on into the
eighteenth century; and from the way in which Boswell and Johnson
write of their fits of _melancholy_, it seems that they had just
reached a point at which they could not be sure, from their feelings
at any rate, whether their common malady was physical in its origin
or purely mental.
The same difference is observable in the names for feelings and
passions. The nomenclature of the Middle Ages generally views
them from without, hinting always at their results or their moral
significance—_envy_, _greedy_, _happy_ (i.e. ‘lucky’), _malice_,
_mercy_, _mildheartness_, _peace_, _pity_[54], _remorse_,
_repentance_, _rue_, _sin_,... Even the old word _sad_ had not
long lost its original sense of ‘sated’, ‘heavy’ (which it still
retains in _sad bread_), and _fear_ continued for a long time to
mean, not the emotion, but a ‘sudden and unexpected event’. Hardly
before the beginning of the seventeenth century do we find expressed
that sympathetic or “introspective” attitude to the feelings which
is conveyed by such labels as _aversion_, _dissatisfaction_,
_discomposure_, ... while _depression_ and _emotion_—further lenient
names for human weaknesses—were used till then of material objects.
In the eighteenth century we notice, as we should expect, a
considerable increase in the number of these words which attempt
to portray character or feeling from within; such are _apathy_,
_chagrin_, _diffidence_, _ennui_, _homesickness_, together with
the expression ‘the _feelings_‘, while _agitation_, _constraint_,
_disappointment_, _embarrassment_, _excitement_ are transferred from
the outer to the inner world. _Outlook_, which meant ‘a place from
which a good view is obtained’, was first employed figuratively by
Dr. Young in 1742.
This brings us to another class of words—appropriate enough
to the century which produced Berkeley’s _Principles of Human
Knowledge_—describing external things not objectively, from their
own point of view, but purely by the _effects_ which they produce
on human beings, such, for instance, as _affecting_, _amusing_,
_boring_, _charming_, _diverting_, _entertaining_, _enthralling_,
_entrancing_, _exciting_, _fascinating_, _interesting_, and
_pathetic_ in its modern sense, none of which are found before the
seventeenth and only a few before the eighteenth century. These
adjectives can be distinguished sharply—indeed they are in a sense
the very opposite of those older words, which can also be said,
though less accurately, to describe external objects “from the human
point of view”. Thus, when a Roman spoke of events as _auspicious_ or
_sinister_, or when some natural object was said in the Middle Ages
to be _baleful_, or _benign_, or _malign_, a herb to possess such and
such a _virtue_, an eye to be _evil_, or the bones of a saint to be
_holy_, or even, probably, when Gower wrote:
The day was _merry_ and _fair_ enough,
it is true that these things were described from the human point of
view, but the activity was felt to emanate from the object itself.
When we speak of an object or an event as _amusing_, on the contrary,
we know that the process indicated by the word _amuse_ takes place
within ourselves; and this is none the less obvious because some of
the adjectives recorded above, such as _charming_, _enchanting_, and
_fascinating_, are the present participles of verbs which had implied
genuine, occult activity.
The change is an important one; it is a reverberation into wider and
wider circles of the scholastic progress from Realism to Nominalism,
and inside the walls of the Church we can perceive the same movement
going on at the Reformation in the Protestant and Dissenting tendency
to abandon belief in the Real Presence. Perhaps the somersault
was turned most neatly by the old Aristotelean word _subjective_,
which developed in the seventeenth century from its former meaning
of ‘existing in itself’ to the modern one of ‘existing in human
consciousness’. _Objective_ made a similar move in the opposite
direction. When using such words as “progress” and “develop” in this
connection, however, we must remember that the semantic histories of
words merely inform us of changes which have actually occurred in a
large number of minds or “outlooks”. They tell us of what is earlier
and what is later, but not of truth and error. In this direction all
that a knowledge of them can do is to equip us a little better for
forming opinions of our own.
At the same time we find a few words to denote the kind of people
who are easily “affected” in this way. _Susceptible_ is first found
in Clarendon, and in the eighteenth century the words _sensible_ and
_sensibility_ acquire their special sense of ‘easily affected’ or
‘having the emotions easily aroused’; and as this kind of experience
grows more familiar, clearer heads become conscious of it, and the
new words _sentiment_ and _sentimental_ appear. _Sentimental_, which
was first used in the title of Sterne’s _Sentimental Journey_,
published in 1768, was found so convenient that the French language
borrowed and the German translated it. No doubt these new notions of
‘sensibility’ and ‘sentimentality,’ of a variety of emotions lying
dormant in the bosom and waiting eagerly to be called forth, combined
with the recently developed interest in character to produce the
curious _personality_, which acquired its modern meaning a few years
later and has gone on increasing in popularity ever since.
It is impossible in the short space that is left to us to do justice
to that extraordinary interlude in England’s literary and social
history—the eighteenth century. The age of powder and platitudes, of
_charmers_ with automatically heaving bosoms, ogling and simpering
at their corseted _swains_; the age of ugly shaven heads secretly
perspiring under fashionable periwigs; the age when country gentlemen
erected artificial “ruins” at the bottom of their gardens, and
serious poets could hardly mention the sea without adding a reference
to the _finny drove_—this age seems to us now to have faded away as
suddenly and inexplicably as it arose, leaving only the faintest
traces upon our language. Those half-hidden vestiges, however—the
just slightly different shades of meaning with which sundry familiar
words were used a hundred and fifty years ago—sometimes seem to
fascinate us by the very paradox of their proximity and elusiveness.
We feel that, if we could only bring them out in some way, we might
take from them the very form and pressure of the age. And so,
when we come across some particularly popular word like _reason_
in eighteenth-century literature, we are sometimes tempted to lay
down the book, while imagination goes groping vainly round the
impenetrable fringe of that mysterious no-man’s-land which lies
between words and their meanings.
If we would seek for the genesis of the curious clockwork cosmos
through which the minds and imaginations of the period seem to have
moved with a measure of contentment, we should find it, perhaps,
not so very far back in the past. Emotionally, the age was still
dominated by a pronounced reaction against religious fanaticism—an
attitude we see reflected in the changeable meaning of _enthusiasm_,
which in Plato’s Greek meant ‘possessed by a god’. Spenser uses it
in its Greek form in a good sense, but by the end of the seventeenth
century we find Henry More writing: “If ever Christianity be
exterminated, it will be by enthusiasm”; and even as late as 1830 a
certain zealous, if dogmatic, Churchman thought it worth while to
write and publish a _Natural History of Enthusiasm_, in which that
dreadful vice, especially in its theological aspect, is castigated
with much vigour. _Fanatic_, which had also meant ‘possessed by
a god or demon,’ underwent the same change of meaning and gave
birth to _fanaticism_ about the middle of the seventeenth century.
_Extravagant_, which had formerly meant ‘non-codified’, got its
new meaning and produced _extravagance_. And the way in which the
word _Gothic_ was used to describe anything barbarous and uncouth
reminds us of how the eighteenth century perceived barbarity and
uncouthness in many places where we no longer see it—such as medieval
architecture, much of which was pulled down at this time and replaced
by buildings which were felt to be more “correct” and classical.
Intellectually, on the other hand, men’s minds seem to have been
influenced above all things by that conception of impersonal “laws”
governing the universe which, as we saw in the last chapter,
was scarcely apprehended before the previous century. Poets and
philosophers alike were delighted by the perfect _order_ in which
they perceived the cosmos to be arranged. They sought everywhere for
examples of this orderliness. Pope, for instance, praises Windsor
Forest on the ground that it is a place:
Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d;
But, as the world, harmoniously confus’d:
Where order in variety we see,
And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.
This appreciation of Nature’s neatness—from which we do not ourselves
so easily derive poetic inspiration—is now so familiar that it is
difficult for us to realize its freshness at that time. Yet this
is unquestionably demonstrated by the dates at which such crucial
words as _arrange_, _category_, _classify_, _method_, _organize_,
_organization_, _regular_, _regulate_, _regularity_, _system_,
_systematic_, ... or their modern meanings, appeared in the language.
Only two of these are earlier than the seventeenth, and most of them
are not found till the eighteenth century. Thus, _arrange_ was a
military term like _array_ until that time, and _regular_ was only
used of monastic “orders” until the close of the sixteenth century.
It is this universal conformity to laws, then, this perfect order
reigning everywhere undisturbed, which the eighteenth century seems
to have had in mind when it used, and sometimes personified, the word
_Reason_. Reason explained everything.
Let godlike Reason from her sovereign throne
Speak the commanding word—I will—and it is done,
wrote James Thomson, and Pope expressed the same idea even more
slickly when he announced in his _Essay on Man_: “Whatever is, is
right.” Thus, rapt in adoration of the radiant new lady, the poets
lost all interest in dame Nature. Only when she was arranged and
regulated and organized into a park or a landscape garden would they
consent to have anything to do with her, and then it was chiefly as
a foil to the superior attractions of her rival. She became a stage,
a “pleasing” background to a sort of everlasting human boxing-match
between reason and “the passions”; and the dictionary dates from
this time our curious custom of describing her face as _scenery_.
And then, after having quietly murdered her, poetry proceeded to
galvanize the poor corpse into a shameful, marionette-like semblance
of life by switching into it that supposititious _personal_ sympathy
with human affairs which mars so much of the verse of the eighteenth
century. We can, however, mark the beginning of this practice at an
earlier date.
The word _conscious_, like _consciousness_, was unknown until the
seventeenth century, when its newfangledness was ridiculed by Ben
Jonson. It is odd, therefore, that the first recorded uses are
figurative, applying it to inanimate objects. When we find Denham
writing in 1643:
Thence to the coverts and the conscious Groves,
The scenes of his past Triumphs and his Loves....
and Milton a few years later:
So all ere day-spring, under conscious Night
Secret they finishèd....
we can almost fancy, by their readiness to seize upon the new word,
that our poets were beginning, even so soon, to feel the need of
restoring “subjectively” to external Nature—of “projecting into”
her, as we can now say—a fanciful substitute for that voluntary life
and inner connection with human affairs which Descartes and Hobbes
were draining from her in reality. The tendency we can see here,
carried to extravagant lengths, at last produced the extraordinary
poetic conventions of the eighteenth century, by which fictitious
personality was attributed to every object and idea under the sun.
Finally the complicated machinery of classical mythology was applied
in the same subjective and purely fanciful way to English society and
the English countryside. It is in the same Windsor Forest that we are
asked to
See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned,
Here blushing Flora paints the enamel’d ground,
Here Ceres’ gifts in waving prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper’s hand.
At first sight this state of affairs looks like an exact repetition
of the later stages of Roman mythology, but in point of fact the
two outlooks are sharply distinguished by the new element of
self-consciousness. Myth was in some way in the blood of the Romans;
it was a living part of their national history, and in spite of all
their artificiality and scepticism there is no evidence that they
ever deliberately created gods and goddesses of the fancy, in whom
they neither believed themselves nor expected anyone else to believe.
We imagine them incapable of grasping, for instance, such an idea
as that which found expression in the brand-new eighteenth-century
verb, to _personify_. One wonders, therefore, to what extent the dawn
of a mechanical age was reflecting itself in this new outlook, this
new cosmos controlled by dead laws rather than instinct with living
spirit, and therefore requiring to be peopled by the fancy.
We have spoken of the eighteenth-century mind as living in a
“clockwork” cosmos, and it is interesting to reflect that even this
simplest form of mechanical contrivance was a thing quite unknown to
the ancient world. Was the rhythmical mimicry of organic life, which
is the characteristic of machinery, already having its unperceived
effect on men’s minds and philosophies? The influences which go
to make up the outlook of an age are sometimes seen working most
powerfully—though beneath the surface—in the very minds which believe
themselves to be combating that outlook most stubbornly. The closing
years of the eighteenth century produced Paley’s famous watch, a
popular cosmic allegory which, in proving the existence of a Creator,
at the same time relegates all His activities to the remote past.
But this is a subject which can be more usefully considered in the
next chapter. Thither we must now turn in order to trace the further
development of the eighteenth-century gentleman’s imaginative double
life—his life in the order and reason of the moral and material
universe and of “sensibility” in the little universe of himself—into
two divergent directions.