Satire, History, Novel : Narrative Forms, 1665-1815 [1 ed.] 9780845346068, 9780874138290

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SATIRE, HISTORY, NOVEL

SATIRE, HISTORY, NOVEL Narrative Forms, 1665–1815

Frank Palmeri

Newark: University of Delaware Press London: Associated University Presses

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palmeri, Frank. Satire, history, novel : narrative forms, 1665–1815 / Frank Palmeri. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87413-829-9 (alk. paper) 1. Satire. 2. European fiction—History and criticism. I. Title. PN6149.S2 P28 2003 809.7—dc21 2003005070

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Cultural Paradigms, Public Spheres, and Narrative Forms 1. The Satiric Almanac in History, 1665–1800 2. Satire and the Historical Memoir-Novel, 1690–1740 3. Satire, Philosophical History, and the Historical Novel, 1700–1815 4. Satire, Conjectural History, and the Bildungsroman, 1720–1795 5. Satire, Novel, and Forms of the Public Sphere, 1740–1800 6. Satire and Utopia in Conjectural History, 1750–1800 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

11 44 77 115 153 178 231 268 274 327 347

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Acknowledgments I BEGAN WORKING ON THIS BOOK MORE THAN TEN YEARS AGO IN AN attempt to answer the question of what happened to satire in the nineteenth century. I first saw the works of Hume and Rousseau as pivots around which a transformation occurred that moved away from the satire of the early part of the eighteenth century toward different forms of the novel that emerged near the end of the century. Chapters 3 and 4 first took shape around these ideas. The French and English memoir-novels and the almanacs from British popular culture offered confirmation of such a long-term shift. Finally, divergences on the continent from the pattern set in Britain led to the notion of an inverse relation between narrative satire and the plural public sphere; and the conjectural histories from high culture gave evidence of both patterns. The argument here is still only a prelude to a genealogy of these forms from 1790–1914; I hope finally to address that question directly in a successor to this book. Many people have helped me in the course of my work on this project. Adam Potkay and Zack Bowen each read the entire manuscript and made numerous valuable suggestions. I have shared conversations with Mark Phillips and Peter Cosgrove on Hume, Gibbon, and historiography that have helped my thinking about the issues addressed in this book. T. E. D. Braun, Chris Fanning, Carl Fisher, Everett Zimmerman, and Thomas Carr offered opportunities for me to present ideas about satire, history, and narrative forms for which I am grateful. I have also benefited in many ways from the ideas and suggestions of David Blewett, Patricia Craddock, Paul Hunter, Joseph Levine, Edward LiPuma, Ronald Paulson, John Paul Russo, Melvyn New, Susan Staves, Ann Van Sant, and Barbara Woshinsky. I am grateful for the assistance I have received from Margaret Borgeest, who has always worked hard to improve the collection at the University of Miami Richter Library; from Gail Gutten, Bob Shafer, and Eduardo Abella, and from the staff of the Interli7

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

brary Loan department at Richter Library; and the staffs of the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. I also gratefully acknowledge grants from the University of Miami that helped support research at several of these libraries. Finally, thanks to Greta West for help with the cover illustration. Participating in conferences helped me formulate aspects of the argument here, especially the Jonathan Swift Centenary at University College, Dublin, organized by Ian Campbell Ross, Aileen Douglas, and Patrick Kelly; and Cultural Studies after Foucault, at the Thomas Reid Center of the University of Aberdeen, organized by George Rousseau, David Hewitt, and John Neubauer. I also acknowledge the strong and original work of students in my three graduate seminars at the University of Miami on satire, history, and the novel in the eighteenth century. Some of those students have become colleagues with whom I have since had valuable conversations about our work—especially Terry Reilly, Mike Sinowitz, and Nancy San Martı´n. I want to express my warm thanks to Donald Mell for his continuing interest in this book, and his support of my work over a number of years. Rosemary and Frank James Palmeri have always provided an atmosphere that encouraged intellectual inquiry, and John LaBriola stood as an example of wide learning and independence of mind. I owe them much. Mihoko Suzuki possesses great understanding of Enlightenment thought and unequalled judgment on matters large and small. She first drew my attention to satiric almanacs, and more than once has seen where I was going before I have myself. She has given help of all kinds with ever fresh generosity. This book, small return, is for her.

A portion of chapter 1 was originally published in Criticism 40, no. 3 (1998): 377–408. Reprinted with permission of the Wayne State University Press. An earlier version of chapter 4 was originally published in Comparative Literature 48, no. 3 (1996): 237–64.

SATIRE, HISTORY, NOVEL

Introduction: Cultural Paradigms, Public Spheres, and Narrative Forms THIS BOOK SEEKS TO ANSWER THE QUESTION OF WHAT HAPPENED TO satire after its period of prominence in the early eighteenth century, and to address a series of theoretical questions that follow from the first concerning the history of relations between genres: How and why does a genre that has been dominant fade in importance and give way to other genres? What elements do new, or newly significant, genres share with the earlier one; in what ways do they challenge, disavow, suppress, but also appropriate features of the previous prevailing form? Can shifts in the appeal and usefulness of genres be related to larger shifts in paradigms of cultural understanding? Is it possible to construct a genealogy of genres? Most critics would agree that narrative satire and formal verse satire were dominant forms in the early eighteenth century, and that by the second half of the century that position was claimed by other forms.1 Although these are closely related genres, it is also important to distinguish between them. As I have argued in Satire in Narrative, narrative satire sets against each other opposed points of view; it criticizes or parodies both extremes, but typically devotes little or no attention to positions that might mediate or accommodate the differences between them. Rather than building to a strong sense of closure, such satires tend to remain open-ended and not progressive, their oppositions unresolved by either marriage or death. Satiric narratives also tend to employ irony and parody in levelling accepted hierarchies of value, such as high and low, the spiritual and the physical.2 The lack of a clear middle ground between opposites is the most distinctive and relevant characteristic of narrative satire for this book; it is notable already in narrative satire of the Renaissance. In the Praise of Folly (1511), the corrupt, worldly foolishness of 11

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the great stands in direct opposition with the probably unattainable simplicity of those who are fools in the eyes of the world, but Erasmus offers no easily discernible ground on which one might honorably take a stand apart from these alternatives. Similarly, in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532, 1534), the satire of scholastic theologians as barbarous buffoons implies a strong endorsement of the new humanism, but Rabelais also depicts with relish the exploits of traditional giants and other elements of medieval popular culture that stand in tension with the elite and high cultural program of the humanists; between these opposed and irreconcilable cultural positions, he does not provide an unambiguous choice. The following chapters take as their point of departure narrative satires from the seventeenth and early eighteenth century that parody or satirize in this way both sides of opposed cultural, political, or philosophical perspectives without authorizing a clear middle ground. Among such satiric works are Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51), Grimmelshausen’s Adventurous Simplicissimus (1669), Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Manley’s New Atalantis (1709), Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1715), Le Sage’s Gil Blas (1715), and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721).3 I argue that in the second half of the eighteenth century novelistic and historical forms of narrative came to occupy dominant positions comparable to the one occupied by satiric narrative in the first decades of the century—partly by defining themselves in opposition to satire, but also by appropriating satiric elements. I examine not only this displacement of narrative satire in England, but also the persistence of the form in France and Germany through the late eighteenth century. The argument proposed here, therefore, does not view ‘‘the novel’’ as the exclusively dominant form in the later part of this period. Rather than recounting the rise or origins of a single novelistic form, Satire, History, Novel examines the movement away from narrative satire and toward specific fictional forms such as the historical novel, Bildungsroman, and comic realistic novel, and toward conjectural history as well. These latter forms attempt to find grounds of mediation and accommodation; they are interested in representing moderate positions and mediating characters. They exhibit a relatively strong sense of closure, and do not give a primary role to parody or to satiric irony. The most convincing and influential thesis on the fading of sat-

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ire from prominence has been offered by Ronald Paulson, who argued in Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England that satire in verse and prose gave way to the novel of sentiment.4 Although Paulson’s book serves as a point of departure for the present study, another account of these generic transformations comes into view if one focuses on narrative forms, makes a comparative study of works from France and Germany as well as Britain, and examines the history of genres in relation to large cultural formations. It is in narrative satire that the pattern of excluded middles and an unresolved openendedness figure most strongly. And it is by contrast with narrative satire that the stages of development in conjectural histories and the growth of the protagonist in Bildungsromane and historical novels emerge most clearly as revisions of a previously dominant form. Such a displacement in the history of narrative genres can be related to a shift in the cultural frameworks within which works and genres are produced. Michel Foucault has provided a persuasive account of such a sequence of epistemological frameworks from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.5 In order to be useful for a study of fictional and historical narratives, however, Foucault’s epistemes need to be modified so that they become more flexible and less exclusive. Adopting such a modification, and employing the resulting notion of cultural paradigms, this book explores the history of genres in relation to the history of organizing cultural frameworks. The cultural paradigm dominant in the earliest part of this period—one organized around paradoxes, ironic disjunctions, and an inability to reconcile divergent cultural imperatives—is consistent with a prominent use of narrative satire, because this form of narrative is also based on irony, paradox, and an absence of mediating grounds between opposed ideologies. The two later paradigms—one of which ascribes the highest value to transparent and universal rationality, the other to the organic development of intrinsic capabilities— encourage the production of conjectural histories and novelistic forms. Conjectural histories narrate the socialization of the species through stages whose reiterations indicate the universality and rationality of the process. Similarly, but later, Bildungsromane and historical novels investigate the means by which an individual seeks to realize inner capabilities even while coming to terms with the surrounding historical situation. Unlike satire, most novelistic forms, including Bildungsromane and historical novels, are accommodating genres: they represent progress

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toward reconciling opposed cultural or historical claims.6 They move toward mediation, and their protagonists themselves almost always come from the social or political middle. This book thus traces the genealogy of a number of narrative forms both in England and across the channel, including the emergence of significant new genres of history and novel on the continent. Chapter 4 argues, for example, that despite asserted opposition to satire in the later forms, a discernible line connects the satire in Gulliver’s Travels with Rousseau’s conjectural history in his two Discourses (1750, 1755); moreover, the latter’s Emile (1762), a kind of speculative history of the individual, has strong ties to the first Bildungsroman, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796). Although this study pursues such suppressed continuities in the history of narrative in Britain, France, and Germany in its first four chapters, it also addresses uneven and asynchronous developments in Britain and on the continent in chapters 5 and 6. Ju ¨ rgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere may help account for such divergences, especially if one stresses more than Habermas himself does the distinction between different kinds of public sphere. The development of a public sphere for discussion of reactions to literature encourages forms that explore individual judgments and feelings such as the sentimental epistolary novel. But the development of an arena for open debate between different perspectives on public questions goes further and eliminates much of the need for satire by making possible the direct criticism of government policies and officials. Thus, in Britain, which saw the early development of such a public sphere, satire faded in a matter of decades, and was replaced by various novelistic and historical forms. However, in France and Germany, where a literary but not a political public sphere developed, satire continued to serve a function and persisted alongside elements of the newer novelistic and historical forms. The argument here stands apart from those inquiries that have sought to trace the origins of the novel in the eighteenth century, and have usually focused on the English novel. It may be more productive in a study of the histories of genres to focus on forms of novels with specifiable periods of prominence and cultural usefulness than to treat the different kinds of novel as though they were one, or to take one variety, such as the realistic comic novel, as a model to which other forms more or less closely conform. As part of its approach, therefore, this book traces related narrative

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developments in both England and France, juxtaposing Defoe, for example, with Courtilz de Sandras and Pre´vost (in chapter 2) or Fielding and Smollett with Voltaire and Diderot (in chapter 5), in some cases noting continuities, in others divergences. In addition, because historical narratives in both Britain and France assumed such distinctive forms as conjectural and philosophical history, forms which revise and reshape satiric narratives, it will also consider novelistic and historical modes of narrative together, investigating parallels and intersections between them. This study thus examines the emergence of distinctive forms of history and of novels, and it relates both of these with the subsiding of satiric narrative; moreover, it sees elements of satiric form retained and reworked in both the historical and novelistic forms.7

FOUCAULT AND CULTURAL PARADIGMS Like Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault explored the role played by epistemological paradigms in shaping and limiting how the world is understood and what can count as true in different periods.8 In particular, in The Order of Things, Foucault gave a productive account of three such paradigms, ranging in their periods of dominance from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. I will consider these three paradigms in detail in the next section, and will specify ways in which my understanding of them modifies Foucault’s. Before doing so, however, I will suggest two directions for revising Foucault’s ideas about such frameworks of knowledge. In the first place, this study is concerned with cultural paradigms, which may include an epistemological dimension, but do not make strong or exclusive claims to the truth as do the natural or the social sciences; this focus opens up for further study the relation between genres of literature and overarching paradigms of cultural understanding. In addition, I revise Foucault’s early accounts of regimes of social scientific knowledge in line with the direction taken by his own later reconception of such frameworks. Foucault began by asserting that an episteme is exclusive, unique, and constitutive, writing that, ‘‘In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge’’ (168).9 In this account of the epistemes governing inquiries in what we now call the social sciences from the Renaisance to modern times, discontinuity plays a determining role. The Renaissance, classical, and

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modern epistemes in The Order of Things are incommensurable; there is no progression from one to the other, and Foucault provides no possible causes for the ruptures he describes. Already in the Archaeology of Knowledge, however, a metamorphosis in mental frameworks is no longer a ‘‘great drift that carries with it all discursive formations at once.’’10 Continuities persist through the transformations that occur; thus, elements of multiple epistemological formations coexist, and the field of knowledge is not total or single.11 After Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault came increasingly to see common grounds between frameworks of knowledge, and departed significantly from his earlier assertions of a radical discontinuity between them. The second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, for example, narrate a very gradual shift away from a regimen of pleasures in the classical Greek world to anxiety about the harmful consequences of pleasure in the early Roman empire. The form taken by Foucault’s genealogical recasting of previous historical accounts varies after Discipline and Punish, but it does not depend on sudden, radical disjunctures between totalizing epistemes.12 In his last years, Foucault conceived of earlier cultural frameworks as a repertoire of practices that could be deployed in a given present. The producing of alternate ways of understanding and acting that Foucault explores in this last phase does not occur as part of an anonymous, agentless history, in response to hidden forces by subjects who are unaware of what they are doing. Similarly, the focus in this study will be on the choices among repertoires of narrative forms made by individual authors in their works, especially choices that lead to the production of new compounds and forms. New genres almost always emerge as a result of selecting, revising, and combining elements of previous genres. One could argue that the shaping of the Bildungsroman in the hands of Rousseau and others constitutes an example of disciplinary innovation, as I do in chapter 4. By contrast, the development of the historical novel by Scott may have opened new possibilities for interpretive understandings of history rather than foreclosing them, as I suggest in chapter 3. Cultural paradigms do not exert an exclusive and all-determining sway; rather, various competing frameworks coexist and overlap at any one time.13 Such overlapping of conceptual schemes parallels what Marx calls uneven development. For Marx, the replacement of an earlier form of social intercourse by a later one on

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which it has become a constraint ‘‘takes place only very slowly; the various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for centuries afterwards.’’14 Many residual formations from earlier periods continue to exert a significant effect at any given moment, and emerging formations also typically attract a small though sometimes prominent set of exponents.15 There need not be a single, unambiguously dominant cultural paradigm at any one time; perhaps two or more major formations may each exert competing but shaping influences on many. This ongoing competition among paradigms refers to the same fluid situation that Gramsci discusses in his prison notebooks as the struggle among cultural forms for hegemonic position. On both accounts, multiple cultural frameworks constantly compete to obtain shifting allegiance by means of persuasion, not force, and adherents of the more recent frameworks will seek to overturn elements and persuade adherents of the earlier and more accepted framework, efforts to which those with the more established perspective will respond. In Gramsci’s terminology, ‘‘dominance’’ implies a reliance on police power to force consent; as I employ the word, it does not. My usage follows that of Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, for whom ‘‘dominant’’ means culturally prevailing. Such a philosophical framework is not imposed from the top down or by force, but instead takes a primary place for a time in the midst of several competing and alternative frameworks. In this sense, what is culturally dominant or prevailing is equivalent to what Gramsci calls hegemonic.16 Nevertheless, I understand my investigation of multiple forms of understanding and their cultural forms of expression to be consistent with what Gramsci sees as the project of explaining ‘‘how it happens that in all periods there co-exist many systems and currents of philosophical thought, how these currents are born, how they are diffused, and why in the process of diffusion they fracture along certain lines and in certain directions.’’17 It would be impossible and beside the point to try to determine which of these major paradigms was dominant by trying to measure which shaped the thinking of the largest number of people during a certain time, or which informed the largest number of printed or popular works. Rather than having recourse to such quantitative measurements, one might use as a criterion the concept of the newly distinctive. A cultural framework that exhibits a new and characteristic way of thinking can be considered a dominant or defining paradigm even if it did not shape the outlook of a

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majority of the subjects in the society at the time. This criterion can be employed even if such a distinctive mode of cultural understanding can only be identified in retrospect; it often happens that a cultural paradigm is recognized and named only once some distance has been gained on it, perhaps near the end of the period of its greatest strength. Thus, for example, it is only in the 1780s that thinkers in Germany began to consider whether theirs was an age of enlightenment, even though identifiable elements and precursors of Enlightenment thinking can be seen as early as the end of the seventeenth century, and most students of the period would agree that in much of Europe the period when such a form of thinking and critique was dominant or newly distinctive included the four or five decades before the 1780s.18 The appearance of a new genre of narrative can also indicate the recent or emerging formation of a new cultural paradigm. Thus, Don Quixote, as the first modern novel, makes an early satiric break with the mental world of Renaissance romance, and, as Foucault argues, the Gothic novel anticipates modern literary attempts to break through the limits of language.19 Moreover, just as Don Quixote relied on elements of the Renaissance paradigm even in repudiating and mocking it, evincing some nostalgia for the signifying richness of that world, so did the early Gothic novels make use of residual elements such as the presence of the supernatural from medieval and Renaissance romance, and a desire to reveal secret corruptions from the Enlightenment, although both are subordinated in this genre to the drive toward extremes of sex and violence. As I have indicated, one might argue that all genres are composed of multiple, discordant, and non-synchronous elements and views of the world.20 Because these hybrid elements in genres have parallels among the elements in cultural formations, the appearance of a new genre can anticipate and accord with a cultural formation; the period of its greatest popularity and cultural usefulness can coincide with the persistence of a larger formation; and the passing of the genre from high visibility or usefulness may indicate the passing of the paradigm from dominance. A principal focus of this book will be the reciprocally constitutive relation between narrative genres and such cultural paradigms. Certain narrative forms possess features that give them an affinity with cultural paradigms, although there is no one-to-one correspondence between paradigms and genres.21 For example, narrative satire, historical memoir-novels, and secret histories typify the skeptical paradigm of the seventeenth and early eighteenth

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century; but narrative satire is characteristic not only of that earlier paradigm but also of the modernist paradigm of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, where it reappears combined with new forms of irony and a newly skeptical attitude toward historical progress. It is thus possible to view a succession of forms and of cultural frameworks without regarding either as constituting a progressive history or an evolution toward increasing complexity. Gaining and losing prominence, different forms take their place in a sequence, not a cumulative accomplishment. Frameworks of cultural understanding may vary in the extent to which they mold thought and expression; they function on the border between inescapable, unconscious categories and conscious thought.22 For many people, such frameworks operate tacitly and unconsciously, as shaping a priori categories. If these people experience a shift in the dominant paradigm in their lifetime, they will probably continue to think within the earlier framework. However, cultural frameworks may exercise a more limited hold on others, who can more readily adapt to, or may more consciously adopt a paradigm that differs from the one that was dominant when they found their intellectual bearings. I have employed paradigms drawn from outside this work, in order to avoid insofar as possible a circular logic according to which the works chosen for discussion would shape the paradigms in reference to which individual works would then be explained. Consequently, I have adopted the conception of the late Renaissance, Enlightenment, and nineteenth-century paradigms which Foucault employs in The Order of Things, modifying somewhat the first of these. I believe that these concepts have a status comparable to such periodizing concepts as modernism and the postmodern: each of them has been what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘‘cultural dominant,’’ and each has exerted a broadly shaping cultural authority.23 In my understanding, these categories are not purely chronological; anticipations of an emerging paradigm often will appear several decades before the newer way of thought and feeling attains wide currency. Moreover, as I have indicated, once a paradigm has taken shape and been surpassed, it continues to be available among the repertoire of cultural forms that have shaped a culture. But such paradigms are not entirely unmoored from chronology either. In a sequence of dominant cultural paradigms during the last four or five centuries in the West, the frameworks of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and nineteenth century—with its organic historicism—have been followed by modernist and

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postmodern paradigms.24 I will turn now to a more detailed description of the first three of these paradigms, which are significant for this study.

THREE CULTURAL PARADIGMS Although they are closely related, the cultural paradigms with which I am concerned here do not coincide exactly with the epistemic paradigms that Foucault describes in The Order of Things. My understanding of the first of the cultural paradigms considered here departs from Foucault’s understanding of the same period. It could be seen as constituting a late variation on the Renaissance paradigm as Foucault characterizes it in The Order of Things or, more precisely, the residue of its disintegration. In Foucault’s episteme, resemblances among all things bind the world in a web of correspondences: nature is the writing of God, and words contain hidden similarities to the things they designate (Order, 17–44, 67– 71). However, in the cultural paradigm that characterizes much seventeenth-century writing, the chain of resemblances has given way, and a vertical chasm has opened up between this world and another one. The view of nature as an unending series of emblematic correspondences, anchored in the principle of the hidden similarities among things, breaks apart. Perhaps, as Lucien Goldmann argues, as a result of rationalistic individualism and a mechanistic view of the world, the deity is evacuated from the physical universe and from the human conscience. In the infinite, rational, and regular space that is left, nature no longer constitutes the writing of God. Rather, the transcendent deity remains silent, inaccessible, hidden.25 Consistent with this lack of binding unity, the seventeenth century gave rise to many works that are composites formed of smaller units bearing only a loose relation to each other.26 A marked tendency toward accretion figures here—for example, in the piling up of citations to demonstrate erudition, or in the introduction of digressions, catalogues, and lists which often overwhelm efforts at organizational unity or syntactic coherence. Walter Benjamin writes of the ceaseless piling up of fragments in the literature of the seventeenth century.27 Like Benjamin, I would stress the proliferation of fragments and ruins; however, whereas Benjamin sees the absence that results from the retreat of the divinity producing allegorical constructions (‘‘allegories are, in the

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realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things’’28), I see the unsuccessful attempt to locate a unifying divine principle as resulting most often in paradoxes of thought and expression.29 As Benjamin himself points out, such paradoxical thinking oscillates between extremes with no middle ground where they might meet and be accommodated.30 Throughout his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697 and later) for example, Bayle alternates between expressing the demands of an extreme form of faith that can claim no support from reason, and the analysis of a relentlessly self-undermining reason which, however, can never lead to faith or certainty. In the entries for his Dictionary, Bayle declares clearly and briefly as a matter of fact what little can be known of the historical individuals named in his entries. Yet the real substance of his work lies in his extensive Remarks or notes to each entry that examine disputed points, demolish historical myths and mistakes, pursue philosophical questions, and reveal Bayle’s own scholarship and erudition. The clarity, certainty, and brevity of the entries stands in an unresolved tension with the ambiguities, polemicism, and accumulation of the Remarks.31 Bayle’s work implies that human beings are caught between extremely limited historical certainties and virtually endless critical ambiguities.32 The Dictionary noticeably lacks a synthesizing middle ground between the opposed extremes of thought and structure with which it works. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51) offers another instance of a work whose additive structure reveals a strongly paradoxical form of thought (the Anatomy dates from the early stages of this paradigm, when it is just emerging). Seeking to provide a comprehensive account of the role played by melancholy in human affairs, Burton lays out an elaborate outline that divides the entire work into partitions, sections, members, and subsections. Yet, even apart from formal digressions, this systematic impulse stands in tension with a contrary impulse toward accretion based on displays of erudition, processes of association, and lists. This cultural paradigm of frustrated resemblance and paradox dominates most of the seventeenth century, and continues to animate notable works into the 1700s, although the succeeding form of cultural understanding begins to assume a prominent role in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, especially in England. The second cultural framework is founded not on resemblance or its suspension, but on representation; one of its earliest adumbrations comes in Descartes’s adoption of clarity and distinctness

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as criteria of the certainty of ideas. Rather than seeing a deep similarity between words and things, this regime of thought views the relation between the two as arbitrary but transparent. Words do not resemble what they designate or mean, but instead allow their meanings to be perceived as though they are unobstructed conduits giving access to certain knowledge. The Renaissance paradigm conceived of a vertical correspondence between the realms of the everyday and the transcendent; the breakdown of this paradigm was conducive to the production of narrative satire, because the lack of correspondence between different realms found a parallel in the lack of mediating relation between other opposed terms. In the eighteenth-century paradigm, however, which eliminates the transcendent realm as a guarantor of meaning, potentially opposed extremes such as idea and actuality or word and thing stand in a horizontal relation to each other. Narratives in this paradigm are able to conceive of grounds of mediation between opposites, because sign and referent exist on the same level and communication between them is unhindered. Rather than dwelling on paradoxes and opposed extremes, such a cultural framework stresses the reassurances of sociability and looks for grounds of accommodation between opposites. Its project of toleration moves it away from asocial and extreme positions. When this form of thinking cannot find terms of moderation—and this occurs sometimes on religious issues—it adopts the satiric structures common under the previous regime, but silently and without acknowledging them as such. Instead, they appear disguised, slightly altered, and in new combinations. What is expressed ironically in the earlier mode by Swift can be repeated with little or no irony by Rousseau or Godwin. Thus, Godwin’s straightforward critiques in Caleb Williams (1794) of the British legal system, of inaccurate historical representations, and of the authoritarian personality closely parallel Swift’s ironic satire of the same objects almost seventy years earlier in Gulliver’s Travels.33 Works written in this paradigm of the mid- and late eighteenth century have a tendency to present their material in taxonomies and tables; such categorizing forms indicate in clear spatial terms the relations between different parts of a field of knowledge on a single plane. The process of understanding here implies a mapping of the phenomena of the world onto a grid or rational outline, and conceives of the investigator’s role as one of dividing up the world and arranging the parts so that they occupy their appropriate

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place in a rational table. The work of Linnaeus or Buffon, classifying animal and vegetable forms not according to emblematic moral or spiritual affinities but on the basis of visible morphological congruences, establishes such a table or outline of life. A project such as the Encyclopedia (1751–72) of Diderot and d’Alembert also occupies a central role in this cultural paradigm, not only because it claims to embody all human knowledge in a single work, but also because to do so it uses categories for articles that are drawn from the overarching rational table or outline of knowledge provided by d’Alembert in his Preface. The Encyclopedia dispenses with the whole apparatus of Remarks and notes of which Bayle made such extensive and ironic use in his Dictionary. In its attack on the alliance between the Catholic church and the French state, the Encyclopedia has a strong polemical purpose, but it presents most of its articles as the consensus of learned opinion on the subject in question. Much of what is true of the Encyclopedia is true also of the Spectator papers of Addison and Steele. The Spectator suppresses learned polemic and scholarly apparatus in order to present what it claims is the consensus of social opinion on the subject of the day.34 As they make use of a rhetoric of mediation, both the Spectator and the Encyclopedia also advance a particular ideological agenda—the former Whiggish, the latter anti-clerical—cast in the terms of a moderate, consensual position. Moreover, each number of the Spectator constitutes an essay, just as each entry in the Encyclopedia does; indeed, by contrast with the fragmentary and accretive forms characteristic of the earlier paradigm, the essay, especially the periodical essay, proves to be strongly characteristic of and closely related to the cultural paradigm of the mid-eighteenth century. The Spectator papers of 1711–12 thus exhibit greater parallels in form and ways of proceeding with the Encyclopedia of the 1750s than with Bayle’s Dictionary, which appeared in 1697 and 1704. On the other hand, one might regard Bayle’s work, so revealing of the earlier paradigm, as participating in or anticipating the later one through its inclusion of clear, brief, straightforward accounts of historical certainties at the head of each article: it foresees the possibility of attaining a certain knowledge of history— after the grueling work of scholarly demystification has been accomplished.35 The third cultural framework that figures in these pages takes as its primary criteria of value process, change, and growth rather than the clear apprehension and tabulation of knowledge, drawing

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its models and metaphors largely from the fields of botany and history. Works written within this paradigm take the form of narratives of development, especially of internal potential; they are concerned with organic growth as self-development in the history both of peoples and of individuals.36 Thus, in his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91), Herder takes the history of humanity to be composed of the history of its individual peoples. Each people’s history as he recounts it reveals an attempt to cultivate and realize their unique cultural potential. Indeed, the conception of culture as an inner state of a society that might be healthy or ill first takes shape in this paradigm.37 A focus on an internal principle of growth reveals how Adam Smith combines elements of this paradigm and the preceding one. As Smith seeks to characterize the self-regulating capacity of the market, he suggests that it is as if an invisible external power, a hidden hand, directed its activities.38 However, that force is in fact internal to the laws and processes of the economy; thus, in a clear shift, an unreadable Providence, the hidden God of Pascal and the Jansenists, has become internalized as the agentless processes of the abstract market. In addition, whereas Hume and Voltaire tend to see earlier historical stages as either unenlightened or enlightened, ascribing a static quality to each and offering little if any account of the transition between them, Smith is able to locate and describe an inner principle of change from medieval feudal society to modern market forms, for example in Book 3 of The Wealth of Nations (1776).39 Within this paradigm, and especially in its historical thinking, static oppositions or tables give way to progressive narrative through the work of mediating terms, by means of synthesis. One of the most characteristic forms of thought in this time is Hegel’s conception of the workings both of history and of reason as dialectical processes that make progress by finding grounds of mediation between warring positions in culture or philosophy. Because of the way it sees growth and change taking place, as internal development that overcomes opposed extremes, this third cultural paradigm exercises a strongly synthesizing and unifying effect. If we compare Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1807), which is concerned with the growth and maturation of reason on the basis of its own inner principles, with Diderot’s Encyclopedia, with its clear, static, and taxonomic principles, and both of these with Bayle’s Dictionary, divided between the convolutions of its massive footnotes and the thin stream of historical certainties above,

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then we can see how each of these encyclopedias is suited to and helps define a reigning framework of cultural understanding. This study will therefore be concerned with these three paradigms: the skeptical and paradoxical paradigm of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; the paradigm of clear tabular representation; and the paradigm of organic growth and the cultivation of potential in individuals and peoples in the last decade or two of the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century. But the primary emphasis will be on the succession of genres that appear in approximate accord with these paradigms. Here I will look briefly at how three pairs of genres are consistent with the three paradigms just described. Each pair consists of one largely historical and one largely fictional genre. The genres that correspond to the first, skeptical paradigm include narrative satire and secret histories. Philosophical history and the comic realistic novel are in accord with the paradigm of transparent representations. Finally, the Bildungsroman and the historical novel exhibit close affinities with the paradigm of organic growth. Narrative satire typically proceeds by parodically critiquing one philosophical, political, or cultural position, and then turning to critique the opposite pole, which might have been thought to be authorized at first. Thus, Swift’s A Tale of a Tub sharply satirizes its own narrator for being a shallow, self-satisfied instance of a modern professional author who worships the new. On the other hand, his writing also holds up to ridicule the strained and emblematic conceits of earlier metaphysical writers such as Donne and Cowley. The superficiality of the modern makes him a selfdeluded fool, but the crucial ‘‘Digression on Madness’’ reveals that the opposite quality, an excessively curious rationality, can make one a knave. The Tale of a Tub thus exhibits a lack of accessible middle grounds between the extremes of superficiality and obscurity, between fools and knaves, or, in its historical allegory, between Catholic Peter and Calvinist Jack.40 This exclusion of middle grounds between untenable extremes characterizes the genre, giving it a structure that closely resembles the paradoxical thinking of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Many works of this time express a need to speak of the divinity but also feel that the language of resemblances between realms— between macrocosm and microcosm, for example—is no longer valid. No middle ground combining reason and faith bridges or softens the incommensurability of divine ways and human reason in the works of this paradigm, from Thomas Browne’s Religio Me-

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dici (1642) to Bayle’s Dictionary. Similarly, one encounters repeatedly in these years the skeptical paradox of reason leading to the undermining of reason, or the complementary fideistic embrace of faith divorced from all rational grounds. Both these structures of thought have an affinity with the production in narrative satire of opposed extremes and the suppression of compromising middle grounds.41 In addition, it is noteworthy that other forms exhibit a tendency toward satire in this period: for example, the characters of La Bruye`re, the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, the fables of La Fontaine, and the comedies of Molie`re and Wycherley.42 Secret histories, which provide a starting point for the argument of chapter 2, enjoyed an immense popularity in France beginning in the 1670s and in England lasting through the teens of the next century. They give evidence of the same skepticism and lack of middle grounds as does narrative satire of the same period. Written almost always by women, and often carrying a strong charge of political opposition, secret histories are skeptical of official historical accounts with their emphasis on battles, treaties, and the celebrated public acts of men. As an alternate site for what is important and determining of historical events, they offer the bedroom, a realm of private acts where women can exert some effective agency and influence. Moreover, there appears to be no middle ground between the extremes of official, laudatory, celebratory history and the secret histories of illicit affairs generating jealousies, intrigues, and acts of revenge. There are either the triumphant but superficial and meaningless acts of men in battle, or the sordid, demystifying, and psychologically charged affairs of men and women pursuing their personal and sexual interests, and altering public political faultlines as they do so. In both of the later paradigms considered here, satire and secret histories give way to novelistic and historical forms. However, different forms of history and the novel are characteristic and dominant in each of these later paradigms. The use of character types in the comic realistic novel in England is consistent with the classifying tendencies of the mid-eighteenth-century paradigm. In Tom Jones (1749), for example, Fielding’s characters not only range across the social spectrum from servants to gentry and nobility, but they constitute a moral taxonomy of innkeepers, parsons, and lords that suggests a composite picture of human nature. The names of characters such as Thwackum and Square demonstrate their typifying function. In addition, Fielding constructs his narrative so that it has an architectural quality, with its parts standing

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in a clear and almost spatial relation to each other. The narrative of the Man on the Hill bisects the plot, coming in the middle of the second of three units of six books each, devoted in turn to Tom’s adventures in the country, on the road, and in the city. Tom’s departure from Allworthy’s country seat in the first part of the novel is answered by his return at its conclusion, and his amorous adventures in London continue his adventures in the country, but among a different and more dangerous class of women. In addition, by stepping back from the narrative and offering a commentary on its methods, the prefatory chapters constitute a series of their own, so that multiple overlapping and alternating symmetries among parts characterize the novel’s structure. Although Fielding wishes that benevolence and sociability could be read transparently through individuals’ actions and speech, his plot largely concerns the dangers the benevolent face from the hypocrisy, self-interest, and pride of others. He retains enough of the preceding paradigm to acknowledge and satirize the predatory and selfish behavior of humans, but his use of satire in this novel is finally subordinated to comedy, and he concludes not with a standoff between knaves and fools but with a comic victory of the wise fools over the knaves, arranged by providential coincidence. As his plot moves knowingly toward such a reconciling of the goodhearted man and the world, it turns away from satire toward comedy and confirms its relation to the later rather than the earlier paradigm. The corresponding form of historical narrative suited to the mid-eighteenth-century paradigm is the philosophical history that seeks to discern and understand general patterns and causes of advance or decline in human societies. Under this broad rubric, it can thus include conjectural histories of earlier ages of society such as Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) as well as cultural and political histories such as Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV (1751 and later). Hume discerns an alternation between polytheistic and monotheistic forms of religion throughout history, and thus presents a fundamentally satiric view of religion without a discernible middle ground between these two extremes; still, he suggests that a secular and skeptical philosophy offers the antidote to religion and the basis of a true sociability. Although it offers a submerged satiric critique of religion, his Natural History is typical of the midcentury paradigm in offering a brief encyclopedic narrative of the field of human history with a strong classifying impetus. Voltaire’s Louis XIV presents a less speculative, more particular,

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and more recent history focused on France in the second half of the seventeenth century. Still, Voltaire’s subject expands to include most European affairs for a century, and even, in his first chapter, a consideration of the emergence of earlier enlightened ages and their eventual eclipsing by the forces of cultural darkness. Thus, Voltaire’s purpose, like Hume’s, is partly taxonomic: characterizing ages of human history and showing why Louis’s century belongs among the enlightened times. However, such classification of ages does not imply a sustained progress: Voltaire’s own age of Louis XV has seen a falling off from the accomplishments of the preceding period. Thus, The Age of Louis XIV, like other philosophical histories of the mid-eighteenth century, reveals a classifying impetus and an alternation between social states that results in a lack of progress over the long term. In both its taxonomies and its representation of an historical equilibrium, the genre is consistent with the prevailing framework. The succeeding paradigm that finds significance in narratives of organic growth clearly offers a suitable framework for the appearance and usefulness of genres such as the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, and, later, romantic historiography such as that of Carlyle and Michelet. For example, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the prototypical hero of a Bildungsroman, must rebel against the secure mercantile world of his father and his friend Werner because it presents a set of possibilities and demands that are external to himself. He explores the world of the theater not only because it affects him deeply and offers a freer mode of life than the world of business, but also because the idea of starting a national theater holds out the possibility of a more meaningful result for his efforts than would years of respectable trading and profiting. But Wilhelm must also grow beyond and reject the theater as ultimately a realm of illusions and trivialities. He begins to accept adult responsibilities, for example by engaging to be married, when he comes into contact with the Society of the Tower at the end of the novel. At the same time, he learns that his previous attempts to realize his full inner potential have in fact been in agreement with the society’s plans for him: his organic growth bears out and conforms to their ideas about his education. Thus, at the conclusion of the novel he moves toward being reconciled to a serious form of social life although he does not return to the commercial society of his father.43 As the Bildungsroman traces the organic growth of the individual, the historical novel traces the movement of a society from an

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earlier to a later stage, usually from a feudal to a modern commercial form of organization. In Waverley (1814), Scott’s first historical novel, the protagonist serves as the means of introducing modern readers to the tribal society of the Highlands on the threshold of its dissolution and absorption by commercial society. Waverley himself also embodies the opposition between these two worlds, since he is the son of a Whig official but has been largely raised by a Jacobite uncle. By joining the rebels in 1745, he rejects the dull, commercially minded world of his father in favor of a romantic adventure with a social group knit together by close personal ties, loyalty, and courage. But Waverley grows to see that his shifting of allegiance constitutes a treasonous betrayal. In the end, he also becomes the means of reconciling political extremes by marrying into a family of Highland Jacobites. Scott’s historical novel performs a parallel function of providing a middle ground that offers its readers the pleasures of adolescent dreams of romantic adventure even while showing the need to accept the dull realities of modern adult life. The historical novel of Scott and his followers, then, like the Bildungsroman, offers a vision of progress and growth as the result of internal development and a synthesis of opposites.

HABERMAS AND PUBLIC SPHERES Up to this point, I have been discussing instances where shifts in dominant genres occur at about the same time across cultures. In such cases, as I discuss in chapters 3 and 4, a satiric form leads to but is modified by a new form of novelistic or historical narrative; in addition, transformations within a genre—which I analyze in chapters 1 and 2—follow the same pattern as shifts from one genre to another. However, there are cases in the eighteenth century when the sequence of dominant narrative genres in France and Germany does not proceed through the same forms and at the same time as it does in Britain. Thus, for example, the comic realistic novel appears in Britain after 1745, and by 1770 satiric narrative has ceased to play a prominent role or serve a useful function in the culture. The English comic novel exerted a clear shaping influence on narratives in France and Germany—for example, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) provides the explicit model both for Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (1770–84) and for Wieland’s Agathon (1767–94). Nevertheless, the continental narra-

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tives do not take the form of realistic novels, nor do they leave satire behind entirely; in fact, satire continues to be a strong element in French and German narratives at least through the 1780s. I suggest that the different forms of the public sphere in England, on the one hand, and in France and Germany, on the other, can help account for the persistence of satire on the continent and for the divergence between the history of narrative forms in the two cultural contexts. In order to see the relevance of the concept of the public sphere for the present argument, it is important to note and develop the distinction between two kinds of public arena that Ju ¨ rgen Habermas discusses in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.44 Habermas examines an early form of the public sphere that he considers to be secondary in importance to what he regards as the fully developed public sphere. This other form, which he calls the literary public sphere, consists of those who are literate, including women, minors, and men with little or no property. The topics and forms of printed discourse in such a context will prominently include counsel literature and narratives that offer models of how others from the middling and obscure ranks behave in difficult circumstances. Such a general public also provides a readership for literary criticism which encourages the development of a non-specialized aesthetic judgment.45 This kind of public, then, provides a readership for genres such as novels and essays, which focus on the formation of sentiments and judgments; in novels, obscure individuals negotiate crises in their lives, and periodical essays such as The Spectator papers shape readers’ social behavior and ability to appreciate poetry.46 Habermas has argued that the epistolary novel develops as a prominent and characteristic form in the first half of the eighteenth century in England because it represents and helps form private subjectivities responding to everyday events and difficulties (49). The literary public sphere and the forms it helps produce also encourage moderation in reactions and behavior. Periodical essays, like novels, offer direct schooling in and models of behavior and critical judgment. Both these forms stand apart from satire, which concentrates on depicting divergences from a norm, and rarely represents exemplary moderate behavior that avoids opposed extremes. Although Habermas discusses the role this literary or cultural public sphere played in early eighteenth-century England, he turns to focus the rest of his account on the political public sphere. It is in this most familiar form of the public sphere that private men come together through coffee houses, clubs, and print forms

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such as newspapers to discuss issues of policy outside the framework of governmental structures and the constraints imposed by official positions.47 Those who participate in this sphere of debate do so on the basis of their authority in the private and domestic realm—as heads of households and owners of property. They have a stake in the public good, but from a position outside the state apparatus. As Habermas acknowledges, such a public is more limited than the public of the literary cultural sphere; it consists of substantial propertied men, but does not include women, minors, or men with little or no property. This form of public sphere is characterized by the direct expression of positions on topical questions of policy, although sometimes these statements can be anonymous in order to claim a general authority based on rationality alone. The essays encouraged by the political public sphere differ from the polite counsel dispensed by periodical essays in the cultural public sphere, in that they take a more political, historical, and logical form. The Spectator papers participate more in the cultural public sphere, the Junius letters (1769–72) and Federalist papers (1788) intervene in the political public sphere, and Hume’s literary and political essays (1741–42 and later) address themselves to both. If the cultural public sphere produces forms that exist apart from satiric narrative, the political public sphere functions more directly to eliminate the role of satire in a society. Such a public arena provides a framework and a set of channels for the open expression of different political positions, including arguments that oppose or criticize government policies. But a primary function of satire was to express indirectly by means of irony, parody, and allegory opposition to officials and established policies. Because it thus enables and authorizes the uncensored expression of an oppositional politics (even though by only a small percentage of the population who are men of large property), the political public sphere significantly undermines and reduces the need for satire, at least among those who participate in it. In the earlier period, satire plays a role that in Gramsci’s terms is hegemonic in expressing a cultural dominant. After the relatively secure establishment of a political public sphere for propertied men, satire continues to be useful for women and for men without property, available to express their voices in opposition to the political censorship that continues to affect them. Such groups are in a position that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe regard as equivalent and in antagonism to the newly prevailing public sphere that excludes them.48

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Although I have stressed the distinction between the cultural and the political public sphere, the two may develop in conjunction and almost simultaneously, as they did in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. The overlapping of the two kinds of public sphere in such circumstances gave rise to juxtapositions of genres characteristic of each in the culture at large, and to composite forms in individual works. Thus, even as the political public sphere was becoming more firmly established in England in the second third of the century, satiric narrative continued to appear, most often in conjunction with sentimental novelistic narrative, not only in different works but in different parts of a single work. In varying proportions and strengths, such a combination of forms helps shape Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and most of Smollett’s fictions. This composite form often poses questions that do not find expression in a political public sphere consisting of propertied men—concerning, for example, the condition of women and the poor. Nevertheless, after this period of transition from the 1740s through the 1760s, satire gave way in Britain to the comic, realistic novel, and assumed a subordinate and local role in the narrative as a whole, in fictions such as those by Frances Burney (Evelina, 1776) and Elizabeth Inchbald (Nature and Art, 1796). Indeed, as I argue in chapter 5, women may have had noticeable recourse to narrative satire in the period from Charlotte Lennox to Mary Wollstonecraft because the political public sphere was not open to them, and there was consequently no forum in which they could directly criticize the legal or social system. In France, a literary public sphere developed during the first half of the eighteenth century—in periodicals such as Pre´vost’s Le Pour et le Contre in the 1730s and in the many weekly salons run mostly by aristocratic women that were meeting by 1750.49 In Germany, a cultural public sphere emerged in the decades after midcentury, shaped by publications such as Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69) and Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur (from the 1770s). As a corollary, an increased interest in the representation of sensibility and individual judgments began to play a role in the narrative fictions of both cultures; men and women of feeling appeared in sentimental novelistic narratives. However, a pluralistic, oppositional form of public discourse emerged neither in France nor in Germany before 1789. The unitary political arena in France allowed for the communication only of the policies, acts, and ideas of the monarch and his officials. Books and periodicals expressing political positions were censored, except for the Gazette de France,

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the one newspaper that published officially sanctioned news (some other papers evaded the censorship by publishing outside the country).50 Although 1789 ushered in a few years of extraordinary activity in the printing of oppositional newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsheets, by 1793 a univocal public sphere was reimposed, this time by a republican rather than a monarchical government. The German states also retained unitary political public arenas throughout the eighteenth century, allowing publication of views consistent with official policy, but censoring alternate and opposing views. Even in Prussia under the liberal Frederick, where citizens were allowed to express their minds on religion, they were not allowed publicly to dissent from the monarch’s policies. Thus, in France and Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century, public criticisms of official policy could only be expressed in disguised forms and through indirect means of communication such as satire, irony, parody, and allegory. Even the Encyclopedia, which presented such a challenge to the old regime in many ways, almost never criticized official policies directly, but rather expressed opposition most often through ironic cross-references and historical allegories—such as praise of the ancient skeptic Pyrrho. Both societies in this period moved toward sentimental and epistolary novels, a shift consistent with the development of a literary public sphere. But in neither did the role of satire fade to a merely subordinate status as it did in England during the second half of the century. This persistence of satire may well have been related to an absence of open and uncensored public debate. Thus, sentimental narratives developed in France and Germany, but satiric narrative did not disappear, and the conjunction of these two forms, in the culture and in individual works, continued into the 1780s—in, for example, Voltaire’s Ingenu (1767), as well as in Wieland’s Agathon and Socrates out of his Senses (1770). In fact, in both cultures, not only did satire retain its earlier importance, but it could still determine the form of a whole work without sentimental admixture. Thus, Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and Wezel’s Belphegor (1776), intensely satiric narratives of travel whose form closely resembles that of Gulliver’s Travels, were written a generation or more after Swift’s work at a time when such bitter narrative satires of human society had not been appearing in Britain for decades. Other narratives in France and Germany participated in the same form, including Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘‘Voyage’’ (1772) and Wieland’s History of the Abderites (1774–81). Chapter 5 discusses most of these

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works and the relation of satiric and sentimental forms to different kinds of public sphere. Chapter 6 argues along similar lines that among forms of historical narrative during the same period, conjectural history offered an extreme vision with affinities to satire (and its related opposite, utopia), and thus played an important role in societies without a pluralistic public sphere. By contrast, in those societies that developed a forum for public political debate, the more moderate form of philosophical history tended to become more prominent.

FOUCAULT AND HABERMAS Thus, I employ a framework of cultural paradigms that modifies Foucault in order to account for parallel sequences of dominant genres in different cultures, and I draw on and modify Habermas’s conception of literary and political public spheres to help explain disparities and asynchronisms between these generic histories. Such a conjunction of Foucault and Habermas raises the question of whether, despite their disagreements, these two approaches can be made consistent. Habermas harshly criticized Foucault in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and thus initiated what has been called the Foucault/Habermas debate. Most of this ‘‘debate’’ has been rather one-sided, though, because Foucault died almost a year before Habermas’s essays were published, and in the absence of his responses, his positions have had to be drawn out and articulated by others. In his criticism, Habermas concentrated on Foucault’s works up to 1977, including Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in order to argue that Foucault’s analysis of forms of power and knowledge is not reasonable because it implicitly relies on the very rationality it opposes, that his focus on anonymous practices and their transformations precludes a view of change as arising in part from ethical agency, and that Foucault does not give an account of his own norms, including a reason for which one should resist injustice.51 Although Habermas’s attack went largely unanswered for the decade after it was published, those interested in Foucault’s thought have pointed out in the last ten years that it may be successfully defended from such charges, at least in part because of directions he pursued after 1977, when he studied forms of subjectification as well as power and knowledge. Thus, one can argue in response to Habermas’s charges that

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Foucauldian genealogical investigations are in fact reasonable because they test specific claims of universal validity in the institutions and discourses they study; that practices such as selffashioning provide the means through which individuals distance themselves from external processes of subjectification which constitute them; and that one does not need a normative universal reason in order to fight injustice because local practices and genealogies already challenge particular abuses and inequities without needing such a justification. Moreover, while Foucault’s positions may thus be defended, Habermas’s thought itself may be open to charges very similar to those that he brought against Foucault’s. One could argue, for example, that Habermas’s claim of universality for his understanding of the modern subject is overstated; that his ideal of perfectly rational communication uncontaminated by power is utopian; and that his own approach supports no actual challenge to domination in the present, unlike Foucault’s genealogical analyses.52 Such lines of thought make clear that Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault do not constitute the final word on their differences. In fact the philosophies of Foucault and Habermas have much in common. Both are concerned with the meaning of the Enlightenment and modernity; they discern in modern societies a paradoxical increase both in individualization and in totalization. Both reject a foundational human subject, and investigate the ways that subjects are constituted by systems of knowledge and conditioning. Largely for this reason, both are critical of the rationality of the social sciences, which has led to more effective techniques of administration and control. Both are also interested in critiquing the historical transformation of modern rationality, showing that what is now has not always been so, and both seek to reduce present forms of domination and abusive power relations to a minimum.53 If we narrow the focus to what Foucault and Habermas have to say about forms of rationality in the eighteenth century, the complementarity between the two becomes even more striking. For Habermas, reason emerged from policy debates in an abstract public forum that had separated itself from the traditional dictates of state authority, while for Foucault, reason in this period emerged as the apprehension of truth through the transparent medium of language with a clarity that was immediately convincing. For both, reason had abandoned traditional certainties based on correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm, monarch and father,

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body politic and human body. Foucault conceives of the pursuit of truth in this period as more individual and Cartesian, in keeping with a focus on France at the time, where there was no uncensored sphere for the public debate of policy. The process that Habermas discusses is more social and Baconian, a description more appropriate for England at the time, where a plural political public arena was being established. Still, both describe forms of rationality that are recognizably and demonstrably related as well as contemporaneous. Of course, differences remain: Habermas is interested in establishing an autonomous subject capable of rational communication in non-coercive speech situations, whereas Foucault cultivates the example of an ethical-political agent who shapes his own subjectification. Still, when the common grounds and divergences are taken into account, these two philosophical orientations may be more complementary than contradictory. They pursue a common project of liberatory critique through distinct and defensible strategies.54 That these two approaches can be reconciled or seen as complementary does not mean that they should be adopted without modifications. As I have already discussed, the focus here is less on epistemological than on cultural frameworks, which I see as multiple and overlapping rather than exclusive and discontinuous. The following chapters modify Habermas’s conception of the public sphere in a similar direction. The account in Structural Transformation is both exclusive and utopian; it conceives of the public sphere as middle-class and thoroughly rational, but does not sufficiently acknowledge the serious limitations that follow from its exclusion of women and unpropertied men. I address these limitations by recognizing that women wrote in a more constricted public world than men in eighteenth-century Britain, and by taking into account alternate public arenas, such as the unitary, absolutist public spheres in France and Germany, as well as the literary public spheres in these societies. The last two chapters make clear that the British experience does not constitute the sole model for the development of a political public sphere. The revisions suggested here work to make cultural paradigms and public spheres less exclusive and dominating; multiple instances of each are at work in a society at any one time. Conceiving of cultural paradigms and public spheres as plural and partial rather than singular and totalizing opens the way to a more adequate understanding of relations between particular works and

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genres and the larger frameworks in relation to which they take shape. Paradigms and public spheres stand in a complementary relation, as they produce results on different levels. The workings of cultural paradigms are more general and abstract, and by necessity must be inferred from observed texts and genres. The effects of public spheres, on the other hand, can be described in more particular and concrete ways; they provide one means by which frameworks of thought and expression assume specific forms and are realized in particular texts and genres.

NARRATIVE FORMS AND CULTURAL PARADIGMS Transformations in cultural paradigms and in narrative genres generally occur slowly and silently, registering in significant divergences between the characteristic works of different authors across generations. However, it can happen that a single work composed over several decades can also sometimes illustrate shifts in cultural paradigms and in the genres that are associated with them. Here, I will look briefly at two such works in order to sketch the kinds of transformations examined in greater detail in the following chapters. Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees gives evidence of a clear transformation of paradigms and genres within a single work. Part One of the Fable (1714, 1723) elaborates on the paradoxical subtitle, ‘‘private vices, public benefits,’’ to satirize as hypocritical the received opinion that a nation may be prosperous and powerful, yet also practice the Christian virtues. It does so on the basis of a rigorous definition of virtue, which refuses to take it as what is in the best interests of society (such a functional definition would eliminate the paradox, as Hume later pointed out). In form, Part One of the Fable resembles Bayle’s Dictionary in its use of extensive Remarks that comment on and complicate a much shorter text (‘‘The Grumbling Hive,’’ the original fable, first published in 1705), and it similarly critiques received opinion by showing the contradictions and hypocrisies to which accepted positions lead. Both paradox and skepticism play a prominent role in Mandeville’s text, as they do in Bayle’s. In Part One, therefore, Mandeville uses the satiric form characteristic of the previous century to offer not precisely a defense of commercial society, but an unsparing attack on those who criticize its unregulated consumption of luxury goods and the high priority it gives to the circulation of money, even of money made available by robberies.

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On the other hand, Part Two (published first in 1729) almost entirely abandons satiric and paradoxical form as its gentlemanly interlocutors carry on a six-part dialogue that allows Mandeville’s advocate Cleanthes to explain, illustrate, and elaborate the doctrines of Part One. Part Two offers a defense of commercial society in a form that closely approximates Shaftesburian dialogue in seeking grounds of accommodation and avoiding both paradox and satire.55 The second half of Part Two provides an extended account of the origins of civil society from a state of animal nature, including hypotheses concerning the origins of language. Taken together, then, the two parts of The Fable of the Bees exemplify the move from paradoxical satire to conjectural history that I observe throughout this book. A closely parallel transformation in the genre of a narrative occurs over the same decades in Gil Blas. The first six books of Le Sage’s work (1715) consist of a satiric and picaresque account of a poor, middle-class protagonist. Like the protagonist of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Gil Blas is kidnapped by a band of robbers. Later, he also works as a servant for an actress and her theatrical troupe, as a valet for an impoverished nobleman, and as an apprentice to an eccentric physician. However, in the next three books (published in 1724), Gil Blas’s adventures lose most of their picaresque and satiric qualities as the protagonist himself begins to move upward in class, serving for example as a clerk and ghost-writer of sermons for a vain bishop. These books retain some of the satire of the earlier books, but they leave behind the sudden violence of the picaresque. In the final three books (1733), Gil Blas becomes one of the most important and powerful figures in the realm as confidential secretary to two prime ministers of Spain. The first time, he misuses his position, selling his influence without regard to the justice of cases, and is expelled from the court for helping to arrange an amorous intrigue for the heir to the throne. However, on his return, he devotes his time to carefully composing statements of policy, and making the case for the new ministry. He works for this ministry twenty years until it falls, when he retires and starts a family with his implausibly young wife. Although the narrative of the first half of the novel could occur at almost any time, in the last books Le Sage indicates clearly that the action takes place under the ministry of the Duke of Lerma and then under Olivares, both in the early seventeenth century. Thus, Le Sage moves from a narrative that is strongly satiric, picaresque, and temporally indeterminate to one that is more histori-

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cally precise and more novelistic; in the end, the work is concerned less with satirizing the narrator or the figures with whom he works, and more with tracing the growth of the protagonist’s character. It thus reveals changes that parallel those in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees; both Gil Blas and the Fable move from satiric to historic and novelistic narrative, and both illustrate a shift from a paradigm of paradox and skepticism to one of clarity and accommodation. Christoph Martin Wieland’s Agathon (1767–94) provides an example of a work which in the course of its publication marks a similar shift from the second of these frameworks, which values clarity and representation, to one that concentrates on organic growth instead. In addition to such revealing shifts in a single work, shifts of cultural paradigms may produce transformations either within or among genres. The first chapter investigates changes in the history of the satiric almanac in England and America. This account begins with the annual satiric almanac Poor Robin, which from its first appearance in the Restoration adopts an explicitly conservative but formally innovative and levelling perspective, and combines cyclical and linear views of history. Swift makes use of Poor Robin in his Bickerstaff hoax, but Franklin revises the form more permanently in his Poor Richard almanacs, moderating the satire, introducing a formal unity, employing more didactic proverbs, and including historic accounts of Whiggish heroes such as Newton and Addison. In the second half of the century, the satiric and the straightforward almanacs approach each other. By the late eighteenth century, both kinds of almanac shape individual subjects by increasingly encouraging their readers to cultivate an ethos of work and prudence and an identity as citizens of a nation. Courtilz de Sandras’s Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan (1700), Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) and Colonel Jack (1722), and Pre´vost’s Life of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of Oliver Cromwell (1732–39) comprise the subject of the second chapter: all take the form of fictionalized memoirs based on seventeenth-century political and military history. The adventurous and traveling protagonists of these novels typically return to society in the end, but they remain unintegrated with their native culture; their tutor or guide advises them that they need to be more moderate and self-controlled in the pursuit of wealth or love. Defoe adopts and adapts this form to make it more historical, by basing it almost entirely on published histories, or more novelistic, by giving the protagonist a more coherent psychology. Thus, the extreme opposites and ex-

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cluded middles in Courtilz’s satiric memoir-novel become less prominent in Defoe’s historical memoir-novels, and even more attenuated in Pre´vost’s novel, which brings the psychological intensity of seventeenth-century romance into conjunction with the fictional historical memoir, and which works to accommodate opposing religious, political, and national perspectives. The third and fourth chapters begin by examining works by Swift and another satirist, then turn to a historical vision that both extends and critiques Swift’s satire, and conclude with the emergence of a new form of the novel out of that historical form. The third focuses first on the satire of religious and cultural extremes (with no middle grounds offered) in A Tale of a Tub and the Fable of the Bees. In his Natural History of Religion, Hume adopts the same attitude as they do toward religious fanaticism, but attempts to purge his position of satiric misanthropy and cynicism, and in such essays as ‘‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,’’ offers a vision of history as a progress through economic, political, and cultural stages. Building on Hume’s work and that of Adam Ferguson, Scott develops the historical novel as a narrative of progress that, especially in Old Mortality, moves beyond superstition, fanaticism, and misanthropy to a modern cultural regime which sanctions the development of a reduced hero. Scott’s protagonists are moderates who avoid fanatical commitments, and his novels represent the superseding of the aristocratic and religious extremist by the moderate and less romantic self of commercial society. Scott sees progress in this transformation, but also substantial loss. The fourth chapter finds at work on the continent the same pattern that the third chapter traced in Britain. This chapter focuses first on the satire of equally unacceptable opposites in Gulliver’s Travels and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. In his first and second Discourses (1750, 1755), Rousseau adopts Swift’s critique of civilization without Swift’s irony, then moves on to propose an educational program to keep the individual uncorrupted by society; in Emile (1762), he writes a pedagogical treatise that modulates into a novel. Building on Rousseau’s concern to show human beings as educable despite the corruption of society, Goethe creates the first Bildungsroman in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796). In the course of this development, the element of satire is submerged, a ´ cs’s phrase) reduced utopia (or ‘‘country-house’’ utopia, in Luka becomes prominent, and the protagonist’s reconciliation with society follows Emile’s model; it involves moderating his desires and

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submitting his will to the judgment of a more authoritative and powerful tutor or mentor. The last two chapters turn from displacements of satire to the persistence of satire in France and Germany, and the lack of alignment between the history of narrative genres in Britain and on the continent. The careers of Fielding and Smollett reveal a move away from the use of strongly satiric forms in their earliest fictions to the later use of narrative forms that are almost entirely devoid of satiric elements. Fielding’s Amelia (1751) and Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), in addition to including representations of normative middle grounds, employ a discourse of open critique which finds its place in a political public sphere, and which removes the need for the more covert, ironic and parodic critique of narrative satire. By contrast, the contemporaneous critique in the tales of Voltaire and the dialogues of Diderot remains strongly satiric. In England, Sterne leaves behind the elements of satire that are present in Tristram Shandy (1759–67) when he writes his Sentimental Journey (1768); however, in Germany, Christoph Martin Wieland imitates Shandy with a more satiric Agathon, then follows that with the extremely satiric History of the Abderites (1774– 81), whose lack of sentimentality, accommodations, and middle grounds recalls the satires of Swift and Voltaire. The continuing extensive use of ironic indirection and parody in the French and German narratives is consistent with the lack of a pluralistic public sphere in those societies late in the eighteenth century. Even in Britain, the exclusion of women from the political public sphere had consequences for the genres in which they wrote. The prominence of satiric narratives by British women from Delarivier Manley to Frances Burney indicates that satire retained its usefulness to a greater extent for them than for their male counterparts. This continued use of satiric form by British women in the second half of the century in response to their lack of access to the political public sphere parallels the practice of the continental writers, both male and female, in response to a similar exclusion. The final chapter traces an opposition within Enlightenment historiography between satiric and utopian conjectural narratives on the one hand and the more moderate genre of philosophical history on the other. Philosophical and conjectural histories can adopt a nostalgic fixation on the past; they can reject the past entirely and turn toward the future; or they can develop a balanced and complex attitude toward their cultural legacy. The nostalgic attitude, associated with verse satire, figures most strongly in the

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conjectural history in Rousseau’s Discourses, and the utopian attitude informs Condorcet’s Historical Sketch (1795). A more moderate attitude appears in the philosophical histories of Gibbon and Voltaire. With the partial exception of Voltaire (who may have been influenced by the years he spent in England in the late 1720s), these historical narratives reveal the same pattern as the novelistic narratives considered in the previous chapter: the more extreme, satiric (or utopian) conjectural histories are written in a society where a plural political public sphere has not taken shape, and the more moderate philosophical histories are written in a society that has developed such a public sphere. Kant writes conjectural histories that have both utopian and satiric elements, but he also moderates such elements by reflecting on the necessity of a political public sphere for the greater maturity of a society. The prominent role of Swift in this book deserves some explanation. My focus on his narrative satires in chapters 1, 3, 4, and 6 arises not from a belief that there are no other satirists from the early part of the eighteenth century worth discussing. In fact, I see Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees as closely related to the Tale of a Tub in chapter 3, the satiric structure of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters parallels that of Gulliver’s Travels in chapter 4, and I discuss Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis as a narrative satire in chapter 5. Still, Swift figures repeatedly as the primary narrative satirist from the early part of this period, in part because he is the exemplary narrative satirist in the tradition who explored the possibilities of almost every satiric sub-genre, yet was also vitally engaged with the cultural and political issues of his day. Even more important for this study, however, is the extensive influence his satiric writings exerted on succeeding generations and on different genres of narrative. Other narrative satires from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century that might have figured here exhibit many of the same formal traits as Swift’s—works such as Marvell’s Rehearsal Transpros’d, Butler’s Hudibras, Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, or Pope’s Dunciad (narrative satire can be written in verse as well as prose). But later generations of eighteenth-century writers did not return repeatedly to engage with these narratives as they did with Swift’s satires—to contest, adopt, extend, and revise them as part of the process of self-definition. The following chapters show the determining effect that Swift’s sometimes suppressed ideas and strategies had not only on the works of other satirists, but also in histories, philosophy, and historical novels. Swift figures so prominently in this study because

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through their afterlife his narrative satires, more than others from the time, helped shape narrative forms later in the eighteenth century.56 The changes studied here in cultural paradigms and narrative genres are registered both in popular and high culture—in the satiric almanacs of Poor Robin and Poor Richard as well as in the histories and essays of philosophers such as Hume, Voltaire, and Kant, in obscure works of a canonical figure such as Defoe as well as in the popular novels of Courtilz, which they resemble so closely. All these chapters trace a shift away from satiric narrative and the cultural paradigm that supported it. The satires that typify the early part of this period and the earlier cultural paradigm tend to represent opposed extremes with no middle ground discernible; the historical narratives and novelistic forms dominant in the later parts of the century find more grounds of accommodation between cultural perspectives and ideological extremes. I suggest that the development of a plural and political public sphere contributes to this moderating and turn away from satire, whereas the persistence of unitary forms of political public sphere encourages the continued use of narrative satire. But the forms studied here not only register change; they also seek to produce it: the recurring and important figures of the advisor, the mentor, and the tutor—from Defoe’s novels and Franklin’s satiric almanacs to Rousseau’s treatise and Goethe’s Bildungsroman—constitute the most visible indication that these narrative forms aim to shape the subjectivity of their readers, like that of their characters, as a product of anonymous observation and hidden guidance.

1 The Satiric Almanac in History, 1665–1800 THE SATIRIC AND PARODIC ALMANAC POOR ROBIN WAS PUBLISHED annually from the mid-1660s through the early nineteenth century. When nine or twelve almanacs for the same year were bound together (as they often were), Poor Robin usually concluded the collection, like a satyr play following a tragic trilogy in Athens, mocking and inverting the conventions of the more serious genre. But Poor Robin not only emptied out the serious almanac; it also accommodated the form it parodied. After the first year of its appearance, the parodic almanac was published by the same Stationers’ Company that energetically protected its monopoly on the publishing of all the other almanacs in England. This chapter will concern itself with five episodes in the history of the satiric almanac. Originating with Rabelais and others in the early sixteenth century, the satiric almanac becomes increasingly partisan in England from the 1590s to the 1650s. Early in the Restoration, Poor Robin begins annual publication, and the following four decades see it at its most innovative and suggestive. Swift refers to Poor Robin and builds on the tradition of the satiric almanac when he writes the predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff for 1708, which begin by foretelling the death of John Partridge, another almanac-maker. The Poor Richard almanacs, written by Benjamin Franklin from 1732 to 1758, take Poor Robin and Swift’s predictions as two of their models; in form they parallel but in political perspective they diverge dramatically from almanacs on the other side of the Atlantic. After the mideighteenth century, the most popular serious almanac in England, Moore’s Vox Stellarum, and the by now only mildly satiric Poor Robin converge on a common hybrid form. I examine these moments to explore not only the history of the satiric almanac but also the ways the satiric almanac uses history. These almanacs employ multiple and opposed attitudes toward history—traditional biblical and cyclical conceptions on 44

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the one hand, and emerging linear, commercial, and progressive ideas on the other. The popular satiric almanacs helped multiply historical perspectives, trying out new lines of thought for which there was a felt need and inverting established lines that were no longer adequate or responsive to the historical situation. For example, as well as helping to build a monument to historical events, and the high culture of the aristocracy, Poor Robin innovates by celebrating the unofficial and memorializing the everyday. Many of these almanacs play a role in shaping an ethos and subjectivity that helps define readers as citizens of a nation. A brief look at the prices, readership, and politics of the almanacs can suggest how they were able to contribute to this end. Through the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, the price of a book almanac remained steady at two pence (book almanacs were almost all three sheets, folded into twentyfour pages; unfolded single-sheet almanacs cost about half as much).1 The price rose gradually to four or five pence by the end of the seventeenth century.2 In 1725, Poor Robin says that his prognostications can be understood by anyone who has six pence to buy an almanac (C1); this seems to be about average for English almanacs of the time. The price of Franklin’s almanacs in the 1730s was five pence (Poor Richard, 1737, Preface); the larger Poor Richard improved probably cost six pence in the 1750s.3 Almanacs, including the satiric kind, thus remained very inexpensive, especially considering that they provided a kind of annual encyclopedia of useful information concerning feast days, phases of the moon, fairs and markets, agricultural and medicinal advice, and national history, as well as weather forecasts, and prognostications of public events, often delivered from a discernible political perspective.4 From the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, the purchase of an almanac was well within the means of almost every household in England. In fact, it has been estimated that one-third of all families in the kingdom bought an almanac each year during the 1660s.5 With almost a half million almanacs printed annually during the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century, buyers must have ranged from nobility, gentry, and well-educated professionals through artisans and small shopowners to include large numbers of small farmers and freeholders who were literate but lacked extensive education.6 Such a wide diffusion of a secular form of writing among a readership spread throughout the coun-

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try and taking in all literate ranks helps the development and consolidation of a sense of common identity across localities.7 The almanacs contribute to this sense of national identity by placing the current year in relation to important events of recent national history, and they address themselves often after 1640 to readers who not only must make up their minds about when to plant peas, buy corn, or cut their hair, but are also asked to assent to an attitude or position on Catholics and dissenters, Parliament and monarch, the French and the Dutch. The satiric almanac clearly exhorts its readers as well to be industrious and productive citizens. These works might be either conservative or radical, either more or less overtly political. The greater number of British almanacs after the Restoration and throughout the eighteenth century tended to be conservative.8 Most adopted their position partly to demonstrate their loyalty to the monarch after the republican radicalism of William Lilly’s almanacs during the civil wars and commonwealth. In addition, of course, it was the safest route to be in accord with official attitudes, or at least not openly in conflict with them. Still, there were variations and notable exceptions: Partridge’s early almanacs of the mid-1680s fiercely contested the pro-Catholic policies of James II. However, Partridge’s extremely Whiggish perspective more closely approximated official policy after his return to England with William of Orange in 1688, and it continued to do so throughout the next two decades. After 1700, the most popular British almanacs adopted a moderately Whiggish and strongly nationalistic perspective.9 The interest that the Stationers’ Company had in maintaining a secure market for the sale of its almanacs also led to a formal conservatism among almanacs; once titles had demonstrated their appeal to an audience and occupied a niche, they tended to vary their formula hardly at all for decades (even as their original authors died and others took their place). Because of this formal conservatism, divergences and variations among the two dozen or so almanacs persisted, and may have increased awareness of cultural and political diversity.10 But the strongest and most direct evidence of the complex politics of the almanacs comes from the satiric form. Poor Robin gave overt expression to a loyalist politics from its beginnings in the 1660s; however, its parodies of the form also levelled the hierarchies and questioned the pieties generally accepted by the serious almanacs. Thus, in addition to

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expressing a reactionary political perspective, the satiric almanac also had an implicitly irreverent and deflating effect on the form and the culture that was at odds with its overt allegiances. This levelling and demystifying effect can be found already in the earliest printed satiric almanacs, and traced through the history of the parodic form.

RABELAIS AND EARLY SATIRIC ALMANACS When Rabelais wrote his Pantagrueline prognostication in 1532, he used the success of Pantagruel, published earlier in the year, to parody the extremely popular almanacs being published in Louvain and other early centers of printing. Although Rabelais’s may not be the earliest parodic almanac, many of the strategies it adopted were also employed by most later satiric almanacs.11 As its chief way of undercutting the portentous claims of serious almanacs, the Prognostication wittily formulates prophecies that cannot help but come true. Concerning the year’s maladies, for example, it announces: This year the blind will not see much, the deaf will hear rather poorly, mutes will not talk much, the rich will be a little better off than the poor, and the healthy will stay better than the sick. (750; 2:507)12

And concerning the fruitfulness of the earth in the coming year, it reveals: ‘‘Of wheats, wines, fruits, and vegetables never have this many been seen—if the wishes of poor folk are heard’’ (751; 2:509). Such prophecies have been hollowed out, but they also draw attention to the gap between rich and poor and the inevitable disappointment of the poor. The Prognostication also at one or two points ironically foretells the opposite of what must occur—what will certainly not come to pass, except perhaps in utopia; thus, in the year ahead, the author foresees that France will have ‘‘no plague, no war, no trouble, shit on poverty, shit on care, shit on melancholy’’ (753; 2:513). Since satire is the underside of utopia (and since the Prognostication is intended for Pantagruel’s kingdom of Utopia), such a passage implies criticism of the rich, powerful, and hypocritical who will not allow the peaceful kingdom to be realized. Throughout the Prognostication, Rabelais satirizes the vague and general prophecies of the serious almanacs, and parodically empties out the form by

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forecasting not singular events but either what must always or (less often) what can never happen. His extremely popular parody expresses a satire of the wealthy and the powerful that helps establish an egalitarian and anti-establishment ideology of the form, which is strengthened by later sixteenth-century parodic almanacs and continues to exert an influence on the form in the following centuries. Satire of the contrast between rich and poor figures strongly in the parodic Wonderfull, Strange, and Miraculous Astrologicall Prediction for . . . 1591 by Adam Fouleweather (traditionally attributed to Thomas Nashe).13 Describing the effects of the planets in the following year, Fouleweather complains of ‘‘the malignant influence of Saturn, whose constellation is that suche as have no mony or credit shall want for wood, and be faine to stand and starve for colde, while olde pennifathers sit and toast themselves by the fire.’’14 Fouleweather’s Prediction also takes a page from Rabelais’s Prognostication, in foretelling what cannot help but come to pass: ‘‘olde women that can live no longer shall dye for age, . . . [and] manye shall goe soberer into Tavernes than they shall come out.’’15 But the potential for the almanac to adopt openly political positions is realized first in the 1640s.16 Given that in mid-century England, there were more almanacs sold each year than any other publication, it would be surprising if almanacs did not participate in the revolutionary ferment of the decade.17 William Lilly, the most significant political astrologer of the day, writing as Merlinus Anglicus Junior in his first almanac of 1644, accurately predicted victories by the Parliamentary generals Fairfax and Bureton.18 By 1647, he was considered influential enough to be invited to an interview with Fairfax, who enlisted his support on the army’s side in the coming struggle with Parliament.19 In 1648 he accurately predicted both a purge of Parliament and the execution of the king.20 Lilly and other republican astrologers such as Culpepper were answered throughout the late 1640s and 1650s by royalist astrologers including George Wharton. However, far from being parodic or satiric, these political almanacs were deadly serious; both Wharton and Lilly were imprisoned numerous times for what they wrote in their almanacs.21 The satiric almanac with topical political implications emerges in the royalist Merlinus Anonymous: An Almanack, and no Almanack of 1653, with its title glancing at Lilly and its dedication mocking Culpepper. Merlinus Anonymous combines features from

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earlier satiric almanacs with innovations that are developed later in Poor Robin. Like Rabelais, Merlinus Anonymous foretells what cannot help but happen: in January there will be ‘‘rain or snow, or cloudy or windy, or fair, or foul weather these dayes, and generally so throughout the moneth’’ (A5v). He portentously marks commonplace occurrences: under February, he notes ‘‘A pick-pocket detected, 1645.’’ Merlinus also introduces a feature that will prove to be a staple of later satiric almanacs: he substitutes for saints’ days parodic feast days dedicated to the likes of Domitian, Messalina, and Heliogabulus, thus suggesting an equivalence between these monstrous rulers of the Roman empire and Cromwell as leader of the Commonwealth. The inference of such a political stance is strengthened by Merlinus’s comments on each month. For example, after referring to mythical monarchs, he pretends to censor himself by ventriloquizing the republicans: ‘‘We ought about this time [October] to expect comfortable News from our Navies,—we thank thee O Neptune, and thy Thetis: ha, Neptune is a monarch, and his Thetis a Queen, and therefore a fig for them both’’ (B7). Merlinus’s comments for some months are virtually incoherent, as he attempts to write from a royalist perspective, yet avoid persecution. Still, he indicates his political position clearly when he calls attention to the constraints under which he works. At the end of a list of English kings, he states: When Kings are lost and Subjects do decay, Though hearts may speak, tongues must not dare to say (A6)

and he concludes his observations for May with a similar couplet: When States dis-joynted are, and Laws untwist, Wise men keep silence, fools speak what they list. (B3)

The echoes here of the conclusion of King Lear, of Lear’s Fool, and of Hamlet offer reminders of the risks that a writer of almanacs could run under the censorship of both the Commonwealth and the monarchy. They reveal the serious implications even of parodic almanacs, and may explain why Merlinus Anonymous’s almanac was published only twice. Montelion, a parodic almanac which appeared in successive years at the end of the Commonwealth, employed and developed

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many of the innovations of Merlinus Anonymous, but did not need to be as circumspect, because support for the Commonwealth had evaporated. In its first edition for 1660 (probably written in late 1659, a few months before the return of Charles II), Montelion parodies Lilly’s prognostications of success for the King of Sweden, and portentously announces the trivial, as in this observation under March: ‘‘there is something intimated by the Position of the Stars, as if the Emperour of Germany intended to pare his nails about a twelvemonth hence’’ (B4). In its second version, written after the restoration of the king, Montelion employs a wide range of parodic satire to jubilantly express its royalist sympathies. The chronology giving the number of years that have elapsed since important historical events includes the following: Since Old Noll [Cromwell] farted and so died, Since Old Noll first erected and set up his bloody slaughter Howse Since the invention of shiting

2 13 3000 (A4v, A6)

In one of its most influential and long-lived features, this almanac combined parodic feast days with official ones. Feast days in January and March thus include Twelfth Day and Shrove Sunday, as well as apparently random days set aside for Aretine, Hector, and Cutting Dick (B1v, B3v).22 Montelion expands the parodic saints’ days that Merlinus Anonymous assigned to Roman tyrants to include pagan and foreign authors and secular heroes. This almanac still makes predictions of what is necessary, all but certain, or tautologous (‘‘Butter shall melt with the extreme heat of Summer; and those that are hanged shall never live to be drowned’’ [A7v]), but the brief items at the end of the almanac indicate the characteristic combination of such parody with satire of the rejected Commonwealth. For example, Montelion offers a recipe for British cooks: How to take the Magots out of the Rump of a Parliament. R[ecipe]. A stout honest General, and 140. Constant secluded Members, and mingle them well together, then take the said Rump, and pick out the said Maggots, and send them to the Tower, after that hang them up 12 hours in the sun, and then bury them under the Gallows. Probat est. (C5v)

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Such entries make literal and material the common characterization of the remnants of the Long Parliament as the Rump, employing one of the most popular strategies of narrative satire. At the end of 1659 or the beginning of 1660, on the cusp between the Commonwealth and the Restoration, an English translation of Rabelais’s Pantagrueline prognostication appeared, accompanied by a mock dedication to William Lilly. Such a publication indicates that the parodic almanac does not possess an inherent and unvarying politics. Here, as in Merlinus Anonymous and Montelion, the form of an earlier parodic almanac can be appropriated to express an opposed perspective.23 The seventeenth-century translation satirizes Lilly, the authoritative republican ‘‘state astrologer,’’ as a way of indicating its strong royalist sympathies. Merlinus Anonymous, Montelion, and this English Rabelais announce that throughout the Restoration the parodic almanac, like its straightforward kin, will express predominantly a royalist and reactionary political position. Still, it is noteworthy that just as Rabelais implicitly criticized those privileged by the traditional hierarchies, these royalist parodic almanacs implicitly attack those made rich and powerful by the Commonwealth: both the progressive and the conservative mock-almanacs share an attack on the authorities of their time. Thus, by 1662 the satiric almanac as a form had developed a repertoire of parodic techniques. It prophesied with a straight face that what was necessary or tautologous would come to pass. It had begun to substitute parodic saints’ days for those of recognized saints, and to include trivial occurrences in its chronology of events. Its satiric form implied a political motive. When Poor Robin appears in the early 1660s, it makes extensive use of all these satiric strategies, exploring their potential and developing new techniques until well into the eighteenth century.24

POOR ROBIN One of the most distinctive of Poor Robin’s strategies from its first edition of 1664 is its juxtaposition of parodic with non-parodic elements, a strategy that leads to the inclusion of two chronologies and two calendars, each pair containing one that is straightforward or ‘‘Loyal,’’ and one that is satiric or parodic, belonging to the ‘‘Fanatics.’’25 The one-page chronologies, both in rhyming couplets, provide a clearer indication of the almanac’s political per-

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spective. The Loyal Chronology confines itself to events of the previous eighty-six years, beginning with the birth of Charles I, and continuing through the restoration of Charles II, noticing along the way the deaths of prominent royalists during the civil wars. The Fanatics’ Chronology begins with Cain’s killing of Abel (5505 years previously) and concludes with the deaths of prominent commonwealthmen including Cromwell’s, remarking along the way the acts of notorious rebels such as Absalom, Cataline, Brutus, Judas, Wat Tyler, and Guy Fawkes. This chronology assimilates such historical rebels with the Long Parliament, whose final remnants it refers to with the standard scatological play: Since the good Old cause was very much perplexed Since the Rump farted, stunk, and made an exit

5 5 (A4)

Poor Robin’s satire here again proceeds by way of literalizing the common term for the earlier Parliament. With the lists in these two chronologies, Poor Robin offers one set of examples to be avoided and one to be followed. The two calendars for 1664 produce a much more complicated effect. Here the ‘‘julian or English’’ calendar on the verso of each page includes recognized saints and established feast days. By contrast, the ‘‘Roundheads or Fanaticks’’ calendar facing it on the recto for each month includes an extremely multifarious assortment of names. For the first few months of 1664, the Fanatics’ calendar includes: Lazarillo, Dionysius the ty., Mother Shipton, Messalina, Amadis de Gaul, Mol Cutpurse, Marius and Sylla, Venner, Sejanus, Robin Hood, Little John, Domitian, Caesar Borgia, Don Quixote, Diogenes, Jack Falstaff, Jack Cade, Cardin. Wolsey, Wat Tyler, Machiavel, Warbeck, John Lilburn, Alex. the sixth, Barebones, Livia, Doctor Faustus, Reynard the Fox, Patient Gryssell, Kn Burn pestle, Jack of Newb., Card. Richelieu, Jack-a-Leyden, Gargantua, Lucian, and Hercules (A5–B1).26 The juxtaposition of characters here from very different categories produces a sense of exuberant wit. Whereas earlier parodic almanacs mention only Roman tyrants or pagan authors as their saints, Poor Robin’s list draws its parodic saints from such widely disparate realms as picaresque and satiric literature, Greek history, English folklore, Italian literature, imperial Roman history, chivalric romance, criminal history, British political history, Shakespearean and other British drama, Elizabethan fiction, French fables, European mythology, the history of Catholicism, and Anabaptism.

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To determine the principle of inclusion for the list is almost impossible. What category can possibly encompass Messalina, Amadis de Gaul, Robin Hood, Patient Griselda, Moll Cutpurse, Don Quixote, and Caesar Borgia? The mixing of categories in this calendar produces a doubleness like that of the Chinese encyclopedia imagined by Borges and discussed by Foucault in the Preface to the Order of Things: categories of discourse appear transparently self-evident to those inside, but bewilderingly illogical to those outside the system of knowledge.27 Poor Robin confronts us with the strangeness of all categories by mixing so many seemingly incommensurable figures and placing them on the same level. Still, one principle of exclusion and thus one horizon of the Fanatics’ Calendar is clear: it excludes just those saints who make up the English Calendar, along with any members of British royalty or aristocracy. Thus, the Fanatics’ Calendar is devoted to those excluded from the official culture of the Restoration, the sinners (indeed, in later editions, it is called the Sinners’ Calendar).28 On one level, the parodic almanac satirizes all these marginal or excluded figures, and defends the monarchy and Church of England; we have already seen the chronologies work to this effect. In addition, the English Calendar marks Charles’s execution with the couplet: This month inhumane Rebels shed the blood Of Reverend Laud, and pious Charles the good. (A4v)

And the final section of the almanac is devoted to satire of the most noteworthy religions of the time apart from the Church of England: Catholics at one extreme, and at the other Presbyterians, Independents, and Quakers. On the other hand, the English calendar of saints’ days clearly holds little if any interest for Poor Robin and his readers; rather, their interest is focused on the sinners. And the satirist Poor Robin indicates his own ironic identification with those sinners by placing among them well-known satirists such as Lucian, Aretino, and Cervantes, as well as such satiric characters as Don Quixote, Lazarillo, and Falstaff. He includes among these sinners characters from Gargantua and Pantagruel, written as we have seen by his influential predecessor in the form of the mock-prognostication. Poor Robin thus stakes out a position among the sinners and satirists, and suggests an attitude sympathetic rather than opposed to the levelling effected by the Fanatics’ Calendar of all the categories it employs; here, Roman or

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British political history has no priority over English or French folk tales, nor does the history of religions take precedence over accounts of criminals. In the form of the Fanatics’ Calendar, Poor Robin expresses a creative ingenuity and wit absent from the calendar of the saints.29 Working in this parodic and satiric form draws Poor Robin away from the loyalist politics he explicitly espouses toward an energetic questioning and levelling of given social and literary hierarchies. Clearly the revolution of the 1640s, and its climax the execution of Charles I, serves as the most significant point of reference for Poor Robin. He seeks to identify royalists with saints, and roundheads with sinners, even if his Fanatics’ Calendar comes to far more than a simple collection of evildoers. The feeling is of course widespread throughout the Restoration and the eighteenth century that the killing of the king marked an irreversible change in the nature of historical events. Vincent Wing’s 1664 almanac contains notes to many dates that commemorate events of the Interregnum. For 30 January, Wing writes: ‘‘K. Charles I: most barbarously murder’d by the bloody Regicides, 1649, Animus meminesse omnes’’ (A6). The same fundamental recognition appears also in a less elevated way in the parodic Poor Robin for 1675: ‘‘The fatal Rump/ and Powder Plot/ Are things will/ never be forgot’’ (B7). The chronology of memorable events is thus organized for decades following 1660 around events of the Revolution, expressing a nostalgic desire to restore the old order. Between this desired but impossible return and the compulsion to remember the traumatic events of the Revolution, Poor Robin negotiates an alternative which involves remembering, but not the regicide or Revolution. The parodic almanac supplements the standard almanac’s chronology of memorable events with a chronology of events that need not be remembered because they are trivial or ubiquitous. Whereas the standard chronology notes the number of years since the deaths of Charles I and of royalist generals and ministers, the ‘‘Brief Chronology of other Things’’ in Poor Robin indicates the number of years Since Men did first of all wear Periwigs Since Ned Stall gave louse to the beggar wench Since Women did at Billingsgate first scold Since Summer was hot weather, winter cold Since Lawyers would no fees of Clyents take

0079 0017 0509 5680 9999 (1675, A4)30

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This chronology combines a number of different kinds of events, all of which are to be distinguished from the notable, irreversible events of historical, linear time. In one such category are the trivial doings of the obscure and low-born, which are here absurdly memorialized. In another category, the chronology commemorates what is always the case, by virtue of the characteristics of the seasons, or by virtue of a misogynous debasement of women’s speech. Still another by exaggeration calls attention to what is paradoxically never the case: for instance, the fees of lawyers date back 9999 years, although the world was only created 5681 years ago. The attention to the obscure and trivial can lead to the circumstantial depiction of comic and satiric scenes: Since J. W. coming riding home by Night with a Pipe in’s Mouth at last spied a Glow-worm on the Ground, and when his Pipe was out, alights, and held it to the Glow-worm to light 2 [years] (1705, A4)

In the same almanac, an event such as the beheading of Charles I still merits only a single line of a couplet. Comic and satiric plots of everyday life, which will later constitute an important part of the novel, see development in the parodic almanac as a reaction against the more formulaic representation of the historical trauma of the Revolution.31 The chronology of non-memorable events employs many of the techniques of the earlier parodic almanacs; to the witty listing of what is tautologous or impossible, it adds the trivial acts of the low-born. However, such representations carry a different implication following a revolution and civil war, from the memory from which they seek to provide some relief. Thus, the parodic almanac can be seen to meditate on history and to exhibit a spectrum of attitudes toward historical representation. The straightforward almanac of the period places in relation to each other the cyclical, repetitive time of the seasons and linear, non-repeatable historical time. The parodic Poor Robin incorporates both these modes, and supplements them by representing what always and what never happens, as well as what has previously been regarded as too inconsiderable to be remarked by historical consciousness. The everyday life of common people is juxtaposed, even if parodically, to momentous events such as the death of a monarch. In a pattern that recurs repeatedly in the parodic almanac, the ideology of the form pulls this almanac away from its stated royalist perspective by focusing on the adventures of the low-born.

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The calendar of sinners or inverted saints remained the most striking part of Poor Robin through the first decade of the parodic almanac. However, it must have become difficult to maintain the same level of inventiveness after that time. To a certain extent, the parodic chronology of the inconsequential emerges in the next decade or two as the most creative part of the almanac. But the chronology plays a minor role in the almanac (two pages) in comparison with the calendar (two pages of facing recto and verso for each month). Poor Robin’s calendars beginning in the late 1670s exhibit a reduced satiric questioning of established categories. The number of sinners’ names for each month declines to fifteen in the 1680s and to seven or eight by the turn of the century. In addition, the list of names has become formulaic and doggerel. For example, the sinners’ feast days for March 1705 commemorate Jumping Jone, Kissing Kate, Lazy Lydia, Mouthing Moll, and Nasty Nann (A7). A mechanical consonance and alphabetical order replace the satiric levelling of categories of the 1660s. The later list makes no reference to specific historic individuals or to figures from different realms, such as fiction and history. The later parodic calendars also reduce their satiric charge by including in place of the multifarious names of sinners verse couplets or brief prose paragraphs that recommend a conventional prudential wisdom. For example, already in January, 1675, Poor Robin advises: ‘‘Grease lawyers fist / and then your case / even as you list / it shall take place’’ (A5). Here the sharp satiric disruption of categories is replaced by mild satire and prudential moralizing. In 1705, Poor Robin concludes a paragraph on the theme that it is better to be wise than to be rich with the dictum, ‘‘To keep yourselves honest is the best policy you can use against a halter’’ (A5). And two years later, he tells a short story to explain the origin of the saying, ‘‘Many things happen between the Cup and the Lip’’ (C6).32 The prominent appearance of these proverbs and sayings typifies developments in the satiric almanac in the thirty years after 1675. Indeed, the 1710 Poor Robin acknowledges the change that has occurred. After a standard explanation of what the different astrological houses signify, the almanac-maker himself concludes: ‘‘Reader, if you’ll believe this you may, but truly I would not have you, because I hardly believe it myself. And therefore, because such things are uncertain, we shall not so much trouble you with Predictions as to give you some choice Observations’’ (C2). In the earlier almanacs, such skepticism was produced through satiric means; here it is stated as homely advice. Between 1665 and

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1705, the parodic almanac itself underwent a change parallel to the one outlined in this passage: after the predictions in its early years of the inevitable or the impossible and a levelling of categories, it came to adopt the prudential, moralizing observations and mild satire of the later Poor Robin. In thus moving from overt politics and public prognostications to private advice, Poor Robin inculcates a Puritan ethos of work and savings but disengages it from its earlier association with fanaticism and enthusiasm. This change in Poor Robin away from sharp satire and toward didactic moral observations was not uniform from year to year. Individual numbers of the almanac could still assume a distinctive character. For example, in the 1695 Poor Robin, the feast days and observations have moved away from the historical specificity and satiric bite of the earlier satiric almanacs, yet this edition also features an elaborate Petronian feast that offers an image of plenty from the land of Cockayne: the first dish features pigs that speak fluent French, and later ones include a dozen larks that jump off their plate and sing through the dinner, as well as a cooked goose that cries out ‘‘come eat me’’ (C5v). Course after course confounds the living and the cooked, and suggests a utopian release from the constrictions of categories like that implied by the sinners’ calendars in the 1660s. Although it is often assumed that forms of popular culture merely repeat conventions formulaically, the Restoration Poor Robins empty out all the conventional features of almanacs, including their fundamental presumption that the skillful almanacmaker can foresee future events. The 1675 Poor Robin confides in its preface to the reader: ‘‘Indeed a Horse that has a bigger Head than I, cannot tell to a tittle what will happen, no more than the best of my fellow Astrologers; only we guess at things which we conceive are most likely’’ (A1v). Still, Poor Robin participates in the very processes it satirizes: its annual parody was published by the same Stationers’ Company that published all the other, serious almanacs throughout the eighteenth century. And so, in the continuation of the preceding passage, the 1675 Poor Robin attempts to distinguish itself from other almanacs, when responding to the charge that the almanac is no longer written by its original author. ‘‘As for myself, it has been (belike) reported about very confidently that I am dead; but if you come to me, you may (if you please) to hear me talk, and see me walk, eat and drink, and (if it be in the afternoon) perhaps see me take a pipe of tobacco too, which are things that very few dead men do, only I have heard of some Alma-

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nack-makers that can write thirty years or more after they be dead as Pond, Dove, Swallow, &c.’’ (A1v). It was probably because the serious almanacs saw the mock-almanac as competition that Poor Robin became the object of such a rumor. The response indicates how Poor Robin was able to have it both ways, both satirizing the conventions of the almanac, and taking its place as one of the biggest sellers alongside the other almanacs year after year.33 Indeed, the charge does finally stick: because of its success, Poor Robin would become one of those almanacs it satirizes here. Its original author, William Winstanley, died in 1698, but the almanac continued to be published under the same name until the nineteenth century (becoming Old Poor Robin in 1777).

ISAAC BICKERSTAFF’S PREDICTIONS When Swift published Isaac Bickerstaff’s Predictions for the Year 1708, they were not intended to run at all beyond their first appearance; nevertheless, like Poor Robin, Bickerstaff went on, ironically, to enjoy an extended life in hands other than those of his original creator. Even apart from Bickerstaff’s mention of Poor Robin (in a passage to which we will return), Swift’s acquaintance with the earlier parodic almanacs is indicated by the parallels between his satire and theirs.34 For example, the Predictions for May foresee that ‘‘On the 15th, News will arrive of a very surprizing Event, than which nothing could be more unexpected’’ (146).35 Such an exemplary tautology, of course, echoes those of Rabelais. Bickerstaff is also a master of the portentous and trivial: ‘‘near the End of this Month, much Mischief will be done at Bartholomew Fair, by the Fall of a Booth’’ (148). The bathos here resembles that in Poor Robin’s historical chronologies.36 In a passage of convoluted ironies, Bickerstaff predicts that the French ‘‘prophets’’ or Protestant fanatics then resident in London will disperse after seeing their millenial predictions fail to be realized. He contrasts the wisdom of ‘‘common Almanack-Makers’’ who conveniently ‘‘wander in Generals’’ (i.e., write in generalities) with the imprudent religious enthusiasts who foretell particular events ‘‘when a very few Months must of Necessity discover the Imposture to all the World’’ (146). In addition to its casual swipe at the astrologers’ notorious vagueness, this passage exhibits an extraordinary cheek, since in his own Predictions, Bickerstaff himself does just what he criticizes the French prophets for doing: he

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foretells in the coming months the exact dates and precise causes of the death of, among others, the Pope, Louis XIV, the Dauphin, and the Cardinal de Noailles; the nearly inevitable failure of all these predictions must necessarily reveal his own deceitful ‘‘Imposture.’’ But of course Swift attacks the astrologers in this pamphlet not by parodying their generalities, like the satiric almanacs before him, but by surpassing them with a flurry of exact predictions which make explicit what the extreme Protestant almanacmakers surely wished but only darkly hinted at: that all the Catholic leaders, from the Pope and Louis XIV down through generals and churchmen, should die within the coming year (predictions of the death or discomfiture of Louis and the Pope were repeated year after year in almanacs such as Moore’s Vox Stellarum). In fact, though, Swift expects that all these later parodic predictions will be neglected in the stir caused by Bickerstaff’s first one, which is ‘‘but a Trifle: the death of Partridge the almanac-maker . . . upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at Night, of a raging Fever’’ (145). Swift’s strategy here involves a bold literalizing: he foretells not the death of astrology, but the death of the astrologer. Herbert Davis has pointed out that Swift had at least two good reasons for choosing Partridge as the object of his satire. Of all the almanac-writers of the time, Partridge was the most extremely and belligerently Whiggish and low-Church.37 In his politics and outspokenness, he occupies a place under the last Stuarts parallel to that occupied by Lilly during the civil wars and Commonwealth. By contrast, at this very time, Swift was expressing in his ‘‘Sentiments of a Church-of-England-Man’’ a determined defense of a high-Church position on the authority of the traditional hierarchy. In The Accomplishment of the First of Mr. Bickerstaff’s Predictions, he has Partridge confess on his death-bed to having been a nonconformist who made a ‘‘fanatick Preacher his spiritual Guide’’ (155). There is no doubt that Swift firmly opposed Partridge’s low-Church politics. In addition, Partridge repeatedly challenged other astrologers to cast nativities with him to see who was more accurate.38 Through Bickerstaff, Swift takes up that challenge, and turns the tables on the issuer of the challenge by making the subject of his first prediction the almanac-maker himself. Although most of his prognostications were vague enough to escape being demonstrated false by events, Partridge did make specific predictions of a revolution in 1688 that seemed to have been borne out by events. The 1689 collection, Annus Mirabilis, re-

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prints many of the predictions from Partridge’s Merlinus Liberatus for 1688.39 For June 1688, Partridge foresaw that because ‘‘Popery appears more bare-faced than it used to,’’ there would be ‘‘some child topt upon a Lawful Heir to cheat them out of their Right and Estate’’ (Annus Mirabilis 13). This prediction anticipates the announcement on 9 June that the Queen had given birth to a son. The news produced a widespread and long-lasting suspicion that under cover of a false pregnancy a fraudulent child had been made Prince of Wales in order to provide a Catholic heir for James and displace his Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne.40 Partridge also predicted that in late 1688 there would be a report of ‘‘some great body of men to meet about matters of State; either in Parliament or some other great Council etc.’’(16). In fact, the extraordinary Convention Parliament met in mid-January 1689, to settle the terms on which the throne would be filled after James’s flight in December, and two weeks later declared William and Mary to be King and Queen.41 Swift may refer to these popular successes of Partridge, and attempt to deflect them, when he has Bickerstaff admit that he was convinced of the accuracy of astrology by a prediction of the revolution of 1688—not by Partridge, to be sure, but by ‘‘the most learned Astronomer Captain Hally [Halley, for whom the comet is named]’’ (149). Like all predictions, Partridge’s express his own hopes and fears and those of his audience. As one who had fled James’s England to join William in the Netherlands, Partridge and other opponents of James certainly felt anxious and skeptical about the possibility that the fifty-five-year-old James might still have a Catholic heir, and they just as certainly hoped that the antagonism between James and his subjects would reach the point where William and Mary would be invited to replace him on the throne.42 But so does Bickerstaff’s most famous prediction express the hope of Swift, the high-Churchman, and the opponents of astrology that astrologers such as Partridge would die or die out. In fact, Bickerstaff has more in common with Partridge than has commonly been supposed. We have seen that Partridge foresaw the birth of a son to the king, the rebellion against James, and the accession of William. Other Whigs had similar thoughts in late 1687 and throughout 1688, and indeed were planning how and when to invite William over to England. But it was a bold move for Partridge to put such rebellious and treasonous sentiments in print so early, a year before James’s flight. Partridge even predicted that the king might die in late 1688 (Annus Mirabilis, 9–

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10), explaining afterward that James suffered a civil death on deserting his throne.43 But if Partridge was adventurous in his predictions, so was Bickerstaff. As Partridge himself said in his 1709 Merlinus Liberatus, after asserting, ‘‘I am still alive’’: Bickerstaff’s prediction of his death ‘‘was a bold Touch, and he did not know but it might prove true’’ (C2–C2v). Astrologers had been under suspicion for centuries because of fear that they could or would predict the deaths of monarchs. Swift innovated not only by predicting the death of an obscure and politically insignificant man but by placing it among, indeed at the head of, predictions of the deaths of kings and cardinals. The juxtaposition of the rich and powerful with the lowly almanac-maker may owe something to Poor Robin’s similar levelling of hierarchies in its Fanatics’ Calendars of the preceding decades. In the Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff Swift offers a number of ingenious justifications of the prediction of Partridge’s death. For example, all men of sense after reading Partridge’s most recent almanac exclaim, ‘‘sure no Man alive ever writ such damned Stuff’’ (162). Then again, Bickerstaff agrees with Partridge that he was alive on the 29th of March—for that is the day he died—and whether Partridge has come to life again, he says, is not relevant to his original prediction (163). Aside from their humor, these selfjustifications come very close to Partridge’s explanations after the fact—that he meant James would die a civil death, for example. Both Swift and Partridge use casuistical cavilling, wordplay, and logic-chopping to make events that do not confirm their predictions appear to do so. In a concluding passage of his Vindication, Bickerstaff addresses the argument that Partridge must still be alive because he continues to write his almanac: But this is no more than what is common to all the Profession; Gadbury, Poor Robin, Dove, Wing, and several others, do yearly publish their Almanacks, although several of them have been dead since before the Revolution. Now the natural Reason of this I take to be, that whereas it is the Privilege of other Authors, to live after their Deaths; Almanack-makers are alone excluded; because their Dissertations treating only upon the Minutes as they pass, become useless as those go off. In consideration of which, Time, whose Registers they are, gives them a Lease in Reversion, to continue their Works after their Death. (164)

Using the phenomenon of the almanacs as an example, Swift here diagnoses a pattern of historical transience that is consistent

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with his depiction of modern writing in A Tale of a Tub as fundamentally ephemeral.44 Almanac-writers do not have access to the immortality that fame brings as a reward to authors in the high, canonical genres. Their writings do not endure because as the days and weeks go by, almanacs are consumed, used up; by the end of each year, the almanac is obsolete.45 Paradoxically, however, as Swift observes, a peculiar form of extended life attends such writings: in compensation for the almanacs’ extreme ephemerality, the names of successful almanac-makers continue to designate the almanacs they founded for generations after the original author has died. Starting from the almanacs, Swift accurately delineates the combination of transient, consumable product and long-lived designation that characterizes the phenomenon of brand names (Wedgwood, Twinings, Lloyd’s), as well as many forms of writing in print culture, such as the newspaper and news magazine (Punch, Harper’s). Each year’s Gadbury, Dove, and Poor Robin, like other brand name products, is bought with expectations based on previous products sold under the same name. It is consumed, and another replaces it. Eventually, innovative features become formulaic, the verse becomes doggerel (as we have seen in Poor Robin), and the quality of the product declines over time. Because of their wide distribution, almanacs were in fact one of the first venues for advertisements in print. The inside front cover of Merlinus Liberatus regularly carried an ad for Partridge’s Purging Pills, and Swift objected to Partridge not only as an astrologer and an extreme low-Church Whig, but also as a quack physician.46 There would be a popular American almanac in the second half of the century entitled Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack.47 However, the most noteworthy development in the later career of the name Isaac Bickerstaff connects it not with further prognostications (though there were some pale sequels among almanacs), but with another form. With Swift’s agreement, Richard Steele appropriated Bickerstaff as the author of the Tatler papers, the first periodical essays in the language.48 As Robert Phiddian has shown, Swift’s mastery of self-assured tone earned greater credibility for the persona Bickerstaff, who existed only in print, than did the assertions by the flesh-and-blood Partridge of his continued existence, also made in print.49 Steele seized on Bickerstaff’s character as a gentleman to make him the guide and censor of manners for the nation in the new form of the periodical essay.50 The Bickerstaff name therefore finds extended life outside the hands of its

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original author not in a sequel of almanacs but in this other form, and constitutes a suggestive link between the satiric almanac and the periodical essay.51 If the afterlife of the Bickerstaff name thus diverges from those of other almanac-makers, it nevertheless still suffers some diminution like those others: from Swift’s satiric almanacs to Steele’s polite essays, one can discern a reduction in satiric force, in the use of irony, and in the challenge to the reader’s understanding.

POOR RICHARD One of Benjamin Franklin’s biographers speculates that to produce Poor Richard Saunders, Franklin combined names drawn from two English almanacs—Poor Robin and Richard Saunders’s English Apollo.52 Franklin was certainly acquainted with satiric and parodic almanacs: he adapted two paragraphs from Rabelais’s Pantagrueline Prognostications in his 1739 almanac, and he imported Poor Robin for sale in the colonies.53 The eighteenthcentury Poor Robin and Franklin’s Poor Richard share a mildly satiric outlook that focuses its critical attention on the uncontroversial subjects of courts and lawyers. Poor Robin typically advises, ‘‘Grease lawyer’s fist / and then your case / even as you list / it shall take place’’ (1675, A5). Poor Richard concludes most of his almanacs with a short narrative that mocks the law and its practitioners (1733–35, 1739–41, 1743–46). In addition, in the 1730s Franklin put to his own use Swift’s Bickerstaff hoax. Unlike Bickerstaff’s Predictions, however, which saw only a single publication, Poor Richard’s prediction of the death of another almanac-maker cleared a space for the successful introduction of his own almanac. In 1733, Poor Richard claims that he is putting out his own almanac only because the market will be left open by the coming death of Titan Leeds, author of the best-selling American Almanack. Whereas Swift predicted the death of Partridge for 29 March, at the beginning of the year (calculating from the vernal equinox), Franklin foresees the death of Leeds for 17 October 1733, near the end of the year, when astrologers would be writing their almanacs for the following year. Thus, in the 1734 preface (dated ‘‘Octob. 30,’’ [1733]) he can spin out the hoax for another year. Richard there claims that since he was called out of town on family business, he does not yet know for sure if Leeds has died. Still, he infers Leeds’s death because in the

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preface to Leeds’s 1734 American Almanack, Poor Richard is called ‘‘a false Predicter, an Ignorant, a conceited Scribler, a Fool and a Lyar’’ (A1v), terms Leeds when alive would never have used for his supposed friend Saunders. Unlike Bickerstaff, who only exhibits disdain for Partridge and all other almanac-makers as ‘‘gross Impostors . . . and illiterate Traders between us and the Stars’’ (A1v), Poor Richard professes to be a friend of his victim. The third Poor Richard, for 1735, parallels Swift’s Vindication in the ‘‘proofs’’ it offers that Leeds must be dead: Leeds’s last two almanacs, for example, ‘‘are not written with that Life his Performances use to be written with; the Wit is low and flat, . . . nothing smart in them but Hudibras’s Verses against Astrology . . . which no Astrologer but a dead one would have inserted, and no Man living would or could write such Stuff as the rest’’ (A1v). The exact quotation from Bickerstaff’s own Vindication demonstrates Franklin’s extensive borrowing from Swift in these three prefaces. On the other hand, the continuation of Franklin’s hoax through three almanacs, and eventually through five of the first ten, indicates how it diverges in significance and effect from Swift’s. Leeds’s American Almanack was one of the most popular almanacs in the colonies until Poor Richard appeared and became more successful. Franklin’s prediction of the death of another astrologer seeks to discredit a rival in a competitive and popular market (at the least, by having the laugh on him). Despite his disingenuous protestations of friendship for Leeds, Poor Richard’s prediction literalizes the desire to kill his competitor in order to replace him.54 The death that Poor Richard asserted facetiously in 1735 came to pass actually in 1738 (when Leeds was only forty), and was announced by Leeds’s publishers in their almanac for the next year. In his own 1740 almanac, Poor Richard claims that these publishers have finally been shamed into admitting what he had said all along and what they could no longer hide: that Leeds is dead. Richard also includes in his preface a letter to Saunders supposedly written by ‘‘T. Leeds,’’ which confirms that he died within about five minutes of the time Richard foresaw, and which initiates another hoax by predicting that the author of another almanac, John Jerman, will become a Catholic (76), the worst calamity next to dying that one might suffer in the mostly Protestant colonies. Despite Jerman’s protests (like those of Leeds, and of Partridge before him), Poor Richard went on in 1742 to find strained evidence of Catholicism in Jerman’s almanac, observing for example that Jerman calls 1 November ‘‘All Hallows Day,’’ and asking ‘‘does not

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this smell of Popery? Does it in the least savour of the pure Language of Friends?’’ (93). Poor Richard is of course more widely known for his shrewd maxims and prudent sayings than for these hoaxes. The preface to the 1758 Poor Richard (the last to be compiled by Franklin), commonly reprinted as The Way to Wealth, collects from the earlier almanacs a hundred of these brief, popular sayings, all of which recommend prudence, hard work, and thrift: ‘‘Trouble springs from Idleness, and Toil from Ease’’ (May 1756); ‘‘The sleeping Fox catches no Poultry. Up! up!’’ (September 1743). Poor Robin had begun to provide short poems and sayings expressing a similar prudential morality, admonishing his readers in 1707: ‘‘The noblest should industrious be, / What’s good disgraceth no Degree. / And therefore no Man should be idle. / Labour is to fond Love a Bridle’’ (A5). Sometimes the later almanac echoes the earlier one both in sentiment and in form. Poor Robin’s ‘‘It must alwaies be understood / To rise betimes is very good’’ (1675 [B7]), although it lacks internal rhyme and anapestic meter, closely approximates Poor Richard’s ‘‘Early to Bed, and early to rise makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise’’ (October 1735).55 Poor Richard’s prudential sayings thus continue and intensify a development in the satiric almanac that had already begun decades earlier. Indeed, as Poor Richard collected his prudential maxims, Poor Robin continued to include similar, if less pointed sayings in his almanac. Both successfully model a form of subjectivity based on an ethos of industry and savings.56 In another way, too, an innovation by Poor Richard will prove to be in line with the practice of other almanacs at mid-century. It was a convention of many late seventeenth and early eighteenthcentury almanacs that a poem of six or eight lines occupied the space above the calendar for each month, the twelve poems remaining unrelated to each other. In 1749, for the first year of his expanded almanac, Poor Richard improved, Franklin divided a single poem of his own composition, entitled ‘‘Advice to Youth,’’ into twelve 8-line portions, one to run above each month. He employed a similarly unified composition for all the monthly headings in six of his remaining eight almanacs. Indeed, Franklin reprinted one long poem in two successive almanacs, continuing James Burgh’s Hymn to the Creator through all the months of 1753 and 1754. This practice of carrying over verses from month to month moves the almanac away from a heterogeneous assemblage of loosely related parts, toward being a unified work with a clear the-

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matic focus. The titles and the subjects of the works Franklin repeated indicate this focus: Richard Savage’s ‘‘On Publick Spirit’’ (1752), Moses Brown’s ‘‘Essay on the Universe’’ (1756) and Benjamin Stillingfleet’s ‘‘Essay on Conversation’’ (1757). Franklin in the 1750s thus transforms the fragmentary short poems that previously appeared at the head of each month into a continuous verse essay for each year, and the subjects of the essays bring them into close accord with the tone and substance of the prudential moral sayings that he continues to distribute throughout the almanac. He gives the almanac far greater unity and coherence than it had previously possessed. Beginning in 1749, Franklin also included in his almanac various short prose essays of a paragraph or two on scientific and historical subjects. Thus, Poor Richard improved became, in the words of the editors of Franklin’s papers, ‘‘more than an almanac and compendium of useful information; it was a sort of miniature general magazine, issued annually.’’57 Born under the aegis of Bickerstaff and his parodic prognostication, the periodical essay moves away from the non-canonical almanac, then, in one of its incarnations, returns, appearing annually instead of two or three times a week, but still recommending the cultivation of selfrestraint, an informed judgment, common sense, and an openminded rationality. This list of the traits recommended in these essays by Franklin, as well as in the earlier founding essays by Addison and Steele, reveals the significant extent to which the essay form can contribute to shaping the responsible, calculating subject required by civil society. Like the first periodical essays, Poor Richard improved was strongly Whiggish. Its brief biographical essays in 1748, for example, commemorate such Whig luminaries as Locke and Addison, and such events as the sitting of the Long Parliament and the Battle of the Boyne. The parodic almanac, which began as an implicitly critical form in Rabelais’s hands, and became extremely royalist at the Restoration and well into the following century, turns again with the colonial Poor Richard improved to question established political authorities, contesting especially the colonial policies of king and Parliament. After having handed over the composition of Poor Richard improved to his partner David Hall in 1757, Franklin returned to America in late 1762 and probably wrote an article for the 1765 almanac, after the passage of the Sugar Act, to argue that the colonists should themselves provide finished goods, such as rum, out of their own produce.58 In the fol-

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lowing two decades, popular American almanacs—by Ames, Low, West, and Hall—played an important role consolidating public opinion in favor of resistance to Parliament and independence from England.59 These patriotic almanacs, which were read by most colonists, not only encouraged providence and self-sufficiency; they also carried essays on liberty, opposed English corruption, and reported ‘‘horrid, infernal massacres’’ by the British. Almanacs significantly helped shape the idea of an American nation and the ideal hardworking citizen of that nation.60

MOORE’S VOX STELLARUM In their political stances, almanacs on the British side of the Atlantic diverge dramatically from those on the American side in this period, remaining royalist and pro-government throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. However, their formal features continue closely to parallel those of their American counterparts. The most popular British almanac for most of the century was Moore’s Vox Stellarum, whose observations and predictions were strongly nationalistic, Francophobic, and anti-Catholic; most of its issues included an apocalyptic vision that combined these sentiments. In 1735, for example, Moore cites a prediction supposedly by the Wandering Jew that Italy will be overrun by Turks, and all Catholic churchmen will be killed except for three good Cardinals, before a good Pastor arises in England who will retake both Italy and Palestine (C4v–C5). In 1755, he sees events in Europe between 1300 and 1500 as fulfillments of the pouring out of the vials or plagues predicted by the book of Revelations (C4–C5v). Related to this tendency is Moore’s inclusion of a full-page hieroglyph in most years, sometimes with its interpretation, sometimes without. In 1755, for example, a ram stands on the back of a dragon with a crab biting the dragon’s tail, while underneath a set of soldiers on the left fires at and defeats a set of soldiers on the right (C4–4v). This almanac provides no interpretation, but readers of Vox Stellarum would know that, at least since the first decade of the century, the dragon has stood for France and the ram for Great Britain. The same shift that Poor Richard exhibits from the use of a more fragmentary to a more linked form in the lines of poetry printed at the top of each month, Vox Stellarum exhibits in the prose ‘‘Observations’’ that occupy the right-hand column of each

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month. In the first few decades of the century, these ‘‘Observations’’ consist of short, general forecasts on a wide variety of subjects, often in nine or ten sentence fragments, with the quarters of the moon intermixed. For example, for January and February, 1707, Moore writes: Some eminent Martial Man degraded, and maNew Moon the 21st day, near 10 morn. ny Heats and Animosities stirred up, and some will rid themselves out of their Lives. God preserve the Queen, and keep the Parliament in Unity: And then, We need not fear what Foreign Foe can do, Since Marlborough the Great is just & true. (A6)

This Vox Stellarum resembles Partridge’s almanacs of the time in its typographic amalgamation of political forecasts with astronomical events, in its jingoistic general prognostications, and in its brief, gnomic treatment of most subjects. The strident nationalism remains throughout the century, but by the 1740s Moore has developed each month’s observations into a unified essay that pays little or no attention to astrological indicators. For November 1745, for example, Vox Stellarum reads: It [the Gunpowder Plot] was contriv’d by the Jesuits, Priests and other Papists, who having undermin’d the New Moon 12 day at 1 Aftern. Parliament-House, and laid 36 Barrels of Gunpowder, intended by firing the same when both Houses were sitting, to have blown up, and so in one Moment to have First Quart. 19 day at 11 Night destroy’d the King, the Prince, and both Houses of Parliament: All should at one blow have fallen a Sacrifice to the enraged Lusts of the bloody-minded Papists. (B7)

Here the earlier series of unrelated, fragmentary predictions has been superseded by two extended sentences on a single historical event. Lacking any reference to astrological influences, and not interrupted by the independently printed quarters of the moon, this

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brief essay memorializes and moralizes on the past, rather than scanning an ambiguous future. Moore takes this tendency further in the mid-1750s by integrating the ‘‘Observations’’ for a number of months into a single connected essay. Thus, for April 1755, he announces that since there is little of interest in the stars for the succeeding months, ‘‘I hope a few late Instances of Popish Cruelty will not be unacceptable to the candid Reader’’ (A8). Having provided this explanation—a curious one for an almanac-maker—he provides an extended narrative of instances in which French Catholics have persecuted Protestants (B1–B7). This narrative covers more than six months, and culminates in November with the traditional commemoration of Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth. Thus Moore, in the prose ‘‘Observations’’ in Vox Stellarum, like Franklin, in the verse pieces of Poor Richard improved, moves away from the unrelated fragmentariness of brief forms, and toward the continuation of a connected whole through twelve monthly installments. This move coincides in both cases with a turn away from predicting the future and toward viewing the past for moral and political lessons. Although Poor Richard is more radically Whiggish and Vox Stellarum more traditionally hierarchical and royalist, the political lessons in each case are anti-Catholic and nationalistic. Both the English and the American almanacs address the reader as a member of the nation, defining the reader of the almanac as an Englishman in one case and an American in the other. The nationalist and imperialist self-identification of the English almanacs is made quite explicit by an innovation of Vox Stellarum. In the 1760s, Moore’s almanac starts to include a table showing ‘‘the Bearing, Distance, Longest Day, and Difference of Meridians of most of the Principal cities in the World, from the famous City of London, including, Bermudas, Calcute, Mexico’’ (1765, C3v). In its aspect as an encyclopedia, the almanac here begins to provide accurate information of interest about non-European lands by reference primarily to the metropolitan center, ‘‘the famous City of London.’’ In addition, most of the other lands are themselves identified by their capital cities. The imperial project and the program of knowledge clearly support each other here. The eighteenthcentury American almanacs never adopt features such as this one that presume identification with the metropolitan capital. In the middle years of the century, Poor Robin is still recognizable as a parodic almanac although it has lost most of its satiric energy. Unlike Vox, with its references to actual countries and cap-

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itals, Poor Robin looks backward and continues to dwell on old forms such as visions of the land of Cockayne. Its ‘‘Observations’’ for June 1755, for example, provide a description of ‘‘Lubberland’’ because it will be ‘‘too hot for the lazy to work’’ (B2); the mountains there are made of grated Parmesan cheese, ‘‘Minc’d Pies grow upon Trees, and Capons ready roasted fly about the country’’ (B2). The Petronian whimsy of this land of Cockayne matches that described by Poor Robin sixty years earlier. After mid-century, Poor Robin becomes even more establishment and less satiric, almost entirely abandoning the parodic calendar with its signature list of fictional, mythical, historical, and popular figures. As it makes these changes in the second half of the eighteenth century, it follows Moore’s lead, and by the end comes to resemble Vox Stellarum closely. For instance, in the early 1760s, a few years after Moore, Poor Robin develops his own monthly ‘‘Observations’’ into year-long essays like those in Vox Stellarum. Nor are these entirely facetious or self-referential pieces. The 1765 essay, entitled ‘‘Considerations on the Present High Prices of Provisions,’’ analyzes the reasons for the high prices of hay, butter, coal, and porter, and concludes by criticizing ‘‘the Distemper of Monopoly’’ with its unhappy effects for ‘‘the Trade, Manufactures and Proprietors of Land in these Kingdoms’’ (B2). Poor Robin’s list here indicates that he is writing for the middle classes and the lower gentry. It may seem that he has taken up the cause of the poor when he writes, ‘‘Monopoly was ever deaf to the Cries of the Oppressed’’ (B4). However, Poor Robin apparently thinks of the middle classes as among those oppressed by monopolies: at the end of the almanac, for example, he is clearly writing for the upper middle classes when he recommends being satisfied with the four percent one can receive from government funds (C7). Not all of the year-long essays in the later Poor Robin offer serious discussion of political or economic questions. The essay for 1775, entitled ‘‘A Letter concerning the migration of cuckows,’’ describes various kinds of birds and their speech, usually with sexual innuendo, ranging from the obvious cuckoo to the migratory young turtle doves who at the tavern next to the playhouse ‘‘serve gentlemen . . . on many pressing occasions’’ (B8). And in a selfreflexively satiric passage, this Poor Robin concludes with a challenge to all the ‘‘Ass-trologers and Conjurers throughout the whole Kingdom of Cuckoldom’’ to show that every human event results from celestial influences (C5–C7). Still, the continuing appearance of such satiric parodies in Poor Robin is outweighed by

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other developments that bring the parodic almanac closer to the more serious kind. By the early 1770s, for example, Poor Robin prints ten tables providing useful information relating mostly to commercial calculations; they include a table of interest at 5 percent (A2v), a table of buying by the hundredweight (C4), a table of wages (C4v), and, like Vox Stellarum, a table of distances from London to world cities (C3). The Poor Robin of the late eighteenth century, therefore, reveals a generic mixing that can include serious essays in political economics alongside satiric and self-parodic pieces, as well as straightforward tables of useful information. Moreover, at the same time that the satiric almanac becomes more serious, the serious one becomes more satiric. At the beginning of the 1775 Vox Stellarum, one finds printed within a drawing of eyeglasses the legend ‘‘Spectacles of the World’s Vanity: Especial use To Discern Levity and Brevity’’ (A2). Although this drawing does not lead to extensive use of satire in the pages that follow, it establishes a more ironic perspective for reading the almanac, as it echoes in a deflated, satiric register Vox Stellarum’s own apocalyptic emblems. Such a gesture gives evidence of a more nearly self-parodic, a less self-important perspective. The same almanac concludes a month of general predictions of unsettled conditions in Europe by saying: ‘‘If so, let us not trouble ourselves about Things which may happen, and peradventure they may not’’ (B6). Such a viewpoint, produced in part by an increasingly skeptical attitude toward astrology, resembles that cultivated by the parodic Poor Robin for more than a century.61 Further evidence of the convergence between the serious and the satiric almanac comes in their common formal and ideological response to the French Revolution. Moore’s Vox Stellarum for 1794 attacks not only the excesses of the revolutionaries, but also the Pope, their common enemy. Half the almanac’s monthly ‘‘Observations’’ are devoted to a long essay foreseeing the possibility that the authority of the Pope and the Jesuits will be re-established in France. As a result, Moore anticipates a persecution of the reformed churches that he feels has been foretold in Revelations. This forecast clearly extends Moore’s continuous history of apocalyptic prognostications throughout the century. The 1794 Vox Stellarum thus positions itself between equally unacceptable opposites—the revolutionaries and the Pope—implying as its desirable middle ground the British system with its guarantee of liberty and property but without the excess of regicide (the regicide of

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1649 remains at this point conveniently unremembered). Because narrative satire characteristically rejects both sides of a pair of unacceptable opposites and conspicuously fails to depict a moderate alternative, the absence of such a middle ground in Moore’s apocalyptic narrative indicates how closely this almanac comes to being satiric in form in the 1790s. The Poor Robin of the same decade also assumes a hybrid form that mixes satiric and non-satiric elements. The first half of the ‘‘Observations’’ in the 1794 Poor Robin consists of a sentimental story about the long-suffering, good wife of a drunkard. When Poor Robin says this letter is not written by himself, ‘‘like the authors of Spectators, Guardians, and Tatlers, to make themselves better thought of’’ (36), he satirizes the Spectator papers even as he imitates them, with a conventional denial of authorship. He thus draws attention again to the genealogical relation between the periodical essay and the satiric almanac. The second half of the almanac consists of a political essay in verse, a long poem on ‘‘The Times,’’ which attacks Paine, Danton, Robespierre, and Godwin, among other revolutionaries and their supporters. Its concluding praise of ‘‘the tree called the gallows’’ (47) may be satiric but is hardly ironic. Like Moore’s serious almanac, Poor Robin at this time mixes extended invective against the revolutionaries with elements of satiric and other forms—apocalypse in Vox Stellarum, sentimental narrative in Poor Robin. Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century, the satiric and the serious almanac in Britain have converged in a mixed form which, in addition to expressing a royalist, counter-revolutionary, and imperialistic politics, can be self-mocking, ambivalent, and satiric. In the course of the eighteenth century, Poor Robin makes less and less use of parodic and satiric doubleness. Replacing its unofficial sinners’ calendar with extended prose and verse essays in the last decades of the century, it ceases to define itself as a parodic almanac. Its revised title after 1777, Old Poor Robin, acknowledges this shift. Conversely, the potential satire in the ambiguous emblems of Vox Stellarum is realized in the 1790s, when Moore shares an antipathy to the Pope with the revolutionaries whom he attacks. In addition, his almanac increasingly expresses an ironic doubleness about its predictions that accords with a declining belief in astrology. The development in both the serious and the satiric almanac of the monthly ‘‘Observations’’ into an extended, even year-long essay, simultaneous with the development in Poor Richard improved of the monthly verses into a year-long verse essay,

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indicates a continuing filiation between the periodical essay and the eighteenth-century almanac, first indicated by Isaac Bickerstaff as author both of satiric predictions and of the Tatler papers.

CONCLUSION One could argue that non-canonical forms such as the almanac show particularly clearly both their relation to a particular cultural paradigm, and shifts within or among such paradigms. In the almanacs, and in other popular genres that are as formally conservative, changes stand out clearly. Those that persist indicate shifts in the needs, expectations, or horizons of readers. I have argued in the Introduction that at any moment a number of frameworks of cultural understanding may be available or may be mobilized, from many that are residual to one or two that are emerging. One may be dominant and characteristic, but not exclusive. The vitality and popularity of the parodic almanac in the late seventeenth century indicate its accordance with the paradigm of skeptical satire and paradox prevailing at the time. Its elaborate self-contradictory form is made up of some features in accord with an official knowledge, and many that undermine it; it is skeptical and satiric of the very knowledge it publishes. In addition, like many other works and genres of the time, it seeks to compensate for but in fact gives evidence of a crucial loss at the center of its view of the world: in this case, a consequence of the killing of the king. Its energetically parodic list of saints produces the same levelling of officially distinct categories as does Bayle’s inclusion in his Dictionary of figures from ancient Jewish, ancient Greek and Roman, ecclesiastical, Renaissance, and contemporary European history, and his subjection of them all to the demystifying effects of a skeptical, critical reason, even as he insists on reason’s impotence in matters of faith. The changes in form of the satiric almanac after the first two decades of the eighteenth century indicate the coming to predominance of another paradigm of cultural value. The paradoxical elements and the satiric charge of the almanacs decline. The new paradigm embraces an ideal of lucidity and unity, emphasizes education in politeness, and pragmatically recommends work and saving. Poor Richard’s proverbs are consistent with such a framework, as is the amalgamation of previously discrete parts of both the serious and the satiric almanacs into year-long essays. In-

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deed, the success of the periodical essay in the hands of Addison and Steele is an early harbinger of the coming to dominance of this set of cultural and formal imperatives.62 The prominence of the essay in almanacs of the later eighteenth century reshapes the almanac so that in form it approaches a literary annual, underscoring not only the genealogical filiation between almanac and essay, but also the agreement of the almanacs with the predominant cultural paradigm of the time.63 Throughout the eighteenth century, both English and American almanacs contribute to constructing the subject as the citizen of a nation and as the embodiment of an ethos of industry and thrift. The almanac performs a disciplinary function, constructing as its readership a provident hard worker, whether as a subject of empire or a republican citizen. The satiric almanac exhibits a characteristic tension over the course of its history. The form ranges from the contestatory works of Rabelais and Franklin to the reactionary almanacs of the Restoration and the eighteenth century in Britain. The ideological effects of the form remain complex even when they seem most extreme. Throughout the Restoration, in one of the form’s most conservative moments, Poor Robin still maintains a satiric and self-parodic attitude that undermines the hierarchic orthodoxies of its time, including its own fervent high-Church royalism. Conversely, although the pre-Revolutionary Poor Richard openly challenges official colonial policy, it retains hardly any parodic and dialogical openness; rather it consolidates a Protestant, middleclass, and Whiggish national culture. Though producing such complex and ambiguous implications, the form of the parodic almanac nevertheless seems to exert a pull on its material that moves it toward a more questioning and critical perspective. The use of parodic satire in particular leads to this result, as it hollows out formal conventions and levels social and cultural hierarchies. In addition, many serious almanacs anticipate a coming age of social harmony, often based on agricultural success and prosperity for farmers. The satiric almanac emphasizes both these tendencies to imply an egalitarian utopianism. By the nineteenth century, the cultural dominant is no longer skeptical, paradoxical, and satiric, nor does it give its highest priority to unity, clarity, and the tabular presentation of knowledge. Changes in the intellectual framework and in attitudes toward astrology led at first only to a slight reduction in the number and variety of almanacs in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Although Poor Robin and Vox Stellarum were still mentioned as the

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most widely distributed almanacs at that time,64 Poor Robin went into decline and was discontinued in 1828. In those almanacs that remained, the visual element became increasingly pronounced and elaborate. Contributing to this tendency, a new annual, The Comic Almanac, was started in 1835, organized around the etchings of George Cruikshank with textual contributions by Thackeray and others. The Comic Almanac offers a striking instance, like others from the late eighteenth century onward, in which the visual art of caricature takes over from verbal forms such as the almanac a principal burden of contemporary social and political satire.65 It had a successful nineteen-year run, finally giving way to Punch’s Almanac and the popular comic and satiric periodical Punch.66 The attitude of The Comic Almanac to history and the nation is distinctly ambivalent. In a move whose unconventionality exceeds even that of the first Poor Robins, the first Comic Almanac devotes its long poem for November not to celebrating but to criticizing Guy Fawkes Day as bigoted and xenophobic.67 It empties out the festive marking of a crucial historic event that has defined the English nation as anti-Catholic and anti-foreign. On the other hand, the almanac also satirizes those who may have benefitted from the recent revision of the Poor Law; it proposes that paupers be housed in mansions, served chocolate in silver pots, and receive a bonus for every illegitimate child they bear (1835, 5). The ambivalence of the almanac is summed up in an attitude it approvingly ascribes to ‘‘the people’’: Tho’ unsparingly they root out old abuses, They have a pious care for things of venerable uses. (21)

The almanac-makers oppose revolution but embrace reform, to benefit not paupers but the working poor. Indeed, the first illustration of The Comic Almanac depicts a small group of bedraggled workers marching down the center of a street under a placard reading ‘‘Poor Froze Out Gardeners,’’ while well-to-do middleclass people crowd inside across the street and more fortunate workers pave the sidewalk in the foreground. The Comic Almanac rejects the earlier definition of the nation based on the foiling of a treasonous Catholic plot, and embraces the need for reform of traditional inequities. It implicitly defines the nation on the basis of just such a capacity for gradual reform as a middle ground opposed to reactionary xenophobia on the one hand and to the convulsive revolutions of recent French history on the other.

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The Comic Almanac thus distinguishes itself from its predecessors by its emphasis on visual satire, the moderation of its satire, and its embrace of progressive reform instead of reaction or revolution. The late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century satiric almanacs, by contrast, suspend the reader between unacceptable alternatives. Poor Robin, for example, offers at once a disruptive levelling of hierarchies in its astrological parody and a strong defense of hierarchies in its social satire, but no way of mediating this contradiction. Similarly, although Swift’s satiric almanac suggests a progressive, enlightened critique of astrology, Bickerstaff maintains a strong allegiance to rank and formal education, and no middle ground emerges between the Whiggish astrologer’s irrationality and the class-based disdain of the conservative satirist. Poor Richard moves increasingly toward the position that to be loyal to the progressive political thought of the English, the colonies must separate themselves from England itself, that no alternative exists between independence and loss of freedom. The articulation by The Comic Almanac of a third position based on the possibility of reform is consistent with a new cultural paradigm prevailing in the first half of the nineteenth century—as seen for example in Dickens’s comic novels, two of them illustrated by Cruikshank—that emphasized organic growth and the realization of progress through accommodation, mediation, or synthesis of opposed perspectives. A hundred years after The Comic Almanac, Antonio Gramsci proposed in his Prison Notebooks the publishing of an annual workers’ almanac. Considering almanacs as ‘‘publications which examine the complex historical activity of each year from a certain standpoint,’’ he suggests including not only information about dates and events which will make it unnecessary for readers to buy another almanac, but also discussion of subjects that are ‘‘of the greatest educative and formative importance.’’68 Gramsci indicates an awareness of many of the essential features of the almanac: it offers a brief encyclopedia of useful information; it presents a view of history and the present from a particular ideological perspective; and it exercises a formative disciplinary impact on its readers. The ideological perspective adopted by the almanac can be radical, reactionary, or moderate. By suggesting that the communists should publish their own almanac for workers, Gramsci returns the ideology of the proposed almanac to the critical, levelling, and popular perspective adopted by Rabelais and Lilly in the early, flourishing days of both the serious and the satiric almanac.

2 Satire and the Historical Memoir-Novel, 1690–1740 THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THIS BOOK WAS CONCERNED WITH THE METAmorphoses of a satiric form in Britain. This chapter will focus on parallel transformations in another narrative form and in a comparative context, linking the history of forms in France and England. The historical memoir-novels of Courtilz de Sandras in the late seventeenth century make prominent use of satiric elements, such as excluded middles. But these features become less important in Defoe’s first-person historical fictions, and even more attenuated in the memoir-novel of Pre´ vost, which tends to accommodate opposing perspectives and forms. The narratives of Courtilz, Defoe, and Pre´vost differ from each other in many ways. Courtilz’s memoir-novels combine the world of the military memoir with the world of the fabliau, both of which prize the successful use of disguises, trickery, and wit. Defoe’s narratives pay less attention to spying and sexual escapades than Courtilz’s, but they also reward practical intelligence of all kinds. Pre´ vost, by contrast, makes extensive use of elements of romance, offers access to the interiority of his narrators, and emphasizes the passionate love and despair of his protagonist. But such contrasts also bring into sharper focus the continuities between the narrative forms used by these three authors. The works of all three take the form of autobiographical memoirs that include figures and events of recent political and military history. All three make significant use not only of the recent past but also of travel. In Defoe and Pre´vost especially, geographical exploration provides a parallel to or a transposition of the historical settings: if the past is a foreign country, a foreign country may also serve as a figure for the past. None of these authors represents the past as separated by a rift from the present; rather, each sees a basic continuity between past and present. The use of the memoir form, the 77

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inclusion of historical characters and events, the element of adventure, the importance of patrons or tutors, an ambiguous and melancholy conclusion, and a continuity between historical periods all contribute to defining the form of these narratives. As memoir-novels combine historical and fictional characters and events, they make it difficult to distinguish between history and fiction. We know that d’Artagnan and most of Courtilz’s other protagonists had a historical existence, but the historical and the fictional are so interwoven in his novels that it is impossible to disentangle the two, and it probably was so from the beginning.1 The attacks on Defoe for presenting lies as the truth, imagined as historical events, in Robinson Crusoe and his other narratives are well known.2 Pre´vost was no less skillful in presenting fiction as fact: his History of Marguerite d’Anjou (1740) combines accurate historical narrative of the life and times of the wife of England’s Henry VI with undocumented and imaginary accounts of her personal and political behavior, and his Adventures of Robert Lade (1744) was accepted as a genuine narrative of travel until it was shown in 1936 that its characters and plot are fictional while its descriptions of foreign places are transcribed from earlier travel narratives.3 I focus here on one novel by Courtilz, two by Defoe, and one by Pre´vost. The Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan (1700) recount the adventures and misadventures of a soldier and spy in the service of Mazarin during the time of the French civil wars known as the Fronde (1648–53), with most of these stories leading to a curiously melancholy conclusion. In Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), Defoe goes back eighty years to the same period to represent the civil war in England, which he hopes will carry a warning lesson to his contemporaries. In Colonel Jack (1722), he explores through narratives of travel, piracy, and history what may be gained by an enterprising individual who has been cut off from traditional moorings, as well as what constraints may still affect him. Like the historical memoir-novels of Courtilz and Defoe, Pre´vost’s The Life of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of Oliver Cromwell (1732–39) is a first-person narrative set in the middle and late decades of the seventeenth century that investigates the possibilities for happiness of a self largely abandoned by society. Defoe’s Colonel Jack and Pre´vost’s Cleveland conclude with their protagonists wanting to return home, but seemingly permanently exiled from their society and culture.

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COURTILZ DE SANDRAS In order to examine some of the means by which the historical memoir-novel came to take its form in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, I will first examine a genre that emerged in the late seventeenth century and whose metamorphoses can be traced in the works of Courtilz, Defoe, and Pre´vost, as well as in the eighteenth-century narratives by British women discussed in chapter 5. After flourishing in the early and middle decades of the seventeenth century, the multi-volume French romance novel gave way to other forms of narrative which were more concise and focused on the more recent past. The more popular nouvelle galante depicted love intrigues among contemporary courtiers and royalty, while the nouvelle historique represented historical characters in the grip of passion. (Both were sometimes called histoires secre`tes.) Works of the second sort combined accurate depiction of historical details, such as court life and the actions of named historical figures, with fictional love affairs, jealousies, and dilemmas, all of which warranted intense psychological analysis. Lafayette’s Princesse de Montpensier (1662), her Princesse de Cle`ves (1678), and Villedieu’s Disorders of Love (1675) provide some of the most notable examples of nouvelles historiques. By contrast with the thousands of pages typical of the romance-novels, these historical novellas are usually only as long as a short story or a short novel. The nouvelles historiques place their narrative at the time of the wars of religion in the late sixteenth century, rather than, like the romance-novels, in a remote period of classical antiquity.4 Romance heroes and heroines such as Cle´lie, Artame`nes, and Cyrus do not exhibit traits distinctive of the historical period in which their narratives are set, but instead speak and behave like idealized seventeenth-century French aristocrats named for ancient Greeks or Romans. The characters of Villedieu and Lafayette may also behave like seventeenth-century French courtiers, but there is much less anachronism in placing them in a sixteenth-century French court than in a Greek court of the fourth century BCE.5 In addition, the behavior of the characters in the nouvelles historiques falls short of the ideal models of love and courage provided by the romances; characters in the nouvelles more closely approach realistic canons of behavior in that many of them are not faithful, and most of them engage in political intrigues to hurt or embarrass their rivals.6

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While most of the characters in these nouvelles historiques represent historical figures and while the narratives allude to many historical events, works in this genre focus almost entirely on psychological analysis of characters in love. Villedieu’s work makes frequent, accurate allusions to well-known historical events, and implies a relation between such events and her characters’ amorous intrigues. But that influence operates in only one direction, as the emotions generated by love affairs repeatedly prove to determine public actions and historical events. For example, when the king’s brother escapes from court to join the forces of the Elector Palatine in 1575 (as he historically did), Villedieu does not represent him doing so for political reasons or even because of rivalry with the king; rather, he has become convinced that the beautiful Mme de Sauve does not return his love, and that she and his rival, the Duke de Guise, have been mocking him behind his back. As her most recent editor puts it, Villedieu ‘‘remains very close to the historical accounts,’’ transforming ‘‘only what ‘generates’ the historical events and not the actual events themselves’’ (137; 18).7 In Villedieu’s version of this genre, love affairs and rivalries determine significant historical events, not the collision of religious or political systems, personal ambition, or large impersonal forces. Lafayette’s nouvelles moderate the perspective offered by Villedieu’s, offering a vision that is more tragic and less satiric. Lafayette makes use of a number of possible connections between history and passion, rather than seeing an unvarying pattern of passion and rivalry as the causes of historical events. For example, near the conclusion of the Princesse de Montpensier one of the protagonists leaves for Paris to avoid having to betray either his patron or his patron’s wife, whom he loves, but he arrives just before the St. Bartholemew’s Day massacre in which he is killed. Here the conflicts between the character’s roles as secret admirer of the Princess, adviser to the Princess, friend of the Prince, and go-between for the Princess’ lover constitute a focus of the narrative, but they do not shape a historical event; rather, the historical massacre serves the plot function of a deus ex historia that cuts the knot of an intolerable complication. In addition, Lafayette allows some of her characters a highmindedness foreign to those of Villedieu. For example, the Princesse de Cle` ves refuses a sexual relationship with the man she loves not only while her husband is alive, but even after he has died.8 Still, despite such heroic renunciation, the Princess can be seen as falling short of the moral ideals of the romance tradition

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because she does love a man other than her husband. A similar ambiguity surrounds her confession to her husband of her love for another, which may be seen as a sign of extraordinary honesty, but also as a destructive act, a declaration that she does not love him. Thus, even Lafayette’s more rigorous nouvelles effect some satiric reduction from the morals represented and promoted in the romance tradition, indicating that the romance expectations are unrealistic. By contrast with the idealizing romances, the nouvelles historiques have the revisionary and satiric effect of implying that the chief force motivating kings, courts, and ministers is not principle, or even the pursuit of group or personal interest, but love and sexual affairs. The nouvelles, especially the nouvelles galantes, bring the highest aristocrats to the same level of behavior as characters in fabliaux concerning merchants, clerks, millers, and their wives and daughters. This satiric levelling of monarchs, aristocrats, and commoners based on their shared subjection to the body’s sexual demands expresses a democratizing sentiment opposed to the centralizing and absolutist efforts of the monarchy.9 The nouvelles historiques reveal celebratory secular history as a mystification that substitutes other explanations, such as interest, ambition, providence, or fortune, for the sexual affairs that the nouvelles depict as the prime shaping force of history. Their satiric critique expresses a strong contemporary dissatisfaction with exemplary and celebratory history, and helped clear the ground for the appearance of the early historical memoir-novel.10 The crucial innovator in the historical memoir-novel was the soldier turned writer Gatien Courtilz de Sandras.11 Like Defoe, he came to his career as a writer in middle age after an earlier occupation. Like Defoe, he was an innovator in journalism, writing the first regular review of European politics, the monthly Mercure historique et politique (1686–1689). Like his protagonists and again like Defoe, he spent considerable time in jail, including lengthy stays in the Bastille.12 His early narratives took the form of nouvelles galantes, for example The Amorous Conquests of the Great Alcandre (1684). But he wrote in many different forms, including fictionalized biographies of Admiral Coligny (1681) and Marshall Turenne (1685). When he moved away from the chroniques scandaleuses, but continued to focus on recent historical events and personages, he altered and extended the nouvelle historique, combining it with elements of other genres to produce the semi-historical memoir-novel.

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Courtilz wrote a number of fictionalized memoirs of obscure historical figures; some of these seem wholly or predominantly imagined, and only tangentially related to an actual figure or to historical events. For example, the recognizable conventions of a romance plot of love and adventure shape the Memoirs of the Marquise de Fresne (1701), and imaginary adventures also seem to dominate the Memoirs of J. B. de La Fontaine (1698). La Fontaine’s occupation as a spy for France takes him to various European capitals, but readers learn much more about his amorous affairs than about the aims, methods, or degrees of success of his undercover activities. On the other hand, the Memoirs of the Count de Rochefort (1687) intersects with public history especially in its first half as Rochefort recounts intrigues in which he served as agent for Cardinal Richelieu. Still, Rochefort draws a firm line between public and private history when he declines to give an account of the Fronde rebellion—‘‘that being the business of an historian, more than of one that writes Memoirs.’’13 In the work’s second half, Rochefort confines himself almost exclusively to recounting private stories of love affairs, jealousies, and lawsuits— some his own, some those of others—that have no larger public or historical issue. Courtilz most fully integrates the public and historical with the personal and sexual in the Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan. Because d’Artagnan is a military man, he is present at many of the most important battles of his age. But even when in the last third of his narrative he concentrates on the military campaigns of the 1660s, d’Artagnan continues to provide accounts of his own career and private affairs. Like the nouvelles historiques, Courtilz’s historical memoir-novels take place in the recent past; in fact, rather than being set about a hundred years ago like the nouvelles, the events in these memoirs occur more recently—in the period from the ministry of Richelieu (1624–1642), through that of Mazarin (1642–1662), which includes the Fronde, and into the first decade or so of Louis XIV’s personal rule (beginning in 1662). Perhaps Courtilz’s most important innovation was to cast his historical fictions not in the the third person, as had the nouvellistes, but in the first person, in the form of memoirs.14 The memoir form produces a greater sense of immediacy as well as a stronger claim of historical authenticity; it reports the narrator’s own adventures, experiences, and dilemmas rather than those of others about whom he can know only indirectly. For these and other reasons, the form of the apocryphal historical memoir had a far-reaching influence; it was used by

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writers of historical fictions throughout the first half of the eighteenth century.15 Courtilz makes other significant departures from the nouvelles historiques as well. For example, he significantly expands the range of the social groups represented in his memoirs beyond the nobility and royalty depicted in the nouvelle historique. His narrators are born into the ranks of poor provincial gentry, are noticed after performing extraordinary feats while still adolescents, and eventually work their way up to becoming agents of the king’s ministers. The narratives focus therefore on the amorous, military, and political affairs in which they have participated, not on the affairs of the upper nobility and royalty about which they may have heard. This derivation of the narrator and protagonist from the lower gentry and from the provinces produces adventures with a broad spectrum of characters and a plot with elements of the picaresque.16 The picaresque elements are particularly strong in Rochefort’s adventures. Cast out of his father’s home by his stepmother, he spends five years among gypsies. He comes to Richelieu’s attention, but dislikes Mazarin intensely, and serves under a number of aristocratic patrons, for whom his efforts earn him more time in prison than money or advancement. After his father’s death, he loses a suit he brings for his inheritance against his stepmother, and is jailed again, for inability to pay court costs. He is the satirized victim of card sharps, of legal shysters, of his own mistakes and misadventures. In the end, his valet makes off with all his goods, which had been packed into trunks in preparation for a move, and the impoverished and disillusioned adventurer retires to a monastery.17 Although d’Artagnan is also involved in numerous scrapes and misadventures that teach him the ways of the world at some cost to himself, the picaresque pattern is less prominent in his memoirs. As a result of a hyper-sensitivity to insults, when he first sets out for Paris, he fights with the entourage of a gentleman who looks askance at him, finds himself imprisoned for two months, and loses his money and horse to corrupt officers of the court. Although d’Artagnan learns to be more prudent and less easily provoked, he encounters a corrupt legal system throughout his narrative. In other picaresque episodes, he adopts disguises on his travels that bring him into contact with the lower orders and with servants: he disguises himself as a tobacco seller to enter the besieged city of Arles, and as a hermit to infiltrate the rebel stronghold of Bordeaux.

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But d’Artagnan’s life does not consist primarily of the kinds of scams and brutalities suffered or perpetrated by the very poor in picaresque narratives. Rather, most of those with whom he comes into contact in his life are of the middle rank, professional people and owners of businesses. The women with whom he has affairs include the wives of a contractor and an attorney, a woman who lets rooms, the widow of a judge, a seamstress, and a number of ladies’ maids. In addition, because of the timely aid he receives from his mistresses, d’Artagnan is enabled to advance his career without repeatedly having to return to rock bottom like the typical picaresque protagonist. To a greater extent than in earlier narratives, his memoirs depict with some realism the kind of financial difficulties that a man in his position would have faced. We learn how much d’Artagnan owes and how much he must pay for his promotions. He is consistently pinched for money, not because of his temperament, or lack of enterprise; on the contrary, he is in need of money because he has a position and wants to obtain a better one. The Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan thus provides an unusual view of the relation between patron and client, inverting the conventional perspective. Instead of focusing on the largesse of the aristocratic patron, Courtilz focuses on the obscure client who receives no salary from his master, no rewards for the dangerous missions he undertakes, and who must go into debt to purchase the promotion that his courage and enterprise have merited for years. Frustrated by the decision of a wealthy young woman whom he had courted to enter a convent, d’Artagnan reports that he broke off all relations with women for a few months. In a revealing parallel between his attitude toward women and toward patrons, he adds that he would have left Mazarin too, if he could have, because the Cardinal was so avaricious that he never rewarded his dependents or clients. In d’Artagnan’s life, the idea of the reciprocal obligations involved in service is breaking down: a master such as Mazarin does not fulfill his side of the bargain between patron and client, and the traditional system of patronage is beginning to give way to a system of wages. D’Artagnan’s financial difficulties arise partly from this changing situation and partly from Mazarin’s character. On more than a dozen occasions, d’Artagnan represents the minister as a man who devotes his considerable intelligence and energy, as well as his official position, solely to making money, concocting imaginative schemes for obtaining a cut of the financial transactions of the

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state. In d’Artagnan’s view, he is more fit to be a shopkeeper than a high minister. Although at such points d’Artagnan sees Mazarin as the origin of greed in France, on other occasions he acknowledges that the minister is not unique and that his opponents are also corrupt. For example, d’Artagnan asserts that Mazarin was delighted with the loss of Courtrai in 1648 because it provided him with an excuse to raise more money. But he also observes that the anti-tax opposition in the Parlement includes ‘‘members who took as much care of their own interests as of those of the people’’ (1:277).18 For d’Artagnan, the rebellious Frondeurs do not offer an alternative of disinterested morality to the Cardinal’s example of unrestrained greed. Instead, in a clearly satiric pattern, d’Artagnan presents at the beginning of the rebellion an impossible choice between two comparably objectionable alternatives.19 Courtilz’s realistic depiction of d’Artagnan’s financial straits thus helps further the satiric portrayals of Mazarin as obsessively crafty and greedy, and the Parlement as self-interested and hypocritical. In addition to broadening the focus of his narrative to include the lives and finances of non-aristocratic characters, Courtilz alters the exclusive focus of the nouvelles historiques on the shaping influence of love and passion. It is no longer sexual intrigues that play a crucial role in determining historical events but the political intrigues of ministers, their secret agents, and their enemies. For example, Rochefort recounts that soon after he delivered a message in cipher from Richelieu to the Scots in 1639 or 1640, the whole kingdom of Britain was in turmoil and on the brink of war. He implies that Richelieu considered it to be in the interests of France to sow divisions there, and that by offering encouragement to the Scottish rebels, he was able to do so. Many incidents from the memoirs of Rochefort and d’Artagnan function in this way, carrying the implication that historic events are shaped by secret agreements and diplomacy in which the protagonist participated. Amorous intrigues still figure in Courtilz’s narratives, but without producing deceits and betrayals among the powerful, as in Villedieu, or psychological analysis, as in Lafayette. Courtilz’s male protagonists calculate their moves and adopt their tactics in such affairs without displaying overwhelming passion. Less than a quarter of the way through La Fontaine’s memoirs, he has married women in France, England, Germany, and (almost) Norway, in addition to having numerous affairs and illegitimate children. He seems to have a wife in every part of Europe, though his mar-

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riages seem ancillary and unrelated to his work as a spy. The Count de Rochefort, on the other hand, recounts a curious series of misadventures in love. After his mother dies, his father seeks another wife, but his first choice proves to be a branded criminal, and the second turns out to have had a child by an apprentice. The third choice will become Rochefort’s shrewish, persecuting stepmother. Rochefort himself repeats his father’s experiences when his betrothed, a baron’s niece, turns out to be pregnant by another, and when he finds a second prospective wife too sexually knowing for his taste.20 In d’Artagnan’s memoirs, amorous affairs regularly alternate with military expeditions or undercover activities to create a counterpoint and parallel between the two. Courtilz indicates his awareness of this pattern at a number of points. After a series of disappointments with women, he resolves to marry, and lays out his criteria for a wife: ‘‘I wanted a young girl who would be rich and passably pretty, or even entirely pretty’’ (1:261). However, his pursuit of such a girl is delayed by the call of duty; he must first turn to recount his role in the negotiations between Mazarin and the rebellious Prince de Conde´. As d’Artagnan’s memoirs proceed, the two strands of the narrative more often intersect and affect each other. At times d’Artagnan becomes the lover of a woman both because she pleases him and because she can help him accomplish his mission. For example, the wife of an attorney during the Fronde lets him know the plans of her husband and his allies in the Parlement, whom Mazarin is then able to divide and defeat through well-placed bribes and a judicious use of force. However, the intertwining of the private and the public, the sexual and the political, does not usually produce such success. When d’Artagnan’s mistress in London turns out also to be the mistress of the jealous French ambassador, d’Artagnan’s secret mission is ruined, and he ends up imprisoned back in France. D’Artagnan also pursues a pretty seamstress unaware that she is the sister of the Cardinal’s would-be assassin, and only through good luck does he escape the trap into which she leads him. In such narrative intersections, the sexual affair most often derails the political mission. Near the end of his memoirs, d’Artagnan finally marries, but the marriage breaks down, according to d’Artagnan, because of his wife’s jealousy. Significantly, d’Artagnan devotes fewer pages to his marriage than to any of his affairs. In these affairs, however, women consistently provide the financial support which enables

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d’Artagnan to survive and advance in his career. His first mistress, who is his landlady, assumes all his expenses during the months after he arrives penniless in the capital, and even goes into debt for him while her husband is away. The wife of a good friend, another of his mistresses, enables him to pay off his debts and purchase his position as captain of a company of musketeers. After d’Artagnan’s wife has retreated to a convent, his final mistress, whose mad husband is confined to the Bastille, refuses to consummate their relationship, but shows her love by making her wealth available to help d’Artagnan pay his expenses and keep up his company of musketeers. According to d’Artagnan, it is paradoxically she who arouses the strongest and most long-lasting love: ‘‘She never even allowed me to kiss her finger-tips and thus made me so amorous, that I don’t believe I have ever loved anyone as much as I have loved her. I love her still today, just as passionately as ever. Besides, I am under infinite obligations to her; her purse has always been open to me, just as if it were mine’’ (3:232). D’Artagnan finally finds his ideal lover in a maternal figure who supports him financially as a patron would and does not ask anything of him.21 The refusal of a physical relationship by the final woman in d’Artagnan’s series of mistresses ironically recalls the refusal of the Princess de Cle`ves to marry de Nemours at the end of Lafayette’s nouvelle. Unlike de Nemours, whose love fades after a few years, d’Artagnan remains enamoured of his virtuous mistress until the end of his memoirs and his life (a brief endnote informs readers that d’Artagnan died at the siege of Maastricht, in 1673). Although Courtilz’s memoirs revise the nouvelles historiques in many ways, the two forms often end on a note of loss, which can be heroic, as in the case of the Princess of Cle`ves; tragic, as in that of the Princess Montpensier; misanthropic, as in Rochefort’s; or elegiac, as in d’Artagnan’s. Courtilz’s semi-historical memoirs, therefore, present a revisionary combination of a number of genres: nouvelles historiques, picaresque, military memoir, and satire. The genre implies a complex set of attitudes toward history. The memoirs of Rochefort and d’Artagnan exhibit no awareness of a break dividing the past of the narrative from the narrator’s present, as an earlier from a later period or stage, for example. Instead, events in the past help account for the quotidian state of affairs in the present; the past serves the function of an etiology of the everyday. For example, in the middle of the Fronde, Rochefort gives a brief account of the efforts of a Father Faure to bring Bordeaux back to obedience to

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the king, adding that for his efforts he received the bishopric of Amiens, which he enjoys ‘‘at the present time.’’ Rochefort and d’Artagnan repeatedly explain the present thus, by means of originating events in the past, implying a fundamental continuity between the two.22 Not only do Courtilz’s apocryphal memoirs see no rift between present and past; they also draw no firm line of demarcation between historical and fictional events and characters. D’Artagnan’s representations of the historic battles, sieges, and campaigns in which he takes part far exceed in length and accuracy the brief references to historic events in the nouvelles historiques. Yet it is hard to know to what extent the private affairs that he recounts had an actual existence outside the narrative; as in the case of the nouvelles, many if not most of these were presumably imagined or adapted from living or literary models. Finally, the narratives of Rochefort, La Fontaine, and d’Artagnan initiate and extensively employ the disguises and adventures of secret agents—in fact, the phrase ‘‘cloak and dagger’’ comes from d’Artagnan’s memoirs (1:246); as in the nouvelles and the histoires secre`tes, the presumption here of a secret dimension behind official history arises from a satiric view of historical narratives that celebrate national and dynastic accomplishments.

DEFOE Defoe almost certainly knew Courtilz’s historical memoir-novels: Memoirs of J. B. La Fontaine, for example, is listed in the catalogue for the sale of his library after his death, and the Memoirs of Rochefort was translated twice into English and went through ten editions in French in the two decades after its first publication.23 In addition, as Georges May has pointed out, Steele’s mildly satiric attack on apocryphal historical memoirs in the Tatler 84 assumes the ‘‘solid popularity’’ of the form ‘‘among the compatriots [and contemporaries] of Defoe.’’24 Using terms that distinctly recall Courtilz’s semi-historical memoirs, Steele as Bickerstaff directs attention to ‘‘some merry gentlemen of the French nation, who have written very advantageous histories of their exploits in war, love, and politics, under the title of Memoirs.’’ He is writing now to ‘‘give Notice to all Booksellers and Translators whatsoever, That the word Memoir is French for a Novel; and to require of them That they sell and translate it accordingly.’’25 Although Steele cen-

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sures the writing and reading of such works, his facetiousness indicates a fairly widespread understanding that works entitled ‘‘Memoirs’’ did not consist entirely of accurately drawn historical events. Rather, they often combined recent history with imagined but plausible characters and events in a new form that diverged from the romances’ combination of remote history with implausibly idealized characters and plots. When he categorizes the semihistorical memoirs as a species of ‘‘novel,’’ Steele disparages them by association with romance novellas. But what was meant ironically and dismissively here presciently designates as a form of novel the realistic historical fiction written by Courtilz and Defoe. As a first-person account of historical matters by a military man who comes from provincial gentry to work for the king, Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, like Courtilz’s Memoirs of d’Artagnan, combines accurate narrative of recent history with fictional but plausible characters and actions. It can be difficult to separate out these different strands and pronounce some elements fictional and others historical.26 Defoe’s Cavalier is an unnamed fictional character who yet participates almost entirely in publicly known historic events; Charles de Batz Castelmore d’Artagnan was a historic figure, about half of whose adventures are private and fictional. Both Courtilz’s and Defoe’s narrators self-consciously distinguish the memoirs they are writing from history: Rochefort says that because he is writing memoirs, he will not provide a history of the Fronde; and the Cavalier for the same reason refrains from recounting what happened after the king was defeated and fell into the hands of the army. However, Defoe’s versions of the historical memoir novel do not use the different forms in exactly the same proportions that Courtilz does. Military memoir predominates in the Memoirs of a Cavalier, with elements of secret history and the picaresque almost lacking. Later, in Colonel Jack, the military memoir recedes in importance while picaresque elements and misadventures with women return to prominence.27 The Cavalier only once disguises himself and plays the role of a spy, when his troop has been separated from the rest of the king’s forces after their defeat at Marston Moor. By his own admission, he is uneasy and ineffective in the role; he is neither a shrewd and adaptable soldier like d’Artagnan, nor a shape-shifting rogue like La Fontaine. Unlike a poor picaro, he is wealthy—able to outfit companies of men at his own expense both in Germany and in England, and although his father loses £20,000 during the war, the Cavalier still has enough to live on when he retires to his lands on the king’s final defeat.

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The Cavalier’s one sexual encounter ends quickly when he realizes that a woman he is visiting in Rome is a courtesan. Defoe introduces such an episode in the beginning of the Cavalier’s memoirs apparently in order to gesture toward the mix of military and sexual adventures found in Courtilz’s memoirs. However, since the Cavalier serves voluntarily as a soldier, not a spy, and remains uninvolved in private affairs that might reveal secret machinations, he writes neither picaresque nor secret history. His memoirs do not exhibit the same skeptical satire of established historical accounts expressed by Courtilz’s picaresque memoirs or by earlier secret histories. Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier actually stands in a complex and ambivalent relation with published histories. It is unclear whether Courtilz had any written sources for d’Artagnan’s Memoirs, but Defoe relied on five public histories as sources for the Cavalier’s: a life of Richelieu by LeClerc, a journalistic account of the battles of Gustavus Adolphus (the Swedish Intelligencer), and histories of the English Civil War by Whitelocke, Ludlow, and Clarendon.28 Defoe closely follows each of these works at various points in the course of the Cavalier’s Memoirs, choosing carefully which events to include as part of the character’s life. The result is a narrative mosaic of the Cavalier and his times, composed of pieces of these five histories. By amplifying brief and impersonal paragraphs from the histories into vivid and detailed episodes, the thirty pages or so of the histories from which he draws the Cavalier’s adventures become a connected memoir of almost three hundred pages of a character’s life and actions in some of the most well-known battles of his time.29 For some of the adventures he recounts no source has been found in the historic accounts, but nothing he includes in his narrative contradicts the histories from which he was working.30 Despite its extensive reliance on published histories, Defoe’s Memoirs asserts its own superiority to such works. The editor considers to be inadequate the histories describing the sieges and battles of the times, from Leipzig and Magdeburg to Edgehill and Naseby: ‘‘do those Relations give any of the beautiful Ideas of things formed in this Account? Have they one half of the Circumstances and Incidents of the Actions themselves, that this man’s Eyes were Witness to, and which his Memory has thus preserved?’’ (2). The editor claims that because of the vividness of its description, this fictionalized account is superior to the published histories. He even asserts that the Memoirs corrects well-known histories: ‘‘this Work is a Confutation of many Errors in all the

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writers upon the Subject of our Wars in England, and even in that extraordinary History written by the Earl of Clarendon’’ (3). Defoe here exhibits an extraordinary impudence, since Clarendon’s was the most highly regarded history of the civil wars: having relied on it and other histories, the editor asserts that where the Memoirs embroiders or includes fictional characters and actions, it is correcting the errors of its historical sources. (Such a brazen strategy will be adopted also by Pre´vost in his Preface to Cleveland). This approach puts some distance between the fictional memoir and history. Like the secret histories, it claims to give the real story behind official versions, but the real story does not consist of secret sexual affairs that lie behind and determine public events. Rather, Defoe’s editor claims that the Cavalier’s narrative is more credible and accurate than published histories because it is more detailed and vivid, in other words, precisely because of its fictional elements. Thus, the succession from the histoires secre`tes to the cloak-and-dagger adventures of Courtilz and then Defoe’s historical Memoirs marks a transition from sexual history as satiric of official history to realistic fictionalizing as a rectification of published histories.31 In the fabricated adventure that most clearly defines his character, the Cavalier enables his troops to rejoin the king’s forces after their defeat at the battle of Marston Moor in northern England. He leads his men through unknown territory, in cold weather, foraging for food, hiking over mountains, fighting when necessary, making use of their wits and strength to stay out of sight and a step ahead of pursuing parties until they are able almost three weeks after the battle to rejoin the king’s forces (203–18). A brief fictional epic of survival demonstrating the perseverance, intelligence, and courage of the Cavalier, the episode resembles in length and implication the story of survival of the carpenter’s company in Journal of the Plague Year. Showing the same character and courage in the first half of the narrative, the Cavalier volunteers for and succeeds in the most dangerous assaults when he is in the Swedish king’s service (like d’Artagnan, who also takes on the most dangerous assignments to obtain advancement from Mazarin). Just as Courtilz’s narrators portray themselves as trusted agents of the king’s ministers, so the Cavalier represents himself as the confidant of two kings, a student of Gustavus Adolphus and an advisor of Charles. These protagonists exaggerate their role in historical events; neither the French nor the English characters historically performed the actions with which they credit themselves.32

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Defoe also has the Cavalier use the lessons he learned under Gustavus as the standard by which he judges and finds wanting the behavior of Charles and his general Rupert. The contrast between Charles and Gustavus gives the Memoirs of a Cavalier a more unified structure and effect than any of Courtilz’s historical memoir-novels. The Cavalier presents first a model general, strategically brilliant, personally courageous and firm-willed, fighting for a league of small Protestant states against the Catholic emperor. When he returns to England, he discovers Charles to be a weak and changeable general, in thrall to high Church leaders. Before the battle of Edgehill, Charles’s followers are so eager to fight that they move down from their advantageous position on the hills (156), and Charles allows his forces to surrender tactical advantages like this repeatedly in the course of the Civil War.33 In addition, Charles vacillates. One of his nobles encourages him in 1639 to attack the Scots immediately: ‘‘he urged it every Day; and the King finding his Reasons very good, would often be of his Opinion; but next Morning he would be of another Mind’’ (126). In fact, Charles does go into battle on this occasion, and it leads to his impoverishment, to the need to call a Parliament, and thus to the rebellion. The Cavalier argues that the King of Sweden was never guilty of such accommodations: ‘‘For if all the officers at a Council of War were of a different Opinion, yet unless their Reasons mastered his Judgment their Votes never altered his Measures’’ (156). Such reversals and accommodations by the king lead to his greatest defeats at Edgehill and at Naseby. Thus, the Cavalier paints a damning portrait of Charles. In fact, that is probably the main reason Defoe makes his narrator a Cavalier: it is more effective to represent the king as incompetent through the mouth of a royalist than a commonwealthman.34 The Cavalier reports that in Germany, he fought in large battles without being very affected by the bloodshed. However, of his involvement in the Civil War, he observes: To hear a Man cry for Quarter in English, moved me to a Compassion which I had never been used to; nay, sometimes it looked to me as if some of my own Men had been beaten; and when I heard a Soldier cry, O God, I am Shot, I looked behind me to see which of my own Troop was fallen. (165)

The Cavalier here presents the horror of civil war as the discovery that the other and one’s own are the same. Because of the vivid-

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ness of this description, the historical proximity of such events, and the sympathy Defoe has generated for the character who utters these words, they carry the implication that civil war is an ever-present threat to the existence and identity of the nation— just as murder within the family is the originary crime.35 Only five years earlier, in 1715, the death of Queen Anne and the passing of the crown to the house of Hanover had led to rebellion in Scotland and the invasion of England by forces loyal to James Francis Edward, the Stuart Pretender. The possibility of civil war is still urgent and proximate for Defoe and his contemporaries. His recognition of the horror of civil war leads the Cavalier to adopt a moderate position: he claims that many loyalists fought only to ‘‘suppress the exorbitant Power of a Party [i.e., of the Parliament], but not with a Design to destroy the Constitution of Government, and the Being of Parliament’’ (166).36 The Cavalier supports not a divinely constituted or absolute monarch, but a limited monarchy and an ancient constitution. This clearly Whiggish position—a paradoxical one for a Cavalier—is consistent with the settlement of 1689. By the end of the fighting, the Cavalier considers Fairfax to be the most able and the fairest of English generals, the one who most closely approaches his old ideal, Gustavus. Defoe structures his work so that even the fair-minded royalist considers Fairfax to be a good man, the king unworthy, and the Civil War the work of extremists on both sides.37 Through the example of the decent Cavalier, Defoe presents an argument for a moderate Whig position both in his own time and seventy-five years earlier.38 Defoe breaks down the established categories in earlier histories, in particular the equation of Cavalier and Tory, Roundhead and Whig: he makes his protagonist a Whiggish Cavalier. The revision of the previous histories that Defoe has used here differs from Courtilz’s satire of both positions in the civil war that he depicts in the Memoirs of d’Artagnan: Defoe uses the participant of one camp to discredit his own side and to validate the moderates on the other side. These memoirs do not continue past the defeat of the king’s forces in the late 1640s, the darkest time for the royalists and a decade before the restoration of the monarchy. Christopher Hill has written about the experience of defeat, the wrenching accommodations required by Commonwealthmen such as Milton and Marvell who lived past the Restoration.39 By breaking off the work where he does, Defoe reverses the common historical perspective and leaves the king’s supporter in a state of defeat and disaffec-

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tion, trying to make sense of his time and justify the ways of God, by examining calendrical coincidences for signs of providential justice. In the work’s concluding pages, the Cavalier lists two dozen pairs of events that happened on the same day of the year, with each pair illustrating the justice of a wrong being returned against the original offender: for example, ‘‘The same Day and Month, being the 6th of August 1641, that the Parliament voted to raise an Army against the King, the same Day and Month, Anno 1648, the Parliament were assaulted and turned out of Doors by that very Army, and none left to sit but who the Soldiers pleased, which were therefore called the Rump’’ (275). The Cavalier believes his coincidences offer consoling evidence of ‘‘the just Judgment of God in dating his Providences’’ (272). However, Defoe undercuts the Cavalier’s procedure here by specifying that his model for making such comparisons is a Catholic neighbor whose providential coincidences almost all involve the deaths of English monarchs on the anniversary of anti-Catholic actions.40 Defoe implies the practice is a superstitious one, opposed to the Protestant identity of the English nation.41 The Cavalier sees evidence of providential design in his long list of strained coincidences, but his claim appears to be a superstitious craving after order by one of the defeated. Like Courtilz’s narratives, Defoe’s Memoirs ends on a note of loss, with the formerly hard-headed and clear-eyed soldier sadly grasping after explanatory straws. The Memoirs of a Cavalier thus resembles Courtilz’s semi-historical narratives in many ways: the works of both authors are military memoirs of a provincial who demonstrates his courage and intelligence in numerous adventures and claims an importance that official narratives do not mention before coming to a melancholy conclusion.42 Works in this genre imply that experience gained participating in historic events is valuable mostly because it reveals the mental and moral limitations of national leaders, but such involvement leads to little if any personal advancement for the martial narrators. Their accounts not only represent the passing of a life with little to show for the efforts made; they also point to the passing of an era. In these narratives by provincial gentry, the old worlds of feudalism and patronage give way: to a centralized monarchy and its ministers in Courtilz’s France; and to the Commonwealth in the Cavalier’s England. The historical memoir-novel tends to assume a melancholy, elegiac form. Captain Singleton diverges in significant ways from Courtilz’s

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model of the memoir-novel. Singleton has almost no contact with historical figures or events in the course of his adventures. In addition, women are completely absent from his narrative, along with the sexual intrigues that constitute more than half of Courtilz’s memoir-novels; in its lack of women and of sexual adventures, Captain Singleton resembles the Memoirs of a Cavalier. Moreover, Singleton and the Cavalier exhibit little or no psychological continuity, but serve primarily as the means by which anecdotes and adventures may be told. In Colonel Jack, Defoe will turn from these revisions back to Courtilz’s form, but he will also employ and extend some of the innovations that he first employs in Captain Singleton. The most important of these changes include a lowering in the class of the protagonist, an increased prominence of tutors, the acquisition of fantastic new wealth, and the subjection of the protagonist to corrective observation. Unlike Courtilz’s narrators and Defoe’s Cavalier, neither Singleton nor Jack is a member of the gentry; both are impoverished and without family. Like Courtilz’s narratives, Defoe’s employ picaresque elements, focusing on the class of the original picaros— penniless boys who engage in thievery or piracy in order to survive. Because they make their way outside systems of patronage, the relation with patrons in the earlier memoir-novels changes in these two novels by Defoe to a relation with mentor figures and tutors. The patrons helped their charges navigate and advance in the social world by means of personal networks and contacts, but the tutors teach their charges generalized prudential wisdom to help them survive and profit. Singleton’s mentor William, for example, makes use of many proverbs, prominent among them: you can trust people to pursue their interest even if not to follow their principles. Being outside the traditional social order makes available a tremendous increase in opportunities for these characters, and also brings into operation an effective system of exclusions and constraints. The rootlessness of Singleton, Jack, and later Roxana allows them to accumulate almost unimaginable riches, to embody fantasies about the kind of wealth the isolated individual can gain by means of work, luck, and calculation in this new world. Courtilz’s characters and Defoe’s Cavalier are much more fixed in a social world, more identified with their family origins and a base of operations. D’Artagnan’s identity is so closely connected with his place of origin that, without using his letter of introduction, he is quickly identified by the other musketeers once they learn of his

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birthplace. Defoe’s Cavalier returns to his family estate after his service in the Thirty Years War and after his involvement in the English Civil War also because that is the center of his life. The gains of adventurers such as Singleton and Jack far exceed what might have been hoped for by members of the lower provincial gentry. Still, although the freedom from hierarchical orders may open the possibility of a dream-like acquisition of wealth, it also calls forth a need to discipline such spectacular success. Thus, the prominent activity of spying from Courtilz’s earlier memoirnovels also undergoes a change: the narrator ceases to be the agent and often becomes the object of observation. Instead of gathering intelligence for the use of his patron, the protagonist in these later novels frequently lives in fear of being observed by anonymous others. The concluding movement of the later narratives implies that there may be no way to live by means of great but dubiously acquired wealth in the protagonist’s own society. Because there is no place of refuge for such figures of fantasized success, they re´cs’s definition of the novel main rootless, exemplifying Georg Luka as the form of ‘‘transcendental homelessness.’’43 Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack represent an unresolved tension between the fabulous stories of unanchored individuals and the constraints and surveillance of a social order whose operations discipline them in the end.44 Captain Singleton most clearly departs from the historical memoir novel by transposing its concerns from history to geography; instead of actual military campaigns, it records some mutinous sailors’ trek across Africa in its first half and a piratical expedition in its second. According to Singleton’s account, he participated in the pirate Avery’s most famous exploit—the taking of a ship containing the Mogul’s daughter and fabulous wealth in jewels (179).45 But this is the only time that Defoe follows Courtilz in having Singleton come in contact with a historical figure; he devotes this work to journeys in space rather than in time. Singleton’s spatial and geographical mobility is associated with the portability of gold and goods, but significantly not with social mobility. Although the nineteen year-old Singleton is one of the leaders of the trek across Africa, an older Portuguese sailor still serves as his tutor, instructing him ‘‘particularly in the Geographical Part of Knowledge’’ (56), and encouraging him to learn as much as possible of other subjects as well. Much more important is Singleton’s second tutor, a Quaker doctor from Pennsylvania. Although William Waters is interested in joining the pirates when his ship is

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taken, he cleverly insists on a written statement that he was compelled to do so. He participates in the piracies that follow, but he remains a liminal figure, with one foot in the world of the pirates and one in the world of legitimate trade. As he pursues profits and tries to avoid violence, William repeatedly asks Singleton and the pirates versions of the question: ‘‘wouldst thou rather have Money without Fighting, or Fighting without Money?’’ (153). Both when Singleton’s mates capture a rich Dutch prize, and when they board a slave ship on which the Africans have revolted and killed the crew, William dissuades the pirates from wholesale murder because there is no profit in it. Instead of throwing the Africans overboard, William takes them to Brazil, where he sells them himself; and, having set the Dutch on shore near an English trading post, where they cannot warn the Dutch or harm the pirates, William, ‘‘merchant-like’’ (253), sells the ship’s cargo of spices to Chinese and other merchants for a huge fortune. William thus largely succeeds in shifting the nature of the ship’s journey from a brutal piratical cruise to a profitable trading voyage (although brutality remains part of the trading). Singleton’s narrative moves accordingly from an account of violent adventures to a chronicle of business deals. With no social place or inherited status, no network of family or friends, and no property in land or social understanding of wealth, Singleton loses all the wealth he obtained in Africa to false friends within two years of his return to London. The second time he accumulates a fortune, he has the benefit of this experience and the assistance of William, but his final situation remains constricted and bleak. Singleton knows that it is easy to enter but difficult to retire from the business of piracy, to escape the gallows and hold onto one’s gains. According to Defoe’s earlier King of the Pirates (1719), Captain Avery established his own settlement of pirates on Madagascar, where their wealth was of no use to them, then eventually made his way to France. Although Singleton has no friends or family in England, he agrees to return there with William, his ‘‘guide, pilot, governor,’’ (271) and brother (he eventually marries William’s sister). However, for fear of being discovered and hanged, Singleton insists that he and William remain disguised forever as middle-Eastern merchants and that they speak English before no one except William’s sister. Thus, although they return physically to England, William and Singleton do not achieve an English identity, but remain in a kind of internal exile, imprisoned in their disguise.46 Under the tutelage of the canny Quaker moral-

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ist and proto-Franklin, the most the fabulously rich ex-pirates can achieve still involves nearly total cultural deracination, even if the caricatural and faintly silly version of the foreigner implied by their disguise somewhat undercuts the danger facing them in the end. In Colonel Jack, Defoe employs more features of Courtilz’s memoir-novels. Although Jack’s military actions do not constitute a large part of the narrative, and although he remains on the fringes of a number of campaigns, still, like d’Artagnan, he plays a role as a military man in several historic events, including the War of the Spanish Succession and the Jacobite rising of 1715. Defoe also restores to a prominent place in the plot of this work the protagonist’s many, varied, and almost comically disappointing relations with women. But as the narrative again employs such characteristics of Courtilz’s form, the result is complicated by Defoe’s incorporation of revisionary features he had first introduced in Captain Singleton. Most notably, in Colonel Jack, the picaresque narrative of the poor illegitimate boy without family expands to include the first third of the narrative.47 Like Singleton, Jack accumulates more than one huge fortune, and he is consequently also the object of anonymous disciplinary observation. Cut off from inherited identity and social ties, Jack has the help of many tutors and advisors in his life. His first is the young master-thief, his ‘‘Master and Tutor in Wickedness’’ (81), who supervises his apprenticeship in the ‘‘Trade’’ of picking pockets (18).48 In his young adult years, Jack’s teacher is the master of the Virginia plantation to whom he has been sold as an indentured servant, although this man functions less as a tutor than as a patron under the older system that Courtilz depicted. On his plantation, Jack modifies the barbaric treatment of slaves and introduces a system based on the more humane principles of mercy and gratitude, a system that he maintains is still practiced in the colony.49 Like Courtilz’s protagonists, Jack credits himself here with an important role on which historical accounts are silent. Like William in Defoe’s earlier work, Jack argues that the use of violence against the slaves is not only wrong but against the planters’ selfinterest; his reform is intended not to end the slave system, but to make it work more efficiently (145).50 For his services, the planter helps establish Jack on his own plantation, which will be the foundation of all his further wealth. Thus, Jack can refer to this man as both his ‘‘Master’’ and his ‘‘Patron’’ (154). Jack’s final advisor is his last wife (he has been married five times to four women, the

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last time remarrying his first wife), who helps him hide when he might be recognized and named as a participant in the 1715 uprising. Like d’Artagnan and Rochefort, Jack is often disappointed in the women he chooses; like d’Artagnan, he finds a helpful guide and advisor in his final relationship. But the most important advisor in Jack’s life is his only formal tutor, a well-educated young man transported to Virginia for stealing, who reads history with him and encourages him to become a Christian. Jack responds to the religious exhortations noncommittally, and drops the whole issue of repentance until the last pages of the narrative.51 More influential, indeed determining, is Jack’s new interest in contemporary history, since it is his ‘‘unquenchable Thirst’’ (172) to participate in historical events that impels his adventures in the second half of the narrative. (D’Artagnan’s need to impress Mazarin similarly places him near the center of historic events such as the Fronde.) Even after Jack spends the years 1701–1708 fighting in an Irish regiment for Louis XIV, he cannot bring himself to return to Virginia to a private life: ‘‘I had got a wandring kind of Taste, and Knowledge of Things begat a Desire of encreasing it, nor could I think of living in Virginia. . . . to go thither, I concluded, was to be bury’d a-live’’ (233). The second half of the novel, then, closely resembles the Memoirs of d’Artagnan in the way it integrates martial adventures with marital misadventures; it takes shape directly from the protagonist’s desire to emerge from the timeless cycles of agricultural life at the margins of empire, and to be engaged in the events of linear history in European metropolitan centers.52 In both his domestic and his public life, Jack is far from heroic; for example, he lets himself be bullied by a debt-collector for his first wife, and he naively and unthinkingly aligns himself twice with the Pretender. Still, his decision to avoid a safe but nameless existence on his plantation and to involve himself in the sharpest conflicts of his day parallels the choice of Achilles or Odysseus to engage in battle and accept mortality rather than withdraw to a peaceful and timeless oblivion. The world of contemporary history thus substitutes for the world of epic in Colonel Jack’s life. However, in a clear revision of the earlier epics, Jack’s actions have little or no impact on the events in which he participates. Like the involvement of Homer’s heroes in battle—which brings fame but also death—Jack’s involvement in historical events has double results: he earns rewards, but he also becomes an object of observation and correction. Demonstrating his courage at the bat-

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tle of Cremona in 1701 finally makes him a colonel not only in name, but in fact. In addition, he finds one situation that allows him to be a perfectly invisible observing intelligence: when he returns to England and resides in Canterbury, he passes for French among the English and for English among the French, and is thus able to observe everyone else but remain unknown himself. On the other hand, his life and wealth become forfeit for treason after he is seen among the Jacobites the day before their defeat at Preston in 1715. Jack withdraws from the field before this battle because, he says, he foresaw the rebels’ defeat when they refused his advice to fortify a crucial bridge. In this instance, as in the Pretender’s abortive 1708 invasion of England, Jack remains only marginally involved in a historical event. Still, if he were to be identified by any of the Jacobites who are later transported to Virginia, he might be executed. He has enough involvement in the event to be guilty of treason, but turns out to have just enough distance from it to be pardoned. In the last section of the novel, therefore, he anxiously feels the possibility of being observed and discovered, the opposite of the condition he enjoyed in Canterbury. He hides in the Caribbean, and is eventually included in a general pardon, but he has been smuggling goods to Mexico, and on his second smuggling voyage is surprised and stranded near Vera Cruz. Significantly, it is at this point that Jack writes his memoirs. He is under virtual and indefinite house arrest in New Spain, known to the authorities as Don Ferdinand of Old Castile (301), in a period of enforced idleness, unable to communicate with anyone, even his wife. Thus he writes in a ‘‘kind of an Exile’’ (307) from his own culture, language, and identity, like the internal exile of Singleton and William. Jack remains on the margins geographically during much of his narrative, including the time when he writes it, but also historically, as he often withdraws and fails to influence the outcome of events. The knowledge that they have been produced in such a situation of confinement and loss of identity casts a retrospective shadow over the rest of his memoirs, and draws attention to the costs of his enterprising involvement in history. That involvement gives him his military rank, but also leads to his very mixed marriages, and causes his repeated flights from the observing eyes of social authorities. It produces his narrative by providing material for its extension; the narrative itself is dependent on—and as engaged as Jack in—the project of participating in history and registering the costs of such participation.

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Roxana’s memoirs follow the same pattern as those of Singleton and Jack. David Blewett has pointed out that the narrative is set in two historical periods at the same time: the Restoration and the England of George I. The chronology of the narrative places Roxana in Hanoverian England, but the title and the references to Roxana as a well-known mistress to the king place her in Charles II’s reign.53 As a first-person account of a career typical of a recent period that brings the protagonist into contact with historical figures, Roxana’s narrative has elements of the semi-historical memoir. It also employs but inverts conventions of the secret sexual history: Roxana lets us know about all her sexual affairs, except for what happened during her three years as mistress to a king whose identity she can not reveal (223).54 Her narrative provides a detailed sexual history of a royal mistress but reveals no political secrets or intrigues. Roxana also obtains fabulous wealth because of her questionable activities, and receives help from the historical Sir Robert Clayton, who serves as her financial and investment advisor. In the last quarter of this narrative too, the protagonist fears being pursued by observing eyes. Seeking to find and be acknowledged by her mother, Roxana’s daughter pursues the seeming Quaker lady (365–67), acting as a detective and a tormenter of Roxana (349), and a hound on the scent (366). To escape and deny her past, Roxana flees to the Netherlands, and allows her alter ego Amy to murder her daughter. In the end, the observing eye ceases to be anonymous and social in this narrative, and becomes her own conscience. In a conclusion that is even bleaker than that of the other historical memoirs, Roxana denies her historical identity, kills a family relation, and finds no social refuge or cultural home. All the protagonists in Defoe’s historical narratives embrace a position opposed to the one Defoe supports: the Cavalier fights for Charles I in the Civil War; Roxana is the mistress of Charles II; Jack fights for Louis XIV and turns out twice for the Pretender. Defoe satirizes all three for their close association with the Stuarts and with Catholicism. However, rather than satire being an end in itself here, Defoe incorporates his satire into the larger narrative framework, which he constructs increasingly around the psychology of the memoir-writer. The change from Courtilz’s works and the Memoirs of a Cavalier to the later works reveals a movement from satire of official history to a more psychological fictionalizing of history, which employs satire as a subordinate element. Although Colonel Jack satirizes Jack for his naive notions of gentlemanly conduct, it is not primarily a satire of Jack for fighting on

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the side of Louis XIV and joining the Pretender; the narrative is chiefly concerned with representing the perspectives of the young thief, plantation owner, soldier, merchant, and smuggler. Similarly, Roxana satirizes the masquerades of George I’s time along with the promiscuity of the Restoration court, but it is most interested in portraying Roxana’s lives as an abandoned young wife and mother, as mistress successively of her landlord, a continental prince, and an English king, and finally as a Dutch merchant’s guilt-ridden wife. Defoe’s later historical memoir-novels express fantasies and acknowledge limitations, but they are different fantasies and constraints in each case than those that figure in earlier instances of the form. Courtilz’s works and the Memoirs of a Cavalier express a fantasy not only of knowing the great figures of history, but of seeing through and correcting their weaknesses and failings. On the other hand, the protagonists of these earlier works do not profit from such knowledge about the great; they remain largely unrewarded observers who do not affect the flow or the direction of history. Defoe’s later works in the genre express a fantasy of coming to possess immense wealth. However, most of the characters who realize such wealth have no secure identity or social place, and remain even more separated from historical processes and events than their predecessors. In their reflections on history, the memoir-novels of both Courtilz and Defoe show that historical processes are not affected by the efforts of individuals, whether famous or obscure. Both kinds of memoir-novels call into question the presumption of the secret histories that the intrigues of highly born individuals make a determining difference in historical affairs. The memoir-novels revise secret histories in order to produce a history of obscure individuals and of changing social and economic forms. Those by Courtilz and Defoe record a transition from a time of feudal, local relations and patronage to a time of capital accumulation when identities and relations are based less on family and birthplace. As the represented world is in transition, so is the representing form, which incorporates and reverses elements of political or military history and secret histories. Significantly, the historical memoir-novel does not itself acknowledge a rift between these different eras. The memoir form typically brings its narrative of a life up close to the present. In addition to expressing this continuity between past and present, Courtilz’s narratives and Defoe’s give little evidence of conceiving

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of history as falling into different periods or stages (an idea that will be developed by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith; see chapter 6). The conception of history in this form therefore differs from that in the classic historical novel of Scott, Balzac, and Cooper. The nineteenth-century historical novels, cast in the third person rather than the first person of the memoir form, explore the relation between the modern world and preceding forms of social life which have been lost. The historical memoir-novel does not articulate such a strong sense of difference and loss. It registers a transition to a new set of behaviors and institutions, but without noting a total disappearance of the old. Rather than attempting to contain these changes in earlier forms such as political or secret histories, the memoir-novel of Courtilz and Defoe expresses them in a newly developing form. Defoe’s later memoir-novels most thoroughly leave behind political histories of important events and individuals in order to concentrate on the histories of obscure individuals. Their project thus in some ways adumbrates that of the Bildungsroman and novel of education later in the century.55 However, Defoe’s protagonists begin with nothing and must worry first of all about survival, then about wealth, whereas the protagonist of the Bildungsroman is typically a middle-class character who has never needed to worry about his next meal but can concentrate on cultivating his humanity (see chapter 4). The memoir-novels of Courtilz and Defoe imply that a single character cannot in a lifetime clearly perceive the kinds of changes that define different historical periods, but they also suggest that with some distance on the life, the author may be able to perceive what the character cannot. Courtilz and Defoe in their titles and in their focus on a single protagonist’s life seem to attribute historical efficacity to individuals; however, the narratives of both actually show the powerlessness of their narrators in the face of large historical and social forces. The narratives themselves tend to subvert the explicit ideology of the form. The internal stresses on the form thus become apparent. The narrator is supposed to be coterminous with the author of a memoir, yet most of these works imply the perspective of an author who sees further than the narrator into the depth of the transformations that have occurred in his lifetime. In addition, the narrator and protagonist repeatedly exaggerates the importance of his participation in historic events, again indicating an ironic distance between narrator and author. The conventions of the form strain

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against each other as the memoir seeks to combine historical authenticity and a fictional protagonist, as it establishes some distance between narrator and author while maintaining the memoir form. The pressure toward authentication that grounded the semihistorical memoir also moves it toward the use of a third-person narrative, an innovation which will eliminate the memoir from the historical novel, and which is realized for the first time in Scott’s Waverley ninety years later. Some of the directions which the form took in the intervening years—toward greater psychologizing by the memoir writer, and a concern with education leading to the Bildungsroman—can be seen in Pre´ vost’s The English Philosopher, or the History of Mr. Cleveland, a historical memoir-novel and romance which also makes extensive use of travel narratives and utopian forms.

PRE´ VOST Pre´ vost lived in England during the years 1728–30, he spoke and read English, he knew most of Defoe’s works from Crusoe to the Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, and he adapted or alluded to a number of them in his own novels.56 In Cleveland, he employs many features of the historical memoirnovel of Defoe and Courtilz; however, he usually revises his precedents by mediating between them or moving in the direction of romance.57 Indeed, throughout Cleveland, Pre´ vost makes use of cultural oppositions that might serve as vehicles of satire, but he consistently turns away from satiric possibilities toward a logic of accommodation that relies extensively on romance conventions. I have argued that a narrative satire typically works by critiquing not only one position in a cultural field, but also an opposing stance, which might have been thought to be authorized by the first attack. Thus, d’Artagnan reveals the nakedly mercenary motives and schemes of Mazarin, but then turns to point out that the leaders of the Fronde, despite their high-minded talk, are also interested in profiting from the people. Such satire works according to a logic of neither-nor, with any clear middle ground excluded. It often involves satire of the narrator who may be a satirist himself. Integrating the conventions and structures of the historical memoir-novels with those of the older romances, Pre´vost’s novel operates according to a logic of both-and, often specifying a third or mediating position as an additional possibility.58 It does not sati-

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rize or undercut its narrator, but rather represents his sentiments with the greatest seriousness. Pre´vost combines features of these divergent genres in representing the class of his hero, the role of patrons and tutors, and the purpose of travel in his novel. He introduces a number of utopias in the course of the narrative, but they do not constitute a satiric challenge to the existing society or culture; instead, the utopias consistently collapse back into actual, flawed societies and become contiguous with the rest of the narrative. Pre´vost implies a satiric perspective only on the matter of religion, by rejecting in the first half of the novel both the opposed positions of Catholicism and Protestantism. In the second half, he implies an accommodation between these two when Cleveland does not explicitly reject either, yet still formulates his own natural theism, a religion of the heart, as an alternative between or outside the other two. Pre´vost’s hero is neither a member of the provincial gentry like d’Artagnan nor a penniless orphan like Jack. As the first sentence of his narrative states, he has a universally recognizable father in Oliver Cromwell. Unfortunately, Cromwell is also generally hated and feared; for Pre´vost, he is a tyrant, coward, and consummate hypocrite who fathers several illegitimate children while leading a Puritan revolution. Cromwell never acknowledges his illegitimate son in this novel, but in fact seeks to punish him once he comes forward. Thus, despite his parentage, Cleveland is not involved in historical or political events in Pre´ vost’s work. Indeed, he must live with his mother for three years in a large cave because it is the only place where they can avoid the ubiquitous surveillance of the vindictive Lord Protector.59 This internal exile at the beginning of Cleveland’s narrative closely resembles the internal exile of Singleton and William at the conclusion of theirs.60 The threatening surveillance of Cleveland becomes less important, however, after the second book and the death of Cromwell. Perhaps there is less need for anonymous surveillance of Cleveland than of Defoe’s protagonists because Cleveland never sets out to gather a fortune through his own illegal enterprise; rather, the money comes to him as an inheritance from his wife’s grandfather, who was governor of Cuba.61 The wealth may be suspect because its source is the Spanish colonial empire; on the other hand, having been transmitted through two generations, these riches have in effect been cleaned of their associations with commerce or exploitation. Thus Cleveland is neither a penniless urban rogue who gains great wealth through his own enterprise, nor a member of

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the provincial gentry who remains in the rank to which he was born; instead, outside or between these two models, this illegitimate son of the gentry comes into wealth through marriage and inheritance. In another instance of mediation between opposing forms and cultural stages, the advisors who play a prominent role in Cleveland’s life consist of his mother and a pair of surrogate fathers.62 His mother gives him the education of a deist, including a strong grounding in history, an elevation of reason over passion, no mention of revealed religion, but a high regard for natural religion.63 Soon after she dies, Cleveland meets his first surrogate father: Viscount Axminster, whose family has been living in another part of the Rumney-Hole cave, also as refugees from Cromwell’s lawless power. Like Crusoe on his island, Cleveland has been praying for the companionship of just one virtuous person, when he discovers Axminster’s inscription in the cave which, like the cannibal’s footstep to Crusoe, reveals that he is not alone in his strange home. Axminster tutors the sixteen-year-old Cleveland in the social graces, and allows him in turn to tutor his ten-year-old daughter Fanny, whom Cleveland soon receives permission to marry. Cleveland thus steps into a set of duplicated family relations in which Fanny serves as his sister and student as well as fiance´e, and Axminster as his mentor as well as father-in-law. According to the conventions of romance plots, this marriage is prevented by misunderstandings, and Cleveland must pursue Fanny to America, where the young couple is married in an Indian ceremony and where Axminster eventually dies. After Fanny leaves Cleveland on their return trip to Europe, Cleveland seeks help from his last and perhaps most important mentor—the historical earl of Clarendon, who has just been exiled to France by Charles II (1668). Clarendon advises Cleveland on how to be reunited with his wife, how to regain custody of his two sons from the French authorities (who have taken them to raise them as Catholics), and how best to react to life’s adversities. He repeatedly counsels Cleveland that human beings are social animals, and that the proper response to disappointment and betrayal is not to turn one’s back on society in melancholic isolation.64 Cleveland’s advisors do not teach him prudential wisdom like William the Quaker, nor do they function as patrons like Richelieu, whom one would serve for advancement. Although well connected, both Axminster and Clarendon are fellow exiles who can do little for Cleveland when he meets them. Pre´vost moves beyond

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the depiction of patrons and tutors in the earlier memoir-novels when he presents Cleveland’s mentors as his mother and two father figures, as in a romance plot. These are not realistic characters or available models, but fantasies of a family romance. The Duchess of Orle´ans, sister of Charles II and sister-in-law of Louis XIV, similarly serves as a patron and mother figure for Fanny, seeking a reconciliation between the young people until she is poisoned, probably by her husband.65 Like the representation of mentor figures, the American adventure, which closely parallels Singleton’s journey across Africa, combines romance elements with opposing characteristics of the memoir-novel. Singleton and his Portuguese companions are a mutinous crew of sailors with guns and powder who compel a tribe of Africans to carry their supplies, and in the process of crossing the uncharted continent make several fortunes in gold. Cleveland and Fanny walk from the mountains of Virginia to the Gulf coast of Florida as prisoners of several tribes of Indians, the first of which roasts and eats eighteen of their captives each day (237).66 Although they too cross an uncharted continent, they have no maps, make no decisions about their route, engage in no trade, and gain no wealth as a result of their journey. Their trip is not a potentially commercial exploration but a romance adventure, and it reaches its goal when they are reunited in Pensacola with Axminster, who had left them fifteen months earlier to find help. Pre´vost signals the hybrid nature of the expedition and of his narrative by making the route as accurate as possible in relation to the geographical knowledge of the day,67 while the Spaniard who brings together the young people and their father identifies himself as an avid reader of romances: This was a young man of a very good family, who having received a tender and generous character from nature, and having filled his head with extraordinary adventures—like most Spaniards—by reading romances, referred everything to such ideas, and lived only for occasions on which to exercize the courage, tenderness, and generosity of a hero. (237)

The novel offers yet another instance of such mediating between, and moving outside, alternative forms and institutions in its use of utopias. Some of these have antecedents in earlier utopian works such Veiras’s History of the Sevarambians and Fe´nelon’s Telemachus, but Pre´vost novelizes his utopias.68 All three of

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Pre´ vost’s main utopias are embedded in and subordinate to the plot of the novel; all are constructed, not found, and they all break down or prove to be seriously flawed in the course of the narrative. Thus, Pre´vost indicates both a fascination with and a consistent undercutting of utopian possibilities. The two most elaborate and prominent utopias in the novel appear to fall apart for different reasons, but in fact do so as a result of disease. The theocratic society of the Rochellers established on St. Helena’s after their defeat by Richelieu in 1628 is challenged by the men who are recruited to join the colony to make up for the low rate of male births. Their objection to being assigned wives initiates a long and dramatic narrative that leads to their being expelled. But the colony itself only falls apart later, we learn, because an infectious disease decimates the population, requiring the survivors to surrender their secret and isolated position on the island (340). Cleveland establishes the other major utopian society among the Abaqui Indians. He does not alter their customs, but institutes the worship of one all-powerful unseen God whom he allows them to identify with the sun. He enforces his own rule, and his religion, by blowing up a rebel with gunpowder and ascribing the explosion to the anger of the unseen god. As questionable as this act is, it does not destroy the utopian society. But when Cleveland goes in search of Axminster, his troop is incapacitated by a cholera-like outbreak; he is abandoned by those who are not sick, and captured by a neighboring warlike and cannibalistic tribe. Thus Pre´vost repeatedly establishes utopian societies, explores problems they generate, and brings about their demise, though not as a result of these problems. Much of the debate about the utopias in Cleveland has concerned the argument that any social system that embodies a rational ideal must fail to satisfy the irrational desires of many in the society. On this view, utopias must fail because of the necessary conflict between the orderly society and the passions of individuals.69 However, Pre´ vost situates his narrative between the extremes of utopian optimism and confirmed pessimism: he sees utopias consistently failing—but for contingent and avoidable reasons, not for necessary and structural ones.70 The breakdown of the utopias allows for the resumption of the narrative. It subordinates utopia to the novel, without indicting the principle on which utopias are constructed. The experience of the governess, Mrs. Riding, among the Native

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American tribe of the Nopandes, recounted much later, follows a somewhat different pattern. The Nopandes were visited two generations earlier apparently by Spaniards who left some vestiges of Christianity among them. But these beliefs and practices have degenerated so that only the literal and material remain. For example, the Nopandes keep a large fire in a hole in the ground, into which they throw convicted criminals; ‘‘they call this hole hell, and the guards are named devils’’ (551).71 Pre´ vost imagines here a walled city whose cultivation of the land and arts of weaving and architecture seem utopian by comparison with the wastes through which Mrs. Riding has been wandering, but whose people prove to have a very imperfect understanding of the ideas on which their culture was founded.72 Unlike the two previous utopias, the society of the Nopandes does not fall apart because of any mysterious disease, but it proves on closer acquaintance to be inadequate. Still, the result is the same: by the end of a visitor’s stay, a society that appeared utopian joins other imperfect and limited societies in the world. Cleveland’s personal life reveals a pattern of involvement and isolation that seems to parallel the pattern of constructing and deconstructing utopian societies. Cleveland typically experiences a wounding disappointment, and withdraws from society for extended periods of misanthropic or suicidal reflection. The retreat of Cleveland and his mother to the cave establishes this pattern. Once he travels to the new world in order to pursue and marry Fanny, Cleveland’s second period of withdrawal occurs after Fanny leaves him, when he almost kills himself and his young sons. But he emerges from this suicidal state as he falls in love with Ce´cile, unaware as yet that she is his own daughter. The return of Fanny and the reconstitution of his family leads him to entertain as munificently as Timon and to gather around himself a group of freethinkers. However, the sickness and death of Ce´cile cause his last depression and retreat, which ends with his seeking to return to England. Pre´vost concludes his narrative in the same way that Defoe concludes his historical memoir-novels, with the protagonist trying to return home. However, Cleveland’s story is presented as a corrective to stories of satiric misanthropy such as Gulliver’s because he pays heed to Clarendon’s consistent counsel that mankind is made for society, even if it is a small society of the melancholy and disillusioned. It might appear that because of their isolation, the utopias in Cleveland could stand as parallels to the periods of withdrawal in

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Cleveland’s life. However, Cleveland’s isolation is never contented, chosen, or utopian. In fact, the stronger parallel between the utopias and Cleveland’s life derives from the fact that utopias fall apart in this novel,73 and that Cleveland’s periods of depressive isolation follow from losing the object of his perfect love, first Fanny and then Ce´ cile. The protagonist’s discovery of the perfect relationship resembles the novel’s construction of the perfect society; the revelation that both are impossible leads to the prevailing melancholy both in Cleveland and in the novel. If the novel thus combines antagonistic forms and disparate conventions, it sometimes leaves open opposed possibilities, as in its consideration of forms of religion. When he has returned to France in despair because Fanny has left him, Cleveland almost commits suicide, but is prevented, in an echo of Augustine’s conversion experience, by the sound of his young children approaching. Until this point, he has had only a natural religion, but first a Protestant minister visits to console him, then a Catholic priest is called in. The priest offers him the parable of a legitimate king who leaves his people good laws against which a small number of discontents rebel, threatening the happiness of the state. The minister suggests instead that a usurper has taken the place of the true king and has hidden away the good laws that he instituted, while some heroic rebels seek a return to the original institutions. To the Protestant’s strong statement of his case, the Catholics have no reasoned response; their only answer is to seize Cleveland’s children to indoctrinate them. The novel thus shows the Catholic authorities as arrogant, intolerant, and willing to use any pressure, including force, in their struggle. The Protestants are more concerned for Cleveland in his troubles, and Pre´ vost indicates his sympathy with them in the time of their persecution. However, the transplanted Protestants on St. Helena’s prove to be fanatical themselves when they obtain civil power. The dialogical encounter between the two religions in this first half of the novel implies a satiric criticism of both the high-handedness of the Catholic authorities and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the repressiveness of the Protestant Rochellers. The open-ended criticism of both the opposed religions marks the end of Book 4 and the first half of Pre´vost’s novel, published in 1731–32. Like the ending of this first half, the conclusion of the entire novel (published in 1738–39) is also concerned with Cleveland’s religion. Some asserted in the eighteenth century that Pre´ vost only obtained permission to publish the second half of Cleveland

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on condition that the protagonist would convert to Catholicism in the end.74 Cleveland does have a conversion experience, but what it involves remains ambiguous: he does not adopt any specifically Catholic doctrines, his spiritual guide at the end is Clarendon (a firm adherant of the Church of England) and there is little if any evidence that Cleveland becomes a Catholic. Pre´ vost leaves the conclusion deliberately vague, so that the authorities might not be able to say that his hero had embraced Protestantism. Since Cleveland does not even acknowledge any distinctively Christian beliefs, the text might be interpreted as indicating that he becomes neither Catholic nor Protestant. He may only become a theist who retains the natural religion inculcated by his mother, especially the doctrine that the natural promptings of the heart cannot be wrong.75 On this reading, Cleveland remains at the end of Book 8 suspended between, or outside, Catholics and Protestants, neither of which is explicitly accepted or rejected. Pre´vost has earlier implied his sympathy with the Protestants as victims of intolerance, but being a churchman himself and seeking to be reconciled with the Jesuits, he cannot make Cleveland a Protestant and also publish the conclusion of his novel. Thus, in Cleveland, Pre´vost is consistently accommodating potential oppositions in narrative forms and in cultural forms. He makes his hero both a member of the gentry, like Courtilz’s narrators, and an outcast with no place in his country, like Defoe’s. Important roles are played not only by formal tutors of the young man, as in Defoe’s novels, and by highly placed patrons, as in Courtilz’s, but also by parental substitutes, as in the romances that preceded the memoir-novels. Similarly, on the matter of travel, he makes use of the newer conventions of geographical accuracy and encounters with new world others, as well as providing motivation again from the older romance tradition in a search to be reunited with the loved one. Pre´ vost repeatedly pursues utopian possibilities even as he novelizes his utopias, breaking down the defining boundaries that would keep them separate from the rest of his narrative world, and subordinating utopia to narrative. He maintains some satiric implications only in the area of religion and only in the first half of the novel, suggesting that if Protestantism is not to be embraced, Catholicism has an even weaker claim ethically and historically. Still, by the end of the novel, Pre´vost has found a way to accommodate these opposites and the third possibility of a non-denominational theism. Typically, he excludes neither the middle nor the extremes.76

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As Pre´vost moves away from satiric structures in this work, he also revises the historical memoir-novel. He continues to include well-known historical figures from the late seventeenth century, but instead of concentrating on an obscure hero who plays some role in recorded historical events, Pre´ vost represents historical figures such as Clarendon and the Duchess of Orle´ans only insofar as they play a role in Cleveland’s private life. He subordinates the historical to the novelistic, the public to the private.77 One can obtain some idea of the satiric direction Pre´vost’s novel might have taken from the spurious continuation to the first part of the novel that was published in 1734. This continuation, which consists of only one volume (whereas Pre´ vost’s second half in 1738–39 would consist of three), is compressed and not written in Pre´ vost’s classical style. However, it follows much more closely than do Pre´vost’s own final volumes the plans he originally had for the novel as indicated in his Preface of 1731 (2:10–13). According to the apocryphal version, Cleveland returns to England soon after meeting Clarendon in exile and becomes a member of the king’s privy council. He finds the king intent only on his own pleasures, surrounded by sycophants and ruffians; in such a court, he is regarded as a philosophical idealist.78 As in the other historical memoir-novels, Cleveland here credits himself with acts of great historical consequence; he claims, for example, that he arranged the marriage of William and Mary. In this extremely anti-Catholic narrative, Cleveland hears from Clarendon that Catholics and dissenters caused the great fire in London after the passage of bills against nonconformity. He also learns that the Popish Plot to kill Charles was not a fabrication: the Jesuits felt they could not rely on him as they could on his brother James. In addition to such outrages against the English, the Jesuits are responsible for a series of heinous crimes against Cleveland and his family. A Jesuit confesses that he betrayed his acquaintance with Cleveland by raping and stabbing Ce´ cile and leaving her for dead. Gelin, who ran off with Fanny and attempted to kill Cleveland in Pre´vost’s own first part, becomes a Catholic and a Jesuit to escape punishment here. At the end, he confesses to having killed Cleveland’s son, shot Cleveland, and killed those who assisted him. (Gelin becomes one of the good Jesuits in Pre´vost’s continuation.) At the end of this narrative, Fanny has died, Cleveland is retired from all public affairs, facing a corrupt and dangerous political system, and almost withdraws again to Rumney-Hole cave. He resembles Gulliver much more than Pre´vost’s

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Cleveland will. A dark air of plots and counterplots, intelligence and counter-intelligence, envelops most of the narrative in this volume 5. Moreover, the way this narrative integrates and draws parallels between Cleveland’s domestic losses and national political crises recalls the interweaving of the strands of public and private in Courtilz’s historical memoir-novels. In its attacks on Catholics and Jesuits, this continuation is far more satiric than either part of the novel by Pre´vost, although the satire is monological and propagandistic. Even if Pre´vost had followed his original plot ideas for the second half of his narrative, it is unlikely he would have written anything so extreme or onesided. The French authorities had condemned Manon Lescaut, and the Jesuits had harshly criticized his portrayal of the Catholics in volume 4 of Cleveland. The spurious continuation caused renewed strong attacks against him. Nevertheless, like Cervantes, who transformed an unauthorized continuation into an important element of the second part of Don Quixote, Pre´vost acknowledged the relation between the apocryphal volume 5 and his own original plans, and this makes volume 5 a part of his text. After the spurious volume 5 was printed in Utrecht in 1734, the first books by Pre´vost were reissued, numbered volumes 1–5 instead of 1–4. Perhaps for this reason, when he published his own conclusion to Cleveland in 1738–39, Pre´vost began that continuation with volume 6 (2:5). The numbering draws attention to the spurious volume 5 as an absent part of Pre´vost’s novel. It allows him both to disavow and figuratively to include it as the mirror image and darker alternative to his own novel. Both the extremely heterodox volume 5 and the accommodating volumes 6 to 8 have continuities with Pre´vost’s original books of Cleveland. The choice between the apocryphal conclusion and Pre´ vost’s own ending points to a fork in the road in the history of this narrative genre, a divergence between the form’s past and its future. The departure from satire and from the historical memoir-novel constitutes a swerve toward the novel of psychological selfanalysis, of sincerity and sentiment, and eventually toward the Bildungsroman; I will rejoin this path in chapter 4. Important indicators of the shift here include Cleveland’s intense self-absorption, his need to overcome misanthropic and suicidal tendencies, his avoidance of satire and irony, and his continuing melancholic dissatisfaction. In light of these indicators, it is revealing and significant, as I will note in chapter 4, that along with Robinson Crusoe, Cleveland was a favorite work of Rousseau, and exerted a

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shaping influence on his narrative practice and historical imagination. First, however, I will return to the British context to establish a line of descent linking not the metamorphoses of a particular form—such as the memoir-novel—but varieties of the three different forms—satire, history, novel—in a single trajectory.

3 Satire, Philosophical History, and the Historical Novel, 1700–1815 THIS CHAPTER TRACES A LINE IN THE HISTORY OF NARRATIVE GENRES that has clear parallels with the genealogy outlined in the next chapter. Whereas the next will be concerned with satire, history, and novels in a comparative context, this chapter focuses on British works. Still, like this one, chapter 4 will take Swift’s satire as a point of departure and from there follow a set of appropriations and revisions through a form of historical narrative to the emergence of a new genre of novel in the early nineteenth century. Here the emphasis is on A Tale of a Tub (1704) more than Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and the related contemporaneous use of satiric form by Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees (1715; Part 2, 1729). Hume distances himself from satire on principle in his Essays (1741, 1742, and later editions), but he also makes use of satiric form in The Natural History of Religion (1757). His covertly satiric conjectural history thus stands in an ambivalent relation to Swift’s satiric narratives. In the History of England (1754–62), Hume attempts to move beyond his satiric indictment of religion (just as Rousseau will later attempt in Emile to move beyond his satiric indictment of modern civilization). Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) mediates between the dominant mid-eighteenth century cultural understanding and a later one based on organic growth, and helps prepare the way for a new genre of novel. The form that emerges in response both to Ferguson’s sociological and Hume’s philosophical histories is the historical novel as practiced by Scott, and in particular Old Mortality (1816). The chief focus here will be on the histories and essays of Hume, because they serve as the hinge around which the history of these narrative genres turns. These histories and essays retain some ties to the previously dominant genre of satire, although they also repudiate most of the presumptions of that 115

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form; and they open up new possibilities for historical and fictional narratives which are eventually realized in the classic historical novel of Scott. I will trace the differing treatment of three major concerns in the works and forms discussed here: the prospects for mediation between the religious extremes of superstition and enthusiasm; the question of the sociability or selfishness of human beings; and the evidence for progress or degeneration in history. Swift’s satires, Hume’s essays and histories, and Scott’s historical novel all examine the effects of religion on society and politics, in particular the social consequences of superstition and fanaticism. They represent the various possibilities—from minimal to substantial—for a middle ground or alternative that would avoid the harmful effects of both these extremes of the religious attitude. Swift’s satiric narratives present the least chance for finding such grounds for moderating the social consequences of religious extremism. Like other satiric narratives, although they represent extremes as pernicious, they provide few or no alternatives to the unacceptable pairs of opposites they diagnose at work in human affairs. Both Hume and Scott stress the way that religious extremes give rise to political parties, but Scott’s novel provides the fullest and most realistic depiction of the emergence and eventual prevalence of moderates and moderation in religion and politics. The shift that takes place among these works can be extended so that the use of and attitude toward extremes and mediation in general constitutes a distinguishing trait of the narrative forms to which they belong. These narratives also take clear and differing positions on the question whether human beings are fundamentally sociable or selfish. The satirists Swift and Mandeville see self-love, hypocrisy, and delusion as the fundamental and defining grounds of human nature. They imply that isolation from a corrupt world is understandable, even though they do not endorse a thoroughgoing misanthropy. Beginning with Hume’s, the later works maintain that human beings are sociable by nature. Indeed, since Hume grounds his moral and political thought on this conviction, it is important for him to controvert the position of the philosophers of selfishness and of such satirists as Swift and Mandeville. In addition, all these works offer distinctive views of history, in particular of the extent to which progress can be discerned in history. Swift’s satires imply that history reveals degeneration, not improvement. In Hume’s view, modern British and European

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history gives evidence of progress in institutions which yet might prove to be reversible and impermanent. Ferguson works out a theory of the stages of social development in which early stages are definitively left behind and indefinite progress is possible, although serious loss also attends any advance. Scott adopts Ferguson’s conception of historical progression by stages along with the losses it entails to produce both an insistence on, and deep ambivalence about, historical progress. The perspectives that these works adopt on the questions of extremism versus moderation, selfishness versus sociability, and degeneration versus progress characterize not only the genres to which they belong but also the cultural paradigms in which they participate and which they help distinguish. Thus, the exclusion of middle grounds and a focus on extremes in narrative satire is closely related to and helps produce the paradoxes that characterize the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century paradigm. The transparent sociability and self-presentation that underpins Hume’s thinking on morals coheres with the paradigm of representational clarity in the mid-eighteenth century. And the vision of indefinite self-generated progress that underlies the historical novel of Scott presents a strong analogue with the paradigm of organic growth and the realization of inner potential that is characteristic of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.

SWIFT AND MANDEVILLE The narrative in A Tale of a Tub establishes a correspondence between contemporary events—the adventures of three lateseventeenth-century men about town named Peter, Martin, and Jack—and events from much earlier times—that is, major developments in the history of the Christian churches in the West from the beginnings through Calvin and Knox. Peter defends his wearing of fancifully embroidered coats with considerable interpretive ingenuity in the face of an explicit prohibition in their father’s will, which serves as the brothers’ scripture (section 2). He also establishes the use of puppet shows, threatening bulls, a universal pickling solution, and a formula that transmutes bread into mutton (section 4). As the object of the satire in the early parts of the narrative, Peter clearly represents Catholics and the Pope, with his assertions of unlimited authority and his reliance on oral tradition. But he also stands for a priesthood that encourages and then

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exploits superstitious acceptance of unreasonable beliefs. His actions illustrate the emphasis on external show, ceremony, and hierarchy that characterizes a superstitious form of worship, as well as its use of strained allegorical interpretation to reconcile modern practices with ancient laws. In its second half, on the other hand, the Tale takes Jack as the object of its satire. After he breaks with Peter, Jack adheres to the literal meaning of the will as the answer to all life’s difficulties, even applying a piece of it to his sore toe. He prays ostentatiously in public, goes crazy when he hears music, and closes his eyes so he will walk into posts (section 11). Again, it is clear that Jack stands for extreme Protestants and Calvin, with his determinism and extreme reliance on scripture alone. But in addition, his behavior is supposed to be typical of fanatics or enthusiasts, as he relies only on the inner light of the individual in interpreting scripture, and goes to ridiculous lengths to do the opposite of what Peter does. Their appearance and behavior reveal how Swift thinks of the leaders of the superstitious and the enthusiasts: Peter is a power-mad fop, and Jack a ragged lunatic. Martin, who stands for Martin Luther and seems to constitute the middle ground between these extremes, does not offer any resistance to Peter’s abuses until the split between the brothers, nor does he succeed at all in moderating Jack’s extreme reaction at that time. In fact, he is an ineffectual cipher who makes no mark on the narrative. In the world of the satiric historical allegory, he offers not an alternative to his brothers, but only an anomalous and transient hint of moderation and good sense. The Tale thus uses the characteristic strategy of narrative satire, which parodically satirizes first one position, and then subjects its opposite and presumed alternative to comparable criticism, in order to show the equal unacceptability of opposed cultural or ideological perspectives. Narrative satire does not represent its norms; it leaves readers with unacceptable extremes and an excluded middle. In the Tale, superstition and enthusiasm stand as the prototypical extremes with which other pairs of opposites prove to be related. For example, in his history of the fictional Aeolists, Swift associates fanatics with a gross physicality, and he assigns a vacuous spirituality to the superstitious, but he represents no grounds for mediating between such materiality and spirituality. Moreover, the satiric pattern of the excluded middle holds not only for the allegorical narrative of church history in the Tale, but also for the digressions that satirize modern learning and alternate with

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the historical allegory of the brothers. Thus, the discourse of modern writers such as the narrator of the Tale is divided between an elaborately figurative and metaphysical style on the one hand and a reductively literal style on the other; the first pretends to bring back ‘‘knowledge of insides,’’ the second to provide merely the results of external observations. But no discourse mediates between the allegorical and the literal, between insides and outsides in the world of learning or the history of religion. At a climactic point in the Tale’s ‘‘Digression on Madness,’’ the narrator himself recommends as the ‘‘sublime and refined point of felicity’’ the choice of being ‘‘a Fool among Knaves’’;1 it is clear that in Swift’s satiric vision in this work, no third alternative exists to this or any other pair of unacceptable possibilities. In Gulliver’s Travels, the same alternation between opposed extremes occurs in Gulliver’s successive visits to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Only the six-foot Gulliver might constitute a figure with a normal human perspective between the small and generally smallminded Lilliputians and the gigantic Brobdingnagians with their large-minded king. But Swift makes sure that Gulliver is not to be relied on as a model or authority. In both these lands, as later among the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver identifies himself with the inhabitants and accepts in large measure their view of him, often without even realizing he is doing so.2 In Book 2, he behaves like a pet, providing entertainment to his owners even as he puts on airs and exaggerates his own importance. In his one attempt to distance himself from the perspective of his hosts, he adopts a contemptuous attitude toward the far-sighted, sensible, and responsible Brobdingnagian king, who refuses Gulliver’s offer of the secret of making gunpowder. Gulliver also falls far short of embodying a norm or mediating term in Book 4. Here, Swift divides opposing traits of human nature between the two most distinctive species on the island. The narrative first satirizes the animal physicality of the Yahoos, with their recognizable desires for wealth, status, and power. But it also establishes an ironic distance from the Houyhnhnms who, despite their rationality and capacity for moderate emotions such as benevolence and friendship, are passionless creatures lacking the capacity to love. They engage in faintly ridiculous activities for equine animals, such as milking cows, threading needles, and chopping down trees. A middle ground combining traits of both these species might acknowledge the passionate and physical desires of the Yahoos, but attempt to exercise the rational control of

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the Houyhnhnms where appropriate. Instead, Gulliver tries to deny his passionate nature and become wholly rational like the Houyhnhnms, but as he does so and shows his ‘‘Love and Veneration’’ (242) for them, he paradoxically reveals his irrational passion for creatures who do not feel love themselves.3 Only Gulliver’s rescuer Don Pedro might embody a mediating term, as a sane and decent civilized human. However, like Martin, Don Pedro is hardly specified as a character in the narrative, and the energies of the satirist go to portraying the extremes and deviations from the norm, not those who may inhabit the middle ground. This concentration on extremes and nearly total exclusion of moderate terms reveals the structure of a paradox in which contradictory terms are derived from the same presuppositions about human nature; it is both necessary and logically impossible to embrace both. Although the Travels thus reveals excluded middles and paradoxical implications, in accord with the cultural paradigm of the seventeenth century, it also makes use of a famously transparent prose style and a lucid architectural construction, especially in Books 1, 2, and 4. In its form and style, Gulliver’s Travels thus gives evidence of the workings of both the earlier and the later cultural paradigms. Satiric narratives of any period do not lead up to tragic recognitions and reversals or comic marriages. Instead, the state of affairs in satire either remains at a level, showing no improvement, or it describes a decline.4 Swift’s narrative satires fit this pattern, revealing no assurance of progress but rather implying a degeneration over time, or at best the persistence of debased conditions, with no change throughout history. The Tale and the Travels are noteworthy also for the force and extent of their critique of official and laudatory forms of historiography. The narrative in the Tale of the sordid doings of a trio of modish contemporaries unambiguously lowers and trivializes the history of the Christian churches. This historical allegory in the Tale implies a view of history according to which delusion and fanaticism underlie the greatest part of human behavior, and the world is divided between fools and knaves. Such a perspective finds no regular or repeated processes that might provide meaning, because they could be understood and shaped by human effort; it satirizes official history and the idea of any coherence in history. The ‘‘Digression on Madness’’ argues that virtually all important human events—including ‘‘the establishment of new empires by conquest, the advance and progress of new schemes in philosophy, and the

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contriving, as well as the propagating, of new religions’’ (178)— take their rise from madness and delusion. There is no ground of accomplishment that is untainted. Even the Tale itself is told, if not by an idiot, then by a madman (85). Furthermore, in a coda at the end of the ‘‘Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,’’ Swift provides a brief history of fanaticism throughout the ages, which demonstrates the constant and enduring traits of the phenomenon, such as charismatic leaders attended by groups of adoring female followers. The same features that characterized fanaticism in the ancient world continue to appear in the modern world. The history of fanaticism, like the history of superstition, gives no evidence of progress or improvement, and there appears to be no history of a moderate religion. The Travels shares the bleak historiographical thesis of the Tale. The narrative of the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians in Book 1 recounts some of the same history of religious disputes as does the narrative of the brothers in the Tale. By reducing the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants to the question of which end of the egg to break, the later satiric history, like the earlier one, lowers and trivializes the causes of religious disagreements. The stress on the large number of deaths caused by wars of religion magnifies the disparity between the trivial or undecidable disagreements and their destructive consequences. In Book 2, after Gulliver presents an official, self-congratulatory account of British institutions and their history, the king’s questions direct attention to the weaknesses, contradictions, and corruptions that Gulliver’s account left out. ‘‘He was perfectly astonished with the historical Account I gave him of our Affairs during the last Century, protesting it was only an Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, and Banishments’’ (116). The king’s perspective converts Gulliver’s panegyric into satire. As he concludes: ‘‘I observe among you some Lines of an Institution, which in its Original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by Corruptions’’ (116). The third book of Gulliver’s Travels generalizes the skeptical view of English history implied by Book 2 and of Christian history from Book 1, applying it to all historiography, secular as well as sacred, ancient as well as modern. In Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver discovers that those celebrated as the greatest heroes in ancient and modern history were in fact the greatest criminals. The world has been misled ‘‘by prostitute Writers, to ascribe the greatest Exploits in War to Cowards, the wisest Counsel to Fools, Sincerity to

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Flatterers, Roman Virtue to Betrayers of their Country, Piety to Atheists, Chastity to Sodomites, Truth to Informers’’ (183). Conversely, those actually responsible for virtuous or heroic actions have been consigned to oblivion or ignominy. Historical narratives, which seem to have been written without exception by venal and biased partisans, exactly invert the characters and events of the past, and posterity, lacking any alternatives, has accepted their lies as the truth. In Book 4, finally, whether the first Yahoo couple appeared mysteriously on a mountain or was bred by the mud (thus recapitulating the accounts of the creation of human beings in Genesis), the history of the species in Houyhnhnmland consists of one uninterrupted degeneration.5 Gulliver’s Travels mocks the view of history as degenerative at only one point: we learn near the end of Book 2 that the Brobdingnagian giants believe themselves to be descended from even more gigantic giants. However, throughout the rest of the work, Swift consistently employs the idea of degeneration with little or no irony.6 To take just one further example, Gulliver places an ancient Roman Senate alongside a modern Parliament in Book 3, and compares some simple English yeoman from earlier days with their corrupt contemporary grandchildren; each case reveals a clear and dramatic degeneration. The view in Gulliver’s Travels of historical narratives as utterly unreliable and void of all meaning or progress is consonant with the view in the Tale of a Tub of history as the shapeless doings of deluded fanatics and mad innovators.7 Understandably, the view that human history consists of corruptions, follies, and madness leads to a withdrawal from human society. The teller of the Tale actually avoids misanthropic rhetoric and gestures, but he is apparently a madman who has spent time in Bedlam, and his genial commendations of his fellow modern writers are the object of fierce satire. Gulliver offers the clearest example of misanthropic withdrawal at the end of his Travels. However, Gulliver’s misanthropy, like his attempt to become a Houyhnhnm, is satirized as an excessive reaction to his belated realization of human imperfection. After all, Gulliver in the end is proud that he talks and trots like a horse, and in the narrative’s concluding paragraph he inveighs bitterly against human pride even as he himself displays a colossal vanity based on his acquaintance with the supposedly superior Houyhnhnms. Swift implies agreement with the Brobdingnagian king’s characterization of human beings as the ‘‘most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin

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that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth’’ (116), yet he does not exempt himself from the humanity thus characterized, and he acknowledges that like Don Pedro individuals apart from the generality can be honest and decent.8 Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees reveals wide-ranging affinities in its form and perspective with Swift’s narrative satires, especially the Tale of a Tub, although his understanding of history diverges significantly from Swift’s. Mandeville’s argument takes the form of the paradox which gives the Fable its subtitle: ‘‘Private Vices, Public Benefits.’’ With evident satisfaction, Mandeville acknowledges repeatedly, ‘‘This I know will seem to be a strange Paradox to many,’’ then goes on to turn an objection into an illustration of his thesis. For example, he writes, ‘‘I shall be ask’d what Benefit the Publick receives from Thieves and House-breakers’’ (86).9 The answer: they provide employment for half the locksmiths in the nation; the money they spend on liquor helps support the innkeeper and brewer; and what they give to their favorite women provides income to linen-drapers, seamstresses, and others. The highwayman, by making money circulate, provides more of a public benefit than the law-abiding avaricious man or the miser.10 Similarly, Mandeville argues that politicians have long understood that it is necessary to tolerate prostitution in order to preserve the honor of respectable women, who otherwise would be subject to more frequent and more determined sexual assaults. The paradox can be expressed by the rhetorical question he poses: who would imagine ‘‘that Incontinence should be made serviceable to the Preservation of Chastity?’’ (95). At times, Mandeville diagnoses the workings of a dialectic in which one extreme produces its opposite and then is modified in turn. For example, he writes that ‘‘Nothing was more instrumental in forwarding the Reformation, than the Sloth and Stupidity of the Roman Clergy; yet the same Reformation has rous’d ’em from the Laziness and Ignorance they then labor’d under, and the Followers of Luther, Calvin, and others, may be said to have reform’d not only those whom they drew in to their Sentiments, but likewise those who remain’d their greatest Opposers’’ (94). Although Mandeville does not contrast superstition with enthusiasm here, he uses the example of the committed reformers and the CounterReformation Catholics to show an unexpectedly useful dialectic between extreme opposites.11 Mandeville ascribes to moral legislators and politicians what he considers the crucial strategy of managing people by setting one

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passion to check another, letting envy overcome laziness, for instance, or employing pride to control desire.12 He thus actually goes further than Swift in his treatment of extremes and moderation.13 Swift is fascinated with the extremists and devotes almost all his energies to representing and satirizing them, but he usually includes some inconspicuous or ill-defined example of the moderate man in his narratives. Mandeville, by contrast, celebrates the utility of extremists and extreme oppositions, and he scorns moderation. Thus, in arguing that prodigality and voluptuousness are useful vices, he observes: ‘‘Abundance of moderate Men I know that are Enemies to Extreams will tell me that Frugality might happily supply the Place of the two Vices I speak of. . . . Whoever argues thus shows himself a better Man than he is a Politician. Frugality is like Honesty, a mean starving Virtue, that is only fit for small Societies of good peacable Men. . . . ’Tis an idle dreaming Virtue that employs no Hands’’ (104–5).14 Since Mandeville sees the passion of self-love behind all human actions, he, like Swift, is averse to most of what passes for sociability: the company of boors who hunt foxes all day long, or of political partisans ‘‘who count the Island to be good for nothing while their Adversaries are suffer’d to live upon it’’ (340). But he insists he is not a man-hater merely because he would prefer to read a book or converse with a polite and learned individual rather than spend his nights with men drinking themselves senseless. His position is similar to Swift’s: he scorns to flatter men in general by ignoring their self-love, pride, and hypocrisy, but he reserves respect for decent individuals. Mandeville is careful to say that he does not recommend that individuals practice the vices whose beneficial effects he diagnoses. Nevertheless, he maintains that a society without luxury, prodigality, envy, and pride, without inequality, money, and trade, would be a poor and unpleasant place to live. This is the moral of the Fable itself: ‘‘T’enjoy the World’s Conveniencies, / Be famed in War, yet live in Ease / Without great Vices, is a vain / Eutopia seated in the Brain’’ (36). As the primary historical example of a poor and plain but virtuous society, Mandeville cites ancient Sparta. But rather than delivering the conventional eulogy of the laws and morals of the Spartans, Mandeville dismisses them: ‘‘there never was a Nation whose Greatness was more empty than theirs: The Splendour they liv’d in was inferior to that of a Theatre, and the only thing they could be proud of, was, that they enjoy’d nothing’’ (245). By contrast, Mandeville asserts that he and

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most others, if they would be honest, prefer an ‘‘opulent, potent, and flourishing’’ society and nation to Spartan simplicity. Mandeville sees the poor if virtuous society as typical of the past, and prosperous commercial societies as characteristically modern. He thus reverses the stoicism and civic humanism to which Swift still subscribes that condemned luxury as corrupting and looked to the ancient republics as model societies. Rather, he celebrates the effects of luxury such as wealth and empire. Thus, for Mandeville, history reveals a clear improvement, away from small, frugal, and honest societies to large, prosperous, and hypocritical empires. In form, The Fable of the Bees is consonant with the seventeenth-century paradigm: in its thesis and in its whole mode of arguing, it privileges paradox. Its Remarks, rather than remaining secondary to the short poetic fable, become of primary importance in the work, just as do Bayle’s Remarks in his Dictionary. The inclusion of essays, notes, poetry, and narrative in the Fable reveals the same miscellaneous accumulation of forms in a single work that Swift’s Tale also exhibits. The celebration of extremes is consistent with this paradoxical paradigm. But Mandeville’s attitude toward history and his affirmation of the positive consequences of luxury seem inconsistent with the pessimistic emphasis in this paradigm on corruption among historical agents and corruptions in the historical record. The acceptance of modern commercial society as an improvement anticipates a common position in the paradigm of the mid-eighteenth century, but it is expressed in a satiric and paradoxical form characteristic of the preceding paradigm. Although Mandeville continued to add to the Fable of the Bees after the first publication of the poem with Remarks in 1715, the form he adopts alters radically in 1729, with the first appearances of Part Two of the Fable. This part uses a series of dialogues between two friends, one of them clearly a surrogate for Mandeville, to defend and extend the ideas in Part One, but it weakens the paradoxical nature of their expression.15 In the last two dialogues, Cleanthes, Mandeville’s spokesman, offers a conjectural history of the emergence of human society in purely naturalistic and secular terms. He argues for the critical importance of fear in the formation of society—fear of predatory animals in the first place, then fear of other men. As he constructs one of the first conjectural histories, whose ideas will be echoed and elaborated later by others, including Hume and Rousseau in the 1750s, Mandeville expresses them in a form that is more conversational than the first part of the Fable, more straightforward and less satiric—more suitable to the cultural paradigm of the mid-eighteenth century.16

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HUME Hume criticizes the use of satiric form because he disagrees with its presuppositions and implications. As he sees it, satire expresses a selfish system of morals which ascribes human actions not to sociability but to self-love, and thus degrades human nature. In addition, satire emphasizes polar extremes, whereas Hume almost always searches for grounds of moderation and accommodation. Lastly, whereas satire tends to see only a process of degeneration, Hume sees a principle of improvement in history. Instead of employing narrative satire, therefore, Hume’s works after the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) take the form mostly of polite essays, collected in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1741, 1742, and later eds.) and histories—The Natural History of Religion (written c. 1750, pub. 1757) and The History of England (1754–62). However, when Hume treats the subject of religion in these forms, he sees a continuing predominance of extremes and no evidence of improvement; his writings on religion, even when cast as an essay or a history, usually include strong elements of satire. In the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), an essayistic reworking of Book 3 of the Treatise, Hume argues that people naturally approve of what is useful and disapprove of what is harmful to society, and that the foundation from which principles of morality can be derived is a ‘‘general benevolence in humankind’’ (300): ‘‘no qualities are more entitled to the general good-will and approbation of mankind than beneficence and humanity, friendship and gratitude, natural affection and public spirit’’ (178).17 To thinkers such as Mandeville and La Rochefoucauld who maintained that all human action could be reduced to the motive of self-love, Hume responds that there is strong evidence from everyday life that people act out of concern for others and for society, and he asserts that he will continue to esteem those who act generously even if somehow self-love motivates their actions (297). In other words, Hume dissolves the paradox of deriving acts of self-sacrifice from selfishness by claiming that the generous act is all that counts; even if the cynics call the motive selflove, that does not reduce the contribution of the act to the welfare of others. The philosophers of selfishness, he concludes, offer a partial, and deliberately paradoxical view of human nature: ‘‘Such a philosophy is more like a satyr [i.e., a satire] than a true delinea-

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tion or description of human nature; and may be a good foundation for paradoxical wit and raillery, but is a very bad one for any serious argument or reasoning’’ (302). In the Enquiry, Hume looks back repeatedly on satire and on the related cultural paradigm which emphasizes paradoxical extremes, convoluted arguments, and intricately subordinative forms. The Enquiry declares more openly than his other works Hume’s opposition to satire; he there provides the grounds for his criticism of a satiric philosophy of selfishness in a moral philosophy based on benevolence and philanthropy.18 But it is in his Essays, Moral and Political (1741, 1742), that he first works out his formal alternative to satire and the paradoxes of the preceding cultural paradigm; in the essays, he offers both a rationale for, and examples of, moderation, sociality, and improvement. The essay presents a clear, accessible argument in polite, non-abusive terms without major digressions, remarks, or other complicating and distracting formal features; it stands in strong accord with a paradigm that emphasizes the clarity, distinctiveness, and general accessibility of accurate ideas. The project of Addison and Steele in their essays was to introduce a more moderate and less satiric tone to polite conversation on everyday subjects; Hume extends this idea, writing essays in order to cultivate a spirit of moderation in the discussion of political topics.19 In the Advertisement prefacing the first edition of his essays, Hume explains their purpose as the introduction of ‘‘Moderation and Impartiality in . . . handling Political Subjects’’; if the essays help quiet ‘‘Party-Rage,’’ he anticipates that ‘‘this design will be acceptable to the moderate of both Parties.’’20 In Hume’s view, satire exacerbates party antagonisms; habitual recourse to partisan passions and satire threatens to disrupt civil order and bring a regression to civil war. The Humean essay, by contrast, seeks to construct a middle ground for the impartial consideration of contentious political questions. Thus, in two essays published first in 1748, ‘‘Of the Original Contract,’’ and ‘‘Of Passive Obedience,’’ Hume considers the most characteristic doctrines of each of the parties in Britain, and offers a balanced appraisal of both, with the aim of bringing each to see the merely partial truth both of its own view and of its opponent’s. The role of the philosophical essayist is by means of such impartiality to suggest grounds of compromise where the moderates of each side can meet in agreement without triumphing over or submitting to the other. Hume also designs his essays as a middle ground or a bridge be-

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tween the learned world and the world of polite society. In ‘‘Of Essay-Writing’’ (1742), he calls himself an ambassador from the learned world to what he calls the ‘‘conversible’’ world. Even more than an ambassador, he sees himself as a commercial agent and middle-man who brings ‘‘Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company,’’ and tries to import from the learned whatever ‘‘Commodities’’ might be useful or entertaining in ‘‘Company’’ (535).21 In other words, whatever the topic and however much it might seem a technical or specialized consideration of political or economic theory, Hume’s activity as an essayist consists of mediating between divergent worlds. Similarly, in ‘‘Of the Middle-Station in Life’’ (1742), he maintains explicitly that those in the middle ranks of men have the greatest opportunity of exercising the moral virtues and possess the greatest reasons to do so; finding themselves between the poor and the great, they have the leisure to pursue knowledge and the motivation to distinguish themselves. In addition to the opportunities and motivation to pursue wisdom and virtue, the middle ranks will also be in the happiest station in life (545–51). Again, it is the middle ground between extremes that is desirable, and the position that Hume himself occupies. In ‘‘Of Luxury’’ (1752, later renamed ‘‘Of Refinement in the Arts’’), Hume adds to his earlier listing of their accomplishments the contribution made by the middle rank of men to the establishment of political liberty. He observes that whereas only two classes exist in previous social forms such as feudalism—‘‘the proprietors of the land and their vassals or tenants’’ (227)—once commerce, industry, and luxury are established, not only can the peasants become independent property owners, but ‘‘tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the property, and draw authority and consideration to that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty’’ (277). The middle ranks of men are responsible for the progress of political institutions to allow greater liberty, and the activity of the essayist parallels their activity, since both essayist and middle-class tradesmen establish a commerce between different and distant parts of the world. The focus on middle terms and middle ranks thus leads to a progressive concept of history. In his essays, Hume in fact constructs a theory of social, economic, and cultural improvement. In ‘‘Of Refinement in the Arts,’’ he asserts that the fine arts progress in tandem with the practical arts as men cease to live in isolated selfsufficiency, and that ‘‘the more these refined arts advance, the

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more sociable men become, nor is it possible that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation, they should be contented to remain in solitude’’ (271).22 Hume here identifies the figure of the lone misanthrope or satirist with earlier, barbaric times when humans had not become civilized enough to engage in polite conversation. Hume’s history of society is founded, like his system of morals, on a human instinct of benevolence, sociability, and philanthropy.23 Commerce builds on and encourages sociability as well as stable and secure social institutions by refining and sharpening the use of practical reason: ‘‘Laws, order, police, discipline . . . can never be carried to any degree of perfection, before human reason has refined itself by exercise . . . of commerce and manufacture’’ (273). Satirists have traditionally attacked as corrupting the effects of luxury on morals, but Hume reverses such charges by arguing that commerce and luxury are actually sources of improvement; they make legal order possible in the first place, and secure the greatest feasible degree of liberty through the rise of the middle ranks of men. Commerce and luxury increase knowledge, industry, and the socialization of humankind. The improvement is not only material, but involves a strengthening of institutions so that the insecurity of feudal times gives way to modern laws that protect civil liberties. Just as Hume’s emphasis on benevolence meant a rejection of satiric misanthropy, his vision of a progressive improvement in society inverts the traditional satiric condemnation of luxury. The satirist attacked luxury in the interest of an ancient republican idea of liberty; Hume defends luxury on the basis of a modern commercial idea of liberty.24 His turn away from satire arises in large part from a commitment to commercial society and to a rational public sphere for the discussion of policy. Hume shows in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals how deliberate and self-conscious he is about transvaluing luxury. ‘‘Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniencies of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satirists, and severe moralists’’ (181). Then, speaking of his own efforts, he observes that ‘‘Those, who prove, or attempt to prove, that such refinements rather tend to the increase of industry, civility, and arts regulate anew our moral as well as political sentiments, and represent, as laudable or innocent, what had formerly been re-

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garded as pernicious and blameable’’ (181). When he substitutes ‘‘refinement’’ for ‘‘luxury’’ at the beginning of this passage and in the title of his essay on the subject, Hume is able to praise its operation without being paradoxical. Mandeville still speaks of the products of luxury—the increased conveniences, comforts, and indulgence in superfluities—as vices, so to point out its benefits seems paradoxical. Hume dissolves this paradox, like the one that saw selfishness behind all behavior, by arguing that because of its social utility what has been called luxury is not a vice (as long as it is moderate); instead, it serves as an engine of refinement and improvement. In both these cases where he eliminates paradoxes, Hume’s position is consonant with a cultural paradigm that stresses uncomplicated clarity of thought and expression. By contrast, even when Mandeville takes the same position on the value of luxury, he does so implicitly, in The Fable of the Bees, casting his thought in a paradoxical, satiric, and highly accretive form. Thus, in the Enquiry and in his Essays, Hume critiques and distances himself from the use of satiric form, arguing that human beings are fundamentally benevolent rather than selfish or misanthropic, supporting moderates and moderation rather than polarized extremes, and seeing improvement in history rather than degeneration. On these grounds, he registers in one of his earliest essays his specific disagreement with the implications and techniques of Gulliver’s Travels. In ‘‘Of the Dignity of Human Nature’’ (later retitled ‘‘Of the Dignity and Meanness of Human Nature’’), he names neither the author nor the title of Swift’s work, but the references to Books 1, 2, and 4 of the Travels are, I think, unmistakable (91). In this essay, Hume first sets out his own belief in the dignity of the species by closely echoing and expanding upon Hamlet’s lines beginning, ‘‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason’’ (2.2.303–6). Man, Hume says, is ‘‘a creature, whose thoughts are not limited by any narrow bounds, either of place or time; who carries his researches into the most distant regions of this globe, and beyond this globe, to the planets and heavenly bodies; . . . who casts his eye forward to see the influence of his actions upon posterity and the judgment that will be formed of his character a thousand years hence . . .’’ (82). He complains that there are, however, two effective ways of undercutting this human greatness. The first is by ‘‘insisting only upon the weakness of human nature’’ (82), an accurate description, I think, of Swift’s strategy in representing human beings as filthy Yahoos or Englishmen as

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vainglorious Lilliputians. The second objectionable technique is the forming of a ‘‘new and secret comparison between man and beings of the most perfect wisdom’’ (83). Hume’s mention of wise ‘‘beings’’ here exactly suits the depiction of the rational Houyhnhnms; it captures the difficulty most readers feel about how to refer to creatures who are physically equine, but speak and act like rational Stoics. Hume protests the implicit nature of Swift’s juxtaposition of Houyhnhnm perfections with human imperfections: he objects that ‘‘we should know when this comparison takes place’’ (83). More substantively, he admits that human beings are imperfect, but argues that all ascriptions of wisdom or virtue are relative, and arise from comparing one man with another. Only by comparing humans with perfection can one make human accomplishments seem contemptible. Thus, Hume argues that Swift’s satire unfairly separates out extremes of human nature, and pays too little attention to the middle ground where most human characters can be found. Perhaps Hume criticizes the satiric techniques used in Gulliver’s Travels, and yet suppresses the name of that work, partly because in some ways his philosophy resembles that of the Houyhnhnms. Hume is far from being a rationalist like the Houyhnhnms, but the list of moderate passions that he cites with approval in the Enquiry as the foundation of morality—‘‘beneficence and humanity, friendship and gratitude, natural affection and public spirit’’ (178)—is almost identical to the list of virtues that the Houyhnhnms practice and respect: ‘‘Friendship and benevolence are the two principal virtues among the Houyhnhnms, and these not confined to particular objects, but universal to the whole race. . . . They preserve decency and civility in the highest degrees. . . . Temperance, industry, exercise, and cleanliness, are the lessons equally enjoined to the young ones of both sexes’’ (253–54). Perhaps Hume saw Gulliver’s Travels as subtly mocking philosophical creatures whose ethic corresponded closely with his own. But Hume also believed that Swift’s work recommended misanthropy and selfishness, as opposed to Hume’s assertion of the benevolence and sociability of human nature, in common with most other thinkers in the mid-eighteenth century. I would suggest that such assertions can be understood as a response to the contrary evidence provided by a commercial economy that much human behavior is in fact calculating, selfish, hypocritical, and inequitable. Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments maintains that everyone must work, not primarily for riches or material comforts,

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but in order to avoid being the object of anonymous disapproving spectators.25 A misanthrope such as Gulliver offends against a commercial system because he unsociably refuses to participate in it. The charge against the misanthrope is that he does not bear out the required sociable view of human nature, nor does he exhibit the anonymous and general good will that is required for participation in a market economy. The expression of such views by Hume or Smith cannot disprove the misanthrope’s perspective or refute the satiric view of human nature; it merely prohibits misanthropy, on the ground that asociability impedes the operation of the system.26 The advocacy of commercial sociability by Hume, Smith, and others certainly helps explain the repudiation of narrative and verse satire in the course of the century.27 There is one subject, however, on which Hume employs satire, and his correspondence indicates that his use of satiric form may have been quite deliberate. In a letter of 1751, around the time he was writing The Natural History of Religion, he regrets what he sees as Swift’s inability, since he was a ‘‘parson,’’ to satirize the clergy; Hume confesses that he ‘‘frequently had it in [his] Intentions to write a supplement to Gulliver, containing the Ridicule of Priests.’’ The subject, he maintains, is ‘‘so fertile, that a much inferior Genius, I am confident, might succeed in it.’’28 Although he might be an inferior satirist, Hume implies that he could outdo Swift on his own ground if the subject were the clergy. In fact, in A Tale of a Tub Swift did write a satire both of extreme religious leaders and of their followers. Although Hume objects to the implications of the satire in Gulliver’s Travels, when he analyzes the effects of religion on public affairs in his essay ‘‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’’ and in The Natural History of Religion, his texts, like satiric narratives, exhibit no discernible middle ground between unacceptable extremes and no progress in their narratives; in fact, they reiterate many of the terms and much of the satire of religious extremes in the Tale.29 In ‘‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,’’ Hume argues that, with its distrust of hierarchies and its assurance of individual inspiration, enthusiasm produces violent effects on the polity in the short term. However, because enthusiasts oppose the institutional structures that provide continuity and duration, the disorders of fanaticism, such as Calvinism or fundamentalism in general, pass fairly quickly. On the other hand, the reliance of superstitious worshippers such as the Catholics or Laudian Anglicans on ritual, ceremony, and hierarchy, produces effects that are less violent but

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more long-lasting. Encouraging timidity before all forms of authority, superstition leads to the eventual tyranny of a priesthood exercised through persecutions and religious wars (73–79). Ultimately, there seems to be no manifestation of religion that might mediate between these two extremes, no religious practice that would bring political peace and stability. In this short essay, Hume summarizes and clarifies much of the complex religious satire of A Tale of a Tub. In addition, he revises and extends the satiric analysis of the effects of religious attitudes on politics. Swift implies that not only are the fanatics and the superstitious insane and powerhungry, but that all of us reveal the same traits; not only is there no middle ground between fools and knaves, but there is nothing outside such opposites either, except perhaps madness. Hume sees only the superstitious and the enthusiasts among religious worshippers, but the lucidity and brevity of his analysis imply that a secure and calm ground can be gained outside the religious attitude, the kind of ground from which he conducts his analysis and writes his essay. The Natural History of Religion elaborates, generalizes, and further clarifies the implications of the analysis of religion in ‘‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’’ by placing these phenomena in a conjectural early history of the human mind.30 Like Mandeville in Part Two of The Fable of the Bees, Hume argues that religion arises not from rational speculation or admiration of the creation, but rather from gloomy apprehensions and fear, as people attempt to understand and propitiate the unknown causes that shape and limit their lives. This explanation accounts for the origin of polytheism; monotheism develops later, but it also depends on fear for its continuing power and appeal. Hume maintains that, rather than ascending irreversibly from polytheism to theism, religions oscillate unceasingly throughout history between polytheistic and theistic phases (48). In this cyclic narrative of religious history, there is no progress.31 After satirizing polytheism as forcefully as theism in the first half of the Natural History, in the second half of the work, he turns to argue that polytheism is actually less dangerous and damaging than theism. Although polytheism encourages superstition, it is syncretistic and tolerant, whereas theism by its nature is persecuting and fanatical. Hume’s analysis in The Natural History of Religion thus closely parallels Swift’s satire in A Tale of a Tub as well as his own earlier ‘‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.’’ Hume satirizes superstitious polytheists and enthusiastic theists just as

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Swift (and he himself ) had earlier satirized superstitious Catholics and fanatical Protestants. In his earlier and more conventional analysis, Hume had shown that the social effects of superstition could be more detrimental than those of enthusiasm; here he argues that the political effects of theism (or enthusiasm) are more damaging than those of polytheism (or superstition). Polytheism tends to foster courageous activity and love of liberty, whereas theism leads to monkish self-abasement and passivity before the deity. Like Machiavelli, Hume contrasts the ascetic self-denial of Christian saints with the battles fought by pagan heroes against tyrants. He considers theism as undesirable largely because of such effects on public and political life (an attitude Gibbon will also adopt in his Decline and Fall). In addition, the linking of philosophy with theology in theism leads philosophy to betray itself by condoning absurdity, mystery, and obscurity, while the separation of the two under polytheism allows more independent and unhindered development of rational philosophy and scientific thinking. Hume thus argues, satirically and unexpectedly, that theism is more unreasonable and oppressive than polytheism. In the Natural History, he follows the satiric strategy of attacking first one extreme form of worship (polytheism), then turning to criticize the opposite extreme (theism) which he might have been taken to endorse; he leaves the reader without a middle ground of moderate or reasonable religion that might be found outside the two extreme forms of ‘‘popular religion.’’ In the final chapters of the Natural History, Hume considers that theism and polytheism both embrace ‘‘impious conceptions of the divine,’’ and exert a ‘‘bad influence on morality.’’ That is, both polytheistic ‘‘idolators’’ and the ‘‘more exalted [theistic] religionists’’ confound the extremes of high and low, worship and fear: despite their assertions of moral probity, ‘‘popular religions are really,’’ Hume says, ‘‘a species of daemonism; and the higher the deity is exalted in power and knowledge, the lower of course is he depressed in goodness and benevolence.’’32 The more powerful the ‘‘religionists’’ make their god, the further they lower his moral nature, by conjoining human emotions such as jealousy, anger, and desire for approval to the powerfully destructive physical forces they call divine. Religionists of both kinds deal in extremes of height and depth, the sublime and the grotesque, and Hume expresses a strongly satiric criticism of all kinds of religion in these concluding chapters. On the final page of the Natural History, Hume argues that

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‘‘popular religions’’ inescapably conflate philosophy and pathology. ‘‘What a noble privilege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; . . . [but] examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams: Or . . . the playsome whimsies of monkies [sic] in human shape’’ (75).33 Contemplating the pathological nature of existing religions, Hume recommends in his conclusion that we let opposite forms of religion such as polytheism and theism battle each other, while we withdraw into the calmer regions of philosophy. There is a sphere outside the madness of ‘‘popular religions’’ in Hume’s Natural History, but that sphere is outside religion entirely, in the moral practice sanctioned by a coolly skeptical social and political philosophy.34 Thus, in his essays, Hume turns away from satire by adopting the view that human nature is benevolent, searching for grounds of moderation in social and political life, and seeing evidence of improvement in history. However, in his conjectural history of religion and in his essay on the subject, Hume employs the same satiric form and techniques that Swift employed in A Tale of a Tub and Mandeville used in his Fable; his satiric narrative of religion shows no evidence of historical improvement or grounds of moderation. The one alternative he envisions is an escape from the mad world of religious pathology into the calm world of philosophical reasoning about it. The History of England reveals a continuing complex relation to satire. Hume still satirizes opposed viewpoints both in politics and religion; however, unlike the more satiric conjectural history, this philosophical history moves toward establishing mediating positions between such extremes. Hume uses satiric form significantly in his history of the British Revolution of the seventeenth century and the rise of parties. He sees the partisan extremes of Tory and Whig as aligned with the religious opposites of superstition and enthusiasm. But in his narrative representation of secular party history, he develops a number of techniques for imagining or envisioning the position of moderate figures in history, and he even finds some grounds for endorsing a moderate position on religion, between opposed extremes. He also maintains that historical progress is discernible, though it might be conditional, or part of a larger cycle of refinement and its loss. Since the Whig interpretation of British history had been dominant for two generations when Hume began writing his own His-

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tory, it is the object of his sustained criticism.35 According to the most widespread version of the Whig view, England had enjoyed since the earliest times a constitution in which a form of Parliament including Commons not only had the right to approve all subsidies and funding for the monarch, but also served as protector of the subjects’ liberties. The Stuart monarchs, then, acted as tyrants who violated the ancient constitution by attempting to impose an absolute monarchy on the English.36 Hume argues, however, that the relative strength of kingly prerogative and parliamentary privilege in the English constitution before the seventeenth century was extremely unclear, depending heavily on the popularity of the monarch and the prevailing opinion of the age. ‘‘It is easy to see,’’ he observes, ‘‘how unintelligible the English constitution was, before the parliament was able, by continued acquisitions or encroachments, to establish it on fixt principles of liberty’’ (5:43).37 Hume argues that the Tudor rulers were actually more absolutist than their Stuart successors. Henry VII oppressed the people to satisfy his greed, while Parliament offered no effective check to his rapacity (3:66–68). Henry VIII had the Parliament declare that royal proclamations were equal in weight to the laws of the realm, and made his Parliaments confirm his continually shifting ideas on ecclesiastical matters. Regularly jailing members of Parliament, and informing Parliament that it could only say aye or nay to her proposals (4:285–89), Elizabeth carried claims of royal authority and prerogative further than any ruler who followed her. Overturning a long-standing Whig adulation of Elizabeth as a popular ruler who respected Parliament, Hume thus compares both Henry VIII and Elizabeth to absolute ‘‘Eastern’’ rulers, and characterizes their Parliaments as ‘‘servile and prostitute’’ (3:310; 4:124). Thus, as Hume sees it, when James I and Charles I laid claim to an absolute prerogative and divine right to rule, they only made explicit the understanding on which the almost despotic rule of their Tudor predecessors had rested. They were not being the constitutional innovators; rather, it was Commons’ growing interest in securing property and liberty that constituted the innovation. For Hume, this independent spirit resulted from recent economic and social developments—the abolition of the monasteries in the sixteenth century and the growth in commercial activity—both of which brought an increase of wealth to the middle class and the House of Commons.38 Since Henry VII and Henry VIII had seriously weakened the barons, the Commons now held a ‘‘balance of

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property’’ (5:40) in the kingdom. Their increased wealth gave them a greater stake in protecting individual property, and they learned that they could use the denial of appropriations as a means to defend the property and civil rights of subjects. In Hume’s view, there was no precedent for such an assertion of the ‘‘spirit of liberty’’ by the Commons. In refuting the notion of an ancient constitution, Hume undercuts the primary ground on which Whiggish principles had been asserted since the early seventeenth century; his overturning of an established dogma carries a strong satiric force.39 Hume not only undermines the most commonly invoked Whig arguments about the constitution through his representation of the Tudors, he also undercuts the common and conventional Tory arguments through his representation of the Stuarts. Against the Tory portrayal of the Stuarts as rightful monarchs who deserved unquestioning obedience, Hume represents Charles I as bearing substantial responsibility for the Civil War and James II as provoking the revolution of 1688–89. He maintains that Elizabeth understood the English system and the times well enough to exert her authority as far as it would go, and no further (4:303–4). Having inherited Elizabeth’s title, however, James and Charles lacked her political skills, and failed to recognize that Elizabeth’s authority, indeed all authority, derives from opinion, and that the temper of the times had changed, producing a new desire for liberty (5:128; 5:544; and ‘‘On the First Principles of Government’’). Hume believes the wisest course of action for Charles would have been to adjust to the new forces driving the Commons. But Charles’s ‘‘high idea of his own authority . . . made him incapable of submitting prudently to the spirit of liberty, which began to prevail among his subjects’’ (5:221). When Hume surveys the condition of the realm on the eve of the civil wars, he concludes that the misfortunes of England at the time arose in significant part from ‘‘the mixt character’’ of Charles (5:384). Although Hume grants Charles ‘‘eminent moral virtues’’ (5:384) in his private life, these exist on an entirely different plane from his serious ‘‘political errors’’ (5:384) which did incalculable harm: they contributed substantially to the coming of civil war, and were responsible for a breakdown in the order which it is the government’s first duty to protect.40 Hume’s Charles I is far from the blameless royal martyr of the extreme Tories. If Tories might take some consolation in Hume’s portrait of Charles’s private character, they could not even find that much in

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his portrait of James II. To Charles’s inflexibility and imperiousness, James added zealous bigotry and exceptional political ineptitude. Since Hume viewed resistance to established authority as a grave act, he thought it unwise constantly to discuss exactly when resistance would be justified. Nevertheless, he regarded earlier Tory assertions that kings ruled by divine right and deserved absolute obedience as ‘‘absurd’’ (5:563). Obviously, there were circumstances that justified resistance—during the reign of Nero, for example (‘‘Of Passive Obedience,’’ 490). When James attempted to rule through unlimited personal prerogative and to make Catholicism the favored religion in the realm, he sought to alter the constitution as it by then existed. This was the constitution as it had evolved to the point where Commons played a more significant role, and a ministerial executive was developing. The result was not yet a ‘‘regular plan of liberty,’’ in Hume’s words, but it was unmistakably different from the nearly absolute rule of the Tudors. By seeking to halt and reverse this progressive movement of the constitution on the fundamental points of prerogative and religion, James necessarily provoked resistance, lost legitimacy in popular opinion, and effectively ceased to protect the peace and security of the people; instead, he became the threat to their security and well-being. Ironically, James II’s bigotry and political ineptitude precipitated virtually universal resistance and thus the successful revolution of 1688–89 (6:531). Hume makes clear that only the revolution, ‘‘by deciding many important questions in favor of liberty,’’ firmly established the modern constitution of Britain, which he calls ‘‘the most entire system of liberty, that was ever known amongst mankind’’ (6:531).41 Thus, Hume criticizes Tory assertions of limitless monarchical prerogative and a duty of passive obedience (see ‘‘Of Passive Obedience,’’ 489–92). But he is just as critical of the Whigs’ cherished idea of an ancient constitution. In undermining both one partisan extreme and its opposite, Hume pursues a strategy typical of satiric narrative. The fact that his History was attacked by both Whigs and Tories indicates his success in confounding the conventional pieties of both parties. Despite the charges that Hume had written a Tory history by his contemporaries as well as by Fox, Jefferson, Macaulay, and others, The History of England is not a onesided party document.42 The fact that it soon became the standard history of England and remained so for three generations indicates that it achieved a largely non-partisan perspective. In addition, whereas narrative satire would leave any moderate

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position ill-defined, Hume retrospectively stakes out impartial grounds of judgment that avoid the excesses of both sides. On a few occasions, he can focus on particular historical agents. For example, he praises as the ‘‘finest genius’’ among Charles II’s ministers Halifax the ‘‘Trimmer’’—who attempted to steer a middle course between the king and his opponents in the 1680s, and who played a crucial role in the revolution and settlement of 1689 (6:419).43 But because he almost always lacks such specific agents of moderation, Hume must imaginatively reconstruct the positions that impartial men might have taken in the controversies he recounts. He thus offers numerous Thucydidean debates that present what the opposing sides might or must have said about an issue such as ship money or the exclusion crisis, and he articulates a third alternative—what the ‘‘wise,’’ ‘‘impartial,’’ or ‘‘neutral’’ observers would have thought and said to themselves (for example, 6:293).44 Thus, he suggests what ‘‘the wise and moderate in the nation’’ (5:95–96) must have felt when considering the claims of liberty against those of authority in the reign of James I, and concludes that, while torn, they would have supported liberty and the Commons over authority and the king.45 Hume also imagines how some of the agents involved might have avoided extremes: James might have imitated Elizabeth’s frugality and patience in order to secure his prerogative; the Commons might have acted more generously toward Charles to persuade him from his extreme assertions of prerogative. Hume suggests these modes and models of accommodation to provide instructive exercise for his readers. As he had indicated in his earliest essays, the people of the nation must work at finding grounds of compromise and mediation (also, 6:533). In the years leading up to the civil wars, Hume observes, ‘‘extremes were every where affected, and the just medium was gradually deserted’’ (5:199; also 5:352–420). In his conclusion, while discussing for the last time the Whig interpretation of history, Hume admonishes that ‘‘extremes of all kinds are to be avoided’’ (6:533); both in its political life and its historical interpretations, the nation should strive for moderation in order to prevent civil strife (6:533). To avoid the unending oscillation between opposed religious attitudes in The Natural History of Religion, Hume recommended escaping from religion to philosophy. To avoid the opposed political alternatives in The History of England, he imagines specific, often fictional characters who embody the moderate position in

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earlier controversies. In this last respect, his activity approximates that of a novelist, in particular a historical novelist such as Scott. Both philosophical histories and historical novels delineate the middle grounds that remain absent in satire. Hume discovers grounds for mediation in most of the controversies that figure in his history; however, it is very difficult for him to find a moderating position between the extremes of superstition and enthusiasm (P 169–73).46 As Hume observes at the earliest formation of the parties (and as he had noted in ‘‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’’), a natural sympathy attaches those who accept external hierarchies and mediators in religion to those who assert the preeminent authority of the monarch (P 172). Conversely, a reliance on individual judgment and opposition to external authorities make natural allies of puritans in religion and republicans in politics (P 172). Superstition thus has provided adherents to the Tories; and enthusiasm has helped fuel the Whig party. Superstition and enthusiasm are older and more fundamental than the political parties, more entrenched in human nature.47 Even if party antagonisms could be contained and moderated, Hume’s analysis leaves open the possibility of an unending oscillation between these two disruptive forms of the religious spirit, periods of superstition and flare-ups of fanaticism, like the ‘‘flux and reflux’’ of polytheism and monotheism diagnosed in The Natural History of Religion. The only substantial improvement in this area might come about through diminishing the strength of the religious spirit or separating it from civil life. Hume does not pursue the second possibility, but he makes a number of attempts to imagine or establish ways of achieving the first result.48 He suggests, for example, that the traditional, mild form of superstitious worship promoted by Elizabeth might serve as a model of moderation in its treatment of ecclesiastical questions (4:122–23), although he notes that the Elizabethan religious settlement suppressed puritan enthusiasm only to have it erupt more forcefully under James. When he discusses the beginnings of the Reformation, Hume argues for a policy consistent with this suggestion. To combat the inflammatory effect of religion on politics, he proposes that there should be an established national religion with its clergy paid by the government, so that they will have no incentive to expand their influence and income by stirring up religious differences. Hume hopes thus to ‘‘bribe the indolence’’ of the purveyors of religious sentiment (3:136). Perhaps not coincidentally, this plan closely approximates

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that pursued by the English government through the Church of England. The established church may not entirely prevent outbreaks of fanaticism or bigotry, as English history in the seventeenth century amply demonstrates. Still, the eighteenth-century English experience, which included tolerance of dissenters, indicated that the policy was working well to dampen the potentially violent intensity of religious feeling (Hume was writing before the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780). Hume here sees a mild, government-controlled superstition as the form of religion that is least harmful and dangerous to civil life. If, as appears to be the case, most people require some kind of religion, then the best is precisely the least religious and most tepid kind.49 Thus, as opposed to the retreat from all forms of religion that he recommends at the conclusion of his satiric conjectural history, Hume moves in this philosophical history to authorize a middle ground—a mildly superstitious practice as a break against religious extremes of either kind.50 Although Hume rejects the satiric view of history as degenerative, in his History, improvement is neither inevitable nor irreversible.51 The gains made for moderation and a middle class remain tenuous and threatened. Hume notes that major historical developments often depend on accident or the unpredictable actions of individuals. In addition, change is often only ironically related to character and intention. Henry VIII, for example, mixed elements of Catholicism and reform in his new church, and throughout the second half of his reign ‘‘held the balance’’ between the two religions, a situation that resembled what a moderate reformer might have intended (3:214, 279). However, since Henry’s capriciousness and cruelty stand as the opposites of temperance or moderation, the irony could hardly be sharper. To take another example of unintended consequences, the puritans had little if any interest in securing civil liberties for all citizens; as they proved during the 1640s, most were interested rather in imposing their own orthodoxy on the nation. Yet, as the only group to oppose the prerogatives of the crown during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, they in fact made a crucial contribution to securing the civil liberties that were finally established by the revolution of 1688–89 (4:368).52 Hume believes that while progress is demonstrable, it is also fragile and unmanageable. In his correspondence, he disagrees with Turgot’s belief in a ‘‘perpetual Progress towards Perfection’’ that will ‘‘prove favourable to good Government.’’ To support his

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position, he refers to the threat posed by the xenophobic and demagogic riots at the time in the name of ‘‘Wilkes and Liberty.’’ For Hume, such civil disorders demonstrate that the desire for liberty has become intemperate, uncontrolled, and destructive in modern England, and that the English may possess not only ‘‘more Liberty than any People in the World,’’ but also ‘‘perhaps more than any men ought to have.’’53 The modern political system is insecure also because it is based on party antagonisms. To eradicate such extremes may be impossible, but Hume devotes his essays and histories to moderating them; in that direction, he believes, lies the only possibility of continued progress. There also remain such phenomena as national hatreds and religious fanaticism, whose eruptions cannot be foreseen and whose effects cannot be moderated. Hume’s view of history is thus, as he says, that of a skeptical modern Whig.54 History exhibits improvement, but it is unintended and precarious; religious and political extremism constantly threaten the modern system with regression to barbarism.55

FERGUSON AND SCOTT Adam Ferguson succeeded Hume in 1757 as Keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, the position that had allowed Hume to do the research for his History of England. Ferguson published his Essay on the History of Civil Society ten years later and five years after Hume had completed his history. Although Hume had been a helpful friend, he had reservations about the Essay. In his correspondence, he limits himself to questions about the correctness and lucidity of Ferguson’s style, always a matter of nearly obsessive concern to Hume. But he probably also objected to the presence in Ferguson’s work of the concerns of civic humanism— the language of civic virtue and corruption that Hume had almost entirely eliminated from his analysis of commercial society.56 Ferguson is in fact distinctive for combining a measured or partial acceptance of commercial society with the older focus on public virtue, luxury, and corruption. However, if he diverges from Hume in his rejection of moderation as a political ideal, and in his respect for tribal and martial virtues, Ferguson agrees emphatically with Hume on the social nature of human beings. Ferguson begins with the principle that ‘‘Mankind are to be taken in groups, as they have always subsisted’’ (10).57 On the basis of this fundamental point, he seeks to correct those who have

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posited and envisioned a pre-social state of nature for mankind; here he specifically includes Rousseau, whose Discourse on Inequality was published twelve years before the Essay. Ferguson’s understanding of sociality involves a characteristic doubleness, however: as he considers the reprehensibility of anti-social passions in the individual, such as malice, hatred, and revenge, he observes that when a group feels antagonism toward another group, the same passions may serve as a means of social bonding: ‘‘Sentiments of affection and friendship mix with animosity; the active and strenuous become the guardians of their society; and violence itself is, in their case, an exertion of generosity as well as of courage’’ (29). For Ferguson, war is an exercise of the social virtues.58 Ferguson stresses the importance of martial strength also because he sees virtue as active, restless, and combative. Such a conception of moral virtue leads to Ferguson’s recurring disagreement with Hume on the value of moderation: ‘‘the merit of a man is determined by his candour and generosity to his associates, by his zeal for national objects, and by his vigour in maintaining political rights, not by his moderation alone, which proceeds frequently from indifference to national and public interests’’ (189). Ferguson suspects the moderate man of being lukewarm in defense of his community. In such civic humanist thought, virtue consists of a willingness to sacrifice oneself and one’s interests for the good of the whole, while the corruption of civic life consists in pursuing private over public interests. Ferguson thus sees moderation as evidence of corruption, and extremism as related to public virtue. In one passage, Ferguson even refers approvingly to the Crusaders’ militant fanaticism or ‘‘enthusiasm’’ (the favorable use here brings the word close to its modern meaning). One can see why Hume had reservations about the Essay. Ferguson agrees with Hume’s historical understanding of the man of the middle as a characteristic product of commercial society, but he inverts Hume’s praise of the moderate. For Ferguson, commercial society loosens the bonds that tie men to their group, making the achievement of civic virtue difficult. Ferguson’s attitude toward progress in history is thus complex.59 On the one hand, he goes further than Hume by finding a ‘‘principle of progression’’ in human nature and evidence of improvement throughout history. Simultaneously with Adam Smith, he worked out an idea of successive stages of social development— from the savage state, in which people are not yet acquainted with property (83), through a second state of barbarian or tribal socie-

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ties in which property is introduced though not protected by law (83), to the commercial state, where property and money are the principal concerns of human activity. In this third state of society, trade and the division of labor help lead to greater provisions and conveniences for greater numbers.60 Ferguson admires the Spartans’ military strength and civic virtue, like Rousseau; however, he emphasizes that their social structure was based on slavery, and asserts that ‘‘slaves have a title to be treated like men’’ (177). In this respect, too, commercial society marks an advance over ancient martial republics such as Sparta and Rome. Still, it is clear that Ferguson has great respect for the tribal societies of the second stage which would include the Greek peoples represented in the Homeric epics, the tribes of American Indians, and even the Scottish Highlanders.61 After he has reviewed the characteristic traits of ‘‘the human species in its rudest state,’’ he concludes that in addition to generosity, honor, and fortitude, such peoples typically exhibit a ‘‘love of society, friendship, and public affection, penetration, eloquence, and courage’’ (93). As property, the law, and commerce are introduced, as order is secured, and the nation increases in extent, those who are safe lose their sense of ‘‘the common ties of society.’’ Commercial societies no longer depend on loyalty among members of a small community. Generosity gives way to calculation (87). The consequence is the reduced character of the modern moderate man who exhibits little or no loyalty to others, but is preoccupied with his private well-being. The division of labor contributes to this result because ‘‘it seems to promise improvement of skill, and is actually the cause why the productions of every art become more perfect as commerce advances; yet in its termination, and ultimate effects, serves, in some measure to break the bands of society . . . and to withdraw individuals from the common scene of occupation’’ (206–7). Ferguson’s view of human progress is thus irreducibly double: on the one hand, the institutions of modern society result from human beings using their natural ingenuity to overcome challenges and hardships. Commercial societies represent a substantial material advance over earlier social forms and in some respects a moral improvement as well. On the other hand, modern societies have little use for most of the characteristic virtues of tribal peoples—including courage, loyalty, honesty, and generosity. In addition, it is difficult for commercial nations to preserve among their members the civic virtue of placing the public good ahead of private interest. In his respect for pre-commercial and tribal societies,

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Ferguson’s attitude is complementary to Rousseau’s. Rousseau’s view of human history is also fundamentally double, diagnosing a real loss behind any apparent gain. Unlike Rousseau, however, Ferguson does not idealize the earliest, savage state of human life, and he does not condemn the effects of civilization in their entirety. Ferguson’s Essay stands in a more chiastic relation with Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. Mandeville uses a form characteristic of an earlier paradigm to satirize the moralistic critics of modern commercial society. In the work’s second part, he defends the same thesis using a conjectural history in the form of a dialogue, a combination which is more suited to a paradigm of polite conversation and transparent access to knowledge. The Fable of the Bees is thus backward-looking in form, but forward-looking in attitude, whereas the Essay on the History of Civil Society agrees with the dominant paradigm in its form, but looks back to an earlier cultural paradigm in its criticism of commercial society. Ferguson’s sustained criticism of the moderate man resembles the satirist’s exclusion of middle grounds. However, the satirist also undercuts both extreme alternatives, whereas Ferguson actually sees value in both the ‘‘enthusiasts’’ of martial tribal societies and even in the modern moderates themselves. Finally, we may observe that Ferguson’s thought stands in an oppositional relation to Hume’s: whereas Hume consistently satirizes religious extremes throughout his essays and histories, Ferguson repeatedly satirizes the moderation and politeness that constitute Hume’s highest values. Both believe that man is born for society, but in Ferguson’s thought, sociability largely consists of the comradeship of republican soldiers, not the geniality of merchants or the wit of polished conversationalists. Several commentators have seen how useful ideas such as Ferguson’s about the stages of social life must have been for Scott as a historical novelist.62 Not only can such links be made between the two genres, but a biographical link provides some direct connection between the two authors. Ferguson was a professor at the University of Edinburgh when Scott was a student there in the 1780s, and one of Scott’s best friends from those days into his adult years was Ferguson’s son. In fact, Scott spent many evenings at the Fergusons’ house in his early adulthood; it was there that he first conversed with Robert Burns.63 Many of the historical thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment could and probably did contribute to Scott’s ideas about the stages of social development.

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But Ferguson’s attitude toward the stages of social life—especially the passage from the tribal or feudal to the modern world—is the most complex and ambivalent among the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the one that most closely resembles the perspective expressed in Scott’s novels. In addition, a genealogy of historical forms and attitudes proceeds from Hume through Ferguson to Scott. We have seen that Ferguson extends Hume’s view of progress and revises his attitude toward moderation; Scott substantially returns to Hume’s attitude toward moderates while expressing the same deep ambivalence as Ferguson toward progress. Both Scott’s view of history in his novels and Ferguson’s in the Essay combine recognition of substantial improvements with regret for irretrievable losses. Such a view may be constitutive for the early historical novel, which is defined by its allegiance both to the past and to the present. The lack of either of these attachments results in other narrative forms: involvement in the past, combined with nostalgic rejection of modern commercial life, leads to historical romance; on the other hand, engagement with modern social life, but without detailed representation of an earlier stage, produces the contemporaneous realistic novel. Scott depicts his protagonist as a man of the middle in many of his novels, but nowhere more clearly than in Old Mortality. In narrating the uprising by radical presbyterian Cameronians against the government of Charles II, Scott focuses on three main characters, two historical and one fictional, who represent groups occupying places across the spectrum of religious and political positions. Balfour of Burley, who leads and typifies the Cameronians, is a murderer (his killing of Archbishop Sharpe ignites the uprising) who hides his extensive ambition behind his religious zeal. ‘‘Daring in design, precipitate and violent in execution, and going to the very extremity’’ in all his beliefs, he exhibits a ‘‘fierce enthusiasm’’ (261–62) as well as deep duplicity.64 His opponent and opposite, Grahame of Claverhouse, under an exterior of graceful and delicate good looks, has pursued a rigid and harsh suppression of the presbyterians who would not worship with ministers approved or ‘‘indulged’’ by the government. Courtly in manners, cool in danger, bloody in the execution of a harsh policy, he is as much of an extremist in defense of the established episcopalian church as Burley is on behalf of the radical presbyterians. Both Burley and Claverhouse are historical, but Henry Morton, the man caught in the middle, is a fictional character. Morton is a young man whose high potential has not begun to be realized at

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the beginning of the narrative. He has been disgusted by the ‘‘narrow-minded’’ and ‘‘gloomy fanaticism’’ of the extreme presbyterians, but even ‘‘more revolted by the tyrannical and oppressive conduct of the government, the misrule, license, and brutality’’ (187). Although he loves Edith Bellenden, the daughter of a loyalist gentry family, Morton is led to join the side of the insurgents by the force of circumstance (without knowing that Burley has killed the archbishop, he shelters him because Burley had saved his father’s life). Once among the rebels, Morton works untiringly for an accommodation with the government. When he helps draw up a petition stating the insurgents’ grievances, it calls essentially for the free exercise of religion and a free parliament (321; see also 259)—the minimal criteria for a modern, tolerant, and limited government. The failure of this petition illustrates Scott’s point that extreme positions tend to prevail, displacing moderate views especially in times of civil strife (282). Clear parallels thus emerge between The Tale of Old Mortality and A Tale of a Tub.65 With his high-handed insistence on the authority and hierarchy of the established church, Claverhouse resembles Swift’s Peter, and more generally the adherents of a superstitious form of belief. With phrases from the Old Testament frequently in his mouth, and his fierce desire to rule veiled by his zeal, Burley resembles Jack and his fanatical followers. Even the acknowledged resemblance in Old Mortality between Claverhouse and Burley as bloody extremists has a parallel in the Tale, where the opposites Peter and Jack, according to the old maxim, come to resemble each other (Tale, 98). However, the characters in the Tale are burlesque allegories, whereas Claverhouse and Burley are realistic, individual, and historical characters. More generally, the allegorical plot of the Tale covers more than a thousand years of church history, while the realistic narrative in Old Mortality focuses on events surrounding two historic battles that took place within a few months of each other in 1679, with an extended epilogue ten years later. As the moderate man, Morton takes the place occupied by Martin in the Tale. Both of them stand between superstitious and fanatical parties and attempt unsuccessfully to counsel moderation. Here again, however, the divergences between Old Mortality and the Tale are telling. Martin is an allegorical figure who entirely lacks particular characteristics and disappears from the narrative after one bland speech. By contrast, Morton is the protagonist of Scott’s novel, the focus of readers’ interest and sympathy. He has

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a detailed personal history, and even a role in a romance plot with a lover and rival who both adhere to the loyalist side. Throughout the narrative, he pursues a moderate course in countless concrete ways, both in speech and action. His position places him in danger, and indeed he is almost executed first by the government and later by the rebels. Rather than being a blank at the center of a satiric allegorical history, the moderate man has become the central character in a realistic historical novel. In Morton, Scott extends significantly and makes central to his new form a fictional figure who serves the same purpose as those unnamed figures that Hume imagined as the ‘‘neutral’’ or the ‘‘impartial’’ observers in different periods. Hume resorts to such figures and quotes what they must have said in times of civil strife and extreme dissension; Scott also typically sets his narratives in times of uprisings or of conflicts between cultures or stages of social organization. Both Hume and Scott use such figures to signal an alternative to the cultural opposites that collide in the times of unrest on which they focus. Scott constructs a new kind of hero— the moderate man who is largely passive and affected by circumstances,66 yet whose role is to mediate between large historical antagonisms in a time of their sharp, even violent confrontation.67 The man of the middle thus becomes crucial for the idea of progress; for Scott, such figures constitute a bridge between opposing stages of social life. In Old Mortality, the polarizing effects of civil strife—the absence of a strong middle ground—lead at first to the defeat of the Cameronians, to the triumph of the governmental extreme, and to a ten-year exile for Morton. The final chapters of the novel, however, take place months after the revolution of 1688–89, in which Morton has played a part as an associate of William of Orange. The revolution stands here, as it does also in Hume’s History, as a clear marker of the emergence of a recognizably modern world characterized by greater security, rationality, moderation, and good order (399–402). Morton’s return to Scotland in the retinue of William III makes explicit the parallel between his role in the novel and William’s rule in Britain. The Williamite settlement after the revolution of 1688–89 signifies the emerging predominance of a politics of the middle, which constitutes itself as the alternative to the opposed political extremes of seventeenth-century Britain: Stuart absolutism and Puritan republicanism, or a politics of superstition and a politics of enthusiasm.68 Through a protagonist such as Morton, Scott depicts the emergence of a third way, a mediating alternative to diametrically opposed historical positions

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and forces.69 For Scott, therefore, resolution of political and social conflicts depends on achieving a moderation that forgoes the fanatic’s claim to undivided truth or pure virtue; Scott’s approving attitude toward moderation resembles Hume’s. However, for Scott, the achievement of the modern also involves irretrievable loss. As in tragedy, the stature of those who survive at the end of the narrative, including the protagonist, registers a falling off from those who have died. However bloody and inflexible Claverhouse and Burley had been, their deaths mark a loss of epic intensity and commitment. In addition, Morton and Emily will be able to marry only because on the novel’s last page the moderate loyalist Lord Evandale, Morton’s rival and alter ego, also dies. Finally, even the two survivors who will be united have lost ten years of their life together because of Morton’s exile, and they carry wounds from having embraced opposite sides in a civil war— Edith and her relatives having lost their property and come close to starvation while they were besieged by Morton’s allies. Old Mortality represents a deeply divided recognition of the losses and wounds as well as the accomplishments and improvements that history produces. Scott’s ambivalence toward historical progress thus closely resembles Ferguson’s.70 If Scott emphasizes the accommodations that lead the moderate to take his place in a reduced modern world, that does not mean that he finally endorses the purity of the fanatics whose time has passed. After his defeat by the government’s forces, Burley retreats to an isolated cave in a wild setting next to a waterfall, and he remains there even after the revolution of 1688–89 replaces the Stuarts with William, and establishes a moderate and tolerant presbyterianism in Scotland. Such an establishment falls far short of the theocracy that he wants to see realized. Burley is the only character in the novel who behaves thus anti-socially, taking on the ranting of a traditional misanthrope or Old Testament prophet. Scott combines elements of A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels here, as the fanatic enthusiast of the first three-quarters of the novel becomes a delusional misanthrope in the end like Gulliver. Aside from Burley, the other characters in the narrative are resolutely social, and Scott surely agrees with Ferguson and Hume that man is made for society. But for Scott, becoming a full member of modern society exacts a toll, and his historical novels repeatedly insist that the middleclass socialization they depict involves losses as well as gains, renunciation as well as gratification. Old Mortality, Waverley, and

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most historical novels by Scott and his contemporaries trace the encounter of a young man who is naive, neutral, or not very mature, with public, historical figures and events that involve, implicate, or threaten him.71 The intersection between his life and such public events typically leads him into reluctant rebellion, and often involves his capture, imprisonment, or injury. By the conclusion of the narrative, he reaches an accommodation with the legitimate authority in his society, but at the sacrifice of some of his earlier illusions or ideas of happiness. We have noted that Morton is only able to marry Edith after both have been scarred by civil war. Similarly, once Waverley realizes the treasonous foolishness of his adventure with the Jacobites, he comes to the sober understanding that ‘‘the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced.’’72 Waverley comes to consider his involvement with the Jacobites and his infatuation with Flora as a romance of adventure and of love. His realistic acceptance of modern commercial life, on the other hand, is associated with history, along with a reduced, less adventurous but more responsible life. These and other historical novels recount a process in which a character is shaped to accept a reduction in gratifications based on acknowledging the force of the real. In other words, Scott’s historical novels function significantly as Bildungsromane in which the potential of the young man is realized only partially in the adult as a reduced hero and man of the middle.73 The shaping role played by the tutor in a Bildungsroman, or by a reduced utopia functioning as the tutor, is assumed in Scott’s novels by history, and by the ways that historical forces shape and impinge on the lives of individuals. In Scott’s conception, as in Ferguson’s, history is moving away from harshly heroic societies, which encourage extremes of personality and opinion, toward commercial societies which depend on sociability, moderation, and other virtues of the middle. In David Daiches’s terms, this is a move from an age of heroic violence to an age of prudence.74 The protagonists of Scott’s novels come into contact with tribal and feudal societies—as in a romance, dream, or nightmare—but in the end they are reconciled to commercial society with its emphasis on respectability and calculation. As they turn away from romantic yearning or nostalgia for a lost past, the historical principle to which they are reconciled in the end exerts a moderating and disciplining force on personality, like that exerted by the tutor or tutorial society in the Bildungsroman. As the following chapter will show, the protagonist of the early Bildungsromane who is unable to attain adult independence

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and autonomy is closely comparable to the reduced, disillusioned, and unheroic protagonist in Scott’s historical novels. Early in the eighteenth century, in works such as A Tale of a Tub and Fable of the Bees, narrative satire articulates the unacceptability of both a dominant and an opposing view, with no prospect of progress to or through a third alternative. Hume’s histories adopt the satiric technique of criticizing opposed religious extremes, but unlike satire include other middle grounds and seek to locate some viable terms of mediation between most opposites. Hume’s conclusion with the founding of the modern political order in Britain in 1689 marks the achievement of a moderate political regime which remains vulnerable to passionate antagonisms. The accomplishment of progress in historical novels is indicated and represented synecdochically by fictional protagonists who in their convictions and behavior mediate between opposed cultural forces or social stages. Such characters enable Scott and his contemporaries to overcome the formal narrative constraints that kept Hume from fully representing moderate positions in his philosophical histories; they function in historical novels as the vehicle and emblem of historical progress, and loss. The early nineteenth-century paradigm finds meaning in development according to an internal law on the model of organic growth. It celebrates the inner process of realizing potential, from the maturing of an individual to the flourishing of a culture. Scott’s historical novels clearly help constitute and express such a paradigm of development, as they typically recount both the progression of a society from an earlier stage of conflict and violence to a later stage of greater moderation and comfort, and the growth of a protagonist from naivete´ and romance to a realistic acceptance of the modern world. Scott presents these two levels of development as parallel and related. We have noted his deep ambivalence toward progress, which resembles Ferguson’s, as well as his ultimate affirmation of moderation, which resembles Hume’s.75 Taken together, these positions produce a bittersweet narrative of progress in which the attainment of moderation by the society rests on loss and renunciation by the individual. Both social improvement and the frustration of individual potential are involved in the process. In Hegel’s philosophy, as in Scott’s novels, organic development toward a greater rationality involves overcoming the opposition between an earlier stage and its negation so that some of the attractions and limitations of both are lost and some are preserved

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or overcome. The dialectic of reason develops as a self-contained process first the negation or contradiction to any concept, and thus a pair of opposites each of which is self-contradictory (were the dialectic to be frozen at this point, it would resemble the plot of narrative satire). Then, again by an internal process, there develops a third alternative that, while different from each of the two opposites, still retains elements of each in a new synthesis.76 The generation of a necessary progress or development by means of a process of mediation or synthesis is characteristic of the paradigm of organic development not only in philosophy and historical fiction, but also in the Bildungsroman. Indeed, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind has been called a Bildungsroman of the human mind over the course of its history.77 Another genealogical line, parallel to the one investigated in this chapter, connects narrative satire of the early eighteenth century with the first Bildungsroman of Goethe by way of Rousseau’s historical vision. That filiation is the subject of the next chapter.

4 Satire, Conjectural History, and the Bildungsroman, 1720–1795 IN THE SURVIVING PART OF HIS WORK ON THE BILDUNGSROMAN, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the demystifying critique of established beliefs and official culture in the eighteenth century resulted in an ‘‘impoverishment,’’ which nevertheless opened up new prospects for narrative and led to the development of the Bildungsroman by the end of the century (44–45).1 Bakhtin’s remarks can serve as a point of departure for exploring the path that leads from narratives of satiric critique in the early part of the century to the appearance of the Bildungsroman at its end. The prominence of the former is indicated by works such as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The Bildungsroman became, according to Schlegel, one of ‘‘the greatest tendencies of the age’’ following the appearance of Wieland’s History of Agathon (1767), and the incontestable exemplar of the genre, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796).2 In this chapter, I propose that Rousseau’s conjectural histories both of society and of the individual serve as crucial mediators in this transformation of prevailing narrative forms. The critique of civilized society in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) agrees in general and in particulars with Swift’s satiric attack on civilization in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels. Emile (1762), which arises from this critique, establishes many parallels between Emile’s education and Gulliver’s; moreover, it constitues an important step in the later development of the Bildungsroman. This chapter focuses on narrative satire, conjectural history, and the Bildungsroman as a series of related narrative forms that succeeded each other in prominence throughout the eighteenth century. As I have argued in previous chapters, the history of genres, their coming to prominence, and their subsiding into ob153

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scurity or disuse, may reveal shifts in cultural paradigms. When a shift in the dominant paradigm occurs, relations between genres are transformed, as are relations among the elements within a genre. Still, many early elements will persist through the successive alterations of a narrative form alongside elements of more recent appearance. In the dominant cultural paradigm of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the Renaissance chain of resemblances has given way at a crucial point, and a lack of correspondence opens between this world and another, or between what is practicable and what is most valued. This seventeenth-century paradigm is characterized by skepticism, satire, and paradoxical forms that simultaneously assert both one perspective and its opposite, that represent opposed but equally unacceptable views with no effective mediating position between these extremes. The succeeding cultural paradigm of the mideighteenth century takes as its criterion the clarity of distinctions produced by transparent signs that immediately persuade the mind of the truth of what they represent. It may still represent a lack of mediation between opposites, and a paradoxical relation between intention and result, but it can, as in Rousseau’s works, represent such doubleness without ironic distance. Satiric structures persist in this paradigm of transparency, but are not acknowledged as such. The third paradigm, dominant in the decades just before and after 1800, sees the highest value in development understood as the unfolding of inner potential. This framework of thought draws its models and metaphors from the realm of botany; it celebrates organic growth in the history both of peoples and of individuals. This paradigm does not readily allow for an absence of mediating terms because of its stress on gradual development and biological forms. The sequence of forms—satire, history, and the Bildungsroman—that is the focus of this chapter closely parallels the sequence traced in the previous two chapters. Like Courtilz’s historical memoir-novels, the satires of Montesquieu and Swift juxtapose opposite perspectives without resolving their conflict in favor of either. Like Defoe’s historical memoir-novels, Rousseau’s conjectural history and pedagogical novel adopt many elements of the previous satiric form, but turn them away from satiric uses. Like Pre´vost’s psychological memoir-novel, Goethe’s Bildungsroman moves even further from public and satiric concerns to focus on the development of a middle-class young man. But if these two series are parallel, they are also contiguous and

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not simultaneous. Courtilz writes his Memoirs of Rochefort more than thirty years before Montesquieu and Swift write their satires, and the same span of time separates Defoe’s novels from Rousseau’s narratives. In fact, Rousseau was an enthusiastic reader of Pre´vost’s Cleveland when that novel appeared in the 1730s,3 and it was not until sixty years later that Goethe’s Bildungsroman was published. But we might expect such asynchronies in the history of cultural paradigms and narrative genres. In the first place, paradigms may, and usually do, occupy a dominant position for several decades. To have works written thirty years apart but in accord with a single paradigm therefore need not be surprising. I have been arguing that the works of Montesquieu and Swift appear in what is perhaps the last decade of dominance for the paradigm of skepticism and paradox, if that dominance has not already passed. Elements of the succeeding paradigm of clarity and certitude appear as early as the mid-seventeenth century in the writings of Descartes, and by the first or second decade of the eighteenth century this later paradigm attains a prominence in England that certainly rivals that of the earlier framework. Such overlapping of paradigms constitutes the second reason we should not expect a one-to-one correspondence linking paradigms, genres, and individual works. At any time, many paradigms of artistic and discursive production are available in a culture, although only one might be dominant. Any paradigm that reaches such a position of cultural authority must emerge and take an increasingly prominent role over a certain period of time. Finally, just as paradigms are multiple, the genres of individual works are almost always hybrids, often combining elements of different genres, and of different paradigms. In Cleveland, for example, Pre´vost combines elements of satire from the historical memoirs of the late seventeenth century with an early emphasis on the unmistakable truthfulness of the heart, part of a paradigm which will only come to cultural prominence in the last decades of the century. This emphasis will be adopted and developed by Rousseau, and later adapted and questioned by Goethe.

MONTESQUIEU AND SWIFT Illustrating the affinity between satiric narrative and the seventeenth-century paradigm, both Gulliver’s Travels, Book 4,

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and the Persian Letters are organized around a fundamental split— between opposite views of human nature in Swift, and between opposites ways of organizing society in Montesquieu. In Gulliver, the Yahoos as animals defined by passions, drives, and gross physicality stand opposed to the clean, entirely rational, stoical Houyhnhnms. In the Persian Letters, the fashionable, tolerant, and corrupt social world of the Parisians stands in sharp contrast to the pure, rigid, and repressive domestic morality of the Persians. Each work originally juxtaposes a world of ideal values with instances of indefensible actual behavior in order to satirize the latter. And yet in each work, the seeming ideal proves to be not only impracticable but, if taken as a model for human behavior, actually pernicious in its effects. Even at their best, the Houyhnhnms are insufferably selfsatisfied, emotionally truncated, and faintly ridiculous (milking cows, wielding axes, and threading needles). Moreover, the love and adoration that Gulliver feels for them reveal most clearly the distance separating the passionate human from such passionless creatures. Swift implies that the attempt by human beings to live according to unreachable Stoic ideals is madness. In Persian Letters, Usbek’s commitment to a repressive domestic regime produces only an appearance of purity among his wives, until a bloody rebellion reveals that they pursued their own desires despite his attempt to force them to be virtuous. Repressive regimes end in violent revolutions. Moreover, those rulers who pursue a desire for purity similar to Usbek’s only weaken themselves and their realms—as did the Persians when they exiled the Gabars, and the French who cast out the Huguenots.4 Thus, both works, after satirizing a corrupt actuality—of the Yahoos and of Parisian society—by juxtaposition with an ideal of reason or purity, turn to satirize the previous, implicitly authorized position, because the pursuit of the ideal involves self-destruction, madness, or chaos. Don Pedro may be a Yahoo like any other in Gulliver’s eyes, but he is a decent man, far preferable to the traveller who considers himself a superior being because he trots and whinnies like a horse. Usbek’s friend Rica may adapt rather quickly to the tainted, adulterous mores of French society, but his acknowledgement of the relative effectiveness of persuasion as opposed to the counter-productiveness of force in the realm of morals surely echoes the work’s ultimate judgment against Usbek’s repressive conjugal purity.5 Both of these early eighteenth-century satiric narratives lack a position that would effectively mediate between overarching opposing terms; no middle ground bridges

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Yahoos and Houyhnhnms or Persian repression and Parisian laxity.6 In both works, the travelling stranger functions as a catalyst to elicit the contrasts between the two worlds. It is also noteworthy that both Gulliver and Usbek withdraw from a corrupt society. Just before his journey to Europe, Usbek retires from the corrupt court at Isfahan after he learns of threats to his safety. Similarly, Gulliver withdraws from the court of Lilliput after he learns of the king’s ‘‘lenient’’ order to put out his eyes (52–55).7 Usbek remains uninvolved in French society, unlike the more accommodating Rica. Gulliver ends his narrative unable to tolerate any human society, conversing only with his two horses. Gulliver’s withdrawal is the more extreme, but Usbek also withdraws because he consider himself to be a truth-teller caught in a society saturated with lies. In accord with the seventeenth-century paradigm based on paradox, both of these satiric narratives take shape around the split between a corrupt but existing world and an ideal but unreachable site of virtue or truth. In both works, the protagonists withdraw from this corrupt world, but the narratives ironically distance themselves from such misanthropic isolation. Montesquieu and Swift also both make use of a language of extreme simplicity in order to satirize conventionally accepted attitudes and authorities. Thus, Montesquieu’s Rica describes both the Pope and the king as magicians: the first because he can make even the king believe ‘‘that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread’’ (73; 56), and the king because if he needs to double the amount of money in his treasury, he merely persuades his subjects ‘‘that one crown is worth two, and they believe it’’ (73; 56).8 Similarly, Gulliver has to explain to the Houyhnhnm that perhaps a million of his fellows have been killed in wars arising from differences of opinion, such as, ‘‘whether Flesh be Bread, or Bread be Flesh; Whether the Juice of a certain Berry be Blood or Wine; . . . Whether it be better to kiss a Post or throw it into the Fire’’ (230). Montesquieu and Swift both use the need to describe European beliefs and conflicts for a foreigner to write simple truths whose satiric force comes from de-familiarizing conventional and established perspectives. Still, despite all these similarities of satiric technique and form, Swift diverges significantly from Montesquieu in a principal object of his satire. Swift’s satire implies a severe criticism of the corrupting effects of commerce and luxury, and the destructive effects of modern technologies, such as gunpowder. However, Montesquieu

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has Usbek decisively reject similar arguments. Usbek maintains, for example, that because of the invention of gunpowder, sieges and wars now end more quickly. On the effects of economic activities, Usbek, like Hume, denies that the pursuit of luxury and commerce makes a nation weak; for a handful of those who want luxury goods, hundreds work hard and obtain a good living. The resulting industry and inventiveness are not signs of weakness in the nation. Moreover, when he imagines a society that produces only necessities and no superfluities, the result is hardly a society at all, but merely a collection of unconnected individuals barely surviving at subsistence level. Through Usbek’s arguments, Montesquieu implies an early acceptance of the healthfulness of commerce and the benefits even of luxury. Montesquieu’s turn away from traditional satire of commercial activities demonstrates that there may be a lack of accord betwen the form a work takes and the political ideology it implies. The form of the Persian Letters is consistent with the earlier paradigm of satiric skepticism and paradox. But Usbek’s acceptance of commerce is in agreement with an emerging view that the pursuit of wealth is not pernicious, but salutary. (Mandeville’s contemporaneous Fable of the Bees makes a similar use of older satiric form to express an emerging acceptance of commerce; see chapter 3.) Montesquieu’s implied position on commerce, so opposed to Swift’s, also demonstrates that works can assume the same narrative form in order to express divergent and even contradictory ideas.9

ROUSSEAU We can now examine a converse case where an argument is closely repeated while the form is radically altered. Rousseau repeats the substance, and crucially revises the form, of Swift’s narrative satire in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Emile. Swift implies in Book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels that civilization constitutes not an advance but a retrogression, a series of paradoxical improvements. The desire to be highly regarded leads to the ‘‘multiplying [of] our original Wants’’ (243), and eventually to the elaborate inequalities of rank and possession that Gulliver’s account reveals. The Houyhnhnm presents a Stoic critique of the artificiality of most of the desires men feel in civil society for goods and status, because they produce envy and dissatisfaction, which selfsufficient animals never know. Civil society establishes the law,

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but the law sanctions injustice, according to the rule of precedents that ‘‘whatever hath been done before may legally be done again’’ (233). From Gulliver’s account, the Houyhnhnm concludes logically that the law exists to protect the strong and the rich from the weak and the poor. In addition, the same forces produce both acquisitive persons and aggressive states. Paradoxically, then, civilization proves to be morally worse than barbarism, since, according to the Houyhnhnm, men use their ‘‘small pittance of reason’’ to ‘‘aggravate our natural Corruptions, and to acquire new ones which Nature had not given us’’ (243), to develop more perfect ways of exploiting, wounding, and killing each other. Similarly, in the Discourse on Inequality, the distinctive human capacity for perfectibility leads to no progress that is not also a regression. For Rousseau, as for Swift, the multiplication of desires that arises from a longing to be well-regarded draws man out of his self-sufficiency, producing interdependence and dissatisfaction. As a result of the division of labor, ‘‘behold man, who was formerly free and independent, diminished as a consequence of a multitude of new wants into subjection’’ (119; OC 3:174–75).10 Although agriculture and metallurgy define civilization, their development is pernicious: ‘‘iron and wheat, which first civilized men . . . ruined the human race’’ (116; OC 3:171) because they depend on the prior existence of property and presume as well as produce inequality. Law is established, then, not to protect justice, but property, and progress in institutional development is equivalent to a ‘‘progress in inequality’’ (131; OC 3:186)—from customary law to government and from marginally legitimate to entirely arbitrary forms of power. In relations between states, might prevails and war is the rule. The progress of civilization ultimately brings about the condition from which Hobbes maintained that civil society had rescued mankind: a war of all against all.11 Rousseau’s representation of civilization in the second Discourse thus corresponds in all essentials to the one Swift presents through the Houyhnhnm in the fourth book of Gulliver. 12 Despite these extensive parallels between the arguments present in Gulliver, Book 4, and the Discourse, Rousseau diverges significantly from Swift in his use of form. In Gulliver, either a character such as the Houyhnhnm or the king of Brobdingnag denounces human civilization, or Swift parodies the official, celebratory view expressed by a naive Gulliver. Swift’s narrative, that is, assumes a parodic and dialogical form, determined by the intersections and antagonisms among alternate voices and perspectives.

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Rousseau, by contrast, delivers his attack directly, abandoning satiric personae, characters, and ironies. He founds his authority on integrity and a transparent sincerity, not the indirections of irony or what he sees as the artificiality of wit. A single voice dominates the Discourse, which thus take the form of a declamation, a sermon, or a formal verse satire.13 To articulate the same critique of civilization as is found in Swift, Rousseau replaces narrative satire with monological discourse. In Emile also, Rousseau presents without irony the same critique of modern society which Swift presents in satiric form and qualifies by irony. In the later work, Rousseau moves beyond the critical project of the Discourse, and attempts as a corrective to show how men might be educated so as to avoid being corrupted by socialization.14 His efforts to distance the new form in which he is writing from satire and irony help to define the novel of education, yet he is finally not successful in eliminating satire from the work. He calls satire the consolation of the wicked man, the occupation of gossipping women, and the assumed pose of a cynical social elite. However, distinctive elements of satiric form persist in the lack of effective mediating positions in the narrative, in its overt condemnation but covert acceptance of misanthropy, and in the prominent role it gives to a naive stranger. Although Rousseau attempts to revise the satiric perception that there is no viable middle ground between equally unacceptable opposites, he represents this same pattern in his own work. He offers the ‘‘Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar’’ as grounds of mediation between the most embattled opposites of his own time—established Christians and philosophical atheists. The vicar concludes that the youth should distance himself from both these extremes. However, this attempt to accommodate proved to be the most incendiary part of Emile; the vicar’s credo offended both the philosophes, by grounding morality in belief in a deity and an afterlife, and the Christians, by eliminating any need for a savior or a Church. The ‘‘Profession of Faith’’ does not succeed in offering an acceptable middle ground; instead, it produces a polarization resembling that of narrative satire. In addition, the narrative as a whole seeks to mediate between an inherently corrupt society and a man who retains his native goodness and integrity. But when this imaginative effort proves to be unsuccessful, Emile again exhibits a lack of grounds for mediating terms that resembles satiric structures more closely than a novelistic accommodation and synthesis of contraries.

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Rousseau attacks the same corruptions that eventually lead Gulliver to become a hater of mankind, yet he refuses to condone misanthropy. Rousseau explains when he first introduces the ‘‘Profession of Faith’’ that it reclaimed him from the ‘‘haughty misanthropy’’ (227; OC 4:564) to which as a youth he was susceptible, and he hopes it will have the same effect on his pupil and his reader.15 He now considers misanthropy to be fundamentally mistaken, since such an attitude infers from the evidence of a corrupt society that human nature is corrupt. To view man as wicked violates Rousseau’s stated first principle, his rule that the first impulses of nature are always right: ‘‘there is no original sin [perversite´ originelle] in the human heart’’ (56; OC 4:322). Rousseau frequently condemns misanthropy and asserts human goodness, yet his work abounds with evidence that human beings are a selfish and untrustworthy lot who drive the decent man to a hermit-like existence.16 In Emile and Sophie, the incomplete sequel that he began writing immediately after completing Emile, the couple, once the tutor has left them, prove to be incapable of living as innocent foreigners in society. Having moved to Paris, they grow apart, and Sophie is seduced by a pair of corrupt worldly ‘‘friends.’’ Emile flees from her, and has a series of adventures before perhaps being reunited years later with Sophie on an uninhabited island (OC 4:881–924; see also intro., clxi–clxviii).17 Thus, although Rousseau asserts that Emile is made to live in society, and although he condemns misanthropy, in fact he can only imagine human beings living virtuously and happily as solitaries, in isolation from civilized society.18 Not only here but throughout the work, Rousseau overtly condemns but implicitly embraces an asocial misanthropy.19 The prominent use of the naive stranger provides another continuity between Emile and satiric narratives. The function of the Carib at the end of Rousseau’s Discourse parallels that of the Houyhnhnm in Swift’s narrative: both are unable to understand words that are crucial to modern civilized life. In Emile, Rousseau appeals to the savage as a simple outsider who serves, like the Carib or the Houyhnhnm, as a standard against which to measure civilized man.20 The savage is sharp where the peasant is dull; the savage does not wear a mask, but is always equal to himself; unlike sages who say we are all bad, the savage says we are all mad. In Rousseau’s narrative, Emile will be that savage, the contrary of social man. He will be, paradoxically, ‘‘a savage who has to live in town’’ (167; OC 4:484), ‘‘an agreeable foreigner’’ in civil society

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(304; OC 4:670). Rousseau asserts that Emile will eventually participate in society, but he ensures that Emile will remain a savage by raising him apart from society, giving him a negative education that retards his maturation, and substituting the authority of nature for that of society. Although Rousseau maintains that Emile is not a vehicle for satire (the philosophes, not Emile or Rousseau, are misanthropic satirists), he occupies the same satiric position of the less civilized, more ‘‘natural’’ stranger and critic of European civilization that is occupied by Usbek or the Houyhnhnms (or Zilia, in de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman). Thus, Rousseau consistently attacks satire and satirists, yet satiric structures persist unacknowledged. Like other narrative satires, Emile offers no persuasive grounds for mediation between the most important opposites it depicts (a corrupt civilization and a man of integrity); it moves toward a misanthropic stance (although it condemns misanthropy); and it uses a naive stranger as a vehicle for its critique of its society.21 More generally, Rousseau repudiates all ironic doubleness, and offers a single-voiced narrative seemingly of a transparent sincerity without contradictions or ambivalences. A pair of related passages condemning luxury can illustrate the difference between ironic narrative and Rousseau’s (non-ironic) pedagogical treatise and novel. Swift has Gulliver assure his Houyhnhnm master that ‘‘this whole Globe of Earth must be at least three Times gone round, before one of our better Female Yahoos could get her Breakfast or a Cup to put it in’’ (235–36). In this passage, we can hear Gulliver’s pride in the accomplishments of his fellows; later, the Houyhnhnm will condemn such proliferating of desires beyond needs. When Emile attends his first feast at a table of the wealthy, the tutor asks, ‘‘What will he [Emile] think of luxury when he finds that every quarter of the globe has been ransacked, that some twenty million hands have labored for years, that thousands of lives have perhaps been sacrificed, and all to furnish him with fine clothes?’’ (153; OC 4:463). In this passage, we hear only the voice of the tutor, assuring us that Emile will agree with the tutor’s own condemnation of luxury, even though Emile has never seen or heard of such displays before.22 Swift’s narrative satire attacks the social economy of excess desires, but also Gulliver’s pride in such a society. Rousseau’s single-voiced narrative condemns the wasteful shows required by society, but exhibits no irony at the expense of his narrator, the tutor.23 Such refusal of irony contributes significantly to Rousseau’s transforming of narrative satire

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into the novel of education. However, it also has troubling implications, which can be brought to light by juxtaposing Rousseau’s monological relation to Emile’s tutor with Swift’s dialogical relation to the Houyhnhnms. The two sets of pedagogical ideas are very similar. Like the Houyhnhnms, Rousseau’s tutor requires physical exercise for both sexes. The Houyhnhnms do not write and have no books. Rousseau declares: ‘‘I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about’’ (147; OC 4:454). Emile’s education, therefore, depends on contact with things, not words. Like the Houyhnhnms, Emile is to have no desires or ambitions, no dependence on others (except his tutor). He is educated so as to retain his native simplicity and ignorance. He will not know what it means to lie, and would presumably better understand the Houyhnhnm formulation, ‘‘saying the thing which is not.’’ However, the authority of the Houyhnhnm pedagogues is touched with irony—they are entirely passionless, excessively proud of their rationality, and comical in their efforts to make hooves do the work of hands.24 In Emile, on the other hand, the tutor assumes the same persona as that of the passionless, humorless Houyhnhnms, and Rousseau presents his ideas about education without ironic distancing. Most significantly, the pedagogues in Gulliver and Emile exercise a striking power over their pupil, for which the relation of Mentor to Telemachus in Fe´ nelon’s Telemachus can serve as a model. Mentor’s advice has the wisdom of a divinity because he is in fact Athena in disguise. Neither the Houyhnhnm nor Emile’s tutor is divine, but each assumes unqualified authority and control over his pupil. Gulliver consistently refers to the Houyhnhnm as his master, granting the Houyhnhnm full authority as an embodiment of the law of reason and a means of controlling his own passions. His worship of the Houyhnhnms results in the sacrifice of his autonomy as a moral agent; even after they exile him from their island, he takes them as his ego ideals, his models of virtue, reason, and conduct. In an extreme of self-abasement, he kisses his master’s hoof when he is forced to depart, and he goes to such comical lengths in Britain as walking and talking like a horse. These actions, of course, indicate the ironic distance between Swift and Gulliver, the disciple of the Houyhnhnms.25 For his part, Rousseau says his tutor must be more than a man, one who will tolerate no competition for authority: Emile ‘‘must honor his parents but he must obey me. That is my first and only condition’’ (20; OC 4:267). His method of teaching by means of

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things rather than words involves repeatedly placing Emile in situations where the other participants act according to a pre-arranged script, while the pupil alone remains unaware that he is in a play. This characterization applies to a whole series of significant events in the work beginning with the planting and uprooting of beans, and including the elaborately staged meeting, courtship, and marriage of Emile and Sophie. Despite the tutor’s assertions, therefore, Emile’s experiences do not result from his contacts with reality or objective circumstances; his experiences have in fact been carefully contrived and rehearsed by the tutor precisely to constitute Emile’s lessons.26 The tutor sees his task as ‘‘the art of controlling without precepts’’: ‘‘let the pupil think he is master while you are really master. There is no subjection [assujetissement] so complete as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will itself is taken captive’’ (84; OC 4:362). Rousseau’s language makes clear that the process of educating the pupil to become a subject, his subjectification, is bound up with the pupil’s subjection to the will of the master. The tutor’s strategy of authoritarian manipulation indicates that Emile’s education will not lead to autonomy or independence; rather, Emile’s judgments will continue to be dependent on his tutor’s.27 As the young man comes to the age of sexual maturity (around twenty, according to Rousseau, for a child of nature), the tutor’s warnings about the strength and danger of awakening passions prompt this outburst from Emile: Oh, my friend, my protector, my master! resume the authority you desire to lay aside at the very time when I most need it. Hitherto my weakness has given you this power. I now place it in your hands of my own free will. . . . Make me free by guarding me against the passions which do me violence; do not let me become their slave; compel me to be my own master and to obey, not my senses, but my reason. (290; OC 4:651–52)

Like Gulliver, Emile here calls his tutor his master, and places himself in the master’s hands as the only means of controlling his growing passions. Emile speaks of obeying reason, but he equates the law of reason with the voice of his master. By thus surrendering himself to the master’s authority, he forfeits the possibility of attaining an autonomous moral character. This passage straightforwardly expresses a serious urgency, and entirely lacks the ironic qualification and humorous undercutting that attend Gul-

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liver’s similar assertions of his discipleship to the Houyhnhnms (his respectful kissing of his master’s hoof, for example). Instead, the passage that most closely parallels this one is to be found in the Social Contract, where Rousseau maintains that ‘‘whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free’’ (64; OC 3:364).28 Similarly, Emile here entreats the master to exercise a compulsion over his passions, to force him to be free. The paradox is constitutive for Emile: Rousseau conceives of the transference of moral choice from the pupil to the absolute authority of the tutor as the successful achievement of his pedagogical enterprise. In the concluding words of the work, Emile asks the tutor not to leave him and his wife, but to remain with them, to ‘‘guide and govern’’ them always. Thus, Rousseau renounces the ironic double perspective that Swift articulates through his use of personae and ironic distance. But he does not thereby evade all doubleness in his narrative of education. The pedagogical project which constitutes Rousseau’s answer to the corruptions of civilized life finally produces a pupil incapable of independent thought and subjugated to an authoritarian master. Rousseau denies the doubleness of this result, by having the pupil himself entreat the tutor to continue to exercise his absolute authority. Emile’s lack of autonomy in relation to his tutor and master parallels Gulliver’s lack of autonomy in relation to his Houyhnhnm master, except that Swift satirically draws attention to the paradoxes and ironies of Gulliver’s position (when he proudly accuses mankind of excessive pride at the end of Book 4, for example), whereas Rousseau obscures and mystifies the paradoxical doubleness of Emile’s position (begging the tutor to remain as a go-between who tells Sophie when she should sleep with Emile, for example). The doubleness at the conclusion of the two works is closely comparable, but Swift’s satire establishes an ironic distance on it that Rousseau’s monological text does not. The contribution of the seventeenth-century paradigm to the shaping of Emile can be inferred from the importance of satiric form here: the absence of effective mediating positions, and the text’s paradoxical misanthropy (overtly condemned, covertly embraced). On the other hand, the eclipsing of the paradoxical result of its pedagogical project (i.e., the subjugation rather than the autonomy of the pupil) indicates the distance of this narrative from the paradigm of satire and paradox. Emile is also consistent with the paradigm of transparent representation: the way that Rous-

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seau gradually brings Emile and Sophie from abstraction and generality into textual existence indicates that representation and truth can be aligned. The narrator claims a transparent, nonironic sincerity. Rousseau also grants large parts of Robinson Crusoe and Telemachus a transparent effectiveness as veridical representations; Sophie loves Emile because he conforms to her image of Fe´ nelon’s Telemachus and Emile finds in Sophie one whose image he already loves. However, such instances of hallucinatory lucidity are counterbalanced in Emile by Rousseau’s deep suspicions of language, writing, and representation. His belief that deeds and things are more effective than words, that ‘‘the most startling speeches were not uttered but shown’’ (287; OC 4:647), points toward the paradigm that asserts the expressiveness of inarticulate organic nature, whose period of predominance will come later in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It may be that the strong pressure felt by Rousseau and his contemporaries to assert the goodness of human nature develops in response to the strong contrary evidence in the commercial economy that much human behavior is in fact calculating, harsh, and inequitable. In order to avoid being led into a disaffected misanthropy by such evidence, one can assert that human beings are naturally good—converting a wish into a fact—and that society alone, somehow apart from human nature, is the source of inequitable distribution of wealth and power. Such a position allows the corrupt social world to take its course, and enables one to concentrate instead on cultivating particular, propertied individuals.29 This, in fact, will prove to be the project of the Bildungsroman, which follows Rousseau in focusing on the psychological development of its privileged protagonist. Rousseau modifies the satiric forms whose elements he adopts to bring them into conformity with his asserted belief in the innocence of human nature and to eliminate satire of his protagonist. Later Bildungsromane will also distinguish themselves, in contrast with satiric narratives, by positing the idealism and innocence of the protagonist whose development they trace. If misanthropic isolation of an individual stands as one extreme of relations to a corrupt society, one alternative would be training the individual to accept a pervasive regime of social control. Having overtly rejected the first of these positions, Rousseau embraces the opposite extreme. Such a constraining pedagogical program could not be said to produce a mature, autonomous character. But Rousseau’s unfinished sequel, Emile and Sophie, shows that even

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on its own terms this program does not succeed. In the absence of the tutor, Emile proves incapable of dealing with life’s difficulties—exposure to the big city, the loss of a child, the adultery of his wife.30 After recounting his flight and Emile’s experience as a slave in Algiers, the text breaks off with the protagonist in exile from family, home, and country—much like Defoe’s Singleton and Jack at the end of their narratives. Although Rousseau does not find a way to integrate the protagonist with his society, the conclusion of Emile and its sequel go further than Defoe in suggesting that the subject may be constituted around a lack of autonomy, may in fact be produced and defined by a sense of guilt or dependence on social authority.31 In their later Bildungsromane, Wieland and Goethe will again reject misanthropy and present disciplinary control as the alternative. In their hands, satiric and ironic elements become more prominent, particularly in the form of a greater distance between narrative authority and the agency of social control. However, the protagonists of their novels also fail to achieve maturity or autonomy, and instead both Agathon and Wilhelm gain subjecthood only at the cost and in the form of being subjected to a controlling social authority.

WIELAND AND GOETHE The trajectory I am tracing here—from narrative satire to the critique of civilized society in conjectural history, and from Rousseau’s Emile to the Bildungsroman proper—is not, of course, the only possible account of the genesis of the new form. Previous narratives of the beginnings of the Bildungsroman do not include either satire or conjectural history among its antecedents. However, the genealogy offered here does intersect in some respects with the other pre-histories of the genre. Perhaps the most widely accepted early history of the genre sees the Bildungsroman resulting from a confluence of Pietist spiritual autobiography and the baroque adventure novel such as the satiric Simplicissimus. The spiritual autobiography turns outward to more varied and worldly encounters while the narrative of adventures develops an interest in the psychology and inner life of the hero.32 I will argue that the spiritual autobiography also helps resolve the problem of misanthropy that, in my view, the Bildungsroman inherits from narrative satire. Another account of the early Bildungsroman sees one strand pro-

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ceeding from English pedagogical writers, through the early and mid-century English novel of education, and then to the distinctively German form. On this view, Emile plays a pivotal role because it grants a special authority to Robinson Crusoe as an earlier novel of education, and because its emphasis on the inner life strongly influenced German writers of the time of Goethe.33 From my perspective, Emile is also pivotal, but rather because it mediates between satiric, misanthropic critique and the accommodations of the Bildsungsroman. Rousseau’s work also makes use of the baroque pedagogical novel, but modifies this form by educating an upper middle-class pupil rather than a prince, as earlier narratives such as Telemachus had done.34 A final argument concerning the emergence of the new genre includes two lines of thought, both of which see it as a response to developments in the history of German political and social institutions. The first links the Bildungsroman to the late eighteenth-century ideal of Humanita ¨t, and understands it as offering imagined compensation for private individuals excluded from political power in Germany.35 By contrast, the Bildungsroman has also been viewed as a means of producing subjects without a strong sense of autonomy who could become civil servants in the bureaucracy of modernizing German states. Although I do not entirely adopt either of these positions, I will argue, in partial agreement with the second, that the psychological discipline of the Bildungsroman works to inure the protagonist to a condition of immaturity and dependence that Agathon and Wilhelm Meister share with Emile.36 Christoph Martin Wieland’s History of Agathon (1st ed., 1767; 2nd, 1773; 3rd, 1794) is more clearly a Bildungsroman than Emile; in this work, the narrative elements outweigh those of a treatise. Wieland places a high-minded moral enthusiast (Schwa ¨ rmer) in contact with various flawed societies and individuals in order to seek some accommodation between the young man’s idealism and corrupt societies, not, like Swift or Montesquieu, in order to satirize both sides and maintain their opposition. However, he can only resolve the conflict between them by turning from the realistic and largely satiric form that he adopts for the greatest part of the narrative to the mode of romance. By contrast with Rousseau’s concerted attacks on satire and satirists, Wieland stresses the continuity between satire and his narrative project by making a distinctive use of satiric strategies and forms. For example, when Agathon is about to have his first sexual experiences—with the

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older courtesan Danae—he describes the mixing of souls between lovers by citing passages from Petronius. On the one hand, Wieland invokes as an authority one of the most scandalous, most materializing, and least metaphysical of ancient authors; on the other, he paradoxically draws on Petronius to assert a union not of bodies but of souls.37 On many other occasions, too, Wieland first satirically demystifies Agathon’s idealism, then reasserts the existence of spiritual powers.38 In addition to the employment of satiric effects in such episodic textual events, Wieland produces a striking and important satiric reversal of convention through his representation of the guide and tutor of his young protagonist. Rather than providing a god-like embodiment of reason and virtue like Fe´nelon’s Mentor, Swift’s Houyhnhnm, or Rousseau’s tutor, he makes Hippias a perverse pedagogue, an Epicurean Sophist who argues that the greatest good is pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Hippias cynically proposes as the highest skill the ability to ‘‘make men subservient to our designs, whilst we induce them to believe the contrary’’ (1: 154; 1: 451).39 (His formulation accurately characterizes the tutor’s strategy toward his pupil in Emile.)40 Throughout the work, Hippias’s materialistic hedonism and cynicism exert a powerful influence; Wieland gives over an entire book to his attack on spiritual values and any kind of idealism.41 In addition, Agathon’s experiences support Hippias’s position. Disillusioned by politics in Athens and Syracuse, by love in Smyrna, and by religious hypocrisy at Delphi, as the penultimate book comes to an end Agathon stands on the verge of acceding to Hippias’s cynicism. Concerning the pressures that disillusionment exerts on his protagonist to become a misanthrope, the narrator asserts that ‘‘the history of Agathon in this instance, as in so many others, is the history of all men’’ (4:133; 1:819–20). But Agathon must not fall into misanthropic disillusionment: Wieland intends for his exemplary protagonist ultimately to resemble Emile rather than Gulliver. In the first chapter of the concluding book, Wieland announces that he can only protect his hero from coming to a misanthropic conclusion by changing narrative modes; he abandons the mode of moral and historical realism, and embraces that of romance and fantasy, which he has satirized throughout the rest of the work.42 Agathon escapes from imprisonment as a conspirator against the Syracusan state through the intervention of Archytas, the ruler of Tarentum, a wise and kind friend of Agathon’s deceased father. In Tarentum, he is reunited

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with Psyche, the object of his longing during their years of separation after their childhood together at Delphi; he now learns she is his sister. In Tarentum, he also encounters again the beautiful older Danae, who has become a reflective scho¨ne Seele (beautiful soul) uninterested in any resumption of their sexual relationship. This romance conclusion represents Tarentum as a country-house utopia, offering a reconstituted family with Archytas and Danae as parental figures and Agathon and Psyche as children. The narrative concludes that Agathon now has it in his power to be happy. But rather than affirming that the protagonist has grown from his experiences into autonomous maturity, the conclusion of this narrative of Bildung in fact represents Agathon’s regressing to a presexual stage in an erotically charged surrogate family.43 Wieland continued to add to the work for the next twenty-five years, but these additions do not extend the narrative beyond its original conclusion. Brief essayistic interpolations bring Agathon into closer resemblance with Emile as a pedagogical treatise; digressive additions strengthen the work’s parallels with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (see chapter 5). The two most extensive and substantive additions—which Wieland announced at the end of the first edition—solidify the relation of Agathon both to Emile and to Wilhelm Meister. Danae’s long account of her earlier life closely parallels the earlier ‘‘Profession of Faith’’ in Emile and the later ‘‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul’’ in Wilhelm Meister. In addition, Archytas’s philosophy of personal Bildung serves the same function in Agathon as does the tutor’s pedagogy in Emile and that of the Society of the Tower in Wilhelm Meister. Archytas requires Agathon to produce a written account of his own life and of what he has learned from his experiences—an assignment that indicates how closely Agathon’s dependence on this authoritative pedagogue resembles the subservience that Emile feels toward his tutor and Gulliver toward his Houyhnhnm master. The prevalence of satiric strategies in the first nine-tenths of Agathon—its satire of enthusiasm (Schwa ¨rmerei), and its frequent use of satiric digressions and ironies—places it in the paradigm that stresses the ironic lack of congruities between the material and the metaphysical, among such works as Gulliver’s Travels and Persian Letters. But Agathon participates also in another and later paradigm. The work revises satiric form by preventing its protagonist from becoming a misanthrope; in addition, it focuses on the inward development of its protagonist’s feelings and beliefs.44 In

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this fundamental shift from an external to an internal mode of representation, Agathon gives evidence at an early date of the paradigm of organic development according to internal laws that will become dominant in the last decades of the eighteenth century, in the time of Goethe. The earliest version of Wilhelm Meister’s story—the Theatrical Mission (late 1770s–early 1780s)—was written before the last additions to the History of Agathon (1794). Yet when Goethe recasts the Mission as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in the mid-1790s, he takes an important technical step: he establishes an ironic distance on his protagonist but he does not set his novel in the ancient world in order to do so; instead, Wilhelm lives and develops in a recognizeable German culture of the recent past. Nevertheless, the parallels in form among Wilhelm Meister, Agathon, and Emile remain numerous and strong. Most significantly, Goethe employs a number of means in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship that Rousseau and Wieland previously used to distance their works from satiric narrative. Wieland made the Sophistic philosopher Hippias a cynical materialist, and Rousseau associated satire with what he saw as the philosophes’ cynicism and asociability. Goethe also identifies satire with the philosophes, through his depiction of the extreme rationalist, Jarno. In the early parts of the novel, Jarno harshly criticizes Wilhelm’s associations with the theatrical company, with Mignon, and with the harper. However, after Wilhelm’s initiation into the Society of the Tower (Turmgesellschaft), Jarno explains and modifies his earlier criticism. When the society was founded, he says, he was out of step with its founder’s ideas: ‘‘I was older than the rest, had seen things clearly from early on, and valued clarity more than anything else. My sole interest was to know the world as it was’’ (336; 589).45 Jarno thus embodies the Enlightenment paradigm of clear distinctions and pointed criticism, as exemplified by Voltaire. But once the abbe´ convinced him that critical observation of men is useless without a commitment to helping them improve, Jarno came to see the necessity of cultivating inner potentialities; he quotes now from Wilhelm’s Lehrbrief: ‘‘One force controls another, but none can create another [die andere bilden]. In every disposition, and only there, lies the power to perfect itself’’ (338; 593). In his own life and in his relations with Wilhelm, Jarno thus moves from the clarity of external critique to a cultivation of inner endowments consistent with a model of organic growth.

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In addition to this exemplary development in Jarno’s character, Goethe indicates his revision of satiric form through his transformation of the misanthrope into a scho¨ne Seele. The spiritual autobiography that constitutes Book 6 of the novel recounts the progress of a pious woman from involvement in the social world, including a betrothal, through an increasing disaffection from the superficialities of social intercourse, to a life of inward conversation with the deity that keeps her in contact with the world only through her nieces and nephews. The same motivations that led earlier characters such as Alceste and Gulliver to a dead-end of misanthropy lead Natalie’s aunt to a cultivation of moral character without totally renouncing human society. As Wilhelm recognizes, she thus constitutes a potential model for his attempt to come to terms with the world of commerce from which he is alienated.46 This lengthy confession serves the same function as the spiritual autobiographies that Rousseau and Wieland interpolate into their narratives. The ‘‘Profession of Faith’’ and the ‘‘Confession’’ both interrupt the narrative more than halfway through with a selfcontained account of the spiritual development of a newly introduced character.47 Although Danae’s autobiography included in the second edition of Agathon (1773) comes closer to the end of that work and concerns a principal character in the main narrative, in its substance and function it accords closely with these other two autobiographical meditations. It translates the metaphysical credo of Rousseau’s vicar into an account of secular Bildung. In addition, Danae’s dialogue with herself about her experiences closely parallels the self-cultivation by Goethe’s ‘‘beautiful soul’’ of her inner conversation with the deity. All three provide a first-person model of development that is exemplary for the protagonist; all three move from a greater involvement in the social world (including sexual improprieties by the vicar and Danae) to a principled withdrawal from social life, which avoids the extreme of misanthropy. Goethe also attempts, like Rousseau and Wieland, to revise satiric form by reconciling major oppositions within the narrative.48 Wilhelm Meister explores the ways in which both the high-minded young protagonist and modern commercial society must be modified in order to bring about an accommodation between them. Unable to work in ways required by a society of merchants, Wilhelm must realize that acting, even in his own theatre company, lacks the capacity for reforming German culture. He encounters an alternative both to commerce and theater in an extended family of

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landed gentry, which pursues practical reforms in education and in land ownership, and which happens to consist of the nieces and nephew of the beautiful soul. In the final books of the novel, therefore, he renounces the theatre, discovers he is a father, and is betrothed to Natalie, who closely resembles her aunt, the beautiful soul. But the society, like the individual, must also be revised: Natalie’s family and the Society of the Tower envision a form of social organization that accepts commercialization when combined with a reanimated aristocracy. Lothario, for example, asserts his willingness to pay property taxes if it furthers the dissolution of feudal restrictions on the sale and purchase of land. However, in accordance with its program of support for the aristocracy, the society is also sending agents to buy land in America and Russia with which to recompense gentry who lose their property in European revolutions that follow the lead of the French. In Goethe, Rousseau, and Wieland, the project of mediating between a high-minded young man and a form of society that falls short of his aspirations—when combined with a critique of the narrowness of commercial, middle-class life and democratic societies—leads to a distinctive fantasy of a harmonious community reduced from the scale of an entire society to that of an aristocratic country house. Rousseau offers an image of this kind of community in a few pages at the end of Book 4 of Emile (just before the introduction of Sophie), where comfortably propertied individuals go on picnics, and share a glass of wine with the peasants returning from a full day’s labor in the fields.49 Wieland concludes his narrative in the house of Archytas at Tarentum, where the highborn young man of integrity finds protection from the threats of both democratic and despotic societies.50 Natalie’s family and the Society of the Tower constitute another of these reduced utopias.51 The Society does not engage in the soulless pursuit of profit, like Wilhelm’s father, but neither is it confined to trivial irrelevance, like Wilhelm’s theatrical company. Wilhelm’s engagement to Natalie removes him from the society of merchants, and raises him into the ranks of the aristocracy. Moreover, the Society offers Wilhelm direction by accepting him into an organization with greater influence than his theater and linking his continued development to its projects. Yet the ultimate purpose of these projects remains unclear. When Wilhelm is initiated into the society, he and the reader learn that it has followed his actions from the beginning. The seven

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strangers whom Wilhelm has encountered in the narrative now all turn out to have been played by the head of the society, the abbe´, as he sought to guide the young man’s steps. In addition, Wilhelm receives a scroll containing a record of his apprenticeship; a version of the narrative that we have been reading has already been written by the Society of the Tower. The events of Emile’s life were arranged by a tutor for pedagogical purposes; the events of Wilhelm’s life have been ‘‘observed, nay guided’’ (474; 543), recorded, and at least partially arranged by the Society. In Emile, only the pupil remains ignorant that his life is a series of staged events; in Wilhelm Meister, the protagonist, most of the characters, and the reader remain unaware of the society’s role in directing Wilhelm’s life until his initiation. In the last two books, Wilhelm objects repeatedly that he finds himself in the middle of secret plots whose extent and purposes he cannot ascertain; the society appears to exercise its invisible power on everything from his choice of marriage partner to plans for him to travel extensively after his engagement to Natalie (nearly thirty years later, in Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, Goethe reveals that these plans have been carried out, and he leaves still unsettled the question of Wilhelm’s marriage). Thus the true author of Wilhelm’s character proves to be the secret society that has shaped him to its requirements. As Wilhelm understands it, his proposal to Therese may be his first resolution to arise entirely from exercising his own judgment (499); yet he sees even that decision evaporate as a new revelation by Jarno restores Therese to Lothario, and moves Wilhelm closer to Natalie. Rediscovering his grandfather’s collection of paintings in Natalie’s house seems to confirm that the Society intends Wilhelm and Natalie to marry. Lothario’s rejected lover Lydia, though scorned by members of the Society, understands that the Society is able to make use of Wilhelm as their tool because, as she tells him, he has ‘‘no force of character’’ (434; 497). The disciplinary process to which Wilhelm is subjected in this novel leaves him without the ability to make and carry through independent decisions.52 Like Emile and Agathon, Wilhelm is a pupil who conspicuously does not achieve adulthood and autonomy of character.53 Instead, all these characters are subjected to a course of disciplining whose most conspicuous product is the young man’s extreme and continuing reliance on social authority. In all three cases, the subjecthood into which the young man grows takes the form of subjection to an external rule. One hardly needs to point to the paradox of this conclusion, given the stated pedagogical project of each work

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and of the genre as a whole. Nor is it difficult to see that the relations between Wilhelm and the secret society, between Agathon and Archytas, and between Emile and his tutor parallel the relation between Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms or Usbek and the Persian institution of the seraglio. As is the case with Agathon, Wilhelm Meister thus stands in a close relation to two cultural formations. The emphasis on selfcultivation in the ‘‘Confessions,’’ the pedagogical philosophy of the abbe´ and the Society of the Tower, and the assertion that Wilhelm learns gradually through experience of his mistakes all indicate that in this novel the slow realization of potential that characterizes organic growth serves as the model for individual moral and intellectual development. On the other hand, the invisible disciplinary authority of the Society, combined with the persistent incapacity of the protagonist, points to a view of knowledge that is deeply ironic, that stresses the paradoxical lack of congruence between the plans of the new form of social authority, which assumes some of the status of providence, and the results of its intervention in the case of an exemplary protagonist. Both Agathon and Wilhelm Meister also give evidence of more ironic distance from the disciplinary authority than is present in Emile. Wieland prominently acknowledges the romance nature of his last book, including by implication Archytas’s philosophy of education. In Goethe’s novel, Jarno admits that the solemn initiation into the Society is a farce, Lydia sharply criticizes the Society, and Natalie opposes the abbe´ ’s vaunted pedagogy.54 Still, along with this emergence of satiric irony in the later narratives, both follow Rousseau’s work in focusing on the supposed growth of an innocent and naive young man. The view of Bildung that emerges from this analysis of early Bildungsromane accords closely with the view of progress articulated by Rousseau in his conjectural histories (and by the Houyhnhnm in Gulliver’s Travels). Having demonstrated in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that the history of civil society necessarily consists of a decline, Rousseau hoped to show that removal from the corrupt spheres of history and society could preserve the individual’s integrity and natural innocence. His pedagogical novel, however, fails to demonstrate the thesis; lacking autonomy, Emile never emerges from the constraining authority of his tutor. Agathon and Wilhelm similarly fail to achieve an adult independence; their regressions to infantile status in surrogate families, like that in Emile, parallel in the history of the individual the devo-

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lution in the history of society that Rousseau asserts in the Discourse. We can discern two attitudes toward history and social control in the paradigm of the Enlightenment. The more humanistic of these sees in history a progressive tendency toward more civilized conditions, greater tolerance, and scientific advances. With its idea of gradual improvement and development, this view is congenial to the notion of Bildung. The other attitude, more interested in social control, sees history as a force of dissolution against which a single truth and virtue need to be asserted. This nostalgic and reactionary view underlies Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts and the Social Contract. For Wieland and Goethe, Bildung offered a model for attaining the highest human potentials, yet both of them are also extremely suspicious of modern commercial society and democratic revolutions.55 The combination in their Bildungsromane of a progressive notion of individual history with an authoritarian idea of social history produces paradoxical results. Like Rousseau, these authors assert the efficacy of organic development in individual lives, but the representation of such individuals as immature and their histories as ultimately regressive indicates that modern social forces prove stronger than the authors’ defensive psychological and humanist constructions. The conclusions of these works imply that similar constraints shape processes of formation both in the history of society and in the history of the individual. The undercutting of a progressive notion of individual development and a nostalgic view of social history produces an implicitly ironic, even satiric, representation of protagonists who do not develop like well-formed plants. Still, the concluding ironic perspective on Wilhelm and Agathon differs significantly from the concluding ironic satire of Gulliver and Usbek. In the earlier paradigm, the satire of misanthropy by Swift and Montesquieu remains detached and external. However, Wieland and Goethe represent from within the limitations of the protagonist who stops short of misanthropy; they thus produce a greater involvement with his plight. The result in the later paradigm closely approximates Romantic irony, which underscores the inevitable disparity between, on the one hand, the limited capacities of the artist or his work and, on the other, his imagination of and desire for infinite freedom. This increasingly internal mode of representation lends itself to and participates in an increasingly disciplinary organization of society. It is not surprising that such a contribution to disciplinarity

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should be found in works that combine the pedagogical treatise with a narrative of the education of an imagined, exemplary individual. Bentham’s Postscript to the Panopticon appears in 1791, the same decade that produces the Society of the Tower in Wilhelm Meister. The sovereign eye of the pedagogical authority in the Bildungsromane of the late eighteenth century not only helps shape the modern male subject as an asexual child of an idealized family; it also anticipates later disciplinary structures such as the anonymous ubiquitous surveillance characteristic of the Victorian novel, and the generalized paranoia about who directs history which informs many postmodern narratives.56 Todd Kontje has argued that the protagonists of early Bildungsromane are often authors who are unable to make a connection between their own experience and imagination and those of a wider public.57 This lack of accord between authors and readers may give evidence of a limited cultural public sphere for the reception of novels and essays in late eighteenth-century Germany. I would suggest that such an undeveloped arena for cultural and political discussions has consequences for the genres of literature that will be produced and published. It could help account for the lack of autonomy and character that we have seen in the protagonists of early Bildungsromane. In addition, it may help explain the persistence of satiric irony and narrative indirection in Germany, as well as in contemporary France, where the political public sphere was limited. By contrast, in Britain, both a literary and a political public sphere had developed by the second half of the eighteenth century, and most British narrative was following a different generic path than was continental narrative. The following chapter turns to consider the divergence between these two generic, literary, and political histories.

5 Satire, Novel, and Forms of the Public Sphere, 1740–1800 PUBLIC SPHERES IN BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND GERMANY

CHAPTERS 2 AND 4 HAVE CONSIDERED CASES WHERE BRITISH AND continental authors make use of related forms and seem to participate in the same frameworks of cultural understanding. However, despite such continuities and conversations among frameworks and genres, the history of narrative forms in Britain also diverges in significant ways from that in France and Germany. From the 1740s through the 1760s, male British writers who once worked in the form of narrative satire—chiefly Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne—moved away from satire and toward other, novelistic forms. By contrast, writers in France and Germany who had worked in other forms of narrative—for example, Voltaire in epic and history, or Diderot and Wieland in erotic narrative— increasingly employed narrative satire between the late 1740s and the 1780s. Instead of revealing parallel literary histories, these decades reveal a chiastic relation between the history of narrative genres in Britain and in France and Germany. As a way of partially accounting for such an uneven development, this chapter and the next will explore relations between narrative satire and forms of the public sphere as they took shape earliest in eighteenth-century Britain, then later and in different varieties in France and Germany. Ju ¨ rgen Habermas devotes most of the first half of his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere to developing a model of what he calls the middle-class public sphere, taking British society as a model. Habermas distinguishes between two kinds of public sphere—a literary or cultural and a political public arena. Both forms of public sphere arose from a space of discursive activity which took shape between the state and society, and which depended upon a private 178

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sphere and an autonomous subject not censored or regulated by the state. Because such an area was defined by the making public of private concerns and interests, Habermas considers exchanges of letters and reactions to literature, which put individual subjectivity on display, to be characteristic of the public sphere. Thus, the emergence of an area of private–public expression has consequences for the history of genres, producing as one of its typical forms the periodical essay, which usually includes literary criticism and advice about social behavior. The appearance of the Tatler and Spectator papers in 1709–1712 indicates the early date at which England was developing a cultural public sphere. Such a public arena also makes possible and leads to what Habermas regards as the ‘‘typical genre and authentic literary achievement’’ of the century—‘‘the domestic novel, the psychological description in autobiographical form’’ (49), the first example of which was the epistolary novel Pamela (1740).1 Indeed, as Habermas sees it, the expression of individual judgments and sentiments in novels is closely associated with the expression of individual subjectivity in the literary or cultural public sphere. Habermas also argues that the arena of discourse that leads to the political public sphere is made possible by the emergence of a realm of autonomous private activities that includes not only domestic life, but also the pursuit of property and profits by merchants and professionals without public authority or official positions. Habermas again focuses on the area where private and public intersect, where ‘‘private people come together as a public’’ (27) to consider and discuss issues of government policy. In England, the sites for the development of such an area of deliberative reason included coffeehouses, which increased dramatically in numbers during the Restoration, remaining popular and important for decades thereafter, and newspapers, which originally included information for merchants about events overseas but also came to include reflections on politics and policies. In a telling and distinctive development, the Craftsman was founded in 1726 and helped establish the idea of a loyal opposition during the 1730s.2 However, the political public sphere, which is made plural by the establishment of a loyal opposition, is much more exclusive than the literary or cultural public sphere: in England, only men who owned large amounts of property participated in and thus constituted the political public sphere. Since Habermas’s work was first published, many other studies have in effect filled out and confirmed his argument about the

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principal factors and stages in the emergence of a cultural public sphere in Britain. Studies of consumer culture in eighteenth-century England have proliferated in the last twenty years, and the support they offer to the argument is the more striking because they usually do not place themselves explicitly in relation to Habermas’s thesis. Beginning with The Birth of Consumer Society (1982), and extending through such collections as Consumption and the World of Goods (1993), this scholarship has investigated and demonstrated the importance of the increase in consumption, the growth of a reading public, the commercialization of leisure, and the move from private forms to public forms of entertainment, largely confirming Habermas’s account of the growth of a cultural public sphere composed of private people in mid-century England.3 Several recent studies of the popular culture of print have made explicit the relation between a cultural public sphere and the history of narrative forms. In Before Novels, J. Paul Hunter shows how an emphasis in the popular press on contemporaneity, news, novelty, didacticism, and the everyday adventures and problems of unremarkable people led to a set of cultural expectations that could be answered by the formal features of the novel.4 In Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740, Brean Hammond has historicized a term from Bakhtin to argue that the cultural and social context, and especially the conditions of authorship in the first half of the eighteenth century, led to a ‘‘novelization’’ of literary forms—a development from epic and romance toward forms that are more heterogeneous, moderate, tolerant, and plausible.5 The features of narrative encouraged by the newly emerging social and cultural nexus—tolerance, diversity, moderation, an interest in the contemporary and the everyday—lead to the production of novels. But just as importantly for this study, the development of a plural political public sphere discourages the production of satire, by reducing the need to which satire responds. Such a public sphere is defined as establishing the kind of space in which oppositional thoughts can be expressed, whether in speech or in writing, without being censored and without fear of punishment.6 In an absolutist or unitary public sphere, criticism, the presentation of alternate policies, and opposition to established authorities can only be expressed indirectly, figuratively, ironically, and under threat of reprisal. The formal features of satire—authorial anonymity; figurative, allegorical, or allusive plots and characters;

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setting in another country or another time; the doubleness of ironies and parodies—can be effective strategies for evading unitary secular or religious authority that requires conformity to a single truth.7 I am not arguing here for a direct or causal relation between legislative censorship and the fortunes of a genre such as narrative satire; I do not see immediate or single results from developments such as the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 or the reimposition of censorship on the theaters in 1737. Rather, the responses to such changes in the legal censorship are multiple and participate in long-term tendencies.8 Thus, satire did not immediately disappear after the expiration of the censorship in 1695. However, the next decade did see the beginnings of a newly sentimental and accommodating attitude, as well as a modification of satiric form in the Tatler and Spectator papers and in the works of Shaftesbury. Moreover, these non-satiric discursive forms came to dominate the cultural landscape in Britain by the middle of the century, largely displacing previously dominant satiric forms. Similarly, Walpole’s reimposition of censorship in 1737 did not lead immediately to a renewal of satire in response; rather, it constituted only one element in a complex cultural situation. The Act ended Fielding’s career as a satiric playwright, but not his career as a satirist; three of the first four narratives that he published in the early 1740s were still strongly satiric. However, Fielding was moving away from the use of satiric form. After a lapse of ten years, he published Tom Jones (1749), the prototypical comic novel with subordinate satiric elements, and two years after that Amelia, which is the work of his most clearly associated with a plural public sphere and the one most devoid of satire. As we shall see, the careers of other writers follow the same path from satiric narrative to sentimental novel in later decades: Smollett moves from Roderick Random (1748) to Humphry Clinker (1771) and Sterne from Tristram Shandy (1759–67) to Sentimental Journey (1768). Many social and institutional factors contribute as much to the establishment of a plural public sphere as legislative acts or their expiration. In addition, the rhythms of individual careers produce different mixtures of satire and novelistic forms, different beginnings and endpoints in each author’s use of form. Despite particular acts of censorship or its lifting, the history of narrative forms in the eighteenth century indicates a long-term pressure to

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modify satiric energies and redirect them into non-satiric forms, and this pressure arises partly, I believe, from the ongoing and early development in England of a limited but still plural public sphere. If work on British social, cultural, and political history in the last two decades has modified and extended Habermas’s argument, even when not referring to his work explicitly, historians have questioned and revised his understanding of the public sphere in France and Germany. Habermas devotes only a few pages to forms of public sphere that emerge late in the eighteenth century in France and the German states, both of which diverge considerably from the English model. In France, Habermas believes that the control and censorship of the press by the national monarchical government (only the authorized Gazette de France was officially allowed to disseminate information) prevented the formation under the old regime of political journalism and an arena for political discussion and debate in print. Even though the salons contributed to the beginnings of discussion and commentary, they remained dominated by the aristocracy, and unable to constitute a broadly based public opinion. According to Habermas, an arena of frenetic political discussion and contestation came into existence virtually overnight in 1789, and lasted for a few years thereafter; only then did a political daily press come into existence, along with political clubs and factions. Other historians have pointed out that there are many different kinds of public spheres besides the political public sphere on which Habermas focused. Joan Landes has argued that the public sphere of the revolution was far from liberal because it effected a rigorous exclusion of women and women’s voices, in striking contrast with the Enlightenment salons which were directed by women.9 Nancy Fraser has pointed to the simultaneous existence of many counterpublics in addition and in opposition to the public of elite men, mentioning for example ‘‘elite women’s publics, and working-class publics,’’ each of which could constitute a counterpublic sphere for discussion of policy alternatives.10 Dena Goodman has maintained that such a counterpublic, the Enlightenment salons of 1750–75, largely constituted a republic of letters whose ideal of sociability, equality, and ordered discussion provided a corrective to the absolutist state.11 In addition, a number of scholars have revised Habermas’s thesis by pointing to continuities between practices under the old regime and in the revolutionary period. Thus, Jeremy Popkin has shown that de-

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spite the strict press censorship, the government tolerated the importation of French newspapers printed in Holland, especially the respected Gazette de Leyde (Leiden), and that the feeding of information to such papers by successive ministers and factions in the government led to a small degree of political journalism in exile in the decades before the revolution.12 Similarly, Keith Baker has argued that a kind of ‘‘politics of contestation’’ emerged in France in the 1750s, and, by the 1770s, an idea of public opinion had been formed. Despite all these developments, however, in France public opinion was understood not as variable, unreliable, and tied to particular interests, but as stable, rational, and undivided—a unitary, not a partisan institution, seen as characteristic of the French nation and people.13 Andreas Gestrich has demonstrated how ‘‘extraordinarily complicated’’ the absolutist public arena could be in early and mideighteenth-century Germany, and by implication in France at the same time.14 Still, in even the most enlightened German states, such as Weimar and Prussia, the development of a cultural public sphere did not begin to gain strength until the 1770s and 1780s with the founding of dozens of reading societies and learned societies.15 Such a cultural public arena had begun to take shape in France several decades earlier in the form of the salons, and a literary, cultural public sphere emerged in England from the time of the Tatler and Spectator papers in the early years of the century.16 The German journals of the time, including Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur (founded in 1773) and the Berlinische Monatsschrift (which published many of Kant’s essays), were predominantly interested in criticism of drama and discussion of philosophical subjects. There was little or no political journalism before the French Revolution (or even for some time afterward); such a venture could lead to indefinite incarceration and death in jail. When Wieland, Herder, Kant, and others set out some of their reflections on the importance of public discussion in the 1770s and 1780s, their essays about public opinion were not confirming, but were rather anticipating and encouraging such a development.17 Certainly, a political arena for the uncensored expression of plural political perspectives did not exist either in France or in the German states during the second half of the eighteenth century (except during the early 1790s in France). Recent scholars have thus revised and complicated Habermas’s argument; still, it remains the case that almost all the public discourse in France and Germany occurred in the latter part of the

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century in the cultural sphere, and was concerned with criticism of literary and philosophical works. Moreover, where recent work has shown the beginnings of political journalism and debate in France before the Revolution, it has also made clear that such discussions presumed a unitary and not a plural form of the political arena. Such a rhetorical framework evolved from the high value placed on the unity of the kingdom, and the presumption that the pursuit of rationality would lead to a single truth that would then be recognized by all Frenchmen. In Germany, a similarly unitary conception of public opinion followed from a nearly opposite situation. The German states were fragmented and shared few political institutions; however, one of these was the censorship of oppositional discourse that each state enforced. At the time of the development of a cultural public sphere in the 1770s and 1780s, thinkers such as Wieland saw the public that read and participated in literary discussions as offering a possible base on which to constitute a unified German culture and nation. There is thus more than one developmental model for the public sphere. Both in the eighteenth century and later, France, Germany, and other nations did not conform to the English model of the plural political public sphere. In France, a strict censorship remained in effect, and many of the writers of the Enlightenment, including those to be discussed in this chapter and the next—Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau—were imprisoned, threatened with imprisonment, or had their writings prohibited, condemned, or burned because of their perceived criticism of church and state. Such intolerance of criticism of the political and religious establishment is not conducive to the ‘‘novelization’’ of print culture that was occurring in Britain. Indeed, for a number of years after 1737, novels were officially proscribed in France.18 Given the absence of a loyal opposition and the insistence on a unitary truth to which all must adhere in public discourse, the irony and indirection of satire continued to serve a useful function in France and Germany; they allowed criticism of government and society to be expressed.19 The view offered here of the history of narrative forms in France finds support in English Showalter’s study of the French novel in the eighteenth century. Showalter argues that critiques of the established social order, of le monde, exist already in satiric narratives from early in the century such as Gil Blas, and that implicit criticisms of this social order continue in the narratives of Marivaux, Pre´vost, and their contemporaries, intensifying in

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the first three quarters of the century, and reaching a high point in Laclos’s Liaisons Dangereuses and in the tales of Voltaire and Diderot.20 The same absolutist idea of a single political discourse in the German states, and a similar confinement of criticism to the literary and cultural sphere, contributed to a comparable situation for narrative forms in Germany.21 Novelistic narratives did not begin to be written in German until the 1760s (Wieland’s Agathon is generally considered the first), and even then strongly satiric narratives (such as Wieland’s own History of the Abderites and Wezel’s Belphegor) continued to be produced in significant numbers. This chapter will focus first on the shift in the narrative careers or Fielding and Smollett from a reliance on satire to the use of comic and realistic novelistic forms. The French writer who is closest to these two in his generation and concerns is Voltaire, who had worked in other satiric forms earlier, but who began to write his satiric tales in the late 1740s, just as Fielding was moving away from satire. In these tales Voltaire found a form in which he could express his criticism of the religious and political establishment in France; he continued to write satiric tales into the 1770s, but throughout his career he did not write a novel. Then I will turn to juxtapose narratives by Diderot and Wieland with those of Sterne. Both of the continental authors make explicit use of Tristram Shandy as a model, yet both also emphasize and strengthen the satiric elements in Sterne’s narrative. Moreover, Diderot and Wieland continue to employ satiric forms in their later works, while Sterne moves away from satire almost entirely in his last work, A Sentimental Journey. All the narratives considered in this chapter reveal some combination of the sentimental and novelistic along with the satiric, although the later British works turn away from this combination and toward a use of form that is exclusively or predominantly novelistic. The greater persistence of this generic mixture in the continental writers may stem partly from another combination: the existence of a cultural public sphere, which encourages the representation of individual sentiments, along with the absence of a pluralistic political sphere, which helps account for the continued usefulness of satire. The exclusion of women from the plural public sphere in Britain, their inability to appear in print arguing for or against official public policy, had consequences on the narrative genres in which women worked. Like continental authors with access to a

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cultural but not a political public sphere, women in Britain continue to use satiric form after the period of its greatest usefulness for British men. The final section of this chapter therefore examines some strong and distinctive satiric narratives by women from the first half of the eighteenth century, and the persistence of this genre in British women’s writings of the middle and later part of the century. As I indicated in the Introduction, the use of an analytical framework that complicates Habermas’s notion of the public sphere can complement an approach employing a theory of cultural paradigms, which modifies Foucault’s idea of epistemes in The Order of Things. Developments that contribute to the emergence of various public spheres occur on a different level from that on which cultural paradigms emerge, shift, and fade: public spheres stand in a more direct relation with changing forms of social life, such as those associated with coffeehouses, newspapers, and reading societies. Still, activities that constitute the various forms of the public sphere are primarily discursive, as are the forms of expression and thought in cultural paradigms. Habermas is more interested in continuities and development than is Foucault, yet he pays particular attention to the breaks that make up the ‘‘structural transformations’’ in the discursive regimes he analyzes. Perhaps it is best to conceive of an analysis that focuses on public spheres as a way of complicating and extending an account cast in terms of cultural paradigms. In particular, the uneven history of narrative genres in different cultures may be understood more readily in terms of different kinds of public spheres.

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND VOLTAIRE Aside from the parodic Shamela, Fielding’s fictional narratives consist of three kinds. The two long works first published in his Miscellanies (1743)—Jonathan Wild and A Journey from this World to the Next—are both satiric narratives. Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) are comic novels, or, according to Fielding, comic epics in prose. And Amelia (1751) is a tragicomic domestic novel. The distinctions between these forms derive partly from the kind of history on which each concentrates—whether public, as in the case of the two satiric narratives, or more private, as in the case of the three novels. For example, more than half of

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the Journey from this World to the Next is devoted to an account of the adventures of Julian the Apostate in successive incarnations from the time he was emperor until he was an alderman in the middle ages. In each of his lives—as a statesman, general, soldier, fiddler, carpenter, or monk—Julian commits enough offenses that he cannot enter Elysium, yet mixed with enough good that he need not go to Hades; so after each life he must return again to another life on earth. Since the avatars of Julian or the events in which he participates can often be identified, his account constitutes a brief satiric history of almost a thousand years. That history consists of a uniform record of folly and vice peopled by types such as the fop, the poet, and the prime minister, who are still prominent and unchanged in Fielding’s own time. The Journey thus offers a satiric history of an unchanging human nature. Jonathan Wild also recounts public history in the form of biography, but it is confined to the natural lifetime of its notorious protagonist. Throughout this narrative, Fielding makes use of a sustained irony of inversion, of blame by praise. The historian narrator writes as an initiate in a systematic reversal of terms of evaluation, according to which Wild, a thief and liar, is a great man. On his first night in jail, Wild remains sleepless because he fears being betrayed by one of his confederates, ‘‘knowing him to be an accomplished rascal, as the vulgar term it, a complete GREAT MAN in our language’’ (158).22 The parodic historian speaks of tenderness and humanity as ‘‘low’’ (125), whereas ‘‘those great arts which the vulgar call treachery, dissembling, promising, lying, falsehood, etc., . . . are by great men summed up in the collective name of policy, or politics’’ (102). Thus, although the great and their apologists use the same language as the vulgar (who are the good), they reverse the meanings of all moral terms. Of course, Fielding satirizes not only Wild and his celebratory biographer but also the politicians such as Walpole who act according to this inverted system of values.23 The narrative then portrays only the two extremes of the great and the good. Fielding makes use of the same irony that Gay employs in The Beggar’s Opera to show that the petty thief or highwayman and powerful politicians or statesmen are not opposites, but in fact mirror each other at opposite ends of the scale. Fielding’s satire brings both to the same level as moral equivalents: the great include all the thieves and knaves, whether from high or low life. But the good man, Heartfree, stands at the opposite extreme from such characters, from both kinds of thieves. He is so guileless

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and naı¨ve that he can offer no resistance to the machinations of Wild and his kind. Thus, in a structure characteristic of satire, the narrative portrays only opposed extremes but no authorized middle ground between them. One of the defining projects of Fielding’s novels is to provide such a middle ground, for example by fashioning a major character who not only has a good and charitable heart but also comes to possess knowledge of the world, prudence, and even the justifiable suspicion necessary to defend himself from impositions and trickery. Fielding was already working toward such a structure in Joseph Andrews. There, the good-hearted but naı¨ve Parson Adams ‘‘never saw further into people than they desired to let him’’ (144).24 However, even the inexperienced young Joseph proves to have more knowledge of the world and of human characters than Adams. When Adams is taken in by the exorbitant and empty promises of a squire in the neighborhood of an inn at which they are staying, Joseph sees through the imposture long before Adams, and catechizes his own teacher. Although Adams prides himself on his superior learning as he asserts that ‘‘Knowledge of Men is only to be learnt from Books,’’ Joseph can answer more accurately and to the point, ‘‘all I know is, it is a Maxim among the Gentlemen of our Cloth [servants] that those Masters who promise the most perform the least’’ (176). What Joseph understands from his limited experience, Adams is only brought to accept with great difficulty, because he believes the squire has the countenance and appearance of a charitable Christian. Joseph proves to be the more flexible and educable, and Adams the more systematic and dogmatic of the two.25 As opposed to Adams, who sees human beings as wholly good, and Wilson, who sees them as wholly evil, Joseph is prepared to see the mixed nature of most characters.26 Like Joseph, who recognizes character as a mixture of opposed traits, Fielding defines his chosen form as occupying a middle ground between other forms. In the Preface, he asserts that the comic prose epic is to be distinguished from romance at one extreme but also from the grotesque at the other. The romance is ‘‘grave and solemn’’; it sets characters of the highest manners before us, and it reaches for the sublime (4). By contrast, the satiric grotesque is concerned with exhibiting what is ‘‘monstrous and unnatural’’ (4); it applies ‘‘the Manners of the highest to the lowest’’ (4) as Jonathan Wild does. The generic middle ground between celebratory romance and satiric grotesque is of course the comic novel, which focuses on the ridiculous—the inconsistencies

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produced by vanity and hypocrisy. The form that Fielding develops in Joseph Andrews, then, is predominantly comic, although it also includes much satire on hypocrisy, a few mock-heroic travesties, a centrally located utopian idyll, and a conclusion that follows all the implausible conventions of romance—reuniting parents and children separated by gypsies, revealing the birth of a protagonist to be higher than previously known, overcoming all obstacles to the union of a chaste young couple. In all these respects, Fielding employs the same form again in Tom Jones, although the later novel is far more intricate in the architecture of its plot than the earlier one. In Jones, Fielding offers his most elaborate example of a character of the middle. He has weaknesses—especially too great a willingness to engage in sexual dalliances—but not the confirmed vices of hypocrisy, malice, or greed. In fact, he comes close to the opposite extreme, with his guilelessness and his unreflective practice of charity. But Tom must and does learn by the end of the novel that good-hearted naı¨vete´ is vulnerable to being misrepresented, and that in self-defense, the innocent must cultivate a degree of prudence and even suspicion. When he is reunited with Allworthy near the end of the novel, Tom confesses to being guilty not of any ‘‘gross Villainy,’’ but of numerous ‘‘Follies which have been attended with dreadful Consequences’’ (959).27 In response, Allworthy articulates one of the moral theses of the novel: ‘‘You now see, Tom, to what Dangers Imprudence alone may subject Virtue. . . . Prudence is indeed the Duty which we owe ourselves; and if we will be so much our own Enemies as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the World is deficient in discharging their Duty to us’’ (960). Of course, Allworthy is himself subject to his own rebuke, since his good-heartedness was deceived not only by Blifil but by Blifil’s mother, with consequences for the lives of Jenny Jones and Partridge far more serious than the results of Tom’s unthinking follies. Still, the irony underscores the point that to possess goodness in the extreme does not suffice, and that knowledge of the world, and some regard to selfinterest is necessary to preserve and defend that goodness. An accommodation between the moral perspectives of self-interested prudence and naı¨ve goodness must be reached so that virtue can survive.28 In addition to this move toward mediation in the thematics of the novel, the metafictional introductory chapters to each book place the novel in the middle ground between other genres of narrative, marking its distance from satire and making explicit its re-

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lation to a political public sphere. Fielding again in Tom Jones defines his role as that of a historian, and places the kind of history he writes in the middle between romance and another species of writing. But the opposite of romance and alternative to the novel, which in Joseph Andrews was the grotesque, becomes in Tom Jones the newspaper.29 The newspaper or historical chronicle devotes the same amount of space to equal periods of time whether significant events occurred within them or not, whereas Fielding’s narrator announces he will skip over large tracts of time if they contain nothing of importance for his story (75–76). The narrator still refers to his work as a comic prose epic (209), but he also designates the form as a ‘‘Heroic, Historical, Prosaic’’ narrative (152), emphasizing its links with history as well as epic. Fielding not only newly defines his genre of writing as historical, and separates it further from purportedly imperfectly historical forms such as the newspaper, he also distinguishes it from public history proper. He points out that ‘‘those Historians who relate publick Transactions, have the Advantage of us who confine ourselves to Scenes of private Life’’ (402). The existence of historical monsters, such as Nero, has not been doubted because of the testimony of many historians. But it becomes novelistic historians like Fielding himself—‘‘who deal in private Character, who search into the most retired Recesses, and draw forth Examples of Virtue and Vice’’ (402)—to remain within the bounds not only of what is possible but of what is probable, because there can be no external confirmation of the events and figures in his narrative. Fielding here defines the comic novel—his historic, comic epic—as a public history of private life. He also shows why its representations of character will tend to be more restrained, more moderate than those in other narrative forms such as romance, satire, or the history of public lives. Idealizing romances are allowed the license of the improbable, even the impossible. Newspapers must confine themselves to the actuality of the everyday, though this may include elements of the marvelous. Between these, histories of public life can depict extreme characters who actually existed, however improbably. But searching into private corners for those who are neither paragons of virtue nor notorious public men, the historian of private life—the novelist—focuses on characters whose combination of virtues and vices makes them probable and believable. Not only will they tend to be mixed characters, but their traits will tend to be moderate rather than extreme; their vices will fall short of the monstrous, just as their virtues will fall short of the heroic.

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Habermas understands the cultural and political public spheres as they took shape in England in the first half of the eighteenth century as ‘‘the sphere of private people come together as a public’’ (27). In Tom Jones, Fielding makes explicit his understanding that the novelist is in the business precisely of making private lives public—as a historian of the contemporary, though not a chronicler or journalist.30 The novelist may be an archivist, like Richardson, but his story concerns the history of a private individual rather than a public one.31 In this regard, one might compare the narrative satire of Gulliver’s Travels with the novel Tom Jones. Swift is not interested in telling about Gulliver’s private life, his marriage, his love for his children, or the psychological determinants of his final madness. Rather, he focuses on public issues, political virtue or the lack of it, corruption, ambition, and the workings of courts. The satirist recounts a history of public life, often displaced by allegory, irony, and other forms of indirection. The biographical form taken by Gulliver’s tale is a sign of such indirection, since the object of Swift’s concern proves repeatedly to be the history of wars and public follies in England over the preceding two centuries. The shift from public concerns of satire to the private concerns of the novel emerges even more clearly from the juxtaposition of these two texts when we consider that the other consistent object of Swift’s satire is the protagonist himself—not because he is a vicious knave, but because he is gullible and naı¨vely accepts the prevailing structures of value in his homeland. Like Tom Jones, he needs to learn to cultivate some suspicions; unlike Jones, he must cultivate skepticism of the political institutions and official history of England. Moreover, when he finally does achieve some distance from the established political perspective, he locates no middle ground, but moves to the opposite perspective of pure rationalism that sees all humans solely as dirty vicious animals. Clearly, the form of the novel registers many gains—whether it is the history of Tom Jones or Clarissa, David Simple or Evelina—and among the chief of these is the opening up of the territory of the historically obscure individual’s interior life. But the turn away from narrative satire involves as well a diminution in the public aspects of characters—especially their address toward particular historical events and political conjunctions.32 The formation of a political public sphere in England may help account for the decline and near disappearance of extended narrative satires in the second half of the eighteenth century. Such sat-

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ire carried a greater weight than the novel of political and publicly historical implications, even if it did so in veiled and indirect ways. But when questions of public policy, corruption, and injustice can be debated openly with little fear of prosecution, when established narratives of national history can be challenged, as they were by Bolingbroke in the Craftsman and other works of the 1730s, and when the notion of a loyal opposition to the ministry gains general acceptance (again from the 1730s), then satire, with its indirections and disguises, allegories and ironies, has less of a purpose to serve.33 Although it is usually not as clearly the case in the career of a single writer as it is in Fielding’s, there was a widespread shift in the second third of the century from satiric parody to direct public comment. Such commentary might take the form of a pamphlet such as Fielding’s Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers, which describes a particular problem in the administration of policy, and suggests particular remedies, without irony, without despair, and with some lasting and marked effect.34 Again, the parallels and the contrasts with Swift, and in particular with the ‘‘Modest Proposal,’’ are striking.35 Amelia, Fielding’s last fictional narrative, takes even further the development beyond satire to open, straightforward comment on policy, this time introduced into a serious history of private life. Aside from an early passage satirizing the maladministration of justice by a corrupt and illiterate judge, Amelia is almost entirely devoid of satire. The novel recounts the domestic history of a halfpay army officer who cannot stay out of debt because of improvidence and gambling, and who is unfaithful to his wife in the first quarter of the novel. Amelia endures his thoughtlessness with patience, and maintains her own chastity despite being pursued with determination both by an unscrupulous nobleman and by her husband’s best friend. The narrative is concerned with the threats to and the eventual survival of their domestic union.36 Even when, as frequently happens, the narrative touches on and draws attention to contemporary corruption or injustice, it swerves away from the possibilities for satire and irony, and instead offers an accurate and indignant description of the problem, usually accompanied by a straightforward, unironic proposal for its elimination. Thus, at one point, Booth gives all the money Amelia has saved from her domestic accounts, all the money they have left, to a man in the War Office who pretends to be able to obtain a commission for him, but who merely pockets the cash and does nothing. In a passage that revises the distinctive phrase of Jona-

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than Wild, the narrator pauses to ask the reader if he is a ‘‘great Man’’ who would ‘‘put a final End to this abominable Practice of touching, as it is called; by which indeed a Set of Leaches are permitted to suck the Blood of the Brave and the Indigent; of the Widow and the Orphan.’’37 The image of the leech can hardly be called satiric here; it underscores the narrator’s straightforward and indignant plea that those in the War Office acknowledge the damage and injustice caused by such bribery and refuse to countenance it. Similarly, when Booth’s protector Dr. Harrison appeals to a nobleman from his neighborhood to obtain Booth a commission, he is told that if he cannot give his vote in the nobleman’s interest at the next election, then his friend cannot expect to receive a commission. In Harrison’s opinion, all the deserving, such as Booth, could be provided for except that all the undeserving have been cared for first. To the nobleman, though, such thoughts are utopian; he argues that in a nation that has grown corrupt, honesty and morality have no role to play. One can imagine the attitude of such a character being wittily satirized by being ironically praised in an earlier work such as Jonathan Wild. But here again ironic satire has given way to indignant and straightforward exposition of corruption and injustice. Although there may appear to be a contradiction between the intense focus on the domestic and private affairs of the Booths in this novel and the explicit and direct pronouncements on public policy and ethics, such a combination makes sense in light of developments in the cultural and political public spheres. As Habermas argues, rational critical discussion in the public realm was based on an autonomous subjectivity that developed out of the literary and cultural public sphere of readers, in other words from the intimate private and domestic realm. The notion of a single public sphere therefore conflates ‘‘two roles assumed by privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple’’ (56). The role of human being as such was available to all readers, including women and propertyless men, but only those who owned substantial property were qualified to speak in public on matters of policy. Indeed, indignant but straightforward criticisms of injustice in the novel are all expressed either by the narrator or by Dr. Harrison, a clergyman with some property and a vote in Parliamentary elections; Harrison clearly stands in for the narrator when he voices such criticisms. But the authority that Harrison and the narrator

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assume derives also from their involvement in the domestic world of Booth and Amelia, to whom Harrison serves as a surrogate father. In effect, the private, domestic world does not stand in opposition to, but rather underwrites the public role of a character such as Harrison or the narrator. Fielding’s narratives thus move from satiric public histories that work by means of parodic reversals and ironic indirection to histories of private life that include straightforward commentary on the inadequacies of law and policies. Smollett’s narratives differ in distinctive ways from Fielding’s—in their thematic concerns, formal features, and generic traits. Yet the trajectory of Smollett’s career as a writer of fictional narratives reveals the same arc as Fielding’s: Smollett begins with works that are predominantly satiric, such as Roderick Random (1748), but his final work, Humphry Clinker (1771), is an epistolary novel that subordinates its satiric elements to the domestic and private concerns of a family group travelling through England, Scotland, and Wales. The satire in Roderick Random is far more violent, physical, and Rabelaisian than that in Jonathan Wild or the Lucianic Journey from this World to the Next, and Smollett, even in Humphry Clinker, never leaves satire behind as completely as Fielding does in Amelia. Nevertheless, the movement from the early to the later works is congruent in the two writers.38 The fact that this shift takes a somewhat different form in the two cases, and that it does not occur in exactly the same years is not surprising. Smollett’s position and experience as a Scot in London in the 1740s, for example, probably contributes something to a form of satiric narrative in which protagonists react violently to the injuries and insults they have received. In addition, changes in predominant genres usually do not take place suddenly, in just a few years, but may occur over several decades. Smollett thus stands as a late instance of a writer of predominantly satiric narratives in Britain in the late 1740s and early 1750s, just as Pope offers a late example of a writer of formal verse satires in the 1730s. Smollett’s distinctive form of satire in his early works depends largely on a grotesque physicality that involves the protagonist either in the suffering or administering of violence, accompanied by a correspondingly vehement use of language.39 Smollett also includes characters who can be considered Juvenalian satirists in most of his fiction. Since the focus here is on relations between narrative satire and other narrative forms, I will concentrate on the changing nature and proportion of grotesque physicality in

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Smollett’s first three narratives, and its eventual moderation in a form of the novel that is more fully engaged with the political public sphere. It is difficult to think of a novel in English that is more unrelenting than Roderick Random in its representation of bodies attacked and abused. Random’s own body is subjected to the greatest number of outrages.40 He is beaten unmercifully and without cause at school, hunted by dogs owned by his cousin, forced into numerous fights, knocked senseless and stabbed on the street, has his face spat upon twice, is attacked by a press gang and carried on board ship, is there put in irons then exposed in shackles on deck for twelve days and nights, undergoes two naval battles in one of which the head of a marine ‘‘being shot off, bounced from the deck athwart [his] face, leaving [Random] well-nigh blinded with brains’’ (167–68), endures the stench and vermin of cramped quarters, barely survives two fevers, is stripped, robbed, and abandoned on a foreign coast, endures the discomforts of being a soldier in the French army, is sexually assaulted both by an old woman and by an English nobleman, then endures another fight and a stay in prison.41 But similar or even worse experiences befall other characters: in the course of the narrative, a schoolmaster is whipped by his pupils (inspired by and including Random); at least two people have chamberpots emptied on their heads; a man is whipped with nettles (by Random); three men have their teeth smashed in; limbs are lost in sea battles; and a man is cudgelled (by Random). Random’s early and prototypical account of his whippings at school exemplifies the kind of language that appropriately conveys such violent scenes: I was often inhumanely scourged for crimes I did not commit. . . . I have been found guilty of robbing orchards I never entered, of killing cats I never hurted. . . . Nay, a stammering carpenter had eloquence enough to persuade my master that I fired a pistol loaded with small shot into his window; though my landlady and the whole family bore witness, that I was a-bed and fast asleep at the time. . . . I was flogged for having narrowly escaped drowning, by the sinking of a ferry-boat in which I was a passenger. . . . In short, whether I was guilty or unfortunate, the vengeance and sympathy of this arbitrary pedagogue were the same. (6)

The listing of such specifics throughout the narrative produces a nightmarish sense of outrageous ‘‘injustice and barbarity’’ (6).

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Smollett’s accounts of grotesque violence echo the violence and grotesque physicality in Rabelais, but without the carnivalesque and festive elements that lead Bakhtin to see bodily wastes and even violence and death in Rabelais as fructifying causes of laughter, as links in a chain leading to new life.42 Instead, Smollett’s narrative repeatedly subjects Random to some unjust and violent outrage, then recounts his sometimes successful attempts to exact an equally violent revenge on the original perpetrators.43 Random’s determined pursuit of violent revenge for the insults and injuries he unfairly suffers reduces the moral distance between himself and the individuals or the system that injures him.44 Moreover, Random’s desire for revenge against society as a whole serves as a model for Smollett’s next two protagonists, and determines the satiric nature of his first three novels. Such vengeful satire is not qualified by the conventional and extraneous romance endings which supposedly reconcile the protagonist to society in the first two; nor is it even overcome by the extended romance plot that concludes the third. Any moral distance that remains between the protagonist and his victims, his attackers, and the corrupt social system becomes even more difficult to maintain in Smollett’s second and third fictions. In The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), the protagonist is a proud and cruel trickster who, like Random, is expelled from his father’s house, although Pickle finds a second home with his childless uncle and aunt. His cruel jokes occur in three stages in the narrative. As a boy and young man, he torments the softhearted but rough-edged sailor-uncle who has taken him in. Then, on his tour of France and Belgium, he plays a seemingly interminable series of practical jokes on his two English travelling companions: a doctor with republican sympathies who reveres the classics but fails to understand their significance; and a pugnaciously patriotic painter who is ignorant of the classics, of French, and even of the most famous masterpieces in the art he himself practices.45 On his return to England, Pickle enters into a partnership with a misanthropic old man, and the two of them prey on and expose a long series of hypocritical, gullible, and superstitious people. Along the way, Pickle seduces, assaults, or has affairs with numerous women, and attempts to rape his beloved Emilia, who nevertheless agrees to marry him in the requisite romance conclusion. The final stage of Pickle’s career prepares for the operations of his successor. In Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), the anti-hero,

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an illegitimate son of an English camp follower in the War of Spanish Succession, is taken in by a family of expatriate Scots whom he thoroughly betrays. Ferdinand is a talented confidence-man by birth and choice, just as Pickle is a malicious trickster. As he seduces and abandons even greater numbers of women than Pickle, Fathom is presented as an example of incorrigible villainy. Still, the narrative registers considerable ambivalence about him: his confidence games and seductive strategies, like the activities of Iago and Volpone, generate and energize the major part of the narrative, and his victims only make themselves vulnerable to his operations because of their own hypocrisy, sentimentality, or greed. When romance and sentimentality take over the plot three-quarters of the way through the narrative, and Ferdinand is imprisoned following the conventions of romance, those conventions have already been satirically dismantled in advance, largely by Ferdinand himself. The narrative thus demonstrates its ambivalence also toward the principal genres it employs: romance, which comes second and shapes the concluding quarter of the narrative, may appear to prevail, but the satire proves stronger, its effects persisting through the conclusion.46 The satire has hollowed out the conventions of romance in advance.47 In Peregrine Pickle, the grotesque violence continues much as in Roderick Random; in Ferdinand Count Fathom, it is transmuted into an intense and generalized hostility to mankind and society. These first three narratives, then, reveal less a consistent satiric object than a persistent satiric structure. In this pattern, two forces stand opposed to each other: on the one hand, the world, which is corrupt, fatuous, and insulting; on the other, the protagonist, who is intelligent, proud, and vengeful, and who sometimes has one or two helpers. Both of these antagonists are defined as extremes. In fact extremes of violence and language, of gesture and behavior, of insult and revenge characterize both the world and the protagonist who opposes it in Smollett’s early narratives, with no reasoned principle or ground of compromise between these opposed forces. Between 1753, when Fathom was published, and 1771, when Humphry Clinker appeared, Smollett wrote fifteen volumes of British history from the beginning to his own times (1755–68); he wrote and edited the Critical Journal, which reviewed literary and scientific books (1756–63); and he edited The Briton, a paper that supported George III’s Scottish chief minister, Lord Bute (1762– 63). This work brought him into conflict with John Wilkes, who

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wrote the famous North Briton in order to oppose Bute, the king, and Smollett. During these decades, Smollett was thus actively involved in literary and critical reviewing, contemporary politics, and the political press. He became an energetic, prolific, and committed participant both in the literary and the political public spheres in England. Smollett’s History of England does not take the form of a philosophical or conjectural history, the genres most closely related to satiric narrative. The History includes passages that express a satiric perspective; however, it is committed primarily to providing a straightforward and vivid narrative of events. Still, it is consistent with the argument of this chapter and this book that as Smollett moved away from the predominantly satiric narratives of his early career, he turned to writing not only history, but also essays (another form closely associated with the cultural public sphere), and eventually an epistolary novel, Humphry Clinker. In The History and Adventures of an Atom (written ca. 1765, published 1769), Smollett produced a fiercely satiric history of English affairs during the years 1754–63, which made use of an unrelenting scatalogical satire and an ingenious allegorical conceit (of an early history of Japan) to attack ministers, M.P.s, and the domestic and war policies of the late 1750s. 48 The grotesque violence and physical humor in this narrative express the same kind of anger and indignation that Smollett’s early narratives express. In its form, the work refers to the satiric narratives dominant in the early part of the century; we can regard it as an anomaly and a throwback among narratives of the 1760s.49 Even before this, Smollett’s fourth fictional narrative already shows signs of a moderating in the satiric pattern. The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–61) concerns a young man who goes mad after losing his beloved, and becomes a modern-day Don Quixote defending victims of injustice. In a major departure from the first three narratives, Greaves is not motivated by a desire to obtain revenge on the rest of those who live in society. The narrative thus registers a moderating of the grotesque violence that had characterized Smollett’s previous narratives. However, the most significant departure from the satiric pattern established in the first three narratives occurs in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. The protagonist, Matthew Bramble, is not a fiery, proud, and angry young man; he is a Welsh landowner in his fifties who has been a member of Parliament, and who complains about his health in most of the letters he writes to his doctor and friend. Although he decries the corruptions of modern urban soci-

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ety, and can be cantankerous with his domestic relations, he is in fact a charitable man underneath a rough exterior, a benevolent misanthrope.50 Some grotesque violence and revolting physicality of language still figure in this novel, but both are extremely localized. The violence in particular hardly affects the protagonist, and most of it is displaced to sites away from the British Isles. When the travelling party of Bramble, his sister, niece, nephew, and a few servants meet the Scottish half-pay lieutenant Lismahago, they learn about the tortures he endured at the hands of the Miami Indians in North America. He has had a finger ‘‘sawed off with a rusty knife’’ and a big toe ‘‘crushed into a mash betwixt the stones’’ (188),51 among other sufferings, in addition to having been scalped and left for dead after the battle of Fort Ticonderoga. Moreover, like Roderick Random during the sea battles, Lismahago does not even experience the worst: Lismahago is married to a sachem’s daughter, he has a child by his Indian wife before she dies, and he is then returned to the British in a prisoner exchange, but his companion Murphy is castrated and tortured to death by the Miami. However, unlike Random and the other protagonists of the early fictions, Lismahago is not driven to seek revenge for what he has suffered; he seems to have accepted it even at the time as the better of the fortunes distributed that day. The grotesque violence from the early works has been doubly displaced here: onto a subordinate character as its object, and onto non-Europeans as its perpetrators. Significantly, Lismahago also maintains a starched superiority to expressions of anti-Scottish sentiment within the novel, and never offers to return violence for the insults or mockery to which he is exposed because of his Scottish identity. Although similarly localized, strongly material language comes from Bramble’s pen, especially when he describes the corruptions and threats to health in the metropolis of London and the resort of Bath. For example, on the difficulties of finding good food and drink in London, Bramble writes that the water the city dwellers drink comes directly from the Thames, which is polluted by the run-off of scourings, decomposing animal carcases, and other matter, of which ‘‘human excrement is the least offensive part’’ (119). He reports that the bread he eats in the city ‘‘is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution’’ (119). And even though the fruit can be good at Covent-Garden, it is exorbitantly priced and unclean: ‘‘who knows but some fine lady of St. James’s parish might admit into her delicate mouth those very cherries, which

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had been rolled and moistened between the filthy, and perhaps, ulcerated chops of a St. Giles’s huckster’’ (120). Smollett is clearly still capable of using extremely strong language here about physical processes that produces reactions of revulsion.52 It is remarkable, therefore, that in Humphry Clinker, Smollett so clearly subordinates extremes of language and violence to a more moderate design. The shift results partly from the narrative’s being divided among five letter writers, each with a distinctive voice. Even so, the three women are consistently satirized: Lydia for observing the predictable conventions of romance; Tabitha for her hypocrisies; and the servant Win for her airs (her unintended puns as a result of misspellings revealing more and other meanings than she intends). The nephew Jery proves to be a fairly callow and predictable youth, although he shares with his uncle the main burden of the narration.53 Thus, Bramble’s own perspective on himself is crucial in moderating the extremity of his complaints.54 He notices, for example, that his view of mankind varies with the weather (74), and that he has the ‘‘common vice of old men’’ (104)—a fondness for the old days and old ways. In addition, by being involved in a web of relations with his adopted family and friends such as Doctor Lewis, Bramble develops the kind of private experience that can qualify his more intemperate pronouncements and still authorize him to speak about issues publicly. For example, when he hears the stories of Lismahago or of his old friends in Bath who tell him of mistreatment by the War Office after their service in the military, he reacts with sympathy, but also with a concern and indignation informed about particulars and turned toward public debate about policy.55 Furthermore, Bramble’s eventual discovery that Clinker is his own illegitimate child helps qualify him as fully and fallibly human, not just a sermonizing moralist or angry satirist. His language and actions by the end of the novel have moved away from their earlier extremes, and have done so because of the increasing integration of his private life with his public concerns. By the end of the novel, instead of inveighing against injuries to himself or to his health, Bramble is expressing concern and pursuing relief for the unmerited injuries of others, like his old military friends (even the grotesque Lismahago will eventually become his brother-inlaw). Smollett’s novel thus moves away from satire as Bramble engages in the interweaving of private sentiment and public debate that constitutes the political public sphere. However, the male protagonists’ participation in the dialectic of

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private and public excludes women as ignorant, foolish, and corrupting. The women in Bramble’s family fall into the first two categories. In addition, near the end of the novel, Bramble is able to rescue from ruin and reform the estate of one of his old friends, but only because the man’s improvident and domineering wife dies suddenly. The increased activity in the political public sphere thus takes place at the expense of the exclusion and scapegoating of women.56 It also produces mixed results in narrative form. As most commentators have argued, Humphry Clinker is far more tightly structured than any of Smollett’s earlier narratives. But there is also a marked decline in the intensity of the language and action in the novel. The move toward novelistic form produces accommodation and reconciliation between private and public worlds, between generations, between the protagonist’s present and his past, and between himself and his own time. But the move from Smollett’s fiercely satiric early works also leaves behind the kind of protagonist whose opposition to the society around him cannot be overcome, and who remains incapable of being reconciled with the injustice, hypocrisy, and complacency of the world. The absence of middle grounds and mediating terms that Smollett revises in his last novel characterizes Voltaire’s earliest tales, such as Zadig (1747), and persists undiminished as an distinctive feature in later examples of the form such as Candide (1759). Smollett edited a collection of the works of Voltaire in the 1750s, and both were well-known satirists and historians by that time. Given such parallels between the two, the chiastic relation between the genres in which they worked in the 1750s and 1760s is striking. Voltaire was best known in the mid 1740s as a writer of tragedy, epic, history, and essays (the Philosophical Letters). Soon after the satiric tales begin to appear, The Age of Louis XIV (1751) and Essai sur les moeurs (1756) established his name as a historian (these two works will be considered in the following chapter). Thus, Voltaire’s narratives do not move from satire to history and the novel, as do those of Fielding and Smollett; rather, to the genres in which he has already been working, he adds narrative satire. Indeed, Voltaire had nothing good to say about novels or long romances. He writes in the Age of Louis XIV, for example, of ‘‘these novels with which France has been and still is flooded. They have almost all, except Zaı¨de [by Mme de Lafayette], been products of weak minds who write easily of things unworthy to be read by people of solid intelligence.’’57 Such a statement by Voltaire may

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not merely express a personal bias against the long implausible romances of the seventeenth century, against psychological novels of his own time such as Pre´vost’s Cleveland, or against Rousseau’s sentimental novel, La Nouvelle He´loise (1761).58 Rather, it may point to the social and political restrictions that encourage the production of such works. The crucial phrase in Voltaire’s dismissal of the romance or psychological novel is his characterization of their subject matter as ‘‘things unworthy to be read.’’ From Voltaire’s point of view, the genres of French long prose fiction were self-regarding and self-contained, lacking in broader social, public, or political importance. I have been arguing that there existed no forum in French society throughout most of the eighteenth century where reasoned and uncensored criticism of the state or church could be expressed openly. When Voltaire returned from his twoyear stay in England, he published the Lettres Philosophiques [Letters on England, 1734], in which he celebrated English tolerance of dissent in religion and politics, and thus clearly though implicitly criticized the intolerance of both in France.59 The prompt condemnation of the Letters by the Parlement (judicial court) of Paris confirmed the accuracy of Voltaire’s criticism, and he was compelled to flee Paris again. From that time on, when he was not living outside France, Voltaire lived close to the French border—at Cirey, a few miles from Lorraine, and at Ferney, a mile from Switzerland. Voltaire’s activities in the 1760s, especially in the Calas and similar affairs, can be read as attempts to remedy the absence of a public venue in which to discuss and criticize policies of state and church. The Huguenot Jean Calas was tortured and executed in 1762 after his son hanged himself, because Catholics asserted without foundation that he had killed the son for thinking of converting to Catholicism. In response, Voltaire issued a barrage of pamphlets and letters that sought in the absence of a political press to create and shape public opinion condemning the injustice done to Calas. In the case of Calas and the similar case of Sirven, he succeeded to the extent that the fathers were eventually exonerated.60 But Voltaire could not singlehandedly institutionalize a pluralistic political public arena, however much he accomplished as an individual author. He even took issue with d’Alembert for editing the Encyclopedia, a work that because of its size and price could only be bought by the wealthy: ‘‘Twenty folio volumes will never make a revolution; it is the little portable books costing thirty cents that are to be feared.’’61 It was in order to pick up where the Encyclopedia left off that Voltaire brought out anony-

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mously in 1764 and continued to expand through the rest of his life the Philosophical Dictionary, with its ironic and satiric attacks on orthodox religious thought (originally entitled Dictionnaire philosophique portatif—Portable Philosophical Dictionary). The work was, of course, immediately condemned and proscribed. Given such intolerance of criticism, it makes sense that Voltaire’s fictions take the form of short satiric tales. Typically, satiric narratives criticize or parody one set of ideas, then criticize its opposite without re-establishing the first. Thus, in Zadig, the protagonist’s experiences through most of the narrative work against the hypothesis that justice is to be found in this world. However, in the last chapters, an angel’s revelations of the paradoxical workings of providence indicate that perhaps justice is done even though we may be unable to comprehend its workings.62 Readers, like the protagonist, are left without a clear ground on which to stand between two extreme views about the possibility and comprehensibility of justice in this world. Similarly, in Candide, the experiences of Candide, Cune´gonde, and the old woman provide a wealth of material to disprove Pangloss’s optimistic philosophy. But then, in chapter 19, Candide is finally changed by what he sees of slavery in Surinam and converted by his subsequent experiences to something close to Martin’s darkly misanthropic position. Like Gulliver, Candide proceeds from an extreme complacency not to a moderate skepticism but to the opposite extreme, a bitter disillusionment. The cryptic injunction to cultivate our garden parallels the implication of the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels that we should be like Pedro de Mendez. However, Martin’s pessimism is also qualified by the last few chapters of the narrative, which advise working in order to stave off ‘‘three great evils: boredom, vice, and need’’ (100; 258).63 That leaves the advice to cultivate our garden as a positive middle ground but one which entirely lacks the specificity that a comic realistic novel would offer. Like Voltaire’s other tales, Candide remains in a relation to the world that is fabular and metaphoric, not realistic and contiguous with ours. Even as he imagines a possibility of obtaining satisfaction in this world, Voltaire acknowledges the constraints on public speech in the absolutist French public sphere of his time: he has the good old Turkish farmer remain deliberately ignorant of public affairs. ‘‘I presume that in general those who meddle with public affairs sometimes perish miserably, and that they deserve it; but I never inquire what is going on in Constantinople’’ (100; 258). Voltaire himself not only

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continued to meddle, but intensified his efforts against what he considered the infamy of superstition and intolerance in the 1760s, attempting to produce and influence opinion so as to affect public affairs. But the position of the old farmer, which is adopted by Candide and his companions, accurately reflects the extreme difficulty of engaging in rational public discussion in France in the absence of a forum for public political debate. The lack of such a political public space based on private subjectivity helps explain the lack of interior subjectivity of the characters in Voltaire’s tales as well as the satiric form taken by those tales. (It also helps explain the lack of innerness in many eighteenth-century French narratives.) In the world of the tale, as in Voltaire’s France, private and public remain separate: one does not affect and inform the other; there is no interweaving of the two. With the state and church claiming a monopoly on truth and justice, contestations of their claims generally had to be satiric and ironic, indirect and deniable. There is, however, one place where Voltaire’s fiction registers the effects not only of an absence of a political public sphere, but also the presence of a cultural public sphere. Ingenu (1767) is, of all his narratives, the one with the most precise historical setting—in 1689, four years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—and the most realistic in its characters and its plot. This is not to say that Ingenu is a novel; it still contains the same fastpaced action, barbed ironies, and thematic arrangements of characters and moral positions that structures his other satiric tales: Ingenu is the innocent, truthful, and noble Huron (who turns out to be an orphaned Frenchman); Gordon the good Jansenist, thoughtful, conscientious, but somewhat narrowly dogmatic; St.`Pouange the corrupt minister; Father All-things (pe` re Tout-a tous) the casuistical, amoral Jesuit. The objects of Voltaire’s satire here include familiar targets: the hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, and corruption of religious and secular authorities. Mlle St. Yves must give herself to St.-Pouange in order to obtain the release of her beloved Ingenu from his unjust imprisonment. But the tone and the form of the narrative shift when, after she sacrifices her virtue and Ingenu is released, she begins to waste away out of grief and remorse for what she has done; she becomes a tragic and sentimental heroine whose conventional death Voltaire represents seemingly without irony. Moreover, he even has St.-Pouange experience repentance at the end of the tale and grant favors to all those who knew and loved Mlle St.-Yves.

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Strongly satiric elements remain dominant through the greater part of this narrative. But it is striking that Voltaire introduces without ascertainable irony what are for him unprecedented novelistic and sentimental elements. In the context of Voltaire’s career as a narrative artist, these can be read as an acknowledgment—limited and late as they are—of the development of a cultural public sphere that encouraged the expression of sentiment and novelistic explorations of individual moral and material dilemmas. In Voltaire, such a recognition remains isolated and atypical: the satiric form—indicating the absence of an oppositional public sphere—remains dominant. By contrast, in Fielding’s career, novelistic form thoroughly displaces satiric forms after 1750. In Smollett’s case, a conjunction of satiric and novelistic forms in the novels of the early 1750s gives way eventually to Humphry Clinker, where the novelistic form clearly predominates. The late date at which Smollett came to subordinate satiric to novelistic form may indicate that he felt for most of his career that the political public sphere was not as open to him as to others, perhaps in part because he was a Scot. In any case, as we have seen, his final, most novelistic and least satiric, narrative represents if not a Scottish then a Welsh landowner participating in a public discourse critical of the government, behaving in accord with sentimental canons of the good heart, and avoiding the satiric criticisms and violent actions that characterized Smollett’s earlier protagonists. Such a structure implies that by the end, Smollett, like Fielding, had found a voice that reconciled the complementary worlds of private life and the public sphere. For Voltaire, by contrast, the expression of individual sentiments and subjectivity remains atypical and subordinate partly because there was no open uncensored forum in France for the expression of disagreements about policy.

STERNE, DIDEROT, AND WIELAND The careers of Sterne, Diderot, and Wieland reveal the same pattern as those of Fielding, Smollett, and Voltaire: a sentimental novelistic form replaces satiric form in the career of the British writer, whereas satiric elements persist and even grow more pronounced in the narratives of the continental authors. Diderot in Jacques the Fatalist (1770–84) and Wieland in the History of Agathon (1767–94) both take Sterne’s idiosyncratic Tristram Shandy (1759–67) as their model, constructing many parallels between

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their works and Sterne’s. Like Tristram, Jacques and Agathon feature a narrative persona who makes prominent satiric use of bawdiness, and all three disrupt the conventions of realistic fiction by means of frequent digressions and addresses to the reader. Diderot even inserts the two-hundred-fifty page narrative of Jacques in the middle of an anecdote that takes up five pages in Tristram Shandy; the beginning and end of Sterne’s episode appear almost verbatim as the opening and conclusion of Jacques. However, because of such parallels, the divergences between Tristram and the two later works emerge clearly. In particular, Jacques and Agathon differ from Sterne’s novel in the kind of history they recount and in the narrator’s role as historian: whereas Tristram turns to represent idiosyncratic, self-contained subjectivity and familial history, Jacques and Agathon maintain an interest in public history and satiric criticism of political affairs. The self-conscious digressions in Tristram and the other two novels draw attention to the activity of narrating, to a narrative’s being always constructed and incomplete. These digressions, interruptions, and addresses disrupt an illusion of complicity with the author as well as the likelihood of becoming sympathetically involved with the characters. Instead, they draw attention to the constructed nature of the narrative. Such techniques frustrate the forward flow of realistic conventions, producing ironic distance and judgment. The particular kind of irony they move toward is the romantic irony that recognizes the unfinished and unfinalized nature of any narrative. In addition to such satiric disruptions of the conventional complicity among readers, author, and characters, Tristram, Agathon, and Jacques also share a satiric emphasis on bawdy wordplay and the erotic. Like other satiric narratives, they deflate idealist philosophies and hypocritical practices by insisting on shared physical functions. However, whereas most satires refer to processes of elimination to effect such critical levelling, these works refer consistently to sexual processes.64 Sterne produces an almost constant stream of double entendres and ambiguous sexual situations to counter the denial of the body’s importance by the sentimentalist or the hypocritical philosopher. The tale of Slawkenbergius serves as the culmination of a series of references to noses that carry an obvious double meaning, as do the emphasized mentions of crevices. When a friend points out the two senses of many of the words he uses, Tristram has an answer ready: ‘‘And here are two roads, replied I, turning short upon him,—a dirty and a clean one,—

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which shall we take?—The clean,—by all means, replied Eugenius’’ (258).65 Tristram may disingenuously claim that he wants us only to take the clean road, but Sterne knows that any adult reader must understand both senses, despite Tristram’s claim that by the word ‘‘nose,’’ ‘‘I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less’’ (258). Indeed, Sterne typically constructs his narratives so that the sexual dimension remains unstated but unavoidable and all the stronger for being implicit. The story of Corporal Trim’s falling in love comes to its climax with Trim’s nurse rubbing his leg above his wounded knee: ‘‘The more she rubb’d, and the longer strokes she took—the more the fire kindled in my veins—till at length, by two or three strokes longer than the rest—my passion rose to its highest pitch’’ (703).66 Sterne’s play on words here is Petronian, and indeed had already been used by one of the scoundrels in the Satyricon.67 In addition to his satiric and levelling interest in sexual functions and the ambiguous language that describes them, Sterne’s narrator also presents himself as a historian, both of public and of familial and personal events. Tristram refers to many historical events, almost all of them military affairs. But historical events figure in Sterne’s Shandean world only because of the private meanings they carry, and Tristram makes use of public history almost exclusively to establish the chronology of events in the lives of his family members. In doing so, he undercuts the conception of history as a series of battles and sieges, and he also satirically inverts the view of military history as prior to and more significant than private history. Sterne’s narrative becomes more novelistic as it moves to focus on the overriding significance not of the public but of the private idiosyncratic and non-political histories of individuals such as Toby and Walter. Although it may seem paradoxical, this concern with private subjectivity gives evidence of the workings of a cultural and political public sphere in British society at the time, because such a discursive sphere is two-sided; it provides a forum for the expression not only of direct political commentary but also of subjective judgment and sentiment. The primary historical point of reference in the narrative is the siege of Namur (1695), because it was there that Toby received the wound in his groin. (Corporal Trim was wounded in the knee two years earlier at the battle of Landen.) Toby begins his hobby-horsical representation of battles and sieges on a small scale four years after he returns to England to recuperate. His reduced campaigns thus begin at the same time as the War of Spanish Succession, and

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his operations continue until the Treaty of Utrecht and the demolition of the fortifications at Dunkirk (1713). The coming of peace is important in Tristram Shandy because it deprives Toby of material for his hobby-horse, and changes the scene of operations from his scale-model sieges to the widow Wadman’s house. The widow’s lack of success in her own siege of Toby forms the anti-climactic conclusion to the narrative, although we learn that four years elapsed between that event and Tristram’s birth (in 1718). Along the way, other sieges are mentioned as they are associated with conversations and events in the Shandy household. Toby brings up the siege of Limerick because he connects the heavy rains there with his brother’s theory of the radical moisture in human beings. Similarly, the battle of Steenkirk (1692) receives mention because that is the subject Toby is discussing when Trim enters to report that Tristram has been inadvertently circumcised. By making reference to historical events in order to establish a chronology and associative links for events in the lives of his characters, Sterne distances his work from the realm of public discourse, placing it instead in the realm of the personal, the private, and the novelistic. Such a procedure is doubly ironic. It satirically implies that the meaning of a battle is not to be found in conventional historical accounts that speak of defeat and victory, strategies and tactics, the number of dead and wounded on each side, but rather in the particular individual histories of the thousands who were wounded, captured, defeated, or otherwise scarred during the battle. On the other hand, Toby’s scale-model representations of the sieges clearly exemplify the kind of self-contained fixation that most of Sterne’s characters exhibit, the active self-absorption that constitutes individual subjectivity in Tristram’s narrative. Toby withdraws from the traumatically wounding and hierarchically structured military world, and develops an individual subjectivity on his brother’s property in the country, but he never makes the complementary move back into a public role, for example, in discussions of policies concerning war and peace. Instead, Toby and Walter present only the private aspect of the public sphere, a partial version of the dialectic that Habermas describes. Similarly, the sketch of the history of Toby’s fortifications occasionally conflates Toby’s activities on the small scale with the actions of generals and armies of thousands on the battlefields of Europe. Thus, when Tristram reports that in the second year of his campaigns, ‘‘my uncle Toby took Liege and Ruremond’’ (538),

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Sterne reduces an episode in the War of Spanish Succession to the scale of a bowling green, with the satiric implication of seeing the conflict and the reasons for it as trivial—merely a diverting hobbyhorse for the generals involved despite the deaths of thousands of men. Such a perspective echoes Swift’s satire of European religious wars in Gulliver’s Travels and A Tale of a Tub.68 However, Sterne does not maintain a satiric focus on the War of Spanish Succession. After noting Toby’s disappointment and lassitude following the advent of peace, the narrative shifts to the siege of Toby himself by the widow Wadman. In a move that is characterstic of his narrative, Sterne shifts from satirizing a military siege to satirizing the amorous siege of a shy man by an aggressive woman. Toby is transformed from the knowledgeable agent of a reduced representation of public events to being the passive and inarticulate object of siege. As Sterne represents them, the Shandy brothers each develop a particular individual subjectivity as a result of their being wounded by the world; neither Walter nor Toby proves able to move beyond an absorption in their own concerns. A Sentimental Journey, Sterne’s only fictional work after Tristram Shandy, leaves behind the satire of hobby-horsical subjectivity and of intellectual systems generally. Rather than the satiric reduction of philosophical pretense to physical fact, the work deploys a free-floating eroticism that oscillates between the sentimental and the bawdy: the sexual here does not undercut or critique so much as it complements and completes the sentimental. The narrative produces less a satiric levelling than a sentimental heightening of sensitivity.69 A Sentimental Journey develops from Tristram Shandy a concern with the impossible necessity of representing the evanescent in writing, an almost romantic irony that recognizes the inability to finalize artistic expression, which allows a narrative to begin in mid-speech and to conclude by breaking off in mid-sentence. A Sentimental Journey may thus express elements of an emerging paradigm of organic development in tracing the unpredictable unfolding of sentiment and desire out of each other, following no law except their own internal dynamic. It moves even further than Tristram Shandy from public comment concerning political and social questions toward the representation of private histories and the delicate sensibility of propertied subjectivity. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne partly satirizes individual subjectivity for remaining absorbed in itself, never moving on to a concern with others or with the public good. In Sentimental Journey, he writes a narrative that is other than satiric: he repre-

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sents the private life of a propertied gentleman, but not such figures coming together to form a public. He dwells on the spectacle of eroticized and sentimentalized charity, and he excludes reflections on institutional causes of poverty, wealth, liberty, and constraint. There is, however, one episode in The Sentimental Journey where Sterne employs a rather self-congratulatory form of satire. In France, Yorick finds himself in danger of being imprisoned in the Bastille because he has been travelling without a passport, and Sterne implicitly criticizes the French for administering a harsh and arbitrary system of justice. Comically, Yorick eventually obtains his passport through the efforts of an Anglophile aristocratic official who loves Shakespeare and believes Parson Yorick is the same individual as the jester discussed in Hamlet. Still, this episode clearly suggests that a unitary public sphere like the one in France calls for continued criticism; hence the satire of the French and their constraining absolutism. Conversely, the narrative implies a self-satisfied recognition that Yorick’s sentimental subjectivity has its ground in an open and plural public sphere such as the one that England now possessed. Despite the many parallels between their works and Tristram Shandy, Diderot and Wieland diverge from Sterne in making greater use of public history to engage with political and social questions, indirectly through satire and irony. Sterne occasionally treats his female reader with mocking condescension, for example when he orders her to re-read a chapter and find the nearly invisible evidence planted there that Tristram’s mother was Catholic. Related, though less playful examples of chastising remarks also figure in Diderot’s work: for example, the narrator tells us that Jacques’s master was ‘‘A curious man like you, Reader. A questioning man like you, Reader. A nuisance like you, Reader’’ (59; 71).70 Like Sterne, Diderot pursues candor on sexual matters. After telling the story of Jacques’s loss of virginity, Diderot’s narrator refers for sanction to Petronius, Juvenal, Catullus, and Voltaire, and he accuses of hypocrisy those who pretend to be scandalized by his tale and by the universally known word for sexual relations, while they participate in illicit sexual affairs themselves.71 In addition to including narratives of sexual affairs as well as this forceful defense of such tales, Diderot indicates his satiric lowering of spiritual claims to physical facts by implying throughout that sex is merely an act, unrelated to morality. The long story of Mme de la Pommeraye and the Chevelier des Arcis, for example,

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implies that such distortions of natural feelings as jealousy and vindictiveness arise from the attempt to make love last beyond the time of its natural passing. Diderot expresses this attitude most clearly and openly at the end of the Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘‘Voyage’’ where he writes that ‘‘shame, punishment, and ignominy have been attached to actions innocent in themselves.’’72 Diderot insists repeatedly on a distance between sex and the identity of the person or subject, whereas for Sterne, the movements of sensuality and desire are linked to the workings of the heart, and thus to the identity of the self. But Diderot diverges most sharply from Sterne as a historian. In Jacques the Fatalist, he adopts the role of a historian of the present in order to express his satiric criticisms of contemporary social and political relations. Violating the conventions of fictional story-telling, Diderot asserts that what he is writing must be historical and true because it is not fiction: ‘‘It is quite obvious that I am not writing a novel since I am neglecting those things which a novelist would not fail to use. The person who takes what I write for truth might perhaps be less wrong than the person who takes it for a fiction’’ (30; 37). Pointing out his refusal to allow implausible coincidences or elevated sentiments into his narrative, he further distinguishes his work from a novel: ‘‘A novelist wouldn’t miss such an opportunity, but I don’t like novels, . . . I am writing history: . . . My project is to be truthful and I have fulfilled it’’ (214; 265). Diderot’s conception of the historian as contemporary truthteller opens up possibilities for emblematic social and political commentary in numerous episodes in Jacques; I will focus on two here, the first of which involves a serious quarrel between Jacques and his master. When Jacques reounts the story of his loves to the point where he is being cared for by a young gentlewoman, this woman’s earlier rejection of Jacques’s master prompts the master to wonder how she could prefer ‘‘a Jacques,’’ namely, a servant, to himself. When Jacques objects to being called an inferior, he is ordered downstairs, but refuses to go. The landlady, who mediates the dispute, rules that Jacques must go below, but can come back immediately on his customary equal footing with his master. As Jacques and his master discuss their relation afterward, Jacques asserts that ‘‘it was ordained that you would have the title to the thing, and I would have the thing itself’’ (161; 199). It is Jacques who gets the two of them moving each day, who gets things done, and who is master in fact, although the other is master in name. In this brief parable, Diderot distills the paradoxical and symbiotic

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relations between masters and servants in the ancien re´gime. He observes that the aristocratic masters have no moral authority (and little sexual potency), and the intelligent and energetic servants, like Figaro in Beaumarchais’s play, in fact run the world in which both live. Moreover, Diderot asserts that his account is truthful because his form of writing produces not a fiction but a contemporary history. In the other brief episode with similar implications, Diderot’s narrator responds to the reader’s questions about the destination of the two travellers by revealing that they may be heading toward a grand chateau that bears the riddling inscription, ‘‘I belong to nobody and I belong to everybody. You were here before you entered and you will still be here after you have left’’ (38; 45). A handful of scoundrels occupies all the best rooms in this chateau, claiming that they own the building outright, and paying another set of scoundrels to kill anyone who disputes their claims. The narrator admits he may be accused of allegorizing, but he has produced a striking emblem of relations between a small band of nobles with their enforcers on the one hand, and on the other the dispossessed multitude, of whom some accept the ongoing usurpation while most of the rest are intimidated by the threat of force. The brevity and simplicity of the tale do not call for intricate allegorical interpretation, but instead express a strong, slightly veiled, satiric critique of the essentials of the contemporary historical situation. Diderot was imprisoned early in his career for writing his Letter on the Blind (1749). He succeeded in seeing all the volumes of the Encyclopedia through the press, but its printing was constantly under threat and twice prohibited by the machinery of state censorship; the final volumes were allowed to be published in 1765 under the pretense that they were volumes of plates being printed abroad. Diderot’s narratives in the 1760s and 1770s, including Jacques, took shape in the shadow of such censorship and in the absence of a plural political public sphere. Tellingly, Diderot did not publish any of these works in his lifetime. Jacques, Rameau’s Nephew, D’Alembert’s Dream, and the Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘‘Voyage’’ were circulated only in the Correspondence litte´raire, a journal of about a dozen copies sent in manuscript to subscribing foreign princes. In the last of these works, Diderot pursues his satire of contemporary society further along the paths he took in Jacques. The speaker designated ‘‘B.’’ in the Supplement, apparently a spokes-

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man for Diderot, imagines a utopian society that is as simple and close to nature as possible. It has no money, no private property, no institutions of government, and no religious fanatics. Diderot’s utopia is characterized by sexual equality, a lack of shame about sexual functions, and a frequent and licit shifting of partners. Unlike purely imagined utopias, this one is based on the historical society of Tahiti, as described by Bougainville and revised by Diderot. Thus, when, like Pre´vost’s utopias, it proves to be impermanent, the loss is not merely in the imagination, but in the realm of the historical: Tahitian society as it existed before contact with Europeans will disappear irrecoverably. The fault lies not with unspecified conditions in human or physical nature, but with the European colonizers who introduce private property and sexual possessiveness into Tahitian society. As the old Tahitian foresees, all these forms of exclusive possession will lead to unprecedented conflict and bloodshed on the island. Thus, the satire of civilization in the Supplement, especially in the old Tahitian’s speech and in the final dialogue between A. and B., is as wide-ranging and radical as the satire of civilization in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels or in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, encompassing among its objects the fundamental social arrangements of Europe and European colonialism. Here again, Diderot bases his searching satire of social institutions on his role as historian of the present. In Jacques the Fatalist, he used Tristram Shandy as a point of reference even as he pursued a narrative agenda that differed from Sterne’s. But whereas Sterne moves to more private, more sentimental, and less satiric narrative in his next work, in the Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘‘Voyage’’, Diderot articulates a wide-ranging critique of social insitutions from European colonialism to established sexual mores. Because of the absence of a forum for the direct expression of such criticisms, he used a satiric form characteristic of an earlier period and paradigm, and he circulated his work not in print but in the older medium of manuscript to the most restricted possible readership. Diderot continued to assume the role of satiric historian of the present in some of his last writings, including his contributions to the second and third editions of the abbe´ Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (1774, 1780). For this work Diderot wrote forceful indictments of tyranny, defenses of the English and American revolutions, attacks on slavery, and praise of primitive over civilized man.73 Again, the form of authorship he chose indicates the absence of an uncensored and plural public sphere in France at the

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time: he wrote these harshly critical passages under the cover of anonymity. Like Diderot’s Jacques, Wieland’s Agathon parallels Tristam Shandy in its narrator’s attitudes toward the reader and in its attention to erotic experience, but diverges from Sterne’s narrative in the political importance of the public history it represents. Many of Wieland’s digressions in Agathon draw closely on Sterne. For example, at one point the narrator digresses into a dialogue with the reader as young man, suggesting that if he wants to attain virtue, he need not renounce love. He can try to find the most virtuous and clever woman and then earn her affections: ‘‘we will maintain that if you are assiduous you may carry on your novel for ten years on a line perpetually converging without drawing nearer to the central point—and this is all we had to say to you’’ (Agathon, 3:63; 1:666–67).74 In its use of the language of geometry, this digression echoes the passage in Tristram Shandy that visually compares digressions to curves interrupting a straight line (570– 71). It also resembles the passage in which Tristram notes that he is now a year older than when he started writing his life, but that his narrative has only made it through his first day, so that he is growing farther behind the more he writes (342–43). Like Sterne’s, Wieland’s digression conveys a sense of the futility and comedy of confusing a life with a novel, and the time of narrating with the time being narrated. In dismissing the reader emptyhanded, with no clear advice or conclusion after leading him through a long tortuous paragraph supposedly full of friendly counsel, the narrator reveals a condescension and even antagonism toward the reader. If Sterne parallels Petronius in his clever and bawdy plays on words, Wieland refers to the Roman narrative satirist to establish an atmosphere of refined sensuality in which beautiful attendants in diaphanous gowns wait on Agathon, attempting to seduce him. In fact, a major concern of Wieland’s novel is the struggle between sensual pleasures and virtuous enthusiasm for control of Agathon’s character. During the first ten books of the narrative, sensualism brings undeniable rewards, even if their impermanence makes it fall short of providing the happiness philosophers seek. High-minded virtue triumphs in the final book (of the 1767 version) only because of a self-conscious generic shift from satire to romance and utopia, and even then we cannot mistake Agathon’s loss when he learns that Danae has no wish for a further physical relationship and that his beloved Psyche is his sister.

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At first sight, Wieland’s use of historical elements in Agathon may seem even more removed from contemporary political realities than Sterne’s. His narrative is set in the Greek world of the fourth century BCE, and in the first sentence of his Preface he acknowledges so little likelihood of persuading readers that it derives from an ancient Greek manuscript that he leaves them free to believe what they will about his source. Still, he points out that the principal characters not only were historical personages, but are such figures as have appeared in every age including his own; his work is therefore perhaps more to be depended upon ‘‘than any composition of the most believable political historical writer’’ (1:xix; 1:376). Indeed, the cynical and materialist principles that the Sophist Hippias expressed in ancient Greece are held in the present by most of those in what is called ‘‘the polite world’’ (1:xxv; 1:379). Thus, Agathon is neither a realistic nor a historical novel; it offers a realistic representation neither of the contemporary social world nor of an earlier historical period. But it does transpose the moral and political dilemmas of the author’s contemporaries to an earlier time, where they can be explored and worked out at a remove from the pressures and censorship that a realistic representation could attract. A setting in ancient Greece serves this function throughout Wieland’s narratives. Such a transposition in fact enables Wieland to consider contemporary political questions at some length. In the middle of the novel, Agathon reveals that before he met the beautiful courtesan Danae, he had a brief but eventful political career in Athens, where he quieted a rebellion of the Euboeans by relying on leniency rather than force, then counseled the Athenians not to pursue a colonial policy based on foreign conquests. However, his successes stirred jealousy among the Athenians, who, like other republicans, he says, tend to resent anyone whose character might be superior to their own; as a consequence, he was accused and convicted of seeking to make himself master of the city. In a passage recalling Gulliver’s punishment by his Lilliputian masters, Agathon expresses gratitude that his punishment for doing his duty consisted only of banishment and the confiscation of all his property. The story of his political life in Athens implies a critique both of colonial expansion as unjust and of democratic republics as unreliable. After he leaves Danae, Agathon once again becomes involved in politics. At the court of Dionysius in Syracuse he succeeds Plato in attempting to make the tyrant into an upright, disciplined, and

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philosophical king. Although at first he seems to succeed in exercising a beneficial influence on Dionysius, he is undermined by the jealousy of previous favorites whom he has displaced, and Dionysius himself increasingly resents Agathon’s attempts to moderate his sensual self-indulgences.75 Finally, in a parallel to the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra, a married woman who tried to seduce Agathon accuses him of having assaulted her, he loses the rest of his support, and he is imprisoned on the charge of having conspired with Dionysius’s enemies to overthrow him. Agathon is rescued only by the intervention of Archytas, his dead father’s friend, and the leader of a neighboring city-state. The politics of Dionysius’s court clearly parallels the politics at many faction-ridden courts headed by princes, counts or even elected administrators in the Germany of Wieland’s time, courts like the one at Biberach, where he was employed while writing Agathon, as well as those at Erfurt and Weimar where he was later employed.76 Displacing his narrative chronologically as well as geographically enables Wieland indirectly to satirize the distinguishing characteristics of two contemporary kinds of government. Although the republican form places authority in the hands of the people, and the monarchic in the hands of a single ruler, Wieland’s narrative shows that jealousy and resentment overwhelm and bring down the upright man in both systems. He constructs a satiric narrative by demonstrating that opposites share common traits, and by suppressing alternate middle grounds between them; his satire through most of the work is critical of democratic republics as well as of aristocratic courts, both in the ancient world and in his own time.77 However, Wieland cannot directly or openly criticize the rulers, forms of government, or policies of contemporary states. He is able to give Agathon a strongly introspective subjectivity, but it is timeless, not tied to contemporary social conditions (much like that of Pre´ vost’s Cleveland). Similarly, he is able to represent strong criticisms of certain political institutions, but their contemporary applicability is disguised. The subjectivity that Wieland grants Agathon indicates the workings of a literary and cultural public sphere in Germany; an interest in representing interiority accompanies the development of a forum for expressing individual sentiments and critical judgments about cultural works. However, the satiric indirection, the lack of particularity and of contemporaneity make sense in a society where there is not a forum for open discussion and criticism of political institutions, officials, and policies.

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Instead of a centralized state with a single political, cultural, and publishing capital like London, the German states consisted of duchies, princedoms, and electorates that retained different restrictions on trade, transfers of property, and the publication of books and newspapers. Wieland himself contributed significantly to the continued formation of a cultural public sphere in Germany by founding and editing the Teutscher Merkur [German Mercury] from 1773 to 1796, as a literary journal and review for the general, middle-class public. He also helped make Weimar a cultural center when, after settling there, he was followed by Goethe, Herder, and Schiller. However, the arena for public discussion of policy alternatives in the German states remained unitary through the late eighteenth century.78 Wieland’s awareness of the restrictions on writers is apparent in a number of essays he wrote for the Teutscher Merkur in the 1780s on the responsibilities of writers, publishers, and the state. In ‘‘On the Rights and Responsibilities of the Writer’’ (1785), for example, he argues that authors have a duty to speak the truth impartially, and the state has a responsibility to allow such expression for the sake of educating the people.79 In other words, society has an interest in allowing the expression of responsible opinion in an independent press. But uncensored political journalism remained a goal to be realized in Germany in the 1780s and for some time thereafter. Like Diderot’s later works, the narratives that Wieland wrote in the late 1760s and early 1770s take their place in relation to a different kind of political public sphere than does Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. Like Sterne’s late work and like Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘‘Voyage’’, Wieland’s Socrates out of his Senses, or The Dialogues of Diogenes of Sinope (1770) focuses on sexuality and sentimentality, and like these other two works, Socrates takes an episodic and digressive form that disrupts transparent unity and produces a narrative pastiche. However, whereas Sterne almost entirely abandons references to public history in favor of representing sentimental subjectivity, Wieland, like Diderot, establishes a historical narrative that conveys a sharp satiric indictment of prevailing social conditions. Wieland sets Socrates out of his Senses again in classical Greece, and reinterprets a historical figure to produce a narrative with clear implications for his own time. Rather incongruously, Wieland gives Diogenes the Cynic a central role in several short sentimental narratives. For example, when he encounters a beautiful young prostitute on the street, Diogenes appreciatively listens to

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her play the lute and then apparently only gives her a good night kiss rather than engaging her services. And when the long-time friend of an accused man refuses to defend him in court unless he can sleep with the man’s wife, Diogenes defends the man for nothing, succeeds in obtaining his acquittal, and makes it clear that his feelings of satisfaction at the end of the day are worth more to him than any fee. 80 Alternating with such sentimental anecdotes, and gradually taking on more prominence are Diogenes’ speeches rebuking the learned and the rich; he accuses the rich of being drones because they live off the work of the poor but pay them only the lowest wages in return. The largest section of Socrates, about a quarter of the total, is devoted to Diogenes’ utopia, his ‘‘republic,’’ which would make all citizens equal, giving them as simple and natural a way of life as possible, and leaving no place for the rich or the learned, for priests, lawyers, soldiers, historians, poets, or actors. Diogenes recognizes that his utopia is a dream, but the expression of his ideal strengthens his exhortations to the rich to share some of their superfluity with the poor. Although the two roles may seem inconsistent in a single character, Wieland makes Diogenes both an eighteenth-century sentimentalist and a satiric participant in contemporary debates about the value of commerce, the responsibility of employers, and the proper and defensible level of wages to employees. Both may have been displaced onto a Greek alter ego of the fourth century BCE so that the sentimentalist might help make the satiric social commentator more acceptable to the authorities of Wieland’s time. The combination of the sentimental and the satiric here, as in Agathon, indicates both the development of a literary public sphere, which is conducive to sentiment, and the lack of a political public sphere—hence the continuing function served by satire. One further narrative by Wieland set in classical Greece deserves brief notice here because it illustrates the extent to which satire persists and even becomes more prominent in his narratives. The History of the Abderites (1774–81) could not be mistaken for a novel: there is no protagonist who appears from one of its five books to another, no representation of individual subjectivity, no dialectic connecting the private and domestic world with public concerns. Rather than focusing on the adventures of an individual or a family, the History of the Abderites offers the history of an extraordinarily foolish people, with each book concentrating on a different aspect of the Abderites’s absurdity. The first shows

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the inversions of the normal and the logical in the Abderites’ way of life; for example, they hang pictures of learned assemblies in their gymnasiums, and their marching songs sound like funeral marches. The last book concerns a religious antagonisms between sects of frog-worshippers who strongly resemble Protestants and Catholics. The middle book represents the Abderites in a period of enthusiasm for the theatre, in which Wieland satirizes the contemporaneous Sturm und Drang movement and the interest in a German national theatre. The second and fifth books depict the Abderites’ extreme litigiousness over the most trivial issues—for example, the question of whether a man who rents an ass also rents his shadow leads to civil war. In this work, Wieland clearly satirizes the factionalism of the Germans, in religion and in other aspects of their lives, as well as their excessive enthusiasms. Paradoxically, in a narrative set in ancient Greece, he even satirizes his countrymen’s love for all things Greek. Wieland himself had helped to encourage an interest in ancient Greek culture, but now felt that it had become too earnest and uncritical. The History of the Abderites concludes with the author’s acknowledgment that he has written a satire of contemporary German culture. Referring to Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and other English satiric narratives from earlier in the century such as Manley’s New Atalantis and Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull, he agrees that every satiric novel must have a key.81 As the key to his own satire, he reveals that, although the town of Abdera long ago disappeared, the Abderites continue to exist, and can reportedly be identified in every city and town in Germany. Such a revelation has brought its own satisfaction to the author as historian: ‘‘For now I saw myself as the historian of the antiquities of a family that is continuing to flourish’’ (307; 4:454). The contemporary ubiquity of foolishness authorizes the fictional historian and gives him his real subject.82 Wieland’s narratives after Agathon therefore reveal the continuing strength and usefulness of narrative satire, and in doing so also indicate that a public domain for oppositional politics has not taken shape in the German states.83 His work to bring about such a mechanism for open discussion and the formation of public opinion parallels the earlier efforts by Voltaire in France as well as the contemporary efforts of Kant, Lessing, and others. In the works of these continental writers, an orientation toward public and social meanings remains strong, even if it must be expressed only indirectly and satirically, and the representation of individual subjectivity usually remains subordinate. In the works of Fielding,

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Smollett, and Sterne, on the other hand, the representation of characters’ individual subjectivity gains prominence, and direct commentary on policy, now possible outside fictional plots, becomes subordinate in narrative fiction. In England, cultural and political public spheres had developed by the 1730s and 1740s. By contrast, on the continent, a literary and cultural public sphere took shape from earlier than mid-century in France and somewhat later in Germany, whereas the institutions and media necessary for a pluralistic public sphere did not develop before 1789 in France and only much later than that in Germany. Narrative forms appropriate to these different contexts emerge in the continental cultures and in Britain. Sentimental and novelistic forms make an appearance in all three countries, but are strongest and most unalloyed in England. There, satiric narrative fades in usefulness and strength after about 1740. However, in both France and Germany, and sometimes in combination with the novelistic and sentimental, satiric narrative continues to serve an important purpose as a means of indirectly expressing views at odds with the established policies of church and state.

SATIRE, THE PUBLIC SPHERE, AND BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS As already discussed, Nancy Fraser and others have pointed out that while the plural public sphere makes room for arguments about policy by substantially propertied male critics and opponents of the government, such a forum for public debate remains firmly closed to other groups such as male workers and women of every rank. In eighteenth-century Britain, women came to have access to a cultural public sphere that produced narratives of love, domesticity, and the moral dilemmas of non-aristocratic individuals, but the dominant forum for public discussions of policies did not accommodate women’s voices or writings. Such a restriction had consequences for the genres in which women worked during this time, and in particular provided an impetus for their continued writing of satire. Since women are usually regarded as victims of satire, it may seem paradoxical or counterintuitive to study women themselves as satirists. Nevertheless, this section will argue that narratives by British women retained strong elements of satiric form throughout the century even as narrative satire faded and almost entirely disappeared from the writings of men. I am not arguing for a strict correspondence between gender and

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genre here: many women worked in sentimental novelistic forms, and a few men continued to use satiric elements in their narratives in the 1760s. But the satiric elements tended to be stronger and to persist longer in women’s writings. To show that narrative satire by women existed in the first half of the century and persisted in the second half despite a pressure toward novelization that affected all writers, I will discuss the principal satiric narratives of five women writers—Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Burney—as well as the renewed use of satiric form by both men and women in the 1790s. In Nobody’s Story, Catherine Gallagher analyzes major works by almost all the female authors discussed in this chapter; her study focuses on developments in the publishing marketplace that led to the concept of fiction as well as to the idea of the author.84 In her argument, women are prototypical modern authors: the anonymity, immateriality, and placelessness that define all authors in the eighteenth century characterize female authors particularly intensely. While her readings often intersect with mine—she emphasizes the importance of satire and self-satire in Manley’s New Atalantis, for example—my argument stresses the contrast between the authority of male authors who had access to a political public voice and the more limited standing of women who had access throughout the century only to a cultural or literary public arena. Rather than focusing on the development of fiction and the novel, I observe the decline or persistence of satire in relation to or in combination with novelistic forms. In Licensing Entertainment, William B. Warner studies the narratives of Behn, Manley, and Haywood as productions of a media culture that were read for entertainment.85 In his account, Richardson and Fielding incorporated while repressing such popular fictions in order to produce their high cultural narratives that began the institution of ‘‘the’’ novel. Like Warner, I question the presumed centrality of a single, abstracted form of the novel. However, I am tracing the appropriation and suppression not of one kind of novel by another, but of satiric narratives by historical and novelistic forms, especially, in this chapter, the sentimental novel. Gallagher and Warner both study the marketplace of print, with Gallagher concentrating on the displacement of the author in the new system, and Warner on the appetite for entertainment of a growing readership. Both studies, however, remain novel-centered and within what I see as the cultural public sphere. Widening the area of study to include the political public sphere allows for an investigation of the increasing

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or decreasing prominence of other than novelistic forms. It also brings into focus a different account of relations between male and female authors of narratives. It would be possible to begin this account of women as authors of narrative satire with two writers of the late seventeenth century: Margaret Cavendish, who frequently used satiric forms to criticize a patriarchy she could not attack directly; and Aphra Behn, who often satirically addressed the most contested partisan political issues in her works and, like Cavendish, implied an ambivalent ideological stance that could be overtly royalist on most questions and yet carry a Whiggish counterimplication on many.86 The writings of both these women are consistent with a characterization of the late seventeenth-century cultural framework as one organized around paradox and ambivalence that encouraged satiric forms of expression.87 Delariver Manley’s Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) and The New Atalantis (1709) participate in the same paradigm and make even clearer and more extensive use of satiric form. Like Queen Zarah, the New Atalantis employs the form of a secret history or scandal fiction, pioneered by Villedieu in the 1670s (see chapter 2), but it sharpens the critique implicit in the earlier form by using it for a contemporary and partisan political purpose.88 Both works tell the secret, sordid, and villainous sexual histories of the most prominent Whig politicians of the time. In her dedication to the second volume of the New Atalantis, Manley herself says the work is ‘‘written like Varronian satires, on different subjects, . . . after the manner of Lucian,’’ and she cites Dryden’s discourse on satire in support of such a characterization of its genre.89 Like many menippean satires, The New Atalantis includes a number of poems in the narrative that are only loosely related to the plot. Moreover, like other such satires, it lowers the character of high officials, famous statesmen, generals, and politicians, exposing the hypocrisy of their claims of public service by depicting their predatory sexual activities and their greed. Whereas most narrative satires focus on the shared physical processes of eating and eliminating, some—such as the Satyricon, Tristram Shandy, and Manley’s secret histories—concentrate on the levelling effects of sexuality. Moreover, because Manley’s narrative undermines its overtly anti-Whiggish line of attack, the New Atalantis implies a double and ambiguous ideological position that is consistent with the way narrative satire criticizes opposite extremes without depicting or

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authorizing a clear middle ground. For example, the detailed and vivid descriptions of seductions among rich and sensual surroundings not only serve a critical and satiric purpose; they also appeal to readers’ fantasized identifications with the characters depicted.90 Similarly, as the episodes accumulate, they come to include not only Whigs but some predatory and deceitful Tories as well.91 The consistently reiterated narrative pattern in the New Atalantis concerns the victimization of innocent young women by powerful older men, and readers may infer that some in the author’s own party are perhaps as amoral as their political opponents.92 The work in fact implies that the patriarchal system that includes both Whigs and Tories is itself corrupt and blameworthy. In a sign that the most obvious level of her political satire was successful, Manley was arrested and charged with libel by the Whig ministry a week after the second volume of the New Atalantis was published.93 The case was eventually dismissed, and Manley soon published Memoirs of Europe (1710), another two-volume partisan and satiric secret history that in later years was sometimes bound together with and served as a continuation of the New Atalantis. Still, this was the last of her political and satiric scandal narratives; her final writings took the form of a history and a nonsatiric amatory fiction. In the autobiographical Adventures of Rivella (1714), she reports through her spokesman in the text that she has come to feel ‘‘that politicks is not the business of a woman.’’94 Although Manley thus moves away from the partisan political satire of the secret histories, the New Atalantis remained immensely popular and one of the most successful satiric narratives of the early part of the eighteenth century. Almost all the equally popular novellas of Eliza Haywood published in the 1720s, beginning with Love in Excess (1719–20), continue this movement away from the political and the satiric: they revolve around the absorbing amatory intrigues of private individuals, usually, as in Manley, with tragic consequences for innocent young women. Even Haywood’s Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1726), which adopts the form of a secret history like the New Atalantis, lacks clear, specific references to well-known figures, and has thus been drained of satiric and partisan political implications. Haywood thus crucially participates in the process of novelization that many critics have analyzed, and that I have argued involves a turn away from satiric and ironic forms.95 It is striking, therefore, that Haywood also published perhaps

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the sharpest narrative satire of Robert Walpole and his administration between Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Jonathan Wild (1743). In Eovaai (1736), she depicts a power-hungry, misshapen magician who has become the effective ruler of his country by placing the king in an entranced state where he hears no complaints and sees none of the wrongs or sufferings of his people. The protagonist is a princess of a neighboring state whose careless loss of a magic protective stone plunges her kingdom into civil dissension and allows her to be kidnapped and almost successfully wooed by the Walpole-like magician. The core of the satire is located in an extensive section in the middle of the narrative where Eovaai hears a speech of an opposition figure attacking corruption in the government, and exhorting his countrymen to be active in asserting their ancient freedoms and properties from ‘‘the hands of Robbers’’ in the current ministry.96 In the previous few years, Bolingbroke had in fact expressed very similar sentiments and articulated the idea of a patriotic opposition openly in the pages of the Craftsman; he published his Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism in the same year that Eovaai appeared. After listening to this speech by the threatened leader of the opposition, the princess hears praises of a nearby commonwealth that closely resembles the Netherlands, and then, most importantly, she engages in a discussion with a wise old man who argues energetically in favor of a republican form of government. This old man anticipates Rousseau’s Second Discourse as he traces the origin of inequality among men, and he proves much more radical than the opposition leader in the text or Bolingbroke, who defended a constitutional monarchy. Haywood has Eovaai cling to some monarchical principles because she is a princess and ruler herself, but she learns that she cannot refute republican arguments against inequality, luxury, and the pursuit of private interests over the public good. Haywood makes many of the same arguments against Walpole’s ministry that Bolingbroke employs openly in his essays for the Craftsman, but not having a legitimate, recognized public voice at the time, she employs the indirect satiric form of a parallel tale supposedly from the early history of China. (Her work may have influenced Smollett’s History of an Atom, discussed earlier in this chapter.) Bolingbroke’s opposition to the ministry keeps him within the constituted political system, but the recourse to satiric fiction enables Haywood to go much further and indirectly to articulate not only an opposition to the ministry but a critique of the monarchical system.

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Like most of Haywood’s works, Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple (1744) turns away from the realm of partisan or political satire and employs elements of other forms such as romance and tragedy. Nevertheless, the narrative remains strongly satiric in its form and implications, both in its first four books and in its last three books which appeared almost a decade later under the title Volume the Last (1753). David remains throughout the narrative an ignorant, trusting naı¨f, in dealing with whom others reveal moral characters that are mostly scheming, deceitful, callous, or proud. In fact, pairings of human beings in this narrative repeatedly prove to embody opposite but comparably reprehensible traits, while no mediator appears who can reconcile the two extremes. For example, one of David’s early companions and guides, Spatter, speaks vituperatively of others, whereas Varnish, who replaces him, never follows up his expressions of sympathy with helpful deeds. Similarly, near the end of David Simple, a young woman reports on three pairs of suitors, each of which consists of opposed extremes: one, for example, reputed to be intelligent, is widely distrusted and considered a schemer, while another, regarded as a fool, is able, because he is never suspected, to carry out his pernicious plots. In his search for a friend, David meets only three other innocent characters: a lively and intelligent young woman who has been tormented by a relative, and a brother and sister who have been persecuted by their stepmother. After they tell their stories of mistreatment, the four become two couples who decide to live together on David’s income after they are married. Thus, elements of romance and a limited or country-house utopia play a role in the conclusion of the first part of the narrative. However, Volume the Last works out a very different conclusion for the characters. Ten years after the fourth book concludes, David and Camilla have five children and Valentine and Cynthia another. But within the year or so recounted in this part of the narrative, David loses all his money through imprudence and a protracted lawsuit; in addition, almost all the members of these two families lose their lives as a result of following the callous, coercive advice of those who patronize them, especially Mr. Orgeuil and his jealous, scheming wife. In the end, only Cynthia and a young daughter of David survive. David’s story resembles Job’s not only because he loses everything but also because his wealthy patrons prove to be false friends, demanding subservience in exchange for ruining his life and the lives of those he loves.97 While a tragic undercurrent colors these con-

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cluding books, the narrative remains consistent with a satiric vision of a human world divided between innocent imprudent fools and predatory, hypocritical, and jealous knaves. No figure in the work is able to combine moral integrity and prudential wisdom, and the absent middle defines the tale as a somber satire of the casual victimization of the sheep by the wolves. The date of publication of Volume the Last—1753—is significant because after the parodic and satiric Shamela and Jonathan Wild, Henry Fielding had written two comic novels with satiric elements, and then the sentimental, non-satiric Amelia (1751). But in her continuation of David Simple, Sarah Fielding did not move away from the satiric form she, like Henry, had employed almost ten years earlier. As we have seen, Henry Fielding was able to express his position on numerous policy debates openly in pamphlets and political periodical essays. In addition, his propertied and charitable Doctor Harrison was able to stand in for the author in Amelia and prevent a tragic outcome. At the end of Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752), another doctor intervenes to reverse the direction of the action, and to provide a conclusion for the plot; but whereas Dr. Harrison rescues and helps provide for Amelia and Booth, Lennox’s doctor works to constrain and discipline Arabella. The satire in The Female Quixote typically works by showing the incongruity that results from Arabella’s reading of romances as historical documents, reacting to everyday events as though they occurred in the world of romance, and patterning her actions on those of romance heroines. Thus, she believes that almost any man who comes into her presence must be in love with her, that her suitors must spend years of silence before obtaining any favors from her, and that a word from her can give a man hope and life or consign him to death from despair. By believing that the French romances provide an accurate map of the world, Arabella not only causes misunderstandings and embarrassments; she also opens up an area where she is able to act independently. Rejecting an early wedding to the cousin her father chose for her, and keeping other suitors at a distance, she remains her own agent, following her own model of conduct. If the romances lead her into absurdities, they also offer an alternative to the passivity, dullness, and lack of identity that obedience to a father or husband would dictate.98 Arabella sometimes even serves not as an object but as the agent of the satire, for example, when she asks what possibility a woman of fashion has ‘‘for high and

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noble Adventures, who consumes her Days in Dressing, Dancing, Listening to Songs, and ranging the Walks with People as thoughtless as herself ?’’ (279). It is consistent with this critique of fashionable society that when Arabella asks a scandalmonger about some of those in the public rooms at Bath, his response could be taken verbatim from the sordid secret histories of the wealthy and powerful in the New Atalantis, and Arabella finds nothing of worth or interest in such tales. Divorced from any political or educational purposes, the scandal chronicle offers no model either for Arabella or for her author.99 The romances, by contrast, at least provide the possibility of autonomy and agency for Arabella. When the doctor steps in to disabuse Arabella of her illusions, he goes further than the narrative has previously gone as he not only questions Arabella’s overly credulous reading of the romances, but also argues that the romances are dangerous in themselves, since they are concerned almost exclusively with love and its often violent consequences. Significantly, the doctor appeals to his many years as a ‘‘public Character’’ (379) to convince Arabella that the romances do not accurately represent social life. Such a character and sphere of action, of course, are not available to Arabella. At one point, her uncle observes that she would have made a great figure in Parliament, had she been a man (311).100 Being a woman, however, she has no access to a public political identity like that of the doctor, whose language and ideas closely resemble those of Samuel Johnson. Arabella’s acceptance of the doctor’s arguments therefore means that she must accept the marriage with her cousin and a foreclosing of possibilities for independent action, even if such action could only be represented satirically. The contrast here between The Female Quixote and Amelia is revealing. For the male novelist and his surrogate, participation in the political public sphere can lead to a resolution of difficulties and misunderstandings, the rescue of a marriage, the provision of a haven from corruption. For the female satirical author and her protagonist, the inability to participate in this sphere leads to a silencing—a loss of identity and agency. The Female Quixote was Lennox’s most successful and popular work, and although she wrote three novels later in her life, her next published narratives were translations of historical memoirs; she sought persistently to write an original history, but was unable to find an authoritative voice and perspective for such an account of public events.101 David Simple was also the most well-known work of Sarah Fielding, and although she published two later nov-

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els, she also tried to work in historical forms, writing a series of dramatic monologues by Cleopatra and Octavia, and translating Xenophanes’ memoir of Socrates. By contrast, as we have seen, in the early and mid-1750s, Smollett was moving away from the fierce and physically violent satire of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle toward a successful use of historical forms and participation in the political public sphere. In the late 1750s, he cofounded and edited the Critical Review, wrote his History of England, and left satire behind almost entirely by the time of Humphry Clinker. We have traced a parallel metamorphosis in the genre of Sterne’s narratives from satire to sentimental novel, and Goldsmith’s works reveal a progression like Smollett’s from the satiric Citizen of the World (1760–62) to the sentimental and novelistic Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and the histories of England, Greece, and Rome. In the context of such a widespread turn away from satiric narrative by male authors in the 1760s, it is striking that in Evelina (1778), Frances Burney writes a first novel that makes such strong and prominent use of satiric elements. In the first parts of the work, Evelina serves as a vehicle of the satire, an inexperienced naı¨f whose comments and questions about the social world draw attention to its emptiness and vanity. As Evelina becomes more proper and less ironic, she is displaced by other satirists: Captain Mirvan in particular stands out for the physical violence of his prankish chastisements, which equal those practiced by Smollett’s characters twenty-five and thirty years earlier.102 By means of the captain’s attacks, the narrative is able to punish and ritually degrade Evelina’s coercive and vulgar grandmother, while Evelina can distance herself from the violence against the older woman and close relative; she disapproves of the Captain’s methods, but agrees with his judgment of Mrs. Duval. Similarly, when Mrs. Selwyn becomes Evelina’s companion and somewhat ineffectual chaperone, Evelina criticizes the unmarried woman’s satirical temper and ‘‘masculine’’ manner, yet she and the author clearly share Selwyn’s harsh judgment of the callous, immature, and empty-headed young men and women of fashionable society.103 Although the narrative concludes like a romance with the recognition of Evelina by her aristocratic father and her marriage to the thoughtful Lord Orville, the energetically intelligent use of language by Selwyn and Evelina (especially in her early letters) gives the work a sharp critical edge. In Cecilia (1782), and in her later works, Burney leaves behind the satire of Evelina, moving toward

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the kind of propriety of diction and imagination that Evelina herself gradually adopts in the earlier work. Nevertheless, Burney’s shift from narrative satire to sentimental novel takes place fifteen years after a similar transformation has occurred in the careers of Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith; Evelina still stands out as probably the most satiric English novel of the 1770s and 1780s. Amid the heated controversies over the revolution in France as well as the agitation for reform and the repressive reaction in England, the 1790s saw a renewed output of narrative satires, including Thomas Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor (1794–97), Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796), Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796), as well as Isaac D’Israeli’s Vaurien (1797) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800).104 This production of political narrative satires bears out the argument made here in a number of ways. It was the radicals who first had recourse to narrative satire during the decade, bringing a new energy and attention to the form. They were attracted in part no doubt by the indirection which enabled them to disguise their critique of aristocratic corruption and disavow treasonous intentions. (Holcroft was in fact tried for treason in 1794 and acquitted.) As the treason trials and transportations, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the prosecution of the correspondence societies indicates, the political public sphere in Britain did not tolerate an opposition and had ceased to be pluralistic by 1794. Significantly, Inchbald was in the forefront of the radical satirists. An early version of Nature and Art was circulating in 1794, even if it was not published for another two years, and through this narrative and the earlier A Simple Story she influenced both Godwin and Holcroft. Although Nature and Art combines satire and sentiment, its satire is sharper and more sustained through the sentimental plot than is the case for most other political novels of the time. When conservative writers responded to the radicals with their own satires, women were prominent among the antiJacobin satirists also, as is indicated by Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Finally, two other female satirists writing late in the decade made important innovations in narrative form, although their work was not strongly or overtly political. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (written 1798, published 1818) pursues a satiric critique of literary and social conventions that would come to be one of the most persistent concerns of the novel in the nineteenth century. And Maria Edgeworth, through the use of satiric and dramatic monologue in dialect, constructs in Castle Rack-

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rent (1800) a narrative of several generations of absentee Irish landowners that would serve as a model for the historical novel of Scott and his followers. Thus, in the 1790s, the works of female satirists in Britain were numerous, strong, and innovative, whether explicitly political or not. But this survey of narrative satire by women from the first decade of the eighteenth century onward shows that such satiric works played a similarly prominent role throughout the century. I would maintain that one of the factors that contributed to the strength and persistence of narrative satire by women in this period was the lack of a place for women in the political public sphere in Britain.105 Women have often been the objects of attack by male satirists, especially by authors of verse satire.106 Narrative satire in eighteenth-century Britain departs from this pattern, however. Women writers worked successfully in the genre of narrative satire throughout the first half of the century alongside male writers, and they continued to find the form suited to the expression of their critical perspectives longer than did male writers in the second half of the century. The eighteenth century was characterized not only by the female sentimental novelist but also by the female narrative satirist. In this writing of narrative satire, as in their exclusion from the political public sphere, British women’s narratives bear comparison with those of French and German writers— male and female—of the later eighteenth century such as Voltaire, Graffigny, Diderot, and Wezel.

6 Satire and Utopia in Conjectural History, 1750–1800 FORMS OF CONJECTURAL HISTORY

THE FIRST FIVE CHAPTERS OF THIS STUDY HAVE EXPLORED A SHIFT from satiric to novelistic or historical forms of narrative; however, the transformation analyzed in the last chapter occurred earlier and more thoroughly in British culture than in French or German. A related asynchronism, a similar persistence of satire in the continental but not in British narratives characterizes the history of two distinctively eighteenth-century genres of historical narrative—the conjectural history of a distant or prehistoric past, and philosophical history, a more moderate genre of historical narrative that pays attention to documented particulars, even as it seeks to discern patterns in large historical developments. As it returns to times before the advent of writing, conjectural history attempts to relate the history of human socialization. One of the principal ideas of such history as it develops in the second half of the eighteenth century is the concept of historical stages, which sees earlier periods as separated from the present by defining social differences. In this view, as a society develops from one stage to another, from, for example, nomadic to agricultural and commercial, the entire shape of the society—its fundamental institutions, mode of economic life, and hierarchy of values— undergoes a transformation that leaves the previous stage behind. By contrast, most political histories of the time attempted to establish the legitimacy of their position through continuities between past and present. Partisan histories, therefore—such as those of Whigs and Tories in England or nobiliaires and royalists in France—constituted a different kind of historical narrative from those conjectural narratives that take a wide historical sweep, moving typically from the earliest emergence of human so231

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cieties to the modern world and sometimes beyond.1 Among the various kinds of history available at the time, conjectural history was most closely related to the genre of philosophical history.2 Philosophical histories concerned themselves with the same events—battles, reigns, diplomacy—as political histories, but they sought to discern in such events general patterns of development or decline and relations of cause and effect. Both philosophical and conjectural history sought to discover non-providential, naturalistic patterns in events; thus, conjectural history has sometimes been seen as a subset of philosophical history.3 I view them here as presenting related but alternate perspectives on the past. In establishing his relation to a past culture, a historian can look nostalgically and admiringly backward, or, at the opposite extreme, he can turn to the future as the opposite of a past of which he is highly critical. A third, more moderate alternative would be to acknowledge the complexity of the past society which he depicts, combining judicious respect with a recognition of limitations.4 Backward-looking conjectural histories tend toward the form of a jeremiad or verse satire (except that they are not in verse).5 By contrast, forward-looking conjectural histories tend to include or move toward a utopian form. Philosophical histories, on the other hand, are more moderate in their outlook, more nuanced in their argument and in their form. In this chapter, the British and German works taken together reveal the same sequence as the French histories: in both series, a conjectural history based on satire or jeremiad is followed by a philosophical history, and that by a utopian conjectural history. Both the satiric and the utopian conjectural histories are more extreme in France than are the corresponding varieties written in English or German. A partial explanation for this discrepancy can be found in the different kinds of public arenas in France and in England; the use of satiric form may be related to the absence of a pluralistic public sphere, while the movement away from satire and from extreme positions occurs most clearly in conjunction with the development of such a public sphere.6 Rousseau’s conjectural histories—the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) and especially the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755)—express a melancholic regard for a lost ideal, as I noted in chapter 4. Rousseau views the ages succeeding the state of nature as a series of catastrophic declinations; castigating civilization and celebrating a golden age before culture, his

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Discourses express an intensely nostalgic fixation with the past.7 By contrast, Voltaire, in The Age of Louis XIV (1751 and later), conceives of history as a repeated eclipsing of enlightened periods by ages of superstition; he writes his history largely to celebrate a period of brilliant cultural accomplishment, and, in a rebuke to his contemporaries, to suggest that another may be within reach.8 Although it took shape as an expression of nostalgic idealizing, The Age of Louis XIV concludes by recognizing the limitations of the age of Louis XIV, and in the end it turns back to the present. The historical vision presented by Condorcet in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) has much in common with Rousseau’s nostalgic stance, as he analyzes and laments the strength of the forces of superstition in previous ages. But unlike Rousseau, Condorcet announces a future age of indefinite material and moral progress, a coming triumph over superstition, ignorance, oppression, and suffering. Among British works, Adam Ferguson’s conjectural history, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), resembles Rousseau’s Discourses in its nostalgia for an earlier state of society. Ferguson sees the threat to public virtue posed by commercial society, but he also recognizes the gains brought about by the modern commercial system. Although he continues to regret the loss of manly virtues, the mixture of progress and decline he discerns in history approaches a recognition of a balance between them. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) begins as a melancholy lament for the fall of a great civilization and an attack on the forces of ‘‘barbarism and religion’’ that brought it down. But as Gibbon progresses past his first volume, he works through in detail the accomplishments and limitations of a series of cultures that have been lost over the course of two millenia, and he increasingly comes to define his work as a historical monument for them. Kant’s late essays on the history of mankind— ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’’ (1784), ‘‘A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?’ ’’ (1798, the second part of the Contest of the Faculties), and especially ‘‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’’ (1795)—offer a utopian vision of the future that is contemporary with but more qualified and mixed than Condorcet’s. Kant only sees a prospect of realizing his utopia in the distant future, and he is most interested in the practical stages by which it may be brought about.9 Both Nietzsche and Kant himself offer terms for conceiving of

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human history as a consistent decline, a progressive improvement, or a state of equilibrium. In The Use and Abuse of History (1874), Nietzsche characterizes historical projects as ‘‘antiquarian,’’ ‘‘critical,’’ or ‘‘monumental.’’10 Those who adopt the ‘‘antiquarian’’ attitude revere what is old and local precisely because it has endured and is familiar. They are nostalgically attached to pre-modern or primitive cultures, in favor of which they reject modern society, and they write in order to be reconnected with an earlier age. Their opposite, the ‘‘critical’’ historians, seek to sever the present from its roots in the past. For them, traditional institutions deserve to be destroyed because they have been responsible for so much injustice. In a utopian future, however, the material limitations and moral failings of the past and present will be eliminated. By contrast with both of these approaches, those who hold a ‘‘monumental’’ attitude toward history seek to remember past heroic deeds and to encourage future ones. They respect and study previous cultural accomplishments in order to locate usable examples which demonstrate that similar achievements are still possible. Such thinkers do not dwell imaginatively in an ideal past or an ideal future; instead, they memorialize parts of the past as a means of intervening in the present. The backward-looking conjectural historian such as Rousseau shares with Nietzsche’s antiquarian a harshly critical attitude toward the present and an imaginative involvement with a past by reference to which the rest of human history appears as a story of decline. The critical historian who turns away from the injustices of the past does not necessarily move on to project a utopian future; still, a progressive conjectural historian such as Condorcet does both. What Nietzsche calls monumental history focuses on the prospects for heroism in the present, a concern that is not foremost in the histories of Gibbon and Voltaire. Nevertheless, like monumental histories, the philosophical histories of both Gibbon and Voltaire are more measured than the conjectural histories already mentioned; they acknowledge the accomplishments and injustices of the past, as well as the possibilities and limitations of the present. In ‘‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?’’ Kant also discusses three parallel understandings of history. He first describes the attitude which sees an unrelenting decline in human history, discerning development only in the human power to destroy, oppress, and exploit; this attitude he calls ‘‘terroristic.’’11 In the second attitude, which he calls ‘‘eudaimonistic,’’ human history

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exhibits a pattern of continual progress and improvement, and contemporary societies approach a future state of utopian perfection. The third attitude Kant calls ‘‘abderitic’’ (referring to Christoph Martin Wieland’s narrative satire, The History of the Abderites, discussed in chapter 5). On this view, human history exhibits a tendency neither to decline nor to improve, but oscillates between the two, with progress and regress cancelling each other out. Especially the first two positions Kant describes, like those in Nietzsche’s account, accurately characterize the attitudes in the conjectural histories at the focus of this chapter. The first attitude is aligned with satiric or ‘‘antiquarian’’ history, the second with utopian or ‘‘critical’’ history, and the third with complex or ‘‘monumental’’ history.12 Kant’s late essays thus serve a number of purposes in this chapter. In the first place, ‘‘Of Perpetual Peace’’ narrates a moderately utopian conjectural history of the future. In addition, on a metahistorical level, ‘‘Is the Human Race Improving?’’ provides terms in which to understand conjectural histories. Finally, by contributing to a theory of the public sphere, ‘‘What is Orientation in Thinking’’ can help account for the differences between the forms taken by these historical genres in Britain and in France. Taking the philosophical histories analyzed here as examples, I will argue that construction of a relatively full, accurate, and mixed narrative representation of an earlier culture that avoids the extremes of idealization or disparagement can be seen as an indication that the work of understanding a cultural loss has been largely accomplished; by contrast, a lack of formal integration in conjectural histories signals a partial and polarized perspective on the past culture.13 A formal contrast between narrative and expository sections is particularly marked in the conjectural histories of Rousseau and Condorcet. Their narrative sections portray some achievements along with many crimes and follies, while the synchronic parts of their works represent a utopian state unqualified by limitations or change, set in the past for Rousseau and in the future for Condorcet. The impulse in the expository sections to escape temporality by positing a fixed, utopian ideal signals a refusal to acknowledge the complexity of the past or to attempt to work through to a balanced understanding. By contrast, the works of Ferguson and Kant examined here express more measured judgments, and do not sever their ideal states from temporality and history. Ferguson sees complex historical pressures moving states toward despotism and loss of civic

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virtue, but he believes such forces can be resisted by a vigilant and active citizenry. Kant foresees a condition of perpetual peace, but he focuses on the practical steps that can be taken to move toward such a state, and on its links with the present. The philosophical histories of Voltaire and Gibbon demonstrate that narrative itself can be conducive to the process of working through to historical understanding, because it usually involves an ongoing representation of multiple perspectives and alternatives. These philosophical histories consider other courses, continuations, and ascriptions of responsibility. They thus go beyond the expository and synchronic, not confining themselves merely to praise or blame, to simply conforming to or opposing an official position.14

ROUSSEAU, VOLTAIRE, AND CONDORCET In his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Rousseau argues that the rebirth of learning in the Renaissance was accompanied not by an improvement but by a degeneration of morals. Furthermore, he associates the arts and sciences throughout history with the corruption of manners and morals, and appeals consistently to Rome and Sparta as the only models of virtuous societies. The first Discourse thus takes the form of a jeremiad or sermon calling on his contemporaries to turn away from the false gods of prosperity, comfort, and softness, and to return to the more difficult, classical republican path of virtue. The stance taken by the orator here also closely resembles that of the formal verse satirist such as Juvenal or Persius. As a more complex elaboration of the same line of thought, Rousseau’s second Discourse offers one of the strongest expressions of a nostalgic, reactionary attitude toward the past. Like other conjectural histories, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality laments the loss of a period of social life, or, in this case, of the period preceding the achievement of social life. Rousseau celebrates the primitive state of man with virtually no countervailing feelings, and his imaginatively detailed remembering of such a condition leads neither to a clarification and loosening of ties to this lost state, nor to a reconciliation with any later social stage. Part One of the Discourse describes the condition of the human being as an animal in a state of nature—solitary, free of anxiety, entirely unreflective. The portrait thus presented is attractive to

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Rousseau in many ways: the human animal in such a state relies solely on the certitudes of instinct and exhibits the same lack of differentiation that characterizes Adam and Eve in the garden— lack of knowledge of good and evil, lack of acquaintance with death, and lack of self-consciousness. Much of the distinctive force of the Discourse stems from Rousseau’s ability to represent the attainment of these various kinds of knowledge as irremediable losses. When he moves from his synchronic exposition to Part Two, Rousseau traces human beings emerging from a state of nature, responding to and overcoming nature’s obstacles. The industry and sociability required for this progress lead to the development of families, settlements, and more long-lasting affections, but also to a rudimentary form of property, a desire to be well-regarded by others, and jealousies which lead for the first time to bloodshed. Rousseau refers to this stage between animality and civilization as the ‘‘golden mean, . . . the best for man’’; all progress after this state ‘‘has been so many steps in appearance toward the improvement of the individual, but so many steps in reality toward the decrepitude of the species’’ (115; OC 3:171).15 Here as throughout the Discourse Rousseau sees apparent improvement veiling actual decline; losses are general and substantial, while gains are transient and illusory.16 The introduction of agriculture and metallurgy brings to an end this transitional state between nature and society, and a further revolution leads to full civil society. The rich suggest that everyone should unite and ‘‘institute rules of justice to which all shall be obliged to conform without exception’’ (121; OC 3:177). Thus a false social contract is established based on the mystification that the rich and the poor benefit equally from the law, even though the law exists to secure property from the threats of those who do not have it. There eventually results a war of all against all, not outside society, as Hobbes would have it, but within society. Any seeming exceptions in Rousseau to the view of history as uninterrupted degeneration prove to be illusory or unavailable, and beyond imitation. In the Discourse, the Spartans seem to offer an alternative to the moderns as a people who placed more emphasis on morals than on legislation, yet Rousseau calls Sparta unique and sees its achievements as unrepeatable. Similarly, the Carib Indians and other non-European peoples seem to demonstrate the survival of the ‘‘youth of the species’’ into modern times; however, as they encounter Europeans, they come in contact with history

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and the corruptions of progress as well. Hence they too degenerate into civilization, or, like the Caribs themselves, they do not survive. In the Social Contract, Rousseau offers an alternate, ideal vision of how the founding contract should be established, to counter that in the Discourse of how it has been universally and corruptly instituted. He announces in the first sentence of the Social Contract that he is searching to discover a legitimate principle of government, ‘‘taking men as they are and laws as they might be’’ (49; OC 3:351).17 As he turns away from the corruptions of political institutions in history, the sole alternative Rousseau presents is a utopian vision of what might yet be. Although he praises the political systems of Sparta and republican Rome, these remain the only historical polities that he consistently commends. He provides a logical foundation for obligation in civil society in this later work, but the insuperable difficulties of actually determining the general will in any given circumstances preclude his utopian vision from being realized in modern societies. Rousseau’s thinking about a cultural state that is more desirable because more primitive partially derives from, but also significantly diverges from, Tacitus’s Germania, which is, along with Herodotus’s, one of the primary classical histories that celebrate the virtue of less civilized peoples. According to Tacitus, whereas adultery is fashionable in imperial Rome, faithfulness and chastity continue to be strictly observed among the Germans (Germania 117–18). In the ninth footnote to his second discourse, Rousseau similarly contrasts the sexual and reproductive mores of primitive societies with those of modern civilization, which he castigates for its tolerance of homosexuality, abortion, infanticide, and the use of castration to produce sopranos. As I observe in chapter 4, this long note is constructed as a formal verse satire in prose, and closely parallels Juvenal’s third satire. While Tacitus compares Romans with Germans who existed in his own time, and whom he could have observed, Rousseau has no recourse for his contrast to direct or personal knowledge of an actual society of primitive peoples; he must imagine them by moving back from travellers’ accounts of less developed peoples in modern times. In addition, Tacitus served as consul, held other offices open to a talented and ambitious Roman, and admired republican Rome as much as the German societies. He was able to write his sharp if implicit satire of the imperial system because he was living under Trajan, himself an upright, energetic, and martial, if absolute,

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prince. Rousseau, however, rules out any such involvement in the administration of political affairs. When he concludes at the end of his ninth note that it is not possible to return to a primitive or savage state, he argues that people should merely obey the laws of the societies in which they find themselves, although such laws will produce more real injustices than apparent advantages. Even working for a good prince offers no prospects for satisfaction or improvement in Rousseau’s view because the system is hopelessly corrupt and unjust. Rousseau’s nostalgia for a pre-social state is more extreme than that of Tacitus for a primitive society.18 In Rousseau’s conception of it, then, history gives rise to an unending distancing from the golden age that has been irrevocably lost and from which modern societies continue to degenerate. In addition, Rousseau’s Discourse reveals a dichotomous understanding of history and society. Part One of the Discourse provides a static description of an ideal of unreflective pre-social humans; Part Two traces the ruinous fall into history and later stages of corruption. The ahistorical speculation of Part One constitutes an admittedly futile attempt to hold off the course of history recounted in Part Two. Rousseau’s nostalgic text remains fragmented: in the first part, the animal-man of nature is idealized and celebrated; in the second, the man of society and history is disparaged and condemned. For Rousseau, awareness of temporality itself is corrupting, and history an unending paratactic series of disasters without meaning. He aspires to a natural state before memory or foresight, history or narrative. Rousseau’s celebration of natural man’s lack of reflectiveness and historicity has much in common with Nietzsche’s recommendation of a state of animal forgetfulness.19 For both these thinkers, reflection constitutes a pathological condition, and its products, history and narrative, must also be corrupting. Among the attitudes toward history I outlined at the beginning of this chapter, therefore, Rousseau’s has most in common with what Kant calls the terroristic view, which sees history as a lineal and unchecked degeneration. His Discourses fittingly adopt the form of jeremiads or formal satires of human history and civilization. As opposed to Rousseau’s declamation against the corruptions of civilization, Voltaire expresses a dialogical view combining more than one perspective and including both blame and praise of his subject. Voltaire arrived at his double and somewhat contradictory view in the course of the twenty years that he worked on The Age

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of Louis XIV (1732–51), during which time its shape changed significantly.20 In 1738, in a letter to the Abbe´ du Bos, Voltaire anticipated that there would be two chapters on internal policy, two on ecclesiastical affairs, and five or six on the arts, beginning with Descartes and ending with Rameau (OH, 606).21 Two chapters of the unfinished Age of Louis XIV were published and seized in 1740, in a vivid illustration of the restrictive conditions under which Voltaire was working. Soon after this episode, Voltaire wrote to Lord Hervey in England to defend his choice of title (Le Sie`cle de Louis XIV), arguing that Louis did more than anyone else to enable the accomplishments of the preceding century, that he founded academies, patronized foreign scientists, and shaped French taste and culture, which in turn served as a model for the rest of Europe (OH, 609–11). When the work was finally published in 1751, however, only two chapters dealt with the arts and sciences. These were later increased to four, but they remain somewhat perfunctory, and make up less than a tenth of the whole. The chapters on culture still constitute the most innovative parts of Voltaire’s history, because they do not follow the course of events or any chronological principle. Instead of devoting attention to the deeds of the ruler, a ‘‘single man’’ (1; OH, 616),22 they describe the attainments of culture at the time, including discoveries in the sciences (chapter 31), productions in literature and the arts (chapters 32 and 33), and advances in the practical arts and sciences (chapter 34). Analytical or expository sections had punctuated previous historical narratives, but these tended to be documents (throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth century), Thucydidean speeches (in classically inspired works), or Herodotean ethnography. Of these, Voltaire’s description of a cultural moment comes closest to Herodotus’s ethnographic descriptions of the Egyptians or the Scythians. Voltaire goes back two millenia—though not to prehistoric times, like other conjectural histories—in his brief representation of the world’s four great cultural ages at the beginning of The Age of Louis XIV. The first three he considers to have been Athens in the time of Pericles, Rome under Augustus, and Florence at the height of the Medici. After surveying the cultural achievements signalled by the works of Bacon, Halley, Boyle, and Newton; Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz; Pascal, Racine, Molie`re, Bayle, Milton, and Swift, he asserts that under the leadership of Louis and France, ‘‘during the past century, mankind, from one end of Eu-

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rope to the other, has been more enlightened than in all preceding ages’’ (381; OH, 1028). Yet Voltaire believes that such periods of increased knowledge and cultural efflorescence do not last indefinitely: ‘‘genius can flourish but in a single age and must then degenerate’’ (370; OH, 1017).23 Although he never sets a precise terminus ad quem for the century of Louis XIV, Voltaire certainly feels that the period of greatness has passed by the time he is writing his history in the 1740s. He describes his chapters on the arts and sciences as an ‘‘account of the progress of the human spirit that began in the time of Cardinal Richelieu and ended in our days [ca. 1630–1720]’’ (375; OH, 1021). Unlike the utopian visions of thinkers who locate an ideal beyond temporality, at the beginning or end of time, Voltaire’s golden ages of cultural brilliance are limited in time. He makes each of his admired cultures an island in the flow of history which surrounds and overwhelms them in turn. In a way that is characteristic of philosophical history, Voltaire thus integrates cultural analysis with the narrative history he writes: the description does not stand apart from his history of political events, but rather is included among such narrative elements. Voltaire also combines a cyclical theory of history, according to which enlightened and unenlightened ages alternate in an indefinite series, with a progressive historicism, according to which later periods of cultural efflorescence rise above earlier ones, and improvements in the sciences and in the human condition take place over the long term.24 Still, the effectiveness of these cultural chapters is undercut by the conventional history of political affairs which precedes them, and the extensive consideration of religious affairs which follows. Traditional political and military history of Louis’s reign in fact occupies the largest single portion of Voltaire’s history—about half of the text. Moreover, since it comes first, the long narrative of war overshadows the cultural description. In his account of Louis’s wars, Voltaire even feels compelled to interrupt his narrative ‘‘to remind readers of this book that it is not a bare record of campaigns, but rather a history of the manners of men’’ (103; OH, 722–23). Such a statement draws attention to the discrepancy between the kind of history Voltaire has proposed in his general introduction and the conventional political history he finds himself writing. The narrative of war and diplomacy focuses principally on the acts and attitudes of a single man, Louis—including the wars he initiated and the outrages perpetrated by French armies fighting

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solely to assert his power and satisfy his pride. Louis invaded Holland in 1670 on trumped-up charges that he had been slighted (chapter 10); the Palatinate was burned and Alsace and Lorraine laid waste in 1675 for no military or political reason (chapter 12); and in 1690, scores of thousands of civilians were dispossessed when the Palatinate was subjected to a second and far more extensive conflagration (chapter 16). For a time, Voltaire attempts to cast the blame for the second burning of the Palatinate on the callousness of the soldiers or of the principal minister, Louvois. However, he eventually admits that although Louvois had advised the burning, Louis was master and could have decided differently. But Louis signed the order for ‘‘the destruction of an entire country’’ (149; OH, 773). At this point, despite some special pleading for the king, Voltaire acknowledges that Louis’s own disregard for life was responsible for the unnecessary death, wounding, hunger, or homelessness of more than a hundred thousand civilians. In recounting Louis’s wars in detail, Voltaire finds it impossible to maintain an unequivocal praise for the king. In addition, Voltaire became more interested in religion, and less interested in the arts; and in religious as well as in military affairs, Louis fell far short of being an ideal monarch.25 In the concluding chapters that follow those on culture, Voltaire analyzes Louis’s misguided handling of religious differences during his reign. By revoking the Edict of Nantes and expelling the Huguenots, Louis allied himself with the forces of superstition and intolerance, and showed himself unworthy of the legacy of his grandfather, Henry IV. Voltaire believes the violent uprising in the Cevennes in the early eighteenth century was caused by the Revocation; without it, there would not have been such outbreaks of fanaticism. Rather ˆ me, as he might have if he were than fiercely denouncing l’infa writing twenty years later, Voltaire confines his criticism of Louis’s action largely to pointing out how it weakened the kingdom by forcing a half million otherwise loyal and productive citizens to emigrate, taking with them ‘‘their arts, their manufactures, and their wealth’’ (408; OH, 1055).26 Voltaire thus interweaves two forms in his history: a synchronic, analytic cultural description, and a more traditional narrative of military and political affairs. Taken together, the celebratory and the critical views of Louis in these two parts of his work suggest an ability to develop a complex and balanced judgment that moves beyond either extreme. Recognizing Louis’s brutality and shortsightedness, Voltaire comes to terms with the underside of the age.

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Rather than condemning the entire reign, however, he opens the possibility of working against such policies of Louis as his wars of aggression or his approval of persecution and intolerance. The historian seeks to build upon the accomplishments in art, science, and philosophy that constitute the enduring cultural legacy of the period. By writing the Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire claims a share in the cultural tradition that he affirms in that history. He thus writes a monumental history, in Nietzsche’s sense, which comes to terms with the past in order to celebrate the achievements that can be discovered there, and still concerns itself with the present, in order to encourage contemporaries to equal or exceed the accomplishments of their predecessors. Voltaire moves further away from political history in his Essai sur les moeurs (1756), which attempts a general history of cultural developments from the reign of Charlemagne to that of Louis XIII, not only in western Europe but in the rest of Europe, the near and far East, and the Americas. Since Voltaire is primarily concerned in this work with condemning fanaticism, injustice, and cruelty around the world, he adopts a largely critical and satiric viewpoint, whereas even in his final version of the Age of Louis XIV, a laudatory perspective predominates.27 Although the Essai takes as its nominal point of departure the reign of Charlemagne—like the reign of Louis XIV, a time of French cultural predominance in Europe—and traces from there the succession of more and, usually, less enlightened rulers and cultures, Charlemagne can hardly be regarded as a progenitor of cultures around the world. By employing his reign as the starting point of his narrative, but not as the origin of all cultures, Voltaire removes some of the pressure from his history to idealize a great forefather.28 The Essai thus focuses more insistently on cultural history than Louis XIV, but without the aim of tracing an originary cultural authority. Consistent with this shift, the Essai does not focus on the history of a single dominant nation, its past epochs of glory and its present decline, but rather discerns widely separated but simultaneous developments such as the growth of intolerance in one part of the globe and its decline in another. The consideration of different cultures in successive chapters of the same work brings developments in any one culture into a larger context, if still a Eurocentric one. Such juxtapositions produce a more multiple and complex narrative history than does the focus on a single national culture. Possessing greater distance and tolerance of different interpretive possibilities, the historian can see such developments

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qualifying and offsetting each other. By moving from a national to a world context, reducing the importance of military history, and abandoning the search for an originary figure, the Essai, like the Age of Louis XIV, adopts an historiographical approach that we might term balanced or, in Kant’s terms, abderitic. In both works, advance and decline balance and offset each other, leading to no clear direction in history. J. G. A. Pocock has written that Voltaire’s histories, especially the Essai, must have been of ‘‘vast importance’’ to Gibbon.29 He argues that the Essai presents an early version of ‘‘the Enlightened narrative’’: an account of the dark ages that followed a period of relative cultural accomplishment and that led up to the threshold of modern, enlightened Europe.30 Voltaire, after all, preceded Gibbon in ascribing the fall of the Roman empire and the endurance of the Christian millennium that followed it to the triumph of ‘‘barbarism and religious dispute.’’31 Although Voltaire’s ironies may typically be more verbal and limited than Gibbon’s, Voltaire still proves himself capable, in Louis XIV and in the early versions of the Essai, of attaining a mixed and ambivalent perspective on crucial cultural predecessors such as Charlemagne, Louis IX, and Louis XIV. In his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, Condorcet seems at first to suggest such a double and ambiguous view of historical progress, but he eventually separates out tendencies that Voltaire had seen as simultaneous and mixed. For Condorcet finally confines superstition and regression to the past and an unlimited, indefinite progress to the future. Like Rousseau, he asserts in the first sections of the Sketch the interdependence of advance and decline, of knowledge and error throughout history. He observes the double phenomenon of progress and regression at the beginning of the agricultural stage, for example, where an increase in wealth brings a comparable increase in thieving. He also points out that the domestic slavery that had tainted Greek and Roman society was only abolished by the ignorant and barbaric Goths. As part of the dialectic of progress and reaction, Condorcet, unlike Rousseau, also frequently observes a disparity between the intentions of agents and the consequences of their actions (thus drawing on such Scottish thinkers as Ferguson and Smith).32 He argues that the Crusades brought Europeans into contact with Arab cultures, led to the translation of scientific writings from Arabic, and demonstrated the consequences of fanaticism in both

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Christianity and Islam. But increasing religious tolerance and the advancement of science were the opposites of what the Crusaders intended to accomplish: ‘‘these wars, undertaken in the cause of superstition, served to destroy it’’ (92; 108).33 Similarly, the introduction of gunpowder in the West, by neutralizing the nobility’s previous advantage in arms, hastened the demise of the aristocracy. Although he underscores their unexpected long-term effects, Condorcet also recognizes the increased destructiveness of firearms. The eventual alteration in historical direction accompanies, but does not erase the violence and deaths that the Crusades and firearms caused. Consequently, Condorcet diverges from Rousseau in not considering degeneration to be the necessary result of historical struggles. Like Voltaire, and against Rousseau, he sees the arts and sciences as engines of knowledge and enlightenment: ‘‘knowledge, so far from corrupting man, has always improved him when it could not totally correct or reform him’’ (24; 26). However, Condorcet finds ignorance and superstition to be even stronger than mankind’s desire to know, and more widespread sources of resistance to progress.34 Repeatedly throughout his history of civilization, reason makes an advance which is blocked by superstition. The conflict between the two is then taken up again in the next stage of civilization. Condorcet discerns this antagonism even in the first of his stages of history, where the largest group of human beings consists of imposters and dupes: one of these ‘‘wishing to place itself above reason, the other humbly renouncing its own reason and abasing itself to less than human stature’’ (17–18; 18). This originary division between mystifying authorities and duped followers parallels the division between the clever rich and the deluded poor in the original false contract of Rousseau’s Discourse (as well as the relation between the first priests and their followers in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals). But whereas Rousseau sees no category of human being standing outside this grouping of imposters and dupes, Condorcet sees enlightened scientific thinkers throughout history as the antagonists of priests and kings, and the sole agents of progress. Since Condorcet discerns the paradox that long-term effects often contradict the aims of individuals or groups, he might recognize the inadequacy of representing benign and pernicious historical forces as separate and opposite. However, he starkly separates scientists from persecuting religious and secular authorities, and identifies himself with the beleaguered scientists as his ideal cul-

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tural antecedents. In doing so, he departs from the example of Voltaire, who does not construct a separate source of scientific authority, but in the figure of Louis XIV represents both a patron of enlightenment and a king in league with priests. Because he locates the only resistance to political and religious power in an isolated few scientific thinkers, Condorcet stresses the fragility of progress and the strength of governing establishments in his first nine stages; superstition and ignorance, power and deception consistently block a culture’s acceptance of the insights of enlightened thinkers. Even in the context of the strides made during the Renaissance, the career of Galileo offers a perfect example of an intellectual advance held back by religious authority. For Condorcet, the vulnerability of philosophical and political progress was not limited to the past, but continued even in his own time, following the revolution in France. Just before he embarks on the vision of a utopian future which serves as his tenth and final stage of history, Condorcet characterizes France as an island of enlightenment in a sea of darkness: ‘‘We see the forces of enlightenment in possession of no more than a very small portion of the globe, and the truly enlightened vastly outnumbered by the great mass of men who are still given over to ignorance and prejudice’’ (169; 199). At each stage of history, Condorcet discovers a stalemate in which understanding makes limited progress, while political power remains firmly in the grip of priests and kings. Although Condorcet celebrates the accomplishments of a small number of scientists and philosophers, his attitude toward history in the first nine stages of the Sketch resembles the attitude of a reactionary thinker such as Rousseau: the alliance between priests and kings has persistently and successfully persecuted generations of reforming philosophes. Condorcet does not begin, like Rousseau, with an idealized state of nature from which history can only decline, so he does not see history as an uninterrupted degeneration. Rather, he sees all the elements for progress combined with obstacles to progress, a triumph of progressive elements in the realm of ideas, but alongside it a persistently reactionary political history. This discord between political and intellectual history closely parallels the split between politics and culture in Voltaire’s history. But Condorcet will resolve this tension in a distinctive way in the final chapter of his Sketch. What Nietzsche calls the critical historian, one who turns away in outrage from the injustices of the past, may understandably seek relief in foreseeing the elimination of oppression and suffering in the future. Condorcet for one pursues this strategy.

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When he comes to his climactic tenth stage, the future history of the human mind, Condorcet reverses his previous melancholy conclusions; he foresees a withering away of the opposition to advancement, and the triumph of unending progress not only in the intellectual but also in the moral and political realms. The goals toward which he sees history moving are indeed admirable and his Sketch has proven strikingly prescient in some regards. He sees the end of infectious diseases, for instance, and the coming of equality between women and men, as well as the advent of a universal language resembling algebra. But his utopian vision neglects the force of countervailing tendencies, such as the resistance to antibiotics exhibited by some strains of bacteria, or the resistance to the improvement of women’s condition in developed societies. In his tenth stage, Condorcet retreats from his earlier insight that historical developments have been double-edged and ambiguous. He does not consider that the authority he foresees flowing to the scientists might lead them to become a new priestly caste. Although it is hard not to sympathize with Condorcet’s plight—he was writing in late 1793 as a proscribed man in hiding from the revolutionary authorities—the Sketch reveals a denial of doubleness and ambiguity, a demonizing of priesthood and superstition as the persecuting powers throughout history, and a desire to triumph over these older and inimical figures of cultural authority.35 Rousseau, fixed in his melancholy, idealized the distant past of the species; Condorcet, through his final stage, idealizes humanity’s future. His sudden shift from a melancholic attitude toward the past to a utopian vision of the future demonstrates a close relation between the two.36 The Sketch concludes with a vision of a society which, lacking conflicts, will be without or beyond narrative. As in Rousseau, the object of Condorcet’s longing is a condition that lies outside the temporal and the narratable. He imagines this future state in order to distance himself from the narrative of beleaguered and reversible progress in history. By contrast with most narrative histories, which take shape as a series of conflicts and resolutions, the utopian conclusion of Condorcet imagines the disappearance of all resistance to reason. In the absence of countervailing forces, he has nothing to recount but a steady state approaching perfection. Visions of utopian futures, like the Sketch, assert control over the future, there to eliminate any suffering, injustice, struggle, even ambiguity. Precluding narrative, their triumph over the past implies an antagonism toward their cultural inheritance, which they regard as a persecuting authority.

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Like Rousseau’s second Discourse, Condorcet’s text falls clearly into two parts. The Sketch devotes most of its attention to remembering historical developments, recognizing the ambiguous involvement of progressive and reactionary elements in historical developments. Even in envisioning a future of indefinite progress, Condorcet imagines not a single cause, such as the elimination of private property, for the transformation of history from a battlefield to a utopia, but the workings of advances in many areas, for example medicine, gender relations, and linguistics. Still, as it divides history into a tyrannical past and a utopian future, Condorcet’s Sketch displays a divided attitude toward history, and takes the split form of a jeremiad and a utopia. Among these histories, then, we can discern a movement and a spectrum ranging from the nostalgic satire of Rousseau to the progressive utopia of Condorcet, with Voltaire’s more balanced and philosophical history falling between the other two. Each of these three historians and their modes of historical understanding stands in a different relation to utopian imaginings. Time separates Rousseau from his utopian vision of the ‘‘true youth’’ of humanity, the most rudimentary stage of social life. Rousseau believes that mankind must have passed through such a stage, and it remains a point of reference for him as a standard of integrity, self-sufficiency, and proximity to nature. In this attitude toward an age of gold in the past, Rousseau resembles verse satirists and moralists from Juvenal and Jeremiah onward. As opposed to Nietzsche’s antiquarian attitude, with its gaze toward the past, the critical attitude, as exemplified in Condorcet, finds its perfect state in the future. The final stage of human history will make a definitive break with the imperfections, injustices, and ignorance of the past, as the obstacles to enlightenment will be miraculously overcome and the human potential for perfection will at last be realized. Nothing of the politics and religions of the past will survive, only the insights of the previously persecuted scientific thinkers. If the non-ironic postulate of a golden age in the past serves as an index of a melancholy nostalgia, the location of a serious utopia in the future (which first appeared in the late eighteenth century, for example with Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 [1771]) indicates a willingness to sever connections with the past. Utopia is difficult to locate within Voltaire’s historical narratives, which go the furthest in acknowledging both progress and decline. The age of Louis XIV, and presumably the other three golden ages as well, combine artistic and philosophical achieve-

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ment with war-making and political repression. When utopia figures prominently in Voltaire’s work, as Eldorado in Candide (written in the same decade that saw the publication of Louis XIV and the Essai), it is distant in space, not time, a foreign land from which the protagonist makes his escape because it does not hold the object of his desire. It is characteristic of Voltaire’s dialogical and satiric conception of utopia that it should lie at a great geographical distance, and that it suffers from a crucial lack. Voltaire appears as a historian who has worked through his ideal vision and acknowledged its unavoidable limitations. Earlier utopias, mostly from the seventeenth century, are almost all defined, like More’s, by their spatial distance from Europe, and are usually qualified by irony or undercut by satire. These works often represent the contemporary alongside the utopian world, so that each is satirized by reference to the other. The contemporary world may be unjust and corrupt, but the utopia is often rigid and constraining. Such works establish a dialogical relation between utopia and the present.37 Satire in narrative works by establishing such an unresolved dialogical relation between different worlds or opposed views. Satire and utopia thus function as a closely related generic pair in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, utopias of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are often set at a temporal distance and rendered with less irony.38 They usually offer an unambiguous proposal for wholesale reformation without ironic mixture or satiric qualification. Condorcet’s tenth stage appears early in the transition from the satiric spatial utopia to the temporal utopia unqualified by irony. The utopian sections in these conjectural histories offer the satisfaction of uncomplicated oppositions: they locate an ideal outside history, which is devalued as a realm of irremediable corruption. Conjectural histories, such as those of Rousseau and Condorcet, may tend to nostalgic and utopian perspectives in part because they are set at a distance from the complications of historical specifics. Other forms of historical narratives, even philosophical histories, must work through a mixed record of achievements and limitations revealed by events in time. Narrative history has less of a tendency to foreclose the opposed views it includes, instead allowing each to comment on and critique the others. Thus, by contrast with atemporal, utopian description, or the moral absolutes of the jeremiad and verse satire, the formal features of philosophical history tend toward a more complex and ambivalent attitude toward history.

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FERGUSON, GIBBON, AND KANT Many of the arguments Adam Ferguson advances about commercial society in his Essay on the History of Civil Society closely parallel views that Rousseau expresses in his two Discourses. As I note in chapter 4, Ferguson distances himself from Rousseau at the outset by maintaining that human beings, never having been encountered outside a social state, must be seen as sociable by nature. This conviction helps lead Ferguson to consider the most virtuous social form to be not the state of human life before society, but the form of society after savagery—the second, ‘‘barbaric’’ or tribal stage of society. Nevertheless, Ferguson’s general view of the direction of history remains similar to Rousseau’s, as do the reasons for his unfavorable comparison of commercial society with an earlier stage of human existence. In Ferguson’s view, human beings are not only sociable, they are also capable of innovative group responses that allow them to survive in the face of hardships and dangers. A progressive principle has helped shape human societies, even if the results have lain outside the intentions of any individuals. As long as insecurity and potential threats shape their lives, barbarian societies exert their strength and vigor to protect themselves. However, as such bands of courageous, loyal fighters succeed in pushing back the insecurities and dangers in their lives, they paradoxically form more extensive societies based on different principles. Martial, tribal societies give way to commercial empires which assure peace and personal security. But if, as Ferguson believes, virtue consists of the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the group, then the success of the virtuous barbarians leads to conditions that encourage the corruption of that virtue. Ferguson’s Essay devotes most of its energy to describing this transition from tribal to commercial societies. The Essay concludes with the decline of nations from the pursuit of riches into political slavery and despotism, indicating strongly that this is the common and most probable course taken by commercial empires. On his last page, Ferguson notes that the disorders and insecurity of despotism force subjects to rediscover that ‘‘vigour, that social attachment, that use of arms’’ (263) which will allow them to reassert their civil rights.39 It is precisely at this point, at the depth of despotism, that Rousseau’s second Discourse also breaks off. The narratives in these two conjectural histories thus describe closely

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parallel trajectories: from the beginning of human society, through an early, transient, virtuous state to a growing inequality, and finally an extreme of despotic rule. Like Rousseau in his second Discourse, Ferguson notes the origins and the spread of inequality, tracing it to the establishment of property and development of the commercial mode of life. The savage knows no superior, but the unequal distribution of property introduces ranks and offices based on wealth rather than personal merit. Like Rousseau, Ferguson observes that laws intended to protect the weak from oppression also protect property and thus maintain its unequal division. Ferguson joins Rousseau in his admiration for the military virtue of the Spartans, their simplicity, equality, and republican form of government. Still, while Ferguson shares so many of Rousseau’s nostalgic attitudes as well as a similar view of the common trajectory of states from vigorous and virtuous to corrupt and despotic, he moderates his positions and formulations so that they diverge from the extremes of Rousseau’s reactionary thought. Ferguson’s understanding of luxury provides a good example of his revisionary practice. He is sympathetic to the civic humanists’ definition of luxury as a pure social evil because it leads to self-indulgence and moral laxity. But he also acknowledges the force of Hume’s argument that in commercial societies luxury can be morally neutral, its pursuit by the rich providing work for tradesmen and the poor. Ferguson sees that one cannot have easy recourse at any point to a determination of what is necessary and what is superfluous in human life because no two ages, and scarcely any two individuals, would agree in their answers to such a question. In the end, he observes that it is not the luxuriousness of their clothes but the strength of their character that determines men’s morality, and he proceeds to keep in play both the civic humanists’ understanding of luxury as a mark of moral decline and the political economists’ view of luxury as a morally neutral cause and result of prosperity. He draws an important distinction between luxury, which may be neutral, and corruption, which by definition indicates a turning away from public virtue. In keeping with this resistance to conflating luxury and corruption, Ferguson unsettles, while not entirely rejecting, the correspondence between corruption and commercial society on the one hand, and between public virtue and barbarian tribes on the other. Thus, some tribal societies are corrupt in the sense of timidly submitting to despotic rule; self-indulgence and irresponsibility may

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be found under thatched roofs as well as gilded ceilings. Conversely, Ferguson observes that the pursuit of commerce and of profits can be consistent with the development of political freedom and of the institutions that secure it—most likely, he is thinking here of Britain in his own time. Ferguson even admits that the ethos and customs of the barbarian tribes stand in need of reformation, that their quarrelsomeness and violence result from ‘‘the operations of extreme and sanguinary passions’’ (208). While some measure of tranquility and orderliness in a society is desirable, the difficulty arises in trying to prevent citizens of successful commercial societies from relaxing their martial vigilance and turning away from public matters. In addition to ensuring greater peace and order and an improvement in manners, commercial society provides other benefits that Ferguson recognizes. The division of labor, in particular, makes available more comforts and conveniences to more people than had any previous society. Consequently, modern societies do not need to be based on the labor of slaves for their provision of goods, unlike even the most virtuous of ancient republics. On the other hand, as Ferguson was one of the first to point out, the division of labor in manufacturing leads to a dehumanizing of the worker, who needs no skill, feeling, or intelligence to perform his mechanical labor. The system of manufactures can be considered as a machine itself, ‘‘an engine, the parts of which are men’’ (174). Still, Ferguson seems willing to accept this harm, in light of the benefits of commercial manufacture.40 Since Ferguson believes it is crucial for every citizen to participate in the army and the government, the most serious consequence of the commercial system would only be realized if fighting and holding office became specialized professions, removed from the experience of ordinary citizens. Thus, unlike Rousseau, Ferguson acknowledges the advances and benefits brought about by commercial society, as well as the danger it constitutes to political virtue, and he accepts its superseding of tribal societies as a fact of historical change. However, he indicates more awareness than Hume of the losses that this change entails. For example, the virtues of generosity, loyalty, and courage, which were cultivated by tribal societies, give way in commercial societies to prudential calculations of interest and advancement. Ferguson’s narrative still traces a historical pattern from virtuous, republican societies to corrupt, despotic states, and commercial society often contributes to this decline by encouraging a flight from responsible political involvement. However, the

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slide into despotism is not inevitable or determined, and Ferguson holds out the hope that the material and moral advances of commercial society may not preclude the political virtue and civic freedom characteristic of so many pre-modern tribal societies.41 If Ferguson thus gives evidence of a nostalgia akin to Rousseau’s in his understanding of the general plot and tendency of history, he also significantly complicates that attitude by recognizing the limitations of the earlier form of society and the accomplishments of the modern. He does not view history with unmixed nostalgia, but moves toward a recognition of the simultaneous patterns of progress and decline. He works through as part of the historical process the passing of the tribal societies he admires, and accepts the somewhat reduced form of modern life. Like Ferguson, Gibbon finds admirable qualities among barbarian tribes, especially their martial independence and desire for political freedom. Gibbon pays considerable attention to the German barbarians: they originally helped preserve the empire, yet eventually contributed to the destruction of its political and cultural institutions, and finally helped establish the modern European republic of nations which combines political freedom and virtue with commercial prosperity more successfully than did the empire. But the barbarian societies, including the Germans and the Huns, do not stand as the sole focus of attention in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In fact, Gibbon records the prosperity and the passing of a series of cultures and cultural stages in his history. His narrative consists to a great extent of representing in detail and working through what is lost with each such decline and finding the strength and value in the culture that emerges from it. His narrative and his reflections also give evidence of the double-sided view that Kant describes as ‘‘abderitic,’’ which sees both progress and decline in history, combining elegy for the past with eulogy for the present. Since Gibbon begins his narrative more than a century after the passing of the republic, Roman culture of the early empire stands as the first object of his study. He devotes the second chapter of the Decline and Fall to a survey of this culture, beginning with the prevailing tolerant, skeptical attitude toward the ‘‘various modes of worship’’ which were considered ‘‘by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful’’ (1: 56).42 He also details the architectural accomplishments and public works of the first century. When he considers the wide extent of commerce throughout the empire, he sees

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both the solid benefits of agriculture, viniculture, efficient food distribution, and mining, as well as the more ambiguous evidence of refinement and luxury. After he has mentioned the splendor and elegance of the dress, the food, and the furnishings of the rich, he remarks: ‘‘Such refinements, under the odious name of luxury, have been severely arraigned by the moralists of every age; and it might perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well as happiness, of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries, and none the superfluities, of life. But in the present imperfect condition of society, luxury, though it may proceed from vice or folly, seems to be the only means that can correct the unequal distribution of property’’ (1:80). Gibbon accepts Hume’s revision of the traditional civic humanist understanding of luxury; rather than being a source of corruption, the provision of luxuries can bring substantial economic benefits for tradespeople and workers. Yet Gibbon also agrees with Ferguson in drawing a distinction between luxury and corruption, and he observes a corruption of civic virtue throughout the history of the empire. Its source is not luxury, however, but one-man rule and the professionalization of the army, the shift from citizen-soldiers to mercenaries. These two imperial institutions deprive the citizen of the opportunity to exercise his civic virtue. The resulting loss of responsibility and freedom necessarily involves corruption of the civic ideal of active citizen participation in politics and war. Thus, although the early empire may constitute a cultural ideal for Gibbon, it remains far from his political ideal because the personal liberty and civic virtue that characterized life under the republic have been lost under the empire. Voltaire had similarly found the culture of the age of Louis XIV to be admirable but Louis’s aggressive and destructive wars deplorable. Gibbon reviews the constitution of the early empire in chapter 3 of the Decline and Fall, which concludes that when the empire consisted of almost all the known world under the rule of a single man, the earth ‘‘became a safe and dreary prison for [the emperor’s] enemies’’ (1:107). Even the celebrated long peace of the Antonines in the second century illustrates the same paradox that Ferguson had analyzed; it leads to the security and comfort of millions, but also to a softening of the military virtues that served as the foundation of Rome’s earlier success.43 To locate a society that preserves personal liberty, Gibbon must look back to the Roman republic or to the earlier stage of social life exemplified by the German ‘‘barbarians’’ who eventually overrun the empire. Gibbon devotes chapter 9 of the history to a descrip-

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tive analysis of these tribes and their stage of social life, asserting that, although lacking ‘‘cities, letters, arts, or money, [they] found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism’’ (1:239). In seeing the Roman empire as both an admirable guarantor of prosperity and tolerance, but also as a despotic state, Gibbon reveals his divided judgment of the culture whose loss constitutes his principal subject in the first three volumes of his history. But he also indicates a similar judgment about the Gothic society that replaces the empire: the Germans retain their martial strength and personal liberty, but they have no understanding of the cultural accomplishments of Rome, in law, the fine arts, or the practical arts. Without settled property, they lack the security and circumstances to be civilized. In characterizing the loss of the empire and the ruin of Rome as the result of ‘‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’’ (3:1068), therefore, Gibbon indicates that he conceives of his history as organized around a series of cultural displacements, each of which involves both gain and loss. After the empire replaces the republic, the ancient world gives way to the Christian and Gothic culture of the middle ages, and the medieval world itself is eventually replaced by the modern world that is formed after the Renaissance and Reformation. The one-man rule of the empire eliminated the personal liberty and civic virtue that existed under the republic. In addition, as Gibbon implies in chapters 15 and 16 on Christianity, and maintains in the ‘‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’’ (following chapter 38), Christianity subverted what remained of military strength and responsible public life under the empire. Soon after the official displacement of paganism by Christianity, the Goths as a result of their invasions restored a ‘‘spirit of freedom’’ to the lands of Europe, but they brought no civilization with them and no respect for the arts and sciences. Finally, at the end of the Decline and Fall, as the last remains of the Roman empire expire in the East, the liberty that persisted in the Germanic tribes combines with the development of commerce and the restoration of letters in Italy to produce the birth of the modern world: with the Renaissance, ‘‘freedom became the happy parent of taste and science’’ (1:84). Gibbon regrets the loss of civic freedom that comes with the fall of the republic and the establishment of the empire. He also marks the loss of the pagan Romans’ tolerance and of their military vir-

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tue, both of which have been weakened but are finally destroyed by the triumph of Christianity in the late empire. Finally, he deplores the destruction by the Gothic invaders of many of the ancient accomplishments in culture and the arts. Although he thus acknowledges the loss of ancient forms of religion, political life, and artistic culture, the process of working through details of the transformations of the empire also leads to recognizing, in the eventual production of the modern European states, cultures worthy of respect. The principle of tolerance re-emerges in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in some of the countries of northern Europe. The political systems in England and Holland safeguard personal freedom through balanced constitutions that take the Roman republic as one of their models. In addition, the three centuries before Gibbon’s own time produce works that in the arts rival, and in the sciences surpass the accomplishments of the ancient Romans and Greeks. Thus, in Gibbon’s history, the process of mourning the demise of the Roman empire leads to a respectful acceptance of existing European culture. Modern constitutional monarchies in Europe combine the pursuit of commerce and artistic accomplishment with regard for individual liberty and military virtue.44 These are the cultural traits which Gibbon has valued and whose loss he has regretted most strongly through different stages of his narrative. One of the clearest indicators that Gibbon has integrated his judgments and feelings toward the lost cultures he depicts is that his history itself becomes a literary monument that in its fullness of detail supersedes the surviving architectural monuments of ancient Rome.45 In the first volumes of the Decline and Fall, Gibbon idealized the pagan Romans for their tolerance, and satirized early Christians as agents of the empire’s collapse because of their zeal and contempt for civic virtue. However, Gibbon’s remarks on religion in the last stages, and after the completion, of his history indicate a softening of his hostility toward Christianity. He disclaims any antagonism to the Church in concluding his penultimate chapter: ‘‘it is my wish to depart in charity with all mankind; nor am I willing, in these last moments, to offend even the pope and clergy of Rome’’ (3:1060). In 1790, two years after completing the Decline and Fall, he writes to Lord Sheffield that he satirized Christianity so harshly in the first half of his history because he was ‘‘attached to the old Pagan establishment and the Christians were the innovators.’’46 Having written the history, he recognizes that paganism has passed, and the triumph of its enemy, Christian culture, is a

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fact of the modern world. Gibbon also acknowledges the fragility of a balance such as that of the eighteenth-century republic of Europe; to his mind, the pursuit of excessive freedom and republican virtue in France after 1789, in conscious imitation of the Roman republic, overturns the decencies and accomplishments of civilization. Gibbon’s shift within the Decline and Fall from the satire of Christianity in the first volume to a more accommodating view in the second half of the work—even of those he had earlier satirized—recapitulates the movement that I have been tracing in this book. Whereas Gibbon’s first volume makes use of a sharply ironic and satiric form of narrative, the later volumes increasingly incorporate elements and patterns of romance narratives (see, for example, the legend of the seven sleepers [2:291–93], the escape of the hostage Attalus [2:485–87], and the feats of the emperor Manuel Comnenus [3:72–74]). Such stories involve impossible or implausible circumstances which Gibbon treats ironically, yet he finds such tales useful for what they reveal about the times in which they were told and about what is taken as true in different historical periods.47 This shift from the first to the later volumes of the Decline and Fall also exemplifies the transformation of the mid-eighteenthcentury paradigm. Unlike earlier figures such as Bayle and Swift, Gibbon’s satire is associated with a paradigm of clarity and transparency. Thus, whereas in chapters 15, 16, and 37, on Christianity, Gibbon’s prose provides a clear representation of the objects of his satire, such transparency gives way in the second half of the work to portraits of figures about whom no clear final judgment is presented. Instead, multiple perspectives remain possible about historical figures and events, which often now possess a new opacity and resistance to final interpretation, including a firmly satiric perspective.48 Gibbon may have used strongly ironic satire to express his assessment of Christianity in his first volume partly in order to avoid the reach of laws that prohibited blasphemy or the denial of the divinity of Christ.49 While there was no place in the public arena for the expression of such views, similar strictures did not apply to the objects of criticism in his later volumes, such as the Byzantine empire, the ancient Germanic peoples, and feudal institutions. We know from the last pages of the Decline and Fall as well as from the Autobiography that as Gibbon originally conceived of his history ‘‘among the ruins of the Capitol’’ (3:1085), it was to be con-

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cerned only with the history of the city of Rome. In its final form, the first three chapters offer a survey of Rome and its empire in the second century, and the last three provide a view of the city at its nadir from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Throughout the final chapter, devoted to the ruins of Rome, Gibbon repeatedly writes of the ‘‘melancholy’’ results of the depredations of the elements, neglect, and plunder on the grand architectural works of the city (3:1062–64, 1072). Yet his final attitude toward these remains and toward his subject distances itself from the melancholic and the nostalgic. Gibbon concludes his narrative with the fall in 1453 of Constantinople, the last vestige of the Roman empire. That leaves his work, as he notes on its penultimate page, on the threshold of the Renaissance, the rebirth of cultural vitality that served as the foundation for the modern society within which Gibbon himself accomplished his historical work. Gibbon avoids an antiquarian fixation on cultural loss partly because his history of that loss contributes to a post-Renaissance culture that in many ways can replace the Roman empire and even the republic as a political and cultural system worthy of respect. To this modern culture Gibbon contributes a verbal monument of scholarship, interpretation, and evaluation that might replace the crumbling stones of the Capitol. If, as Nietzsche says, the monumental historian writes in order to inspire his contemporaries to achievements that might compare with those of their ancestors, Gibbon’s history not only adopts such a position, but also constitutes in itself an example of a cultural achievement rivalling those of the world whose passing he records. When, as in the history of Gibbon, and to some extent that of Voltaire, the writing of a narrative of loss leads to a working through of historical particulars, and to the acknowledgment of and movement beyond the absence of an admired culture, the result is a significant act of historical understanding. By contrast with Gibbon’s sustained attention to the past, Kant, in several essays in the 1780s and 1790s, proposes an idea of universal human history that culminates in a permanent peace among mankind in the future. The most extensive and significant of these essays, ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ appears in the same year as Condorcet’s Sketch, and foresees in detail the coming of a utopian society. However, elements of satiric form also play a role in Kant’s thinking, moderating a potentially one-sided utopianism. Such satiric acknowledgment of the obstacles in the way of realizing a utopian vision helps pull Kant’s view of history toward a less extreme and more measured form.

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‘‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,’’ the earliest of the essays articulating Kant’s philosophy of history, considers whether there is any purposiveness in nature directing human history. It discusses the three positions on human progress that we have already noted: there may be some force that leads the species upward from animality to the highest level of humanity; conversely, the formations and collisions of states may be driven by a random process and thus involve a continued decline; or, thirdly, all the actions and reactions of states may balance each other so that things remain as they have always been. Kant argues for the adoption of the first position even though humans have not heretofore acted on a conscious plan of development: nature, he proposes, intends for the species to develop all its potential capacities completely, sooner or later in the course of its history. This vision of the external realization of internal potential on the stage of history stands in clear accord with the paradigm that considers the organic growth of the individual and the species to constitute the highest truth for both. However, on Kant’s view the means that nature employs to ensure the development of the species closely resemble the behaviors for which human beings were satirized in the paradigm of paradox and skepticism. Kant says that nature uses antagonisms within society, what he calls human beings’ ‘‘unsocial sociability’’ [‘‘ungesellige Geselligkeit’’] (44; 4:155), to bring about the growth of culture. Men desire to live in society, but each man also wants to live as an individual. Desire for honor, for power, and for possessions leads to competitiveness among humans, but also to the development of men’s natural capacities, and they give evidence of a desire to be recognized by others in society. As Kant sees it, the desire for distinction makes a significant contribution to the development of a moral and unified society. Here, Kant’s argument joins those of others in the century about the unintended effects of selfishness and conflict. Mandeville used satire to show that individuals’ private passions paradoxically lead to social benefits, and Ferguson similarly maintained that warlike pursuits help keep a society cohesive and public-minded. Like these two thinkers, Kant sees features of human nature that are far from admirable in themselves and are typically the objects of satire as contributing essentially to the growth of society and culture. In ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ Kant extends this argument, proposing that if mankind is to realize its full potential, it will need to use war as the spur for turning away from war. To avoid both declared

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and undeclared wars, which prevent wealth from being used for education and welfare, two developments must take place. First, a republican form of government must be established in every state. Under such a constitution, the citizens will be reluctant to declare war because they will bear the burdens of war; they will have to supply the costs of the war from their own resources and make good the devastation that ensues. As Kant here argues for the significance of republicanism for establishing peace, he inverts the arguments of the civic humanists for the importance of a republican soldier-citizenry. Secondly, a federation of states will need to be established to secure the freedom of each and to serve as an external tribunal for deciding between competing claims by right and not force. Kant resists the perhaps utopian idea of establishing a single international government; he wants to see the freedom of each nation preserved as much as possible. He argues that in addition to the motives of morality, the spirit of commerce also promotes the cause of peace. Perpetual peace is conceivable and a possibility: it is everyone’s duty to work for this goal, which is ‘‘more than an empty chimera’’ (114; 6:455), although it will be realized only by means of a gradual advance. The goal of achieving perpetual peace may be considered utopian, but Kant does not envision the need for a utopian transformation of human nature in order to realize it. Instead, he anticipates and seeks to encourage a gradual establishment of new institutions, based on the past and on the analogy with the original founding of societies. Throughout ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ Kant maintains a satiric, ironic perspective that is both anti-war and anti-utopian. For example, he points out that unlike some American tribes who make a meal of their defeated enemies, Europeans make better use of the defeated by adding them to the number of their own subjects; they thereby increase their capacity for conducting even broader wars (103; 6:440). Kant here echoes Montaigne’s reflection in ‘‘Of Cannibals’’ that torture of the living by Europeans may be worse than eating of the dead by American natives. Similarly, Kant observes the violation of the universal law of hospitality by colonizing Europeans who after all are visitors in other lands, where they make the inhabitants slaves: the colonizers are powers who ‘‘make much ado of their piety, and, while they drink injustice like water [Unrecht wie Wasser trinken], wish to be considered chosen believers’’ (107, translation modified; 6:446). Kant’s image here of the hypocritical European powers drinking down their colonial injustices like water is vividly satiric. In fact, this passage levels the same

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criticism against the European colonial powers that Swift does at the end of Gulliver’s Travels (bk. 4, chap. 12), where Gulliver describes the planting of a colony in unvarnished terms that reveal the ‘‘civilizers’’ to be the true barbarians. Kant’s ironies may not be quite as searching and barbed as Swift’s, but in the context of his sober philosophical prose, they carry a strong satiric impact. ‘‘Perpetual Peace’’ thus offers a distinctive hybrid of historical, utopian, and satiric elements. In doing so, it returns to the mixing of utopia and satire in earlier utopian writings by More, Rabelais, and Swift. On the one hand, Kant foresees the eventual elimination of the source of the greatest sufferings that afflict civilized nations, and the establishment of a world federation of republics. On the other hand, he acknowledges that this desired transformation is barely possible and only in the distant future. In addition, his observations join some of the sharpest satire written on war-mongering European powers and their colonial outrages. Kant’s view of future history is thus moderately utopian, while his view of present history is strongly satiric, and taking humanity from the one to the other will require much work and time. In line with these views, Kant answers with a qualified affirmative the question he poses in the third of his late essays, ‘‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?’’ As historical evidence for his view that human beings desire progress toward conditions of greater justice, he cites the enthusiasm from various parts of Europe for the French Revolution. On the basis of this testimony of approval for a republican mode of government, Kant infers that man has a moral character, or at least the beginnings of one, and that this constitutes not only hope for improvement, but an improvement itself (182; 7:397). Again, however, Kant does not expect any improvement in the basic moral character of human beings, and he believes that such an expectation would feed the charge that hopes of progress are impractical and utopian. Here again he presents a utopian prophecy in decidedly non-utopian terms. Indeed, we could characterize these three essays as offering visions of widespread improvement that are utopian in their universality, yet are non-utopian in their gradualism and search for practical means of realization. Kant thereby insists that they are not fantasies.

HISTORICAL NARRATIVE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE I now turn from Kant as a practitioner of conjectural history of the future to Kant as a theorist of discourse in the public sphere.

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In a fourth late essay, ‘‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’’ Kant addresses the question of how properly to conduct rational discussion in the public sphere, and he argues that rationality provides the only acceptable ground for such discourse—rationality unmixed with beliefs or feelings. If faith or feelings are granted a role in deliberations on public policies, then the result will be a form of extremism, either the superstition that arises from traditional religious beliefs or the fanaticism that grows out of individual inspiration. His reflections on the requirement of a moderating rationality for the public sphere provide a context in which we may contrast the attitudes and forms used by the French conjectural historians with the attitudes and forms used by the British historical thinkers (and by Kant himself ). Kant maintains that public freedom of expression is a prerequisite even for personal freedom of thought because we hardly know what we think unless we are able to communicate our thoughts to others and to evaluate theirs in turn (247; 4:363).50 But freedom of thought and expression carry the responsibility of subjecting reason to ‘‘no laws other than those which it imposes on itself’’ (247; 4:263). It is crucial that the public sphere be oriented so that it takes reason alone as its criterion for knowledge, and not traditional faith or intuitions of a supersensible being or an afterlife. If traditional articles of faith are allowed into public discourse about policy, they open the door to claims of access to a truth higher than those reached by reason alone. The result is a compromising of the public sphere by zealotry, fanaticism, or, in the eighteenth-century sense, enthusiasm [Schwa ¨ rmerei]; there then follows the loss of any standard by which to adjudicate competing claims, and instead each individual follows his own beliefs or interests. Assertions of authority based on individual inspiration lead to the publication of dubious facts for which assent is demanded. Reason is subjugated to convictions that lack rational support.51 The acceptance of traditional religious beliefs or the toleration of fanatics corrodes the rational public sphere, and leads to the related extremes of superstition and enthusiasm. Kant’s analysis here parallels that of Hume, who, as we saw in chapter three, regards the public sphere as the arena in which to develop a dispassionate middle ground as an alternative to irrational and dogmatic extremes with their potential for violence. Kant agrees that without rationality as the adjudicator of conflicts about policy, force prevails. Kant’s account of the genesis of extremism and irrationality in public debates also agrees with Swift’s analysis of super-

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stition and enthusiasm in A Tale of a Tub (discussed in chapter 3). In fact, Kant’s summary passage closely parallels the climactic sections 8 and 9 of the Tale. Kant writes: The genius is at first delighted with its daring flights, having cast aside the thread by which reason formerly guided it. It soon captivates others in turn with its authoritative pronouncements and great expectations. . . . It then adopts the maxim that the supreme legislation of reason is invalid, a maxim which we ordinary mortals describe as enthusiasm [Schwa ¨rmerei]. . . . The ultimate consequence of all this is that inner inspirations are inevitably transformed into facts confirmed by external evidence, and traditions which were originally freely chosen eventually become binding documents; in a word, the complete subjugation of reason to facts—i.e., superstition—must ensue. (248; 4:365)

This passage on the opposite extremes to which ‘‘the genius’’ is led by his uncontrolled speculations strikingly recalls two key passages from the Tale of a Tub. The first is from section 8: [W]hereas the mind of Man, when he gives the spur and bridle to his thoughts, doth never stop but naturally sallies out into both extremes of high and low, of good and evil, . . . not well perceiving how near the frontiers of height and depth border upon each other; with the same course and wing he falls down plumb into the lowest bottom of things, like one who travels the East into the West, or like a straight line drawn by its own length into a circle.52

The second passage, which comes a few pages later in section 9, concerns the ease with which the philosophical or religious innovator makes converts: When a man’s fancy gets astride his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding as well as common sense, is kicked out of doors; the first proselyte he makes is himself, and when that is once compassed the difficulty is not so great in bringing over others. (82)

Kant and Swift are drawing satiric attention to the same phenomena: superstition and enthusiasm as opposed but equally pernicious divergences from the middle ground of rational discussion. However, the striking similarities also help reveal a sharp divergence between the historical context and the implications of these passages. Writing around 1700, when the plural public sphere is

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just beginning to take shape in England, Swift does not envision the possibility of moderating such perennial extremes by means of rational discussion and debate in public. He observes a public discourse which consists solely of the extremes. Possible middle grounds remain elusive and unspecified throughout his narrative satires (the absence of such middle grounds characterizes the genre of narrative satire in general). Kant, by contrast, seeks the exclusion of precisely those forms of irrationality that, in Swift’s view, monopolize public discussion. He exhorts his contemporaries to frame their public discourse so that it will consist entirely of rational arguments for moderate positions. As I have argued in chapter 3, when Walter Scott represents what happens to superstition and enthusiasm in the late seventeenth century in Old Mortality (1816), he adopts the same perspective that Kant does here. For the purpose of providing a satisfactory resolution to the conflicts in the novel, Scott pushes back the establishment of a moderating public sphere by several decades, as he suggests in the final section of the novel that William’s displacement of James in 1688–90 initiated a cultural regime in which rationality could moderate violent conflicts between religious and political extremes. In contrast with developments in England, in eighteenth-century France, discourse in the public sphere remained unified and absolutist, organized around a single official truth rather than a search for truth through the collision of multiple perspectives. The absolutist public sphere does not rely on rationality alone for its legitimacy; nor does it tend to draw opposing positions toward a moderate center. Although there were some preliminary elements of a rational and oppositional public sphere in eighteenth-century France, including a few newspapers published in Holland that occasionally diverged from the position taken by the government, and although there was an aristocratic sphere of discussion in the salons, the absolute rule of the monarch, the alliance between church and state, and the institution of censorship combined to prevent the development of a public arena for oppositional discourse. Voltaire expresses a somewhat balanced and complex view of the past he recounts both in the Age of Louis XIV and in his Essai sur les moeurs. But Rousseau and Condorcet diverge from this stance, offering extreme versions of the historical perspectives that they adopt. As I have already observed, Condorcet was a proscribed man living in hiding when he wrote his Sketch under the reign of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793. Rousseau’s first works were not banned in France, but the condemnation of Emile

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led him to leave France and wander in search of asylum for most of the rest of his life. Because of the threat of prosecution, even Voltaire at the time he published his histories was about to establish himself at Ferney, a mile or two from the border between France and Switzerland; we have seen that the first chapters of Louis XIV were seized when first published. The real prospect of censorship and prosecution played a significant role in the lives and publishing strategies of all these thinkers. Voltaire’s practice may diverge from that of these other two historians partly because he had been impressed by the workings of public discussion during the years he lived in England; in his Philosophical Letters (1734), he praises the religious toleration practiced in Britain, and made possible by the separation of controversies based on religious beliefs from public discussion of policy. This is precisely the crucial separation for which Kant argues in ‘‘What is Orientation?’’ By contrast with the situation in France, a plural political public sphere had already emerged in British society by the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In such a context, extremes appear to be out of the mainstream, and most arguments tend to move toward the center in order to gain adherants. Moderating a position and recognizing the legitimacy of an antagonistic view offer ways of recommending oneself to an anonymous, widespread, and rational readership. In Britain, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall stands out as a historical narrative that represents a series of earlier societies in measured ways. In Nietzsche’s terms, it is a monumental historical narrative that mourns the loss of past societies but also moves beyond them. Its first volume was attacked by many churchmen and pious Christians, but the work was never in serious danger of being censored or proscribed.53 Gibbon was generally agreed to have established the learning of his narrative on the solid foundation of his footnotes, and to have decisively bested the one antagonist he chose to answer in his Vindication.54 Ferguson’s Essay offers what is in many ways a nostalgic and in Nietzschean terms an antiquarian view of history, but its attitude is much less extreme than that of Rousseau’s Discourses. Ferguson is able to see the limits of earlier warlike societies, and to acknowledge the moral achievements of modern society. I know of no history of a utopian future, like Condorcet’s, published in Britain in the 1790s, despite the repressive crackdown by the government under Pitt and its suspension of guarantees for freedom of public discussion. Kant, writing in Prussia, was for a time in the 1790s enjoined by Frederick William II from writing on religion.55 Nevertheless, for

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most of his career he wrote under the absolute but tolerant and enlightened Frederick II, and he became a self-conscious theorist of publicity and the public sphere.56 He qualifies and moderates his utopian history by placing it in the distant future, by looking for evidence of humanity’s moral nature, and by paying attention to the practicalities and the intermediate stages between the unacceptably bellicose present and a pacific future. In all these ways, his ‘‘Perpetual Peace’’ and related essays differ from Condorcet’s Sketch, offering a more moderate and less dogmatic utopian vision. The move away from extreme positions in the philosophical histories is consistent with the moderating that occurs in other genres of narrative with the development of the public sphere. I have suggested in earlier chapters how a more polarized and satiric form of narrative gives way to more novelistic forms in the course of the eighteenth century. Philosophical history often represents the middle grounds that remain absent in conjectural histories; as such historical narrative juxtaposes evidence of both advance and decline, it includes elements that may be embraced from each. Such historical narratives still refuse the consolation of synthesis, but they take shape around a both/and rather than a neither/nor, an inclusive oscillation between past and present, or decline and progress. Conjectural history of the later half of the eighteenth century, whether written in France, Britain, or Germany, thus reveals a movement from the nostalgic jeremiad of Rousseau and, to a lesser extent, Ferguson, to the utopian, progressive history of Condorcet and, to a lesser extent, Kant. Such a sequence from jeremiad to utopia has affinities with the sequence traced in the other chapters of this book from satiric to novelistic forms throughout the century—from the satires of Swift and Montesquieu through the philosophical and conjectural histories of Hume, Rousseau, and Ferguson, to the historical novel of Scott in chapter 3, for example, or the Bildungsroman of Goethe in chapter 4. This parallel emerges clearly from an observation that Kant makes about the prophetic conjectural history he is writing in the 1780s and 1790s. He admits it may seem that from such a train of thought, ‘‘only a novel’’ could result (51–52; 4:164). And a history of the future such as Kant’s in fact shares with novels a basis in imaginative conjecture combined with a realistic engagement with the moral conditions and practicalities of the author’s present. Conjectural history of the future and utopian science fiction share a common narrative form. As Kant ponders whether and how the human race will

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reach a state of perpetual peace in a cosmopolitan federation, he is engaged in a project that does not differ fundamentally from that of Ursula Le Guin, who describes her novelistic histories of the future as ‘‘thought experiments’’ that pursue possible courses that human history might take.57 It should come as no surprise that what many regard as the first science fiction novel should have been written in France in the late eighteenth century. Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 offers a conjectural history of the future that includes both pointed satire of eighteenth-century French society and a utopian vision of the distant future. I have argued here that nostalgic conjectural history such as that of Rousseau and, to a lesser extent, Ferguson is a transitional form that carries elements of the more satiric paradigm of the early eighteenth century—especially the critique of modern commercial civilization—into the paradigm of transparent representation dominant in the middle of the century. It brings elements of satire into the framework of wide-ranging historical visions. The mixed and ambivalent philosophical histories of Gibbon and, to a lesser extent, Voltaire are more closely related to novelistic forms with their accommodations and mediations. Such histories contain satire, but they are not predominantly satiric; nor is theirs the reactionary nostalgic satire of a jeremiad. The utopian, conjectural histories of Condorcet and, to a lesser extent, Kant are related, as we have just seen, to another novelistic form—the science fiction novel. As they attain a satiric perspective on their own time by envisioning a future in which most of the major problems of their day will have been solved, they anticipate such works as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). The movement from satiric and backward-looking to novelistic and forward-looking forms is most pronounced among the French works. The differences between the forms of the public sphere developed in France and in Britain helps account for the persistence of satire in the French works and for the strength there of its counterpart, the utopian vision. Still, although less emphatic, the pattern of generic transformation is also present in the British and German works. Despite variations, then, these conjectural and philosophical histories convey the same movement we have observed throughout the century from satiric to novelistic narrative forms.

Conclusion THE DISCUSSION IN THE LAST TWO CHAPTERS OF DIFFERENCES IN the history of narrative forms in Britain and on the continent focused mostly on works from the second half of the eighteenth century. This concentration indicates that divergences between the forms of the public sphere in different cultures were more significant in the later than the earlier part of the century. By the 1730s, an oppositional public sphere took shape in Britain, and not in France, but it did not produce a divergence between the narrative forms most prominent in the two countries until the decades after 1745. Defoe adopted and revised the historical memoir-novels of Courtilz, and Pre´vost in turn adopted many features of Defoe’s novels. This sequence of works and genres indicates that in the early part of the century the two cultures contributed to and borrowed from each other. The later divergence began with the abandonment of satire by male British writers such as Fielding, while satire persisted and even became sharper in the narratives of French writers such as Voltaire and Diderot. Despite the divergence between the dominant genres in Britain and France, the succession of characteristic genres in France and Germany shows that these two cultures continued to be closely aligned in the later eighteenth century. Rousseau’s second Discourse and Emile informed Wieland’s Agathon and thus helped shape the first Bildungsroman of Goethe. The succession of newly characteristic genres in Britain took a different but, interestingly, a parallel path. Building on Hume’s histories, Ferguson’s conjectural history, with its deeply ambivalent attitude toward commercial society, helped shape the attitude toward the past in the historical novels of Scott. Conjectural histories by Hume in Britain and Rousseau in France fit the Enlightenment cultural framework, as they established through the stages of social history a table of knowledge for the field of history. Similarly, both the Bildungsroman and the historical novel conformed to a cultural framework that stressed the unfolding of inner capaci268

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ties, whether of individuals or of societies. These parallel generic histories indicate that similar cultural understandings prevailed in Britain, France, and Germany at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, while differences in the kinds of public sphere in each produced some generic divergence within the overarching framework. In examining broad cultural changes from the early to the later parts of the eighteenth century, this book has also traced another shift: from a narrative form and cultural framework that excluded middle grounds to forms and cultural understandings that established grounds of accommodation and compromise between opposed values and contradictory positions. Narrative satires typically parody or critique both one set of cultural values and its opposite; after criticizing the two extremes, these narratives do not resolve the contradiction or specify a norm apart from or between the opposed sets of values. Novelistic forms, by contrast, typically work to bring about accommodations between opposing claims and sets of value.1 Throughout this study, the works and forms that succeed narrative satire delineate middle grounds, and think in the mode of both/and rather than neither/nor. In Poor Richard, for example, Franklin does not parodically satirize astrology and astrologers, including his own persona, as Swift had done in his Bickerstaff predictions; instead, he invites readers to share Poor Richard’s moderate and rational perspective, and to substitute the prudential morality of his maxims for questionable and potentially divisive readings of the stars. Similarly, in his Essays, Hume praises the middle rank of men for increasing commerce and helping to establish institutions of representative government, and he attempts to move Britons toward the political middle by demystifying the extreme positions of both parties. Neither Franklin nor Hume exclude middle grounds or leave readers without an authorized position; rather, both explicitly represent models to be followed of moderate thinking and prudent behavior. We have also seen that in writing the second half of Cleveland, Pre´vost avoided satire of either the Catholic establishment in France or of its Protestant opposition, and instead steered his protagonist to a vague and undogmatic religion under the guidance of the English Clarendon. Fielding too moved away from satire in the structure of his later novels, and this shift involves in the typical case of Tom Jones a protagonist who is neither satirist nor satirized, whose acts are private, not public or political, and who must learn the same virtues that

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Franklin taught—moderation, prudence, and forethought—in order to avoid the excess of one’s own naivete´ or the malevolence of others. The structure of accommodation and moderation becomes even stronger in the Bildungsroman and the historical novel. Wilhelm Meister repudiates a career of unsatisfying usefulness as a merchant like his father, but he must learn that the pursuit of individual fulfillment in the theater will not suffice for him either. Instead, he must cultivate the unfolding of his potential (he must pursue Bildung) under the disciplinary guidance of his overseers in the Society of the Tower who have been watching his progress all along. The story of the protagonist of Scott’s historical novels leads to a similar accommodation. He is typically a young man with ties both to an older feudal or tribal order and to a newer order based on commerce. Although he is not an extremist, he chooses to fight for one of these worlds, usually the older one, but when the civil struggle is over, he adheres to the progressive form of modern society, which, however, brings a sense of diminishment and loss, both in his personal life and in the world at large.2 The shift away from satiric extremes and excluded middles thus involves a pressure to reach an accommodation in both the Bildungsroman and the historical novel. Such narratives have a disciplinary and normalizing effect because the middle ground they authorize as a model involves acceptance of current social relations despite their flaws and the sacrifices they require. The analysis presented here is in accord with the line of argument in two recent studies of the language of middle grounds and strategies of accommodation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Dror Wahrman has traced the various stages, circumstances, and controversies through which, between the 1780s and the 1830s a ‘‘middle-class idiom’’ came to be established in British political discourse—a form of argument which could be used by opposing political positions that credited the middle class with distinctive virtues and even with being the hinge holding together the British political and social system.3 Margaret Cohen argues that in France from the 1790s through the 1820s, the predominant sentimental novels written mostly by women saw no means of reconciling the opposing claims of virtue and happiness, the freedom of the individual and the welfare of the community. However, around 1830, such narratives were displaced by realist novels written by Balzac and Stendhal in which a typically male protagonist accommodates himself to the de-

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based conditions of social life in an amoral struggle to succeed.4 The developments that these two works analyze in political discourse and in novelistic genres in the early decades of the nineteenth century reveal clear continuities with the shift studied here toward the embracing of middle grounds by novelistic forms directed to middle-class readers in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the Introduction, I noted other genres that could have provided examples of the transformations and displacements in narrative forms that have been the subject of the preceding chapters. I would like briefly to cite two examples of these other genres, the first of which further illustrates the move away from irreconcilable oppositions to accommodations based on middle grounds. The history of the fable, from La Fontaine’s first collection (1668) to John Gay’s second (1738), reveals just such a transformation. A tension arises repeatedly in La Fontaine’s fables from the inconsistency between the fable’s narrative, on the one hand, and the explicit or seemingly obvious moral on the other. For example, the fable of the oak and the reed (bk. 1, no. 22) seems to recommend the accommodating pliancy of the reed, but the language of the fable gives the oak a tragic heroism that is difficult to dismiss. The unresolved tension between the apparent moral and a strong countercurrent of implication is typical of La Fontaine’s narratives and leaves the reader without a clearly authorized position. Gay’s fables, by contrast, consistently and clearly align narrative and moral. A concluding or introductory couplet often explicitly draws a parallel between the behavior of human beings and that of the animals in the fable. Thus, a modish monkey who has seen the world corresponds without ambiguity to a well-travelled fop (bk. 1, no. 14). La Fontaine’s fables describe no middle ground between opposed alternatives, both of which can seem problematic or unacceptable. But in Gay’s fables, a prudent position between extremes is recommended for Gay’s royal pupil as well as for other readers of the fables. The second example of a generic transformation that could have been pursued here will help introduce my final point, which concerns the kind of history recounted in this book. In his political Gothic novel, Caleb Williams (1794), William Godwin appropriates numerous and distinctive elements of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Like Swift’s satire, Godwin’s novel depicts legal institutions and historical representations as morally bankrupt; Caleb admires his aristocratic master just as Gulliver reveres the Houy-

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hnhnm he calls ‘‘master’’; and in the end, both protagonists become disillusioned, isolated, and mad. But Godwin significantly alters the Swiftian elements he adopts: in addition to being far more internal and psychologizing than Swift’s satire, his political Gothic almost entirely avoids the characteristic ironies that complicate Swift’s work.5 Godwin accepts Swift’s satiric critiques of the workings of the law and of historical representation, but he neglects the possibility that a Houyhnhnm’s position, for example, may be undercut by irony, and he drains almost all irony out of his own narrative. Godwin seeks to assimilate his narrative to Swift’s satire, but in doing so he deprives the Swiftian narrative of its constitutive, self-undercutting elements. Caleb Williams thus not only gives evidence of participating in a different cultural framework than Gulliver’s Travels, but also demonstrates that the passage from one framework or genre to another often does not follow a smooth and graduated path. An author may claim or believe he is continuing a generic project when he is in fact transforming or subverting it. To return to the example of Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin blatantly adopts the satiric strategy of Swift’s Bickerstaff papers in predicting the demise of a fellow almanac-maker; however, as we have seen, Franklin does not seek to satirize the other astrologer or discredit him by producing laughter at his expense. Rather, he adopts Swift’s tactics (including at points the actual wording of Swift’s pamphlets) in order to displace his competitor and establish his own work as the most popular almanac in the colonies. What appears to be a clear reiteration of a witty trope in a satiric form turns out to be an appropriation and redefinition of that form, a successful attempt to establish market dominance in a prudential, moralizing comic almanac. If Franklin and Godwin appear to carry on the use of a form whose features they in fact transmute or undo, the converse also occurs in eighteenth-century narrative forms. Both Hume and Rousseau, for instance, criticize satiric attitudes and strategies, yet both also silently employ the form they denounce. In his Essays, Hume criticizes the satiric perspectivism of Swift, and he often distances himself from the extremes on which satire relies, recommending middle grounds and moderation in all things. In his writings on religion, however, he makes effective use of satiric form. The Natural History of Religion diagnoses a perpetual oscillation between extremes, and an absence of any legitimate ground for religious practice. It thus adopts essentially the same

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form and perspective as does Swift’s satire of religious extremes in A Tale of a Tub—but in the guise of an ethnographic, conjectural history. In Emile, Rousseau castigates the satiric writings of the philosophes for being negative and destructive; however, his attacks on civilized society in the Discourse Concerning Inequality and in Emile itself closely repeat Swift’s satire on the same theme in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels as well as Juvenal’s satires of social life. But, of course, Emile is an overtly pedagogical treatise, and the Discourse another conjectural history. Both Rousseau and Hume therefore explicitly attack a form which they also appropriate and whose strengths and characteristic features they reinterpret.6 If we are interested in what happened to satire in the later eighteenth century, therefore, we can say that many of its elements, although disavowed and suppressed, made their way into conjectural histories and from there helped shape later novelistic genres. As we have seen, the narrative practices of Hume and Rousseau informed the historical novel and the Bildungsroman. Much of the history of narrative forms in this book thus can be understood as a genealogical history in the sense that Nietzsche gave to that term. The previous chapters have analyzed a tangled set of appropriations, reinterpretations, and reversals, many of which have been disavowed or willfully forgotten, which reveal links between such low genres as Courtilz de Sandras’s popular historical memoir-novel and the more well-known novels of Defoe, or between the low genre of narrative satire and the high genres of conjectural history, the historical novel, and the Bildungsroman. Despite being discredited and suppressed, satiric form continued to be appropriated, reinterpreted, and reshaped by histories and novels throughout the eighteenth century. I hope in Satire, History, Novel to have made a first step toward writing a genealogy of relations among these narrative forms.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. A number of critics have offered analyses of the decline of formal verse satire in the mid-eighteenth century. Andrew Wilkinson sees the increased importance of the middle class, of sentimentalism, and of a belief in progress producing a set of attitudes that precluded the need for satire (‘‘The Decline of English Verse Satire in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century,’’ Review of English Studies n.s. 3 [1952]: 222–33). W. B. Carnochan argues that, in the course of the century, Juvenal came to be valued as a source of the sublime and of sentiment rather than satire, while at the same time the complications of irony fell into disuse (‘‘Satire, Sublimity, and Sentiment: Theory and Practice in Post-Augustan Satire,’’ PMLA 85 [1970]: 260–67). Thomas Lockwood concentrates mostly on Charles Churchill to show that as verse satirists after Pope turned inward to focus more on feelings, their writing lost a public dimension (Post-Augustan Satire: Charles Churchill and Satiric Poetry, 1750–1800 [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979]). Vincent Carretta similarly ascribes the decline of political verse satire in the middle of the century to the loss of a uniformitarian historiography which deprived poets of the kind of norm such satire may require (The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Satire from Pope to Churchill [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983], 211–26). William Dowling argues that Shaftesburian benevolism triumphs over verse satire because it displaces the philosophies of egoism and self-interest on which the satirists had concentrated their attack (The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991], 105–6). 2. See Frank Palmeri, Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, Pynchon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Two recent works discern a move toward the representation of middle grounds in political and social terms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their arguments thus parallel and provide support for the argument that I am making here about a movement in narrative away from satiric extremes and toward novelistic middle grounds. See Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). In the Conclusion, I take up the relation of these works to my argument. 3. Such satire did not cease to be written after the first half of the eighteenth century. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), for example, Twain first satirizes the medieval world for its lack of the practical advantages and comforts that follow from advanced technology. But he reverses course in the work’s final chapters to sharply satirize the advanced technologies of nineteenth-

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century American society because of the mass murder to which they lead. Similarly, in ‘‘Tlo ¨n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’’ (1940), Borges originally presents the new world of Tlo ¨n as a utopian site of wondrous possibilities that overturns stale unquestioned certainties. But in the final pages of the tale, he represents the new planet’s takeover of the familiar world as a dystopian project that allies Tlo ¨n with totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right. Neither of these works provides a mediating perspective between opposed worlds and world views. 4. Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). For a more recent examination of the relation between satiric and sentimental forms, see the essays in Claude Rawson’s Satire and Sentiment, 1680–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970). 6. On the Bildungsroman as a genre that seeks accommodations and middle grounds, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 54, 64. 7. In analyzing intersections among satire, novels, and history, three works offer precedents for studies of the history of related genres in the eighteenth century: Paulson, Satire and the Novel; Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Joseph Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 8. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 162–63. In Kuhn’s understanding, there tends to be only one such school in a particular field at any time because it must provide the framework and rationale for problem-solving by a limited and sometimes small scientific community. On the other hand, a multiplicity of available schools characterizes a field before it reaches the stage of a normal science, and competing paradigms will both find adherents during a period of scientific revolution as well. In such a revolutionary period, the operations of normal science are suspended until a consensus develops among those in the field in favor of an alternate paradigm. For some critical approaches to Kuhn, which can parallel criticisms of Foucault, see Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow explore pertinent parallels and divergences between the thought of Kuhn and Foucault at a number of points in their Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 60, 69–70, 76–78, 198–200. J. G. Merquior also considers Kuhn’s paradigms and Foucault’s epistemes in Foucault (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 36– 38, observing, for example, that Foucault’s epistemes exist below the level of consciousness, whereas Kuhn’s paradigms are closer to theories, and are accessible to consciousness. On the other hand, both paradigms and epistemes are superseded not because of an overarching standard of rationality but largely because of cultural shifts or transformations. 9. Foucault, The Order of Things, 168. 10. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 175. 11. Roger Chartier observes that in the Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault does not present even the French Revolution as ‘‘a time of a total and global rupture reorganizing all intellectual disciplines, discourses, and practices’’ (‘‘The

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Chimera of the Origin: Archaeology, Cultural History, and the French Revolution,’’ in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], 177–78). 12. During the 1980s, four major critical works made use of Foucault’s ideas in the analysis of the novel. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) focuses on discourse analysis to discern the splitting of a previously undifferentiated practice that he calls the news/novel discourse, out of which journalism and the novel took shape, and fact and fiction were eventually distinguished. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) concentrates on scenes in prisons in eighteenth-century novels. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) sees novels by women as helping to define the desire that they then seek to govern. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) argues that the sensation novel participates in a disciplinary regime that seeks either to punish or to normalize exceptional or unconventional characters. 13. Ian MacLean revises Foucault’s notion of an episteme based on the work of Kuhn, Weber, Husserl, and Collingwood in ‘‘The Process of Intellectual Change: A Post-Foucauldian Hypothesis,’’ Arcadia 33 (1998): 168–81, arguing that ‘‘conceptual schemes are potentially both pluralist and polyphonic; they contain different discourses which interact with each other both methodologically and terminologically, and are not closed or finite in the sense suggested by Foucault’’ (106). 14. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 87–88. See also the Introduction to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1904), 301: earlier forms of society are found in later, bourgeois forms, ‘‘but in a crippled state or as a travesty of their former self.’’ 15. Arthur Danto has explored the reasons for the allegiance to a paradigm by a strong thinker at a time when most of his colleagues have begun to subscribe to another paradigm (‘‘The Decline and Fall of the Analytical Philosophy of History,’’ in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner [London: Reaktion, 1995], 70–85). The Prague School argued that among the constitutive elements of a genre, one, the structural dominant, gives the genre its distinctive integrity at any time; however, the relations among these elements vary from one period to another. Such an understanding of the dominant feature(s) within a genre parallels the understanding proposed here of a dominant paradigm and genre, both of which also change over time, while other paradigms and genres contest their dominance. See F. W. Galan, Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928–1946 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 54, 108. I thank Ronald Schleiffer for pointing out the relevance of Galan’s work to my argument. 16. For Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, see Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12–13, 53, 160, 210. On dominant, residual, and emergent cultural formations, see Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 204–5. For Jameson’s understanding of ‘‘cultural dominants,’’ see Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 4, 6, 158–59.

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17. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 327. 18. One may also identify different specific forms of a dominant cultural paradigm, as J. G. A. Pocock has recently done in The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50–71, 137–51. 19. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Language to Infinity,’’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 51–67. See Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), 110, 114. On ‘‘Language to Infinity’’ and some of Foucault’s other criticism of literature, see also James Mell, ‘‘Foucault as Literary Critic,’’ French Literary Criticism vol. 4, ed. Philip Crant (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 197–204. 20. Mikhail Bakhtin also sees genres not as a series of formal conventions, but as ways of conceiving the world: ‘‘Every genre has its own orientation in life, with reference to its events, problems, etc. . . . We may say that every genre has its methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality.’’ M. M. Bakhtin/P. M. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 131, 133. Fredric Jameson similarly considers individual texts to be made up of multiple contradictory or mediating generic elements that derive from earlier stages of social and cultural development; the original ideology of the form persists into later, more complex and hybrid structures as a sedimented layer deposited by the conditions of the earlier time. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 21. The relations of narrative forms and paradigms may be more pronounced and accessible than, for example, those of lyric forms because narrative is typically more anchored in social and material life than is lyric. Narrative forms are also generally less interested in moving beyond particulars of time and place in order to reach a transhistorical realm. 22. MacLean argues for such an understanding of paradigms, ‘‘a working hypothesis of a paradigm and a paradigm shift which is not constrained by Kantian categorialism,’’ in ‘‘The Process of Intellectual Change’’ (180). I thank John Neubauer for pointing out the relevance of MacLean’s argument to the understanding of paradigms suggested here. 23. Jameson, Postmodernism, 6. 24. For an analysis of film history according to a sequence of realist, modernist, and postmodern periods, see Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The Existence of Italy,’’ Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), 155–229. Henry Louis Gates employs the same sequence of paradigmatic terms to analyze relations among African American novels in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘‘Racial’’ Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 25. See Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of the Tragic Vision in the ‘‘Pense´es’’ of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), esp. 22–39. 26. See Ronald Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift’s ‘‘Tale of a Tub’’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 5–25. 27. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1977), 178. 28. Ibid. 29. Goldman stresses the constitutively paradoxical nature of Pascal’s thought

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(Hidden God, 192–200). We might discern the same tendency at work in another register in many Dutch paintings of the time, such as those of J. B. Weenix, which combine ruins from different periods and cultures with a couple on a beach in contemporary costumes and a seascape with ships, thus juxtaposing elements from many genres in a heterogeneous composition. Many Dutch still-lifes also juxtapose disparate elements to produce a similarly paradoxical result, in paintings in full bloom of flowers that blossom only at different times of the year. While such paintings may point to an allegorical meaning, they also contain strong elements of paradox. 30. Benjamin, Origin, 160. On the paradoxical nature of a wide range of seventeenth-century writing, see Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). 31. On the structure of Bayle’s text, and especially his Remarks, see Lawrence Lipking, ‘‘The Marginal Gloss,’’ Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 609–55; Lionel Gossman, ‘‘Marginal Writing,’’ in New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 379–85; and Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 205–14. 32. Seventeenth-century English histories also participate closely in this paradigm of contradiction and accretion. According to Robert Mayer, the historical discourse of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England, which he names Baconian historiography, includes ‘‘a taste for the marvelous, a polemical cast, a utilitarian faith, a dependence on personal memory and gossip, and a willingness to tolerate dubious material for practical purposes.’’ History and the Early English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4. Not only does this historiography allow, as Mayer notes, fiction in historical representations, but it also combines sharp skepticism with continuing belief, rational criteria with personal anecdote, the plausible and the marvelous. The contradictory, paradoxical qualities give this form a distinctive character which fits the dominant paradigm of the time. 33. On this subject, see Archaeology, 143, where Foucault makes the general point that what seem to be the same ideas—such as the brotherhood of man or the great chain of being—function differently and carry a different meaning when they appear in other periods, in altered contexts and changed paradigms. 34. George Justice argues that in attacking party oppositions and satiric scandal narratives, Addison proceeds in the Spectator from a social and political middle ground (Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002], 237). 35. On this point, see Grafton, The Footnote, 208–10. 36. On the prevalence of organicism in Romantic critical thought, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), chapters 7 and 8. 37. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 88–89. 38. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), 456. 39. See Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 3, chapter 4. 40. See Palmeri, Satire in Narrative, 39–63. 41. The disjunction between this world of experience and the unknowable world of the deity may also find expression in the form of tragedy. Pascal’s two

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major works demonstrate how both tragedy and satire can express a view of man as a creature of paradoxical extremes. The Pense´es assert the tragic nature of human experience, which follows from man’s condition as simultaneously abject and noble: he is ‘‘wretched because he is so, but truly great because he knows it’’ (Blaise Pascal, Pense´es, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976], 61, no. 416). The Provincial Letters advance this same position satirically, using the writings of Jesuits and Molinists to convict the casuists of fatuousness and moral bankruptcy out of their own mouths, just as Swift uses the voice of the modern author to satirize modern authors in the Tale of a Tub. The conclusion of the Letters—in which Pascal drops the use of irony and satiric quotation in order to lament directly and hopelessly the triumph of force over right in the state’s actions against the Jansenists—indicates also that the form of satire this paradigm produces often tends to be tragic. Swift’s Tale of a Tub similarly moves toward a tragic, not a comic, perspective at its climax in the ‘‘Digression on Madness.’’ 42. Joseph Levine explores the tensions between opposed cultural values in late seventeenth-century England, and the striving to find a middle ground between them, in Between Ancients and Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). This effort can be seen to mark the period as a transitional one between the earlier cultural framework based on paradox and division, and the later one based on transparent representations. 43. On Wilhelm Meister, see Moretti, The Way of theWorld, 29–73. 44. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 14–89. 45. William Walker argues that it is unjustified to call the public area devoted to the cultivation of such aesthetic judgments a ‘‘middle-class’’ public sphere, as Habermas does. ‘‘Ideology and Addison’s Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2001): 65–84. 46. Historical narrative, like fiction, moves at the same time toward a greater focus on the private lives of those whom it represents, and also moderates party feeling by expressing sympathy for the losing side. See Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in England, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 47. Habermas points out that London saw a dramatic growth in the number of newspapers after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. He does not, however, consider at length an earlier period that contributed to the development of open political discussion in print—the revolutionary decade of the 1640s, when a previous Licensing Act lapsed, and thousands of pamphlets and broadsides were published expressing divergent positions on the major and minor issues of the day. David Zaret focuses on the petitions of male citizens in his analysis of the first emergence of a public sphere in England in the 1640s. The Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Like William Walker (see n. 45), Zaret also argues that it is not accurate to conceive the political public sphere that first emerged in seventeenth and eighteenth century England, as Habermas does, to be a ‘‘bourgeois’’ structure (27–35). Because I understand participation in the political public arena to include more than just the middle class, I avoid characterizing that arena as a bourgeois institution. It might also be argued that the trial and execution of the king in 1649 marked a moment when the British saw that traditionally established hierarchies of value

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were inessential, debatable, and reversible. Ronald Paulson argues along these lines that Britain experienced its moment of cultural iconoclasm, which destroyed and recast previous embodiments of authority, a hundred and fifty years before France and the other countries of Europe. See Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989). 48. For their ideas on antagonism and hegemony, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 122–27. 49. Dena Goodman has analyzed the salons as a form of public sphere in which women had a substantial role in The Republic of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 50. On the prominence of these papers published in Holland, see Jeremy Popkin, ‘‘The Gazette de Leyde and French Politics under Louis XVI,’’ in Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, ed. Jack Censer and Jeremy Popkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 75–132. 51. Ju ¨ rgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 239–93, esp. 276–86. 52. In the foregoing analysis, I am indebted to James Tully, ‘‘To Think and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’ Theory,’’ in Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (London: Sage, 1999), 90– 142; and Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1995), 110–16. 53. One of the most extended considerations of commonalities in the thought of Foucault and Habermas can be found in Thomas McCarthy, ‘‘The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School,’’ in Critique and Power, 243– 82, esp. 243–49. In Critique and Power, 291–92, James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg also consider the extent to which Foucault and the Frankfurt School pursued a common project. One may consult in the same collection the discussion of shared features by Nancy Fraser, ‘‘Michel Foucault: A Young Conservative?’’ 199, and Michael Kelly, ‘‘Foucault, Habermas, and the Self-Referentiality of Critique,’’ 371. In Foucault contra Habermas, see Tully, 92–93, and Daniel W. Conway, ‘‘Pas de deux: Habermas and Foucault in Genealogical Communication,’’ 63. See also Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, ‘‘What is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on ‘What is Enlightenment?’ ’’ in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 109–10; and Simons, Foucault and the Political, 110–11. 54. Foucault seems to have been more aware than Habermas of the grounds of agreement between them. See his late interview, ‘‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,’’ in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 298. 55. For Shaftesbury’s ideas on satire and raillery, see his ‘‘Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,’’ and ‘‘An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,’’ in Characteristics (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). In Part One of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville had attacked Shaftesbury’s argument for the sociability of human beings as well as his recommendation of aristocratic wit over railing satire. Mandeville’s shift of form in Part Two is thus paradoxical and ironic, but no less ironic is Shaftesbury’s own turn to a more convoluted, seventeenth-century form in the

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last essay in Characteristics, the ‘‘Miscellaneous Reflections on the Previous Treatises.’’ 56. On the afterlife of Swift in popular culture and the media, see Ann Cline Kelly, Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

CHAPTER 1. THE SATIRIC ALMANAC IN HISTORY, 1665–1800 1. Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500– 1800 (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 41. Those who study English almanacs are indebted to this extraordinary work. 2. See Cyprian Blagden, ‘‘The Distribution of Almanacks in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,’’ Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 115; and Capp, 41. 3. See the calculations of C. William Miller in ‘‘Franklin’s Poor Richard Almanacs: Their Printing and Publication,’’ Studies in Bibliography 14 (1961): 97– 115, esp. 112–13. 4. On almanacs as encyclopedias, see Eugene Bosanquet, ‘‘English Seventeenth-Century Almanacs,’’ The Library, 4th ser. 10, no. 4 (1930): 360–98, esp. 365–74. 5. Capp, Astrology, 23. 6. Ibid., 60. 7. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 25–46, 61–62, on the importance of print culture, especially newspapers, for the establishment of a sense of nationalism. 8. Capp characterizes the general attitude of the almanacs toward social issues as one of ‘‘conservative paternalism’’ (Astrology, 102). 9. See Capp, Astrology, 216, 245, and 286 on the strident nationalism of the almanacs, especially those of Partridge and Moore. 10. Ibid., 287. Providing support for an awareness and cultivation of such differences, Bosanquet cites evidence that some almanacs were bound together before being sold in sets of two, four, nine, or twelve (368). 11. Ronald McKerrow observes that Rabelais is indebted to two earlier parodic almanacs, by Heinrich Bebel and Jakob von Sindelfingen, both printed at the end of Bebel’s Facetiae (1508). See Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald McKerrow (London: Bullen, 1910), 4:476. On Bebel and von Sindelfingen, see also F. P. Wilson, ‘‘Some English Mock-Prognostications,’’ The Library 19 (1938), 6–43, esp. 16. 12. Franc¸ois Rabelais, Complete Works, trans. Donald Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 750; Pantagrueline prognostication certaine, ve´ritable, et infaillible pour l’an perpetuel, in Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. P. Jourda (Paris: Garnier Fre`res, 1962), 2:507. Further references to these editions appear in the text. 13. See Works of Nashe, ed. McKerrow, 5:138, for his reasons for concluding that ‘‘there is not the slightest reason for connecting it in any way with Nashe.’’ In his edition of Nashe, Grosart provides some, admittedly slim, reasons for identifying Nashe as the author. His antagonists, Gabriel and William Harvey, had

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written an almanac and a number of prognostications in the 1580s to which the Wonderfull, Strange Prognostication might parodically respond. See The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Alexander Grosart (London: Aylesbury, 1885), 6:xix–xx. 14. Works of Nashe, ed. McKerrow, 3: 388. 15. Ibid., 3:383–84. 16. Between Fouleweather’s and those of the 1640s, two other parodic almanacs appeared that deserve mention: the Raven’s Almanac (1609) by Thomas Dekker (Non-Dramatic Works, ed. Alexander Grosart [1885; New York: Russell and Russell, 1964], 4:167–266), and the Owles Almanac (1618), whose author is unknown (Owles, ed. D. C. Allen [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943]). After opening in its first few sections as a mock almanac, Raven’s turns into a collection of tales, an intriguing amalgam, but one in which the relation between the long comic tales and the parodic almanac is not clear. Owles similarly includes comic sections, especially one on the signs of the zodiac in which each sign is literalized and castigates Prometheus for the harms caused by civilization; the ram, for example complains that his fleece is no longer safe, the archer because the forests have been thinned of prey (40–60). Owles concludes with twenty-seven paragraphs, each forecasting good fortune for a different trade of Englishmen, from grocers and drapiers to butchers and carpenters. Like the Raven’s, Owles presents an intriguing composite form, akin but not identical to parodic satire. 17. Print runs for individual almanacs were between ten and twenty thousand in the 1640s; see Capp, Astrology, 23, 44. 18. A Prophecy of the White King (a collection of the predictions of Merlinus Anglicus Junior from 1644–46), 5. 19. See Lilly’s autobiography, Mr. William Lilly’s History of his Life and Times, reprinted as The Last of the Astrologers, ed. Katherine M. Briggs (Ilkley, Yorkshire: Scolar, 1974), 52–53, for his own account of his meeting with the generals. 20. See Capp, Astrology, 74, 77. 21. See Lilly, History, 63 and 69, for an account of his time in jail, and his successful efforts to have his ideological opposite Wharton released from prison. 22. Aretine refers to Aretino the sixteenth-century Italian satirist and pornographer; Hector could refer either to Achilles’ antagonist in the Iliad or to a common bully; and Cutting Dick almost certainly refers to a popularly known thief of the time. 23. On the adoption of a given argumentative and rhetorical strategy by opposing sides in a cultural struggle, see Oscar Kenshur, Dilemmas of Enlightenment: Studies in the Rhetoric and Logic of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3–46. 24. Genevie`ve Bolle`me has argued that the almanac necessarily involved an element of satire, because of the unavoidable controversy in which it found itself concerning the validity of astrology (Les Almanachs populaires aux xviie et xviiie sie`cles [Paris: Mouton, 1969], 19–20). This controversy also figures prominently in Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel About Astrology and Its Influence in England (Durham: Duke University Press, 1941). 25. The earliest edition in Wing’s Short Title Catalogue is that for 1664. Poor Robin himself retroactively sought to push back the date of his first publication a number of times. For example, in the chronology in the 1670 edition, he gives as

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nine the ‘‘years since Poor Robin first was published.’’ And he similarly identifies the 1683 edition on its title page as the twenty-first. Such revisionary dating appears to aim at making the mock almanac coincide more closely with the restoration of Charles II. 26. Briefly identifying some of the figures in this list, omitting the most wellknown, can serve to indicate the widely dispersed realms from which they are drawn: Lazarillo, hero of the first picaresque novel; Dionysius the tyrant, ruler of Syracuse in Plato’s time; Mother Shipton, a mythic prophet; Messalina, the mother of Nero; Amadis de Gaul, hero of a chivalric romance; Moll Cutpurse, a well-known thief and heroine of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl; Marius and Sulla, consuls of Rome and rivals in a civil war; Sejanus, favorite of and second-in-command to the emperor Tiberius; Domitian, Roman emperor of the first century; Jack Cade, English rebel in the time of Henry VI; Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII; Wat Tyler, English rebel in the time of Richard II; Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the English throne in the time of Henry VII; John Lilburne, leader of the Levellers during the Civil War in England; Livia, wife of Caesar Augustus; Reynard the Fox, hero of medieval French animal fables; Patient Griselda, legendary long-suffering wife; the Knight of the Burning Pestle, a grocer’s apprentice who takes this name in the play of the same title by Beaumont and Fletcher; Jack of Newbury, a successful weaver who rose to become Lord Mayor of London, subject of a novella by Thomas Deloney; John of Leiden, Dutch leader of the Anabaptists in Mu ¨ nster; Gargantua, mythical giant of French folklore and hero of the first book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel; Lucian, Syrian, Greek-speaking prose satirist of the second century. 27. See Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,’’ in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 101–5. 28. The satiric almanacs reveal no pattern of associating parodic names with certain feast days or saints’ days. In the almanacs I have examined from many of the years between 1660 and 1700, the same parodic names are placed next to different dates in different years. That there is no correlation between the parodic almanacs and particular feast days underscores the idea that the significant relation exists between the parodic names as a group and the legitimate saints’ names as a group—in other words, between the ‘‘fanatics’’ and the official world. 29. Swift’s writings offer numerous parallels, for example in the way that speaking as the mad modern in A Tale of a Tub or the free-thinking Whig in the ‘‘Argument Against Abolishing Christianity’’ allows him to express uncomfortable insights and mock established pieties that he defends vigorously in his nonparodic writings. On this contradiction between the official and the pseudonymous Swift, see my ‘‘The Divided Swift,’’ Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift, ed. Frank Palmeri (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1993), 3–10. 30. These four-digit dates are printed this way in the seventeenth-century almanacs. 31. See J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of EighteenthCentury English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), for discussion of many of the popular and non-literary forms which encouraged habits of reading that would later be employed in the reading of novels. 32. Defying the prophecy that he would never drink his own wine, Acteon was raising a cup of it to his lips when a messenger ran in with the news that his vineyard was in danger, and rushing out he was killed. 33. Blagden, ‘‘Distribution,’’ 107–16, provides the number of the different al-

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manacs printed between 1664 and 1689. The run of Poor Robin was between 18,000 and 25,000 during the period, exceeded only by four of the two dozen or so almanacs. Interestingly, three of those four are among the almanacs that Poor Robin accuses of not being written by their original authors. The bestseller of the time, left unnamed by Poor Robin, was that by Vincent Wing, of which typically 40,000 were printed annually during the Restoration. 34. Maureen Perkins notes the connection between Swift’s Bickerstaff Predictions and Poor Robin in Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 126. 35. Jonathan Swift [Isaac Bickerstaff, pseud.], ‘‘Predictions for the Year 1708,’’ in Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), 2: 146. Further references to this edition of the Bickerstaff writings appear in the text. 36. In a short essay following its calendar, the 1705 Poor Robin writes that love must be blind; otherwise, he asks, who would ‘‘tye himself to a Wife’’ with a ‘‘most vile face, and yet spends forty Pounds a Year in Mercury and Hogs bones: all her Teeth are made in the Blackfryers, both her Eye-brows in the Strand, and her hair in Silver-street, every part of the Town owns a piece of her, she takes herself asunder still when she goes to Bed into some twenty Boxes, and about next Day noon is put together like a great German Clock’’ (C4). This vision of woman as a mechanical assemblage of prostheses is taken verbatim from Jonson’s Epicoene 4.2.91–101 (Ben Jonson, ed. Hereford and Simpson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937], 5:225–26). It is echoed in later works, including Swift’s ‘‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’’ (1734), which similarly lists the artificial parts that go to make up a prostitute. The fact that both the later works make use of this passage provides another indication of a common filiation and an affinity between Poor Robin and Swift. I am grateful to Arthur Marotti for pointing out Poor Robin’s borrowing from Epicoene here. 37. See Davis’s Introduction to Prose Works, 2:x–xi. See also Richmond Bond, ‘‘Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.,’’ Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 103–24, esp. 104, and, on Partridge’s ‘‘pugnaciously Whiggish’’ almanac, Margaret Weedon, ‘‘Merlinus Fallax, or Bickerstaff Bit,’’ Swift Studies 2 (1987): 97–106, esp. 100–1. 38. Prose Works, 2:xi. 39. The 1688 edition is now extremely rare. I have seen a copy in the Bodleian; most were probably read to pieces. 40. After James’s accession, Partridge fled to the Netherlands, from where he issued his almanacs for three years. It is possible that he would have heard of the Queen’s pregnancy, which was announced in London the last week of December 1687, before he had written in Holland his prognostications which were typically finished in late October or early November. On the suspicious reaction to the news of the birth of the Prince of Wales, see Stuart E. Prall, The Bloodless Revolution: England 1688 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 173–75, 193–95. 41. On the events surrounding William’s landing in England, see Prall, Bloodless Revolution, 210–45. Partridge predicted that the astrological conjunction for the year would give ‘‘Nations and Kingdomes suspicions of their Governors; and this sometimes not without cause; . . . [leading finally to] some great Irruption in the State, or alteration in the Government by some misfortune to the then King, Prince, &c.’’ (4). Partridge accurately predicts the troubles James would have

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with the English people throughout the year, including his eventual loss of the throne. 42. Near the end of his predictions for 1688, Partridge addresses England: ‘‘At thy appointed time shall thy deliverance come, even at that time when the Sun makes the Scorpion a second visit, and then will the Spanish apple (that is an Orange) be grateful to the English palates’’ (Annus Mirabilis, 26). The circumlocution here is transparent; Partridge predicts the arrival of William in England by the end of 1688. 43. See Capp, Astrology, 150–51. 44. On the transience of modern writing in the Tale, see Ronald Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift’s ‘‘A Tale of a Tub’’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 162–77, and, on the lack of duration and memory in the world of the modern author, John R. Clark, Fear and Frenzy in ‘‘A Tale of a Tub’’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 117–41. 45. As Capp points out, almanacs served as symbols of transitoriness (Astrology, 66); Anderson discusses the similar obsolescence of the newspaper (Imagined Communities, 35). 46. The pills would cure ‘‘Sciatica, Worms, Running Pains, Ulcers, Scab, Itch, nay, and the Leprosy, if taken often’’ (1707). In the Accomplishment, after Swift has Partridge confess that to make his predictions, he merely guessed what would happen (recalling Poor Robin’s similar confession), he has Partridge add, ‘‘I wish I may not have done more Mischief by my Physick than my Astrology; although I had some good Receipts [recipes] from my Grandmother, and my own Compositions were such, as I thought could at least do no Hurt’’ (155). 47. See Marion Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 88–91. 48. On the career of Bickerstaff from Swift’s hands to Steele’s, see Bond, ‘‘Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.’’ On the movement from Swift’s biting Tory satire to Steele’s mild Whig satire, see Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 210–21, and, on the movement from the harsh satire of the late seventeenth century to the mild humor of the eighteenth, Stuart Tave, The Amiable Humorists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 3–15, 22–34, 150–77. 49. See Robert Phiddian, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 96–101. 50. What I have to say here and later about the filiation between the almanac and the essay refers to the periodical essay as practiced by Addison, Steele, and their followers, and not to the essay as developed and practiced by Montaigne or Bacon. The eighteenth-century periodical essays assume a more educational function, one that makes more consistent reference to the public sphere, than do those of Montaigne or Bacon; Montaigne is more interested in the reflections of an individual and Bacon in the hidden reasons of state. Montaigne’s essays do include a skeptical and satiric strain that can become prominent in essays such as ‘‘Of Cannibals,’’ ‘‘Of Coaches,’’ or ‘‘On Some Verses of Virgil.’’ 51. The almanac will continue throughout the eighteenth century to display a close relation to the essay. In their turn, the essays of Addison and Steele occasionally show awareness of both the filiation with the almanacs and divergence from them. In Tatler 18, for example, Addison considers the shortcomings of two kinds of artists: sign-painters and news-writers. In the essay’s first half, he uses the language of astrology to complain that those who paint inn signs are ‘‘usually

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so very bad, that you cannot know the Animal under whose Sign you are to live that Day’’ (The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], 1:145). The sign-painters whose work Addison proposes to correct thus resemble incompetent astrologers or almanac-makers. The essay’s second half criticizes news-writers who ‘‘have taken more Towns, and fought more Battles’’ than the army, and who exhibit their enthusiasm for the war by having given ‘‘the General Assault to many a Place, when the Besiegers were quiet in their Trenches’’ (1:149). The writers who anticipate military events here closely resemble almanac-writers such as Partridge and Moore who prognosticate the dates and (generally fortunate) outcomes of battles at a spatial and temporal distance from the field. At first, Mr. Spectator identifies himself as an ‘‘unworthy Member’’ of the news-writers’ fraternity, but he concludes by separating himself from their bloody and inaccurate reports which will hardly survive the coming of peace; Mr. Spectator, by contrast, will continue to write as long as there are ‘‘Men or Women, or Politicians, or Lovers’’ about whose foibles he can comment (1:151). In repudiating the kinds of writing typical of the newspapers and almanacs, Addison also acknowledges his essay’s kinship with them. 52. Barnard Fay, Franklin, The Apostle of Modern Times (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 158. Perkins also notes some relations between Poor Robin and Poor Richard (134–35). 53. Carl van Doren notices the borrowing from Rabelais in Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 113. On the importation of Poor Robin, see Fay, 159, and Stowell, 80. Stowell points out that the Rhode Island Almanack, published between 1728 and 1741 by Benjamin’s older brother James, was written in the name of Poor Robin (77). 54. Robert C. Elliott has associated maledictions that include the foretelling of an opponent’s death with the composition of satiric verse in cultures as diverse as ancient Greek and medieval Irish and Persian. He finds this practice based on magical or ritual beliefs transmuted into art in literate and print societies. The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). Franklin’s Poor Richard marks a stage in the transformation of the magical or satiric malediction into commercial terms. In addition, it transforms the author of the curse from an angry opponent to a benevolent friend of everyone. 55. A number of commentators have investigated the sources of Poor Richard’s prudential and worldly sayings, and have found most of them to come from collections of such maxims. See Stuart A. Gallacher, ‘‘Franklin’s Way to Wealth: A Florilegium of Proverbs and Wise Sayings,’’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 48 (1949): 229–51. On the sources of some sayings in individual authors, see Robert Newcomb, ‘‘Poor Richard’s Debt to Lord Halifax,’’ PMLA 70 (1955): 535–39, and ‘‘Benjamin Franklin and Montaigne,’’ MLN 72 (1957): 489– 91. Not only do some of Poor Richard’s specific sayings appear to derive from Poor Robin, but Poor Robin also offers a generic model for Poor Richard by combining popular sayings and exhortations to hard work in a mildly satiric almanac. 56. These almanacs thus indicate some of the means by which a work ethic was inculcated in England and the American colonies in the early eighteenth century. For a general characterization of the process, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner’s, 1930). 57. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 3:244.

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58. Ibid., 12:3–12. 59. See Allan R. Raymond, ‘‘To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760–1777,’’ Modern Philology 51 (1978): 370–95, on the role played in the American revolution by almanacs, the majority of which spoke out for independence. Stowell points out that some popular almanacs avoided political commentary entirely during this period, while a few professed Tory principles (179–82, 294). 60. This emphasis on the shaping role of the almanacs is consistent with the argument advanced by Michael Warner, in The Letters of the Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), that print culture itself framed the terms and results of debate in the public sphere of the colonies and the early republic. Franklin offers the prototypical instance of the man of letters who makes a career of his appearances in print, employing various personae. 61. See Allen, Star-Crossed Renaissance, 193, 244. 62. The emergence of a literary public sphere in the later seventeenth century contributes significantly to the formation of this new cultural paradigm. See Ju ¨ rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), and chapter 5 herein. 63. The Ladies’ Diary, a precursor of the literary annuals of the nineteenth century, begun in 1704 and published throughout the eighteenth century, included short stories, verse riddles, moral essays, and mathematical challenges, the solutions to which were provided in the following year’s almanac. See Capp, Astrology, 245–47. 64. Perkins, Visions of the Future, 125. 65. See Vincent Carretta, The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Political Satire from Pope to Churchill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 173–211. 66. On The Comic Almanac’s being superseded by Punch’s Almanac, see Blanchard Jerrold, The Life of George Cruikshank (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1882), 19–21. On the development of the satiric periodical from the satiric almanac, see Perkins, Visions of the Future, 146. 67. The main poem for November, 1835, contains the following stanza: Tis a beautiful truth For the minds of our youth And will make ’em all Christians indeed; For the church and the state Thus to teach ’em to hate All those of a different creed. (25)

68. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 403–4. See also his related proposal to publish a yearbook or annual with essays on topics such as international politics and the agrarian problem; as a model of the form he has in mind, Gramsci mentions ‘‘the different types of popular ‘Almanacs’ (which, if well done, are little Encyclopaedias of topical subjects)’’ (421).

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CHAPTER 2. SATIRE AND THE HISTORICAL MEMOIR-NOVEL, 1690–1740 1. In his Historical and Critical Dictionary, Bayle criticizes nouvelles historiques by Mme de Villedieu and others, implicitly including Courtilz, for their historical inaccuracies (in the articles Nidhard and Jardins—i.e., Desjardins, the unmarried name of Mme de Villedieu). See also n.17. 2. See for example Charles Gildon’s Epistle to Daniel Defoe, written in response to the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719. 3. See R. A. Francis, ‘‘The Abbe´ Pre´ vost’s Histoire de Marguerite d’Anjou: Novel or History?’’ Modern Language Review, 71 (1976): 31–41; and J. Ducarre, ‘‘Une Supercherie litte´raire: Pre´vost’s Les Voyages de Robert Lade,’’ Revue de Litte´rature Compare´e 16 (1936): 465–76. 4. See Georges May on the move toward representation of the more recent past in ‘‘L’histoire a-t-elle engendre´ le roman?’’ Revue d’Histoire Litte´raire de la France 55 (1955): 155–76, esp. 169. 5. Joan DeJean points out that some anachronism remains; a wife in the time of the publication of the Princesse de Cle`ves would hardly have dared to confess to her husband her love for another man; for a woman of a hundred years earlier to do so would have been almost inconceivable. Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 6. Among the many works on the nouvelles, see Barbara Woshinsky, La Princesse de Cle`ves: The Tension of Elegance (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 48–59; Erica Harth, Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 162–79, 190–206; and Nancy Deighton Klein, The Female Protagonist in the Nouvelles of Madame de Villedieu (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 1–10. 7. Mme de Villedieu, The Disorders of Love, trans. Arthur Flannigan (Birmingham, Ala.: Summa, 1995), 137; Les De´sordres de l’amour, ed. Arthur Flannigan (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), 18. 8. Based on such considerations, Erica Harth distinguishes between the histoires secre`tes as unofficial nouvelles and the Princesse de Cle`ves as an official nouvelle. 9. Harth points out that this implication is particularly concentrated and subversive in the nouvelles galantes or histoires secre`tes (Ideology and Culture, 190– 96). De Jean argues that the nouvelles were concerned with the conditions under which unhappy marriages might be dissolved because the state was increasingly interested in wresting from the church jurisdiction over how large properties linked by marriages were to be divided, if at all, as a result of separation or dissolution (Tender Geographies, 134–52). 10. Paul Hazard discusses the dissatisfaction with received forms of history in the later seventeenth century in The European Mind 1680–1715 (New York: Meridian, 1963), 29–53. On Descartes’s indictment of history, see also Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 205–7. 11. For the somewhat meager facts of Courtilz’s biography and the most extended consideration of his works, see Benjamin Woodbridge, Gatien de Courtilz, Sieur de Verger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1925). 12. See Woodbridge, Courtilz, 9–14.

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13. Memoirs of the Count de Rochefort (London, 1707), 117. 14. Courtilz makes use of earlier examples of the military and political memoir, such as the memoirs of the Sieur de Pontis. On such antecedents of Courtilz’s memoirs, see John C. Major, ‘‘The Role of Personal Memoir in English Biography and Novel’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1935), 24–26, and Woodbridge, Courtilz, 45–46. 15. Georges May sees Courtilz’s innovations as having exerted a shaping influence on the novel in the eighteenth century (‘‘L’histoire a-t-elle engendre´ le roman?’’ 161). See also Lawrence Forno, Robert Challe: Intimations of Enlightenment (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972) on the impact of the vogue for the nouvelle historique which ‘‘reached its height around 1700 with Gatien de Courtilz’’ (65–66) and which prepared the way for a new realism, ‘‘the bedrock of the modern novel’’ (69). On the predominance of the memoir form among French novels in the first half of the eighteenth century, see Philip Stewart, Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir-Novel, 1700–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). I focus here not on all the personal memoirs and first-person novels published in this half century in France and England, but only on the memoir-novel making some significant use of identifiable historical events or persons. 16. On elements of the picaresque in the memoirs of Courtilz, see Woodbridge, Courtilz, 43, 168–71. On some relations between Courtilz’s picaresque and Defoe’s, see Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe, Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 148–49. 17. Bayle calls Courtilz ‘‘a modern satirist’’ and cites the Abbe´ Faydit as having referred to the author of Rochefort as an ‘‘insolent scribbler’’ of ‘‘venomous satire.’’ Both take issue with what Rochefort asserts (apparently inaccurately) in the first part of his Memoirs about a supposed affair of the heart by the (future) wife of the Marshal de Schomberg. Bayle, Dictionary, s.v. ‘‘Schomberg (Charles de).’’ 18. [Gatien Courtilz de Sandras], Me´moires de M. d’Artagnan, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie Illustre´, 1898), 1:277. Further references to this edition appear in the text. Translations from d’Artagnan are mine. 19. See Palmeri, Satire in Narrative, and Introduction. 20. Vivienne Mylne, in The Eighteenth-Century French Novel: Techniques of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), sees in Courtilz’s writings not only an illustration of ‘‘the progress from biography to pseudo-memoirs’’ but also a shift ‘‘from predominantly public and military subject-matter to more private and intimate affairs’’ (38). 21. Perhaps not only the cynical might agree that, in addition to her chastity, the material aid that she offers helps keep d’Artagnan loyal to his last mistress. 22. See also, for example, Rochefort, 160, 249; and d’Artagnan, 1:355; 1:425; 2:293; 3:281. 23. The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell: Olive Payne’s Sales Catalogue (1731), ed. Helmut Heidenreich (Berlin: W. Hildebrand, 1970), 59. 24. May, ‘‘L’histoire,’’ 165. 25. Tatler, no. 84 (22 October 1709), in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 2: 36. 26. Lennard J. Davis in Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) discusses, primarily with reference to Defoe, this combination of the factual and the fictional as indicative of an undif-

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ferentiated kind of discourse that he calls ‘‘news/novel,’’ out of which modern journalism and the modern novel came to be differentiated soon after Defoe. 27. John Major notes that despite the prominence of the picaresque elements in Courtilz’s apocryphal memoirs, the picaresque hardly figures in Memoirs of a Cavalier. However, Paula Backscheider argues that the strength of the picaresque elements makes Colonel Jack closely resemble the Memoirs of Rochefort, for example. Arthur Secord takes the related position that because Courtilz’s memoirs are ‘‘less sober’’ than the Memoirs of a Cavalier, they are on the whole more like Colonel Jack. In my view, the shared picaresque elements, among other traits, link Courtilz’s apocryphal memoirs with Colonel Jack, a point to which I will return. However, I also believe that the Memoirs of a Cavalier belongs to the same genre as the Me´moires de d’Artagnan because, apart from the picaresque, it shares all essential features with the earlier work. For another discussion of the relation between the formal features of the ‘‘fictive biography’’ as used by Courtilz and Defoe, see Wilhelm Fu ¨ ger, Die Entstehung des historischen Romans aus der fiktiven Biographie in Frankreich und England (Munich: n.p., 1963), esp. 208–22. 28. See the Introduction and Notes by James T. Boulton, Memoirs of a Cavalier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). References to this edition appear in the text. 29. The Appendices in the Oxford edition reprint many of the specific passages Defoe uses. 30. The practice Defoe follows here is therefore in accord with the procedures Scott sets out for himself and other historical novelists in the Author’s Note to Ivanhoe. 31. Ronald Paulson has written about the movement from satire to realism in the mid-eighteenth century. This movement earlier in the century from Courtilz’s memoirs to Defoe’s is mediated by history: from satire of history to the realistic historical memoir-novel. Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 32. In Tatler 84, a chief complaint of Bickerstaff is the central role the narrator-protagonists assign themselves: ‘‘To read the narrative of one of these authors, you would fancy that there was not an action in a whole campaign which he did not contrive, or execute; yet, if you consult the history, or gazettes, of those times, you do not find him so much as at the head of a party from one end of the summer to the other’’ (2:36). 33. For example, the Cavalier notes the absence among the king’s troops of the tactic introduced and perfected by Gustavus of placing musketeers among the horse so that each can support the other (236) 34. Defoe relies for much of his account of the Civil War on Whitelocke’s history in Memorials of the English Affairs, a Parliamentary account; but he places a loyalist protagonist within Whitelocke’s narrative framework. 35. A similar recognition about civil war lies close to the heart of Scott’s historical novel—throughout Old Mortality, for example, and through the death of the paternal Colonel Gardiner in Waverley. See also the emblematic scene of civil war in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI (act 2, scene 5), where a son kills a father and a father kills a son during the War of the Roses. 36. Again, the structural parallel is striking between the Cavalier and Henry Morton in Old Mortality: as moderates, both still must adhere uncomfortably to one of the parties in a British civil war.

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37. The Cavalier complains about the fanatical high Churchmen at the start of the civil wars (137) and draws attention to the extremism of the Independents when he discusses taking power from the Presbyterians by their end (271). 38. The editor announces that the Cavalier ‘‘does Justice to his ‘Enemies,’ and honours the Merit of those whose cause he fought against’’ (3). Defoe’s strategy in this work differs from Courtilz’s satire of opposing positions, since Defoe uses the participant in one camp to discredit his own side and validate the moderates in the camp with which Defoe agrees. 39. Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York: Viking, 1984). 40. For example: ‘‘King Edward the VIth died the very same Day of the same Month in which he caused the Altar to be taken down, and the Image of the Blessed Virgin in the Cathedral of St. Paul’s’’ (272). 41. In addition, since a number of the Cavalier’s coincidences make reference to the Restoration, they are inconsistent with the editor’s earlier account of the manuscript’s having been found on a battlefield in 1651 (viii, 2). Thus, ‘‘13. The Parliament voted the Queen to be a Traytor for assisting her Husband the King, May the 3d 1643; her Son King Charles II. was presented with the Votes of Parliament to restore him, and the Present of 50000 l. the 3d of May 1660’’ (276). For a related view of the Cavalier’s retreat from history into providential explanation, see John J. Burke, ‘‘Observing the Observer in Historical Fiction by Defoe,’’ Philological Quarterly 61 (1982): 13–32. 42. Juxtaposing A Journal of the Plague Year with the Memoirs of a Cavalier demonstrates the crucial differences between the genres of the fictional journal and the fictional memoir. In the Journal, Defoe makes no use of retrospective distancing, no voice of an editor to remind us that these events took place sixty years earlier. In addition, H. F. is a merchant, not a soldier, and his adventures consist only of walks through the urban spaces transformed by the disease and of conversations with those who are surviving. H. F. does not portray himself as a confidant of the Lord Mayor or any other high officials; he is merely an obscure and unnamed citizen and observer. Unlike the Cavalier, H. F. in the Journal has no guide or mentor who might exercise a moral authority in his narrative; he can only look for guidance to signs of God’s meanings in the events he witnesses. The Cavalier rarely meditates on the possible meanings of the events in which he takes part though he does resort eventually to his system of coincidences. On the other hand, although H. F. is concerned with possible signs of providential actions from the beginning, he consistently refuses to accept strained or superstitious ascriptions of events directly to providence. In departing from the Cavalier in this respect, H. F. moves in the same non-providential direction as Colonel Jack and Captain Singleton, perhaps even more definitely. Finally, the Journal ends on a note of release, not constriction, as the plague gives way to the world of everyday life seen as a deliverance; the Journal is the only one of Defoe’s historical fictions to end thus, with an opening up or a homecoming. ´cs, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 41. 43. Georg Luka 44. Robert Markley points out that in one of his last fictional narratives, A New Voyage around the World (1724), Defoe imagines the accumulation of fantastic wealth by the unnamed narrator, who rather than being observed and constrained by the social order himself exemplifies the faceless operations of power as Foucault understands it. As a venture capitalist in the South Seas, he enacts the dream, or what Markley terms the ‘‘positive unconscious,’’ of capitalism, ac-

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cording to which resources are infinite. ‘‘ ‘So Inexhaustible a Treasure of Gold’: Defoe, Capitalism, and the Romance of the South Seas,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 18 (1994): 148–67, esp. 160 and 164. In allowing its narrator to accumulate extraordinary wealth and not be the object of constraint or surveillance, A New Voyage constitutes the exception among Defoe’s fictions. 45. Daniel Defoe, The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton, ed. Shiv Kumar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 179. Further references to this edition of Singleton will appear in the text. 46. Zimmerman points out that Singleton elaborates a disguise but does not find an identity at the conclusion of his narrative. Defoe and the Novel, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 65. 47. As David Blewett observes, the plot is divided between a rogue biography and a memoir-novel. Defoe’s Art of Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 104. 48. Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). Further references to this edition appear in the text. 49. This action will be repeated by the protagonist in the sequel to Rousseau’s Emile; see chapter 4. 50. John Richetti notes in this context that Jack ‘‘understands the instrumentality of everything, even his own best impulses.’’ Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 168. 51. Richetti points out that Jack’s relation with his tutor does not take the psychologizing turn that it would later in the Bildungsroman (Defoe’s Narratives, 168). Samuel Holt Monk discusses Colonel Jack as an ‘‘adumbration of the Bildungsroman’’ in his Introduction to the novel, xvi. 52. Richetti underscores this connection in the title of his chapter on Colonel Jack: ‘‘The Self Enters History,’’ chapter 5 in Defoe’s Narratives, 145–91. Jack, as he says, ‘‘leaves prosperity as a Virginia planter to get back into history’’ (187). One finds the same juxtaposition of kinds of time in the almanacs; see chapter 1. 53. See David Blewett, ‘‘Roxana and the Masquerades,’’ Modern Language Review 65 (1970): 499–502, and Paul Alkon, Defoe and Fictional Time (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 52–54. 54. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress (New York, Penguin, 1982), 223. Further references to this edition of Roxana appear in the text. 55. Richard Barney considers Robinson Crusoe as a novel of education and antecedent of the Bildungsroman in Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 206–54. On these forms, see chapter 4. 56. See Claire-Eliane Engel, Figures et aventures du XVIIIe sie`cle (Paris: Editions ‘‘Je Sers,’’ 1939), and Paul Hazard, Etudes critiques sur ‘‘Manon Lescaut’’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). 57. For a discussion of parallels between the historical memoir-novels of Courtilz and Pre´vost’s Cleveland, see Andre´ Le Breton, Le Roman au dix-huitie`me sie`cle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1978), 35–38. 58. Alain Montandon notes that Pre´ vost mixes historical names and scenes with fictional ones in the manner of Sandras. Le roman au XVIIIe sie`cle en Europe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 403. 59. Pre´vost reverses a pattern from Roxana: instead of the daughter keeping her mother under surveillance, here the father pursues and wants to destroy his

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child. Although Rumney-Hole is not an actual topographical name, it does resemble caves in Cornwall described by Defoe in the Tour. See Oeuvres de Pre´vost, ed. Jean Sgard, 8 vols. (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1986), 8:91, notes to Cleveland by Philip Stewart. The text of Cleveland is volume 2 in this edition. For Defoe’s account of similar caves, see Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. P. N. Furbank, and W. R. Owen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 246–48. 60. Sgard uses the term ‘‘exil inte´ rieur’’ to describe the heroes in Pre´ vost’s novels of 1740, Pre´vost romancier (Paris: Librairie Jose´ Corti, 1968), 411. 61. However, the sense of being the object of surveillance by the authorities appears again in France where it is felt strongly by Cleveland’s Protestant friends in Book 4 under the increased persecution that the Protestants faced in the decades leading up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. However, this constitutes a different kind of surveillance—not an anonymous shaping presence in the lives of individuals, but an explicit political decision by the government to use its powers to pressure a large group of people. On the movement from the earlier form of public observation to the later, anonymous internalizing surveillance of individuals, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977). 62. James P. Gilroy provides a extensive discussion of the mentor-pupil relations in Cleveland in Pre´vost’s Mentors: The Master-Pupil Relationship in the Major Novels of the Abbe´ Pre´vost (Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1989), 48–72. 63. In another reversal of the example of Roxana, this former mistress of the Lord Protector and of Charles I who bears the name of one of Charles II’s most famous mistresses, remains with her child and educates rather than abandoning him. 64. Clarendon advises Cleveland not to follow the path to misanthropy taken by Gulliver, whose Travels were published five years before Cleveland began to appear. Rousseau will later echo Pre´vost (see chapter 4). 65. In its portrayal of this historical character and the cause of her early death, Pre´vost’s narrative stands in a close relation to Lafayette’s Histoire de madame Henriette d’Angleterre, virtually an official posthumous biography of Henrietta by her friend. More conventional tutors figure in the novel; in particular, Gelin serves as the Jesuit tutor to Cleveland’s boys when they are taken to the Louisle-Grand school, but he does not abuse his power over them. Gelin is, however, responsible for a serious misuse of power when he almost persuades Fanny to stay with him indefinitely on the Isle of Madeira, having paid an actress to play the role of a satisfied exile there. Gelin’s manipulation here anticipates the tutor’s mode of operating in Rousseau’s Emile by arranging scenes in which only his charge does not know that everyone else is acting a part (see chapter 4). 66. Antoine Pre´vost d’Exiles, Le Philosophe anglais ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, ed. Philip Stewart (Grenoble: Press Universitaires de Grenoble, 1978), 237 (vol. 2 of Oeuvres de Pre´vost, ed. Jean Sgard). Further references are to this edition; translations from Cleveland are mine. There exists an eighteenthcentury translation: The Life and entertaining Adventures of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of Oliver Cromwell, 5 vols. (London: T. Astley, 1734–75). This version includes volumes 1–4, the first half of the novel (published in 1731–32), and the spurious volume 5, which is discussed later in this chapter. 67. On Pre´vost’s extensive knowledge and accurate use of American geogra` propos phy, see Paul Vernie`re, ‘‘L’Abbe´ Pre´vost et les re´alite´s ge´ographiques, a

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de l’episode Ame´ricain de Cleveland,’’ Revue d’Histoire Litte´raire de la France 73 (1973): 625–35, and Philip Stewart, ‘‘L’Ame´rique de l’abbe´ Pre´vost: aspects documentaires de Cleveland,’’ French Review 49 (1976): 868–82. 68. For a brief consideration of the relation of works such as Se´varambes to Cleveland, see Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 41. 69. Jacques Decobert concentrates on what he sees as the conflict between nature and society in the Rochellers’ community in ‘‘Au proce` s de l’utopie, un ‘roman des illusions perdues’: Pre´vost et la ‘Colonie Rochelloise,’ ’’ Revue des sciences humaines 155 (1974): 493–504. James P. Gilroy places a related emphasis on the disruptive nature of uncontrollable passions in ’’Peace and the pursuit of happiness in the French utopian novel: Fe´nelon’s Te´le´maque and Pre´vost’s Cleveland,‘‘ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 176 (1979): 169–87. 70. Philip Stewart argues that the society of the Rochellers in Cleveland is not really utopian in ‘‘Les de´sillusions de l’heureuse ˆıle,’’ Saggi e ricerchi de litteratura francese 16 (1977): 215–40. Stewart also notes a number of close parallels between Pre´vost’s narrative and earlier romances. 71. This is almost the only satiric passage in the seven-volume novel. 72. Cleveland also sets up a country house utopia in Havana, which leads to the greatest disaster of his life—Fanny’s flight from him. 73. For an exploration of this pattern in the novel, see Philip Stewart, ‘‘Utopias That Self-Destruct,’’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 9 (1979): 15–24. 74. See Sgard, who cites Condorcet and Chamfort (Pre´vost romancier, 219). It is also worth remembering that Pre´ vost was writing the concluding books of Cleveland at a time when novels were officially proscribed; see May, Le Dilemme du roman, 75–100. 75. On Cleveland’s move from a deistic to a theistic position, see Sgard, Pre´vost romancier, 208. 76. Cleveland’s theism and his doctrine of natural sentiments anticipate Rousseau’s religion as formulated by the Savoyard vicar in Emile; see chapter 4. In his notes to the Grenoble edition, Stewart observes many other parallels between Cleveland and Emile. 77. Stewart (Oeuvres, 8:9) points out that whereas Villedieu and Courtilz use historical figures as their protagonists, Pre´vost innovated by placing a fictional hero among known historical figures. Actually, he had been anticipated and probably influenced in that practice as in others by Lafayette and Defoe. 78. The protagonist finds himself in the same situation at the court of Dionysius of Syracuse in Wieland’s Agathon (1767). See chapter 4.

CHAPTER 3. SATIRE, PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY, AND THE HISTORICAL NOVEL, 1700–1815 1. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 84. 2. Ronald Paulson points out that Gulliver assumes the values of his hosts in The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 163. 3. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), 242. Further references will appear in the text.

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4. See Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 32–33. 5. On the tendency in satire to figure inheritance as decline and descent as degeneration, see Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 6. J. W. Johnson, in ‘‘Swift’s Historical Outlook,’’ Journal of British Studies 4 (1965): 652–77, argues that Swift mocks the idea of a tendency to decline in nature, but believes firmly in the tendency of human beings to degenerate morally and intellectually. 7. Ironically, Swift’s own Four Last Years of the Queen (written 1713, pub. 1756) can stand as an example of historiography that claims to be impartial, yet seeks to transmit to posterity a biased view of the materials it takes as its subject. In addition, among the historical works that ascribe ‘‘Roman virtue to betrayers of their country’’ might be numbered Swift’s own earlier Contests and Dissensions in Ancient Greece and Rome (1701): the Whig lords whom Swift defends as ancient heroes in that work he attacks as corrupters of their country later in the Four Last Years and in Gulliver’s Travels. On the satiric elements in Swift’s histories, see Palmeri, ‘‘The Historian as Satirist and Satirized,’’ in Locating Swift, ed. Aileen Douglas, Patrick Kelly, and Ian Campbell Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 82–93. 8. See Swift’s letter to Pope of 29 September 1725: ‘‘I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. . . . Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy, though not in Timons manner, the whole building of my Travells is erected.’’ The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 3:103. 9. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1988), 1:86. Further references in this chapter are to the first volume of this edition. 10. In Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, Macheath and the other robbers take a similar view of the usefulness of highwaymen to society. In Alciphron, George Berkeley disputes Mandeville’s arguments from the Fable; his spokesman Euphranor, for example, maintains that spending for innocent purposes has the same benefits as spending connected with vice, and that virtuous people live longer and therefore spend more. The extent to which Euphranor’s arguments refute Mandeville’s is open to serious question. But there is no doubt that Berkeley responds appropriately to Mandeville’s satiric Fable with his own most satiric work—at least in Dialogues 2 and 3 on Mandeville and Shaftesbury. In form, these two dialogues of Berkeley resemble the satiric dialogues of Lucian (see note 34 below). However, Berkeley is also a Christian churchman who, unlike Swift, argues explicitly for his orthodox position in the same work in which he satirizes its opponents. Alciphron, therefore, turns increasingly away from satiric use of the dialogue form to a straightforward exposition and celebration of Berkeley’s Christian philosophy. 11. Mandeville’s dialectic of paradoxes thus anticipates the workings of the dialectic as Hegel understands it. 12. On this strategy in Mandeville’s thinking, see M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 47–77. 13. For discussions of Mandeville’s use of satire and paradox, see Mandeville

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Studies, ed. Irwin Primer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), especially Robert H. Hopkins, ‘‘The Cant of Social Compromise: Some Observations on Mandeville’s Satire,’’ 168–92, and Philip Pinkus, ‘‘Mandeville’s Paradox,’’ 193–211. 14. Mandeville does not hide his low opinion of moderation: ‘‘That boasted middle way, and the calm virtues recommended in [Shaftesbury’s] Characteristicks are good for nothing but to breed Drones, and might qualify a Man for the stupid Enjoyments of a Monastick Life, or at best a Country Justice of Peace, but they would never fit him for Labour and Assiduity, or stir him up to great Atchievements and perilous Undertakings’’ (333). 15. Timothy Dykstal points out that paradox remains even in the dialogues of Part Two; for example the pursuit of interest in commercial activities, which Mandeville endorses, contradicts the disinterestedness of the dialogue form. The Luxury of Skepticism: Politics, Philosophy, and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere, 1660–1740 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 122–24. 16. For an analysis of Mandeville’s relations to other eighteenth-century thinkers, especially Shaftesbury, Hume, and Rousseau, see E. G. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 75–125; and Malcolm Jack, ‘‘One State of Nature: Mandeville and Rousseau,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 119–24. 17. David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, in Hume’s Enquiries, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 300, 178. Further references to this Enquiry will appear in the text. On the importance of genre in Hume’s writings, see Mark Box, The Suasive Art of David Hume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 90–95, 110, 115, 125. 18. Hume implies that Timon was not really entirely misanthropic because he approved of the behavior of Alcibiades (who, as he foresaw, would harm Athens) (Enquiry, 226–27); Hume ascribes the philosophy of selfishness to a ‘‘spirit of satire’’ in such philosophers and not to their being corrupt at heart (Enquiry, 271). 19. Nicholas Phillipson, in Hume (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 53–54, sees Hume’s aim as a corrective both to Bolingbroke’s partisanship in the Craftsman and to Addison’s lack of political engagement in the Spectator. 20. David Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh, 1741), iv. 21. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1987), 535. Further citations will appear in the text. Jerome Christensen shows the ramifications of this passage in Hume’s awareness of the essay-writer as middleman who employs politeness and moderation as his strategies, in Practicing Enlightenment (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 96–116. He also considers many of the ways that Hume acted literally as the middleman or commercial agent for his writings as commodities in the market (120–201). As Christensen sees it, the achievement of moderation and sociability by the writer involve both a self-neutering (94–98) and a principle of selfregulation (29). 22. For discussions of the importance of sociability and sympathy in Hume, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Languages of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 18–43, who distinguishes the emphasis on sympathy in the Treatise from the use of benevolence in the second Enquiry; and Phillipson, Hume, 17–34, who emphasizes the implications of sociability for a political ideal of politeness. See also J. B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963),

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64–68; and Carol Kay, Philosophical Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 23. Considering the prominent role played in satires of the early eighteenth century by misanthropes such as Swift’s Gulliver and Montesquieu’s Usbek, Hume’s revision of conventional satiric perspectives emerges clearly here. 24. The satirists’ traditional attacks on luxury converge with the criticisms of luxury by thinkers in the tradition of classical republicanism. On the thought of such civic humanists, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). On the history of attitudes toward luxury, see John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 25. Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 50–51. See also Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 181. 26. On the course of misanthropy in the later eighteenth century, see Thomas R. Preston, Not in Timon’s Manner: Feeling, Misanthropy, and Satire in Eighteenth-Century England (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1975), esp. chaps. 1–3. Preston shows that the figure of the benevolent misanthrope becomes common in novels and plays in the second half of the eighteenth century, and that in nearly all of his appearances, such a figure is comfortably well-off, but does not engage in getting and spending; he disguises his benevolence; and he is not political, that is, his acts of private charity or goodwill do not challenge the system of commercial relations. The novels of Mackenzie and Smollett offer numerous examples of such figures. For discussion of Smollett, see chapter 5. 27. For analyses of the decline of verse satire, see Introduction, n. 1. 28. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:153. On Hume’s somewhat halting efforts at satire and comedy on other subjects, see Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 232–39. For a study of irony as a literary mode in Hume’s major works, see John Vladimir Price, The Ironic Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965). Price sees some satire as well as irony at work in Hume’s writings on religion; see his discussion of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 123–39. 29. There is a strongly chiastic relation between Swift and Hume as satiristhistorians. Hume was a historian who aspired to be a satirist of religion, while Swift was a satirist who aspired to be royal historiographer. However, whereas Hume arguably succeeds in satirically depicting opposed religious extremes in The Natural History of Religion (or in the History of England—see Adam Potkay, ‘‘Hume’s ‘Supplement to Gulliver’: The Medieval Volumes of the History of England,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 25 [2001]: 32–46), Swift’s historical writings reveal none of his distinctive satiric parody, and remain either derivative and fragmentary (as is the History of England, ca. 1700) or partisan and topical (as is The Conduct of the Allies, 1711); see Irvin Ehrenpreis, ‘‘Swift’s History of England,’’ JEGP 51 (1952): 177–85. The most accomplished of Swift’s histories, the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen (1713, pub. 1758), claims to be nonpartisan and free of satire and panegyric, but in fact bitterly satirizes Marlborough and the Whigs, while lauding Swift’s friends among the Tory ministers.

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Combining such partisanship with an inside account of the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Utrecht, the Four Last Years in some ways falls into the genre of secret history that Swift himself would later parodically satirize in Gulliver’s Travels, bk. 1, chap. 6. There Gulliver ascribes his fall from favor to the personal dislike of jealous ministers, and protests that he had no improper relations with a Lilliputian noblewoman five inches tall. 30. Mossner dates the composition of Natural History of Religion to 1749–51, just before Hume began writing the History of England (Life of Hume, 321). 31. This balanced attitude resembles the view of history that Kant will call abderitic; I argue in chapter 6 that it is characteristic of philosophical history. 32. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 178. This passage closely echoes a passage in A Tale of a Tub: ‘‘The mind of man, when he gives the spur and bridle to his thoughts, doth never stop but naturally sallies out into both extremes of high and low, of good and evil, his first flight of fancy commonly transports him to ideas of what is most perfect, finished, and exalted; till, having soared out of his own reach and sight, not well perceiving how near the frontiers of height and depth border upon each other; with the same course and wing he falls down plumb into the lowest bottom of things, like one who travels the East into the West’’ (A Tale of a Tub, 76; see also Kant’s echoing of this passage, discussed in chapter 6). For these authors, high aspirations in religion often turn into their debased opposites. 33. This passage expresses a perspective very close to the one that Philo approvingly characterizes as skepticism in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Near the end of Part 7, Philo observes that ‘‘The Brahmins assert, that the world arose from an infinite spider, who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels . . . , which appears to us ridiculous; because a spider is a little contemptible animal’’ (Dialogues concerning Natural Religion [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990], 90–91). In Swift’s Battle of the Books (published in the same volume with A Tale of a Tub), a dirty spider who spins world-views out of his own entrails represents proud, self-sufficient modern scholars (A Tale of a Tub, 110– 12). Rather than using it as part of an attack on modern writers, Hume uses the same image to satirically subvert traditional anthropomorphic conceptions of the creator. 34. The implications of Hume’s Natural History of Religion thus closely resemble the implications of Lucian’s satiric dialogues and narratives. For example, in his Alexander and Peregrinus, Lucian satirizes a fraudulent modern oracle and a disturbed religious fanatic, seeing both in those who profit from religious belief and in those who are themselves believers a pathological divergence from the healthy workings of cool reason. His Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead express an ironic, bemused mockery of the whole pantheon of Olympian gods, as well as of all the principal schools of philosoophy—with a partial exception for the Cynic Menippus, Lucian’s predecessor in his use of form and in his mocking deflation of conventional pieties. In the Natural History, Hume accomplishes a similarly irreverent levelling of all Christian sects, and all forms of monotheism—Jewish, Christian, and Islamic—with the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans, and of other cultures around the world. In fact, as I have argued, he compounds the satiric effect by judging polytheism as less pathological than theism. 35. On English historiography from the late seventeenth century to Hume’s

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day, see Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). 36. On the history of the idea and the controversy concerning the ancient constitution, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), as well as Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965), and Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 260–307. 37. David Hume, The History of England, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983), 5:43. Further references to this edition appear in the text. 38. See Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 267. Harrington had argued that ‘‘power follows Property.’’ 39. The contemporary political implications of Hume’s argument were complicated by the fact that in the 1730s some in the Tory opposition led by Bolingbroke began to argue that the ancient constitution was being corrupted by the long ministry of Walpole. At the same time, ministerialist Whigs took the position that only a radical departure in 1688 had ushered in the reign of freedom that they were now supervising. The parties had thus switched sides in the controversy over the ancient constitution, and Hume’s position closely resembled that of the ministerialist or court Whigs. However, Hume still overturned the position of the old or country Whigs, which continued to command strong support. In addition, he offered far greater historical specificity and depth in demolishing the traditional version of the ancient constitution than did the court Whigs, who also opposed it, or those of either party who made use of it. On the ancient constitution in the History of England, see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 243–49; Phillipson, Hume, 56–59; and David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 164–67. 40. As Phillipson points out, Hume represents Charles as neither a despot nor a martyr (Hume, 96). Hume’s depiction of Charles closely parallels Thucydides’ depiction in Book 8 of The Peloponnesian War of Nicias, the commander of the Sicilian expedition. Both Nicias and Charles possess personal traits that attract the historian’s praise, but the grave harm to the polity that results from the actions of each can neither be ignored nor rationalized by reference to the leader’s private virtues. Mark Phillips discusses Hume’s portrait of Charles as part of his attempt to involve readers of sentimental novels in his historical account. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 103–5. 41. By contrast with his judgment of James, Hume’s praise of William III is generous enough that it should have satisfied any Whig: ‘‘it would be difficult to find any person whose actions and conduct have contributed more eminently to the general interests of society and mankind’’ (6:504). 42. On Jefferson’s changing attitudes toward Hume’s History, see Craig Walton, ‘‘Hume and Jefferson on the Uses of History,’’ in Hume: a Re-evaluation, ed. Donald W. Livingston and James T. King (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976), 389–403. The attacks on the History of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth century for exhibiting a Tory bias have led to many detailed analyses in the twentieth century of whether the work implies a partisan or non-partisan perspective. The judgments of modern commentators reveal a strong consensus that the History does achieve the kind of independence that Hume was aiming for. The following consider the question and pursue different lines of argument

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to the conclusion that the History is fundamentally non-partisan: Earl Campbell Mossner, ‘‘Was Hume a Tory Historian? Facts and Reconsiderations,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941): 225–36, and ‘‘An Apology for David Hume, Historian,’’ PMLA 56 (1941): 657–90; Duncan Forbes, Introduction to Hume’s History of Great Britain, 43–50, and Hume’s Philosophical Politics; Strand, ‘‘David Hume, Historian,’’ Social Science 50, no. 4 (1975): 195–203; and Phillipson, Hume, 85. Karen O’Brien points out that Hume’s revisions of the History provide no clear evidence for those seeking a party position in his narrative. Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Hume to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67. 43. Leo Braudy discusses the historical figures that Hume admires as ‘‘heroes of moderation,’’ in Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 59. 44. Such pages in Hume’s history find parallels in the many passages in the Decline and Fall where Gibbon imagines the observations of the philosophers of the ancient world, who had placed themselves apart from the controversies between the pagans and the Christians. For examples, see Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 1:56; 1:519. 45. To ‘‘the good and virtuous, . . . liberty, so requisite to the perfection of human society, would be sufficient to byass their affections toward the side of its defenders’’ (5:96). Leo Damrosch discusses the importance of fictional constructions in Hume’s epistemology in Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 16–64. 46. David Hume, The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 169–73. Further references to this volume appear in the text in the form (P 169). The Penguin edition of the early Stuart volume reprints the first edition of the first volume of Hume’s History, published in 1754. In later editions, Hume cut, revised, and relocated many passages concerning the effects of religious opinions on politics. In this case, Hume moved a section on religious extremes and political parties from the text to an endnote (it appears at 5:558–59 in the 1778 edition). 47. O’Brien discusses the influence of A Tale of a Tub on Hume’s History, noting that Hume concentrates on the social rather than the individual abuses that arise from enthusiasm (Narratives of Enlightenment, 77). 48. Hume himself attempts to allay the harmful effects of religion on political discourse when he omits early controversial sections on superstition and enthusiasm from all editions of The History of England after the first (P 71–73, 96–99). The tone and substance of these passages are consistent with those in Hume’s earlier writings on religion; the fact that they were moved or cut indicates his strategy of accommodation in the History. 49. Donald Siebert, in The Moral Animus of David Hume (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), has argued that Hume changes his position on superstition in the course of writing the History of England (85–95). Whereas in the earlier works, he satirized superstitious practices sharply, he comes to adopt a favorable assessment of anything that prevents the excesses of enthusiasm, and even to see mild superstition as a kind of inoculation against that religious disease (104). 50. See chapter 6 for further analysis the contrast between more satiric conjectural histories and more accommodating philosophical histories.

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51. On the traditional view of history as degenerative, see Ernest Tuveson, Millenium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949). 52. Similarly, if James had been less inept and cowardly in 1688, and William less shrewd and temperate, the revolution at that time might have been far more bloody, less ‘‘glorious,’’ and less successful. Hume also notes that the restoration of Charles II was accomplished without bloodshed largely because General Monk decided not to oppose Charles’s return. In this case, too, a different decision by one man might have cost many lives and produced more ambiguous results. 53. The Letters of David Hume, 2:180. On the basis of his response to the riots for ‘‘Wilkes and Liberty,’’ Donald Livingston sees Hume diagnosing a dangerous and distinctively modern form of mass violence: Hume ‘‘had caught an intimation of the emerging age of mass secular philosophical enthusiasms.’’ Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 289. 54. Letters of Hume, 1:111. 55. In his Introduction to the Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire advances a conception of historical progress as even more intermittent and precarious than Hume’s: in Voltaire’s view, four brief ages of great accomplishment (the last of which occurred in the Europe of Louis XIV) have been interrupted by long periods of regression to irrationality and superstition; see chapter 6. 56. Istvan Hont makes this suggestion in ‘‘The ‘Rich Country–Poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy,’’ in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 295. Adam Potkay has pointed out that in his early essay ‘‘Of Eloquence,’’ Hume subscribes to the classical, civic humanist view of eloquence as a product of liberty and bulwark against tyranny. ‘‘Theorizing Civic Eloquence in the Early Republic: The Road from David Hume to John Quincy Adams,’’ Early American Literature 39 (1999): 147–70. 57. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 10. Further references are to this edition. 58. David Miller recounts an occasion on which, while they were travelling together, Hume good-naturedly criticized the martial civic humanism of Ferguson. See Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought, 125. 59. On Ferguson’s thought, see David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965). 60. However, Ferguson argues, the military should not be made a separate profession because all citizens should be willing and able to defend their country; that is a chief part of the definition of a virtuous society (215). 61. Ferguson himself was from Perthshire, just inside the Highlands, and was a Gaelic speaker; see Duncan Forbes, Introduction to Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1966), xiii. 62. On the importance of Scottish philosophical historians, and in particular of Adam Ferguson’s ideas, for Scott and the historical novel, see: Duncan Forbes, ‘‘The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott,’’ Cambridge Journal 7 (1953): 20–35; Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 37–50; Peter D. Garside, ‘‘Scott and the Philosophical Historians,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 36

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(1975): 495–512; Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 51–69 (Garside and McMaster consider Ferguson’s influence on Scott to be less extensive than do the others cited here); David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 179–81 and 199–202; P. H. Scott, ‘‘The Politics of Sir Walter Scott,’’ in Scott and his Influence, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1982), 208–17; and George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 75–78. In addition, although he does not mention the philosophical historians or Ferguson, David Daiches explores the essential ambivalence about historical progress that Scott shared with Ferguson in ‘‘Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist,’’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1951): 81–95, and 153–73. 63. J. G. Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (London: Dent, 1908), 43, 49. 64. Walter Scott, Old Mortality (New York: Penguin, 1986), 261–62. Further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. See also the annotated edition: The Tale of Old Mortality, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). 65. It is certain that Scott knew the Tale well, since he edited Swift’s works a few years before writing Old Mortality. 66. Doing so produces a rather peculiar protagonist who is not conventionally heroic. Indeed, one of the first critics to have remarked on the lack of active strength in his protagonists was Scott himself. In his anonymous review of his own first novels, he calls these central characters a ‘‘very amiable and very insipid sort of young men . . . never actors, but always acted upon by the spur of circumstances,’’ Quarterly Review 16 (1817): 431–32. Alexander Welsh discusses Scott’s passive protagonists, and derives their passivity from their inheriting of landed property and their respect for authority. The Hero of the Waverley Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), esp. 63–85. 67. Waverley, for example, has affiliations with and differences from both the tribal, Catholic, Jacobite Highlanders and the commercial, Protestant, Whiggish English groups of characters in that novel; he thus functions both to make the former accessible and finally to provide a model for rejecting them and accepting the less romantic modern commercial society. Frank Osbaldistone mediates between the same two kinds of society in Rob Roy. Similarly, Ivanhoe, the son of a proud Saxon, is also a follower of the Norman king Richard, so his marriage to a Saxon princess indicates the eventual synthesis of the two peoples, their cultures and languages. ´cs argues convincingly that the historically typical protagonists 68. Georg Luka in Scott’s novels serve the function of mediating between large historical opposites. The Historical Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 36–37. 69. The protagonist functions as mediator between opposed historical forces not only in Scott’s narratives, but in most early nineteenth-century historical novels. In The Last of the Mohicans (1826), for example, Natty Bumppo mediates between the settled way of life of the European Americans and the more nearly natural way of the natives. In Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1836), Pyotr Grinov has strong ties both of loyalty to the Czar and of gratitude to the rebel Pugachev. 70. Many of Scott’s other novels also register such an ambivalent view of progress. For example, the defeat of the rebels in Waverley means the loss of the estate of Waverley’s father-in-law to be. When the estate is returned to him at the end

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of the novel, the feudal society becomes a commercial form, ownership by rank and title gives way to ownership by purchase, and Baron Bradwardine becomes Mister Bradwardine. Scott allows Bradwardine, previously a pompous, archaizing figure, to articulate a Virgilian perspective on this transition that combines lament for the world he has lost with acceptance of the new society in which he now must live. See Bruce Stovel, ‘‘Waverley and the Aeneid: Scott’s Art of Allusion,’’ English Studies in Canada 11, no. 1 (1985): 26–39, and Palmeri, ‘‘The Capacity of Narrative: Scott and Macaulay on Scottish Highlanders,’’ Clio 22, no. 1 (1992): 46–47. Through Bradwardine, Scott thus expresses the ambivalence of his historical novel as a form—its nostalgic regard for what is lost, as well as a clear-eyed acceptance of the present. 71. See Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels, 101–17, on the anxieties that typically attend the protagonists of Scott’s novels. 72. Walter Scott, Waverley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 415. 73. Patricia Harkin draws a connection between the historical novel and the Bildungsroman in ‘‘Romance and Real History: The Historical Novel as a Literary Innovation,’’ Scott and his Influence, 167. She argues that the protagonist in most of Scott’s historical novels must learn to regulate and discipline his imagination in a way that parallels the education that the protagonist undergoes in a Bildungsroman. 74. David Daiches, ‘‘Scott’s Redgauntlet,’’ in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 47. 75. See the anonymous review of Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather in the Westminster Review 10 (April 1829): 257–83. The review attacks Scott for the Tory slant of his history of Britain for young people, and it accuses Scott’s novels of also expressing a Tory perspective. Still, the essay presents a useful contemporary argument for seeing a close relation between Hume’s History of England and Scott’s historical novels, claiming that Scott ‘‘may be presumed to have had [Hume’s History] frequently in his hands of late’’ (257). 76. Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (the Encyclopedia Logic) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 113–33, sections 79–88. On Hegel’s idea of the dialectic, see Michael Foster, ‘‘Hegel’s Dialectic Method,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 130–41; Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 134; and Duncan Forbes, Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xv. 77. M. H. Abrams discusses the Phenomenology as a Bildungsreise in Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1973), 229–35. John Smith discusses Hegel’s comparison in the Phenomenology between the historical development of the Spirit and the formation of the individual mind, in ‘‘Cultivating Gender: Sexual Difference, Bildung, and the Bildungsroman,’’ Michigan Germanic Studies 13 (1987): 206–25, esp. 210.

CHAPTER 4. SATIRE, CONJECTURAL HISTORY, AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN, 1720–1795 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘‘The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),’’ in Speech Genres and

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Other Late Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59, esp. 44–45. 2. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 46. 3. See Rousseau’s Confessions Book 6, in Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Bibliothe` que de la Ple´ iade, 1959), 1:1356, 1366. Further references are to this edition of Rousseau’s works. 4. Oscar Kenshur underscores the inconsistencies in Usbek’s attitudes: the rebellion in the seraglio ‘‘has as its ideological justification precisely those principles that Usbek had accepted in the abstract but had attempted to keep from penetrating into the seraglio.’’ Dilemmas of Enlightenment: Studies in the Rhetoric and Logic of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 6. 5. On Rica’s acceptance of the duplicity in Parisian masks and costumes, see E. J. Hundert, ‘‘Sexual Politics and the Allegory of Identity in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes,’’ The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 31 (1990): 101–15, esp. 111. Suzanne Gearhart sees Rica’s observations on Parisian society as a ‘‘radical relativization’’ of cultural values. The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 117–19. 6. Concerning false dilemmas in A Tale of a Tub and in Gulliver’s Travels, Martin Price remarks: ‘‘in both cases the extremes are presented as necessary alternatives, and the mean is ignored.’’ Swift’s Rhetorical Art (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1963), 98. 7. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), 52–55. Further references appear in text. 8. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. C. J. Betts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 73; Lettres Persanes (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 56. Further references are to these editions. 9. On this point, see Kenshur, Dilemmas of Enlightenment. 10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 119; Oeuvres comple`tes 3:174–75. Further references are to these editions. 11. Peter France details the parallels between the critique of commercial society in Rousseau’s Second Discourse and in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (see chapter 3). He notes that Rousseau and Ferguson were similarly placed as products of small states bordering larger, more advanced ones; Rousseau is more nostalgic and committed to primitive times, Ferguson more accepting of commercial society. ‘‘Primitivism and Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Scots,’’ The Yearbook of English Studies 15 (1985): 64–79. 12. In drawing attention to parallels between Gulliver’s Travels and Rousseau’s works, I am not arguing that Swift exercised a direct influence on the development of Rousseau’s views or his use of form. Sybil Goulding cites no evidence of Rousseau’s acquaintance with Gulliver’s Travels in Swift en France: Essai sur la fortune et l’influence de Swift en France au XVIIIe sie`cle (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1924). I believe Rousseau knew Gulliver in translation (Desfontaines’s popular French translation appeared a year after Gulliver’s publication, followed by other French versions), but my argument does not depend on demonstrating that he did. In fact, considering the parallels between their critiques of civilization as well as their shared conception of the relation between pupil and master, the absence of direct connection linking Gulliver’s Travels with the Dis-

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course and Emile actually provides evidence that perhaps only a shift in paradigms of knowledge could have helped shape such similar arguments and narrative materials into a different and new genre. 13. The ninth footnote of the second Discourse, which lists at length the miseries of civilized life, imitates or even constitutes a Juvenalian satire in every way except that it is not written in Latin verse. Like Juvenal’s satire on the dangers and evils of life in Rome (Satire 3), Rousseau’s note includes heirs waiting for their rich relatives to die, innocent men threatened by falling buildings, and nouveaux riches indulging in expensive luxuries. The note is approximately the same length as Juvenal’s satire, and the cumulative rhetorical effect of its lists of crimes and inconveniences leads to the same effect that Juvenal’s produces: a combination of fear, revulsion, and disillusionment turns the reader, like the speaker, away from life in urban society of the time (146–54; OC 3:202–8). 14. For investigations of ways in which Rousseau’s views on pedagogy and human nature in Emile aim to correct the problems diagnosed by his social and historical thought in the Second Discourse, see George Armstrong Kelly, ‘‘Borrowings and Uses of History in Rousseau,’’ Studies in Burke and his Time 16 (1975): 129–47, and Jean Lacroix, ‘‘Nature et histoire selon Rousseau,’’ in Rousseau au Pre´sent (Lyon: Presse Universitaire de Lyon, 1978), 147–61. Peter Westin argues that Rousseau transfers the place of wildness from the forests of the New World to the years of bourgeois childhood in ‘‘The Noble Primitive as Bourgeois Subject,’’ Literature and History 10 (1984): 59–71. 15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1989), 227; Oeuvres comple`tes 4:564. References to Emile are to these editions. 16. Lester Crocker writes that, ‘‘Rousseau’s belief in man’s goodness masked his deeper conviction (which his friend Conzie once noted) that men are wicked.’’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Prophetic Voice, 1758–1778 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 86. 17. While a slave in Algiers, Emile convinces his owner that the slaves will be more productive if they are treated well—thus repeating the argument of Colonel Jack in Defoe’s novel (OC 4:922–23). Thomas Kavanagh discusses this episode in Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 98–99. 18. Compare Rousseau’s assertion in the Discourse on Inequality that humans are fundamentally asocial: ‘‘We see at least from the small pains which nature has taken to unite man through mutual needs or to facilitate the use of speech how little she has prepared their sociability and how little she has contributed to what they have done to establish bonds among themselves’’ (97; OC 3:151). 19. Mark Hulliung sees a close equivalence between Rousseau’s misanthropy and Pascal’s in the Pense´es, except that Rousseau’s is non-theological. The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 36. 20. Marc Eigeldinger argues for a continuity between Rousseau’s conception of history in the Discourse on Inequality and in Emile, in ‘‘La vision de l’histoire dans Emile,’’ in L’Histoire au dix-huitie`me sie`cle (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1980): 429–45, esp. 434–37. Similarly, Asher Horowitz observes that the account of childhood in Books 1–3 of Emile parallels the account of the state of nature in the Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau, Nature, History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 235. Lionel Gossman focuses on the comparable importance of history in the second Discourse and the Confessions, in the public and the pri-

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vate realm; even though the condition to which history has brought us is unacceptable, history is all-pervasive and inescapable. ‘‘Time and History in Rousseau,’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 30 (1964): 311–49. 21. Satire and the early Bildungsroman are not the only genres combined in Emile; its last book also revises romance narratives by bringing together, separating for years, and then reuniting two young lovers. 22. Swift and Rousseau share an admiration for the institutions of republican Rome and a related condemnation of the luxury and corruption of commercial societies which places them in a tradition of civic humanist thought that includes political thinkers (such as the Machiavelli of the Discourses) and satirists (such as Persius and Juvenal), as well as numerous moralists and historians. This tradition is described by J. G. A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). For accounts of how Rousseau participates in the tradition, see Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), and Lionel Gossman, The Empire Unpossess’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s ‘‘Decline and Fall’’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 23. Rousseau finds it extremely difficult to speak through a persona: on the one occasion in Emile when he tries to do so, in the story leading up to the ‘‘Profession of Faith,’’ he begins in the third person, but soon confesses that the account really concerns himself, and from then on stays in the first person to represent the young man saved by the vicar’s teaching (223–26; OC 4:561–63). 24. For a different view of the physical accomplishments of the Houyhnhnms, see Claude Rawson, ‘‘Gulliver and the Gentle Reader,’’ in Jonathan Swift, ed. Denis Donoghue (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1971), 400–1. 25. Ronald Paulson observes that Gulliver’s imitation of his ‘‘masters’’ in Books 1, 2, and 4 produces ‘‘Swift’s central irony’’ in Gulliver’s Travels. The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 163–64, 176. 26. Gearhart argues that in prearranging and ‘‘staging Emile’s existence,’’ Rousseau’s tutor does not make use solely of the conventions of the theater; the self-alienation of theatricality characterizes action on the stage of history also (The Open Boundary of History and Fiction, 277). 27. Crocker stresses the crucial use of the ‘‘hidden hand’’ by the tutor in Emile (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 136–45) and by Wolmar in Julie (69–86). Richard Barney notes that English writings on education occasionally stage brief scenes of whose theatricality the pupil remains unaware, but none of these approach the elaborate and programmatic deception of Rousseau’s tutor. See Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 110. On the other hand, Horowitz interprets the tutor’s actions as an unobjectionable strategy of letting nature do its work in the maturation of Emile. Rousseau, Nature, History, 207–53. 28. The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 64. 29. I take the Social Contract to be a utopian work, not an attempt to participate in the affairs of any existing polity. For a contrasting interpretation of the Social Contract, as anchored in a view of history as regressive, see Roger Masters, ‘‘Nothing Fails like Success: Development and History in Rousseau’s Political Teaching,’’ University of Ottawa Review 29, no. 3–4 [1979]: 357–76. Indicating that he conceives Emile as a turn from the public to the private, Rousseau asserts

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early in the work that he can only offer a ‘‘private’’ education, not the ‘‘public’’ kind illustrated in Plato’s Republic: ‘‘the public institution cannot exist because ` il n’y a pas de patrie where there is no country there can be no citizens either [ou il ne peut plus y avoir de citoyens]’’ (8 [translation modified]; OC 3:250). Public education can only take place in a virtuous republic; under a cosmopolitan monarchy, there is no public virtue, and only the private form of instruction is available. 30. Marie-He´le`ne Huet argues that the sequel undoes the painstaking educational project of Emile, in ‘‘Social Entropy,’’ Yale French Studies 92 (1997): 171– 83. Janie Vanpe´ e comes to the same conclusion in ‘‘Rousseau’s Emile ou de l’e´ducation: A Resistance to Reading,’’ Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 156–76. 31. In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), Judith Butler argues that Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Althusser, and Foucault all conceive of the subject as constituted by a development of guilt or conscience, a process in which subjecthood is bound up with subjugation to a social authority or law. 32. For formulations of this argument, see Melitta Gerhard, Der deutsche Entwicklungsroman bis zu Goethes ‘‘Wilhelm Meister’’ (1926; Munich: Francke, 1968); E. L. Stahl, Die religio¨se und die humanita ¨tsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert (Bern: Haupt, 1988); and Ju ¨ rgen Jacobs, Wilhelm Meister und seine Bru ¨ der: Untersuchungen zum deutschen Bildungsroman (Munich: Fink, 1972). On these and other accounts of the origins of the Bildungsroman, see Todd Kontje, The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993). 33. See Barney, Plots of Enlightenment, 308. 34. On the relations between Rousseau, Wieland, and the early novel of education on the continent, see Gerald Gillespie, ‘‘Wieland’s Agathon als Bildungsroman zwischen Barock und Romantik,’’ Jahrbuch fu ¨ r Internationale Germanistik 8 (1980): 344–52, and Gabrielle Bersier, ‘‘Wieland and the German Enlightenment at School with Fe´nelon and Rousseau,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 10 (1986): 1–13. 35. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (1906; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), and Thomas Mann ‘‘Der Entwicklungsroman,’’ (1916) in Eberhard La ¨ mmert, ed., Romantheorie: documentation ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland seit 1880 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1975). 36. See Dorothea von Muecke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Karl Schlechta’s strong skepticism about the Society of the Tower in Goethes Wilhelm Meister (Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman, 1953) moves in the same direction. Although the genealogy of the genre offered here does not intersect with them, other pre-histories of the genre could be mentioned. For example, Wilhelm Vosskamp argues that the Bildungsroman arises from a need to distinguish between serious and popular fiction at a time of immense growth in literary production. ‘‘Gattungen als literarisch-soziale Institutionen,’’ in Textsortenlehre-Gattungsgeschichte, ed. Walter Hinck (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1977), 27–44. Franco Moretti argues that its focus on youth makes the Bildungsroman the symbolic form of modernity. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987). 37. Petronius provides Wieland with a number of important models in this

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work. The plight of Agathon at the court of Dionysus of Syracuse throughout Books 9 and 10 closely parallels that of Petronius at the court of Nero: both advisers attempt to influence a weak and dissolute ruler by reforming his taste, and both are defeated by the machinations of the ruler’s previous favorites. 38. Wieland shares such mixing of satire and sentiment with other writers of his time, especially Smollett and Sterne. His ambiguous coyness closely resembles Sterne’s: although both concern themselves with sexuality, Sterne can deny the physical meaning of his double entendres, and Wieland can protest that his interests are largely philosophical. Wieland also makes frequent use of a digressiveness which, like Sterne’s, includes playful addresses to the reader (e.g., Book 8, chaps. 4 and 7; Book 9, chap. 2). For further discussion of these parallels, see chapter 5. 39. Christophe Martin Wieland, The History of Agathon (London: T. Cadell, 1773), 1: 154; Die Geschichte des Agathon, in Werke, ed. Fritz Martini, 5 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1964), 1:451. Further references to Agathon are to these editions. 40. Hippias’s philosophy also develops that of professor Agamemnon, who is speaking when the surviving fragments of the Satyricon begin, and who maintains that the teacher’s real mission is to please his customers, his students, and to obtain dinner invitations from their families. 41. Alain Montandon points out that Hippias’s skeptical sensualism restates the argument of Helve´tius that moral ideas and conduct are dependent on external influences such as social environment. Le roman au XVIIIe sie´cle en Europe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 361–62. 42. I refer here to the division of the first edition of the History of Agathon into eleven books. However, the distinction also applies to the second as well as to the third and final edition, where material from the eleventh book of the first edition appears in the thirteenth of sixteen books. 43. Dorothea von Muecke argues that Agathon returns to a primary narcissism as an exemplary move in the development of a class of servants for the state bureaucracy. Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, 232–72. I share von Muecke’s view of the importance of Agathon’s concluding renunciation of sexuality; however, rather than viewing it primarily as a step toward the creation of a class of civil servants, I see it as a reversion by the individual to a pre-Oedipal fantasy. HansJu ¨ rgen Schings sees Agathon’s as a pathological character, but he identifies his sickness (and that of the beautiful soul in Wilhelm Meister) as an excessive melancholy and spleen; see ‘‘Agathon—Anton Reiser—Wilhelm Meister: Zur Pathogenese des modernen Subjekts im Bildungsroman,’’ in Goethe im Kontext: Kunst und Humanita ¨t, Naturwissenschaft und Politik von der Aufkla ¨rung bis zur Restauration (Tu ¨ bingen: M. Niemeyer, 1984), 46–47. For an expression of the opposing view that sees Agathon achieving his own autonomous individuality at the end of the novel, see Gerhart Mayer, ‘‘Die Begrundung des Bildungsromanes durch Wieland: Die Wandlung der Geschichte des Agathon,’’ Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1970): 7–36. 44. This conclusion about the combination of earlier and later paradigms in Wieland’s novel is in accord with the argument of Gerald Gillespie (in ‘‘Wieland’s Agathon als Bildungsroman’’), who sees much of Agathon following the baroque tradition of the education of a prince through travel, with the last book displaying a freer, more Romantic use of the imagination. Frederick Keener, however, argues that in the eighteenth century, satiric narrative distinguishes itself from the realistic novel by its capacity for representing gradual internal change in its pro-

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tagonists. The Chain of Becoming: The Philosophical Tale, the Novel, and a Neglected Realism of the Enlightenment: Swift, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Johnson, and Austen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 20–21, 46, 191. 45. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans . Eric Blackall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 336; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1948), 589. Further references are to these editions. 46. Donald R. Wehrs argues that Wilhelm gives evidence of an ethical relation to others when he takes responsibility for Mignon and Felix, who proves to be his son. Wehrs also notes that whereas Wilhelm’s relations with women in the Theatrical Mission resemble those of Tom Jones, they take on a greater seriousness in the Apprenticeship, which shows the injuries caused to others by the pursuit of egotistical desires. ‘‘Levinas, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and the Compulsion of the Good,’’ The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40 (1999): 261–78. 47. Franc¸ois Jost has noted the parallel between the ‘‘Profession of Faith’’ and the ‘‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul’’: both interpolated narratives perform the same structural functions; in particular both illuminate and shape the interior life of the hero. See ‘‘La Tradition du Bildungsroman,’’ Comparative Literature 21 (1969): 97–115, esp. 109. 48. Franco Moretti argues that Goethe’s Bildungsroman, like other novelistic forms, constructs narratives of compromise, accommodation, and synthesis, as opposed to the plots of tragedy, epic, and revolutionary history that polarize, split, and refuse to reconcile opposites. The Way of the World, 12, 35, 52. 49. Rousseau constructs a much more extended image of such a reduced utopia in the estate of Clarens in La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, published the year before Emile. 50. See Schings on Archytas’s Tarentum in Agathon as a ‘‘utopische Enklave’’ (58). In a note to the final edition of Agathon (1794), Wieland argues that his criticisms of democratic rule in the first edition of his novel have been borne out by the recent excesses of the French Revolution. See Werke, ed. Martini, 1:910. ´cs discusses the Society of the Tower as a utopian island within 51. Georg Luka bourgeois society in Goethe and his Age, trans. Robert Anchor (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1969), 55–57. On the importance of utopias in Bildungsromane, see Susan Cocalis, ‘‘The Transformation of Bildung from an Image to an Ideal,’’ Monatshefte 70 (1978): 399–414, esp. 409; and Frederick Amrine, ‘‘Rethinking the ‘Bildungsroman,’ ’’ Michigan Germanic Studies 13 (1987): 119–39. The imagined community evoked on the last page of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education carries a utopian implication similar to that of the reduced utopias in the Bildungsromane. 52. Moretti understands the disciplinary surveillance of the Society of the Tower as satisfying a desire among middle-class readers to ‘‘escape from freedom.’’ The Way of the World, 55, 64–67. 53. On the failure to attain autonomy in most Bildungsromane, see Cocalis, ‘‘Transformation,’’ 409, and Amrine, ‘‘Rethinking,’’ 129, 135. ´ cs considers Goethe’s conception of the Society of the Tower to be 54. Luka somewhat ironic (Goethe and his Age, 63). 55. Completing the final versions of their Bildungsromane soon after the execution of Louis XVI and the violent rule of the Committee on Public Safety, Wieland and Goethe assign greater legitimacy in their narratives to paternal authority than to the urge for independence of rebellious sons. On the reconstituting of the family’s legitimacy after the Thermidorean reaction, see Lynn Hunt,

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The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), chap. 6. On the Bildungsroman of Goethe and Austen as an effort to elude or disavow the French Revolution, see Moretti, Way of the World, 60–64. 56. On the increasing extent and sophistication of disciplinary surveillance during the last two centuries, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977): Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 13–23; Leo Braudy, ‘‘Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel,’’ ELH 48 (1981): 619–37; and D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), among others. 57. Todd Kontje, Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).

CHAPTER 5. SATIRE, NOVEL, AND FORMS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE, 1740–1800 1. Ju ¨ rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 49. Further references to this edition appear in the text. 2. See Archibald S. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition 1714–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 120; and Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 3. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), and Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993). Geoff Eley writes that ‘‘The value of Habermas’s perspective has been fundamentally borne out by recent social history in a variety of fields’’; he calls it ‘‘striking to see how securely and imaginatively the argument is historically grounded, given the thinness of the literature available at the time.’’ ‘‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,’’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 294. 4. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). 5. Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670– 1740: Hackney for Bread (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Hammond discusses Habermas on 147–48. Although Clifford Siskin focuses on the later decades of the eighteenth century, what he describes as ‘‘novelism’’ is consistent with, and a development of, the phenomena that Hunter and Hammond describe. See The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 6. See the treatment of Voltaire by the Chevalier de Rohan discussed later in this chapter (n. 59 below). 7. Hunter observes that ‘‘it is no accident that satire dominated the literary climate in England just before the emergence, and the domination, of the novel,’’ Before Novels, 125. See also Hammond on the antagonism of most satirists toward novels in the first half of the century, Professional Imaginative Writing, 270–75.

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8. Consistent with this position, Pierre Bourdieu argues that changes in legal structures and other social and historical changes are not sufficient to determine changes in the hierarchy of literary genres. However, changes within the field of cultural production do not remain unaffected by changes in the larger field of power: there may be concordances between external and internal changes without the former directly or solely causing the latter. See The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 54–57. 9. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Dena Goodman (‘‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,’’ History and Theory 31 [1992]: 1–20) and Daniel Gordon (‘‘Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of Public Opinion,’’ French Historical Studies 17 [1992]: 882–956) have argued that Landes conflates the liberal public sphere with the exclusionary public sphere of Rousseau and his revolutionary followers. Sara Maza (‘‘Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gordon and David Bell,’’ French Historical Studies 17 [1992]: 945–50) points out that Landes first drew attention to the exclusion of women from the revolutionary public sphere, by contrast with their importance in the salons. 10. Nancy Fraser, ‘‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,’’ Habermas and the Public Sphere, 109–42, quoted passage from 116. 11. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 12. Jeremy Popkin, ‘‘The Gazette de Leyde and French Politics under Louis XVI,’’ in Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, ed. Jack Censer and Jeremy Popkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 75–132, and News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s ‘‘Gazette de Leyde’’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 13. Keith Michael Baker, ‘‘Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old Regime: Some Reflections,’’ in Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, ed. Censer and Popkin, 204–46; Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and ‘‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas,’’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, 181–211. ¨ ffentlichkeit: Politische Kommunikation in Deutsch14. See Absolutismus und O land zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts (Go ¨ ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994). Gestrich shows that there were pockets of society where the ruler and established authorities could be questioned or contested. The equality of condition among the learned, for example, and their advancement on the basis of qualification, not birth, helped constitute the republic of letters as an alternate, anti-feudal model of society. Like Foucault, Gestrich observes that while public executions demonstrated the power of the prince, they also provided an occasion for the expression of popular discontentment. In addition, he notes the importance of protest demonstrations and pamphlets on political topics. Although he does not use the term, we might see Gestrich involved in investigating a number of counterpublic spheres. For a study of two such counterpublic spheres in seventeenth-century England, centered on the petitions and publications of women and

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apprentices, see Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 15. Also contributing to this development of a cultural public sphere in Germany was the founding in the second half of the century of a large number of Masonic lodges, which encouraged non-hierarchical discussion among those admitted. On the importance of lodges and learned societies in Germany, see Richard van Du ¨ lmen, The Society of the Enlightenment: The Rise of Middle-Class and Enlightenment Culture in Germany, trans. Anthony Williams (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992). 16. Olaf Simon, in Marteaus Europa, oder Der Roman bevor er Litteratur wurde (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), argues against the standard view—from Kant to Habermas and today—that there was a time lag between the emergence of the public sphere in England and in Germany. Simon sees the publication in Germany in the 1710s of satiric secret histories of the same genre as Manley’s New Atalantis (1709) as evidence of an early, European-wide cultural public sphere. However, the publication of satiric secret histories in the teens indicates not that the German states shared with England the polite, moderating journals or other institutions that were helping to establish a cultural public sphere there; rather, it shows the strength in Germany of the older, more censored, and satiric culture that was already beginning to lose its predominance in England. (The last section of this chapter discusses the New Atalantis.) 17. See John Christian Laursen, ‘‘The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of ‘Public’ and ‘Publicity,’ ’’ Political Theory 14 (1986): 584–603. The following chapter discusses Kant’s essays on the groundrules of a political public sphere. 18. See Georges May, Le Dilemme du roman au xviii sie`cle: Etude sur les rapports du roman et de la critique (1715–1761) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 75–105. 19. An additional contrast between the British and French cultural contexts bears on the history of narrative genres: a revolution against the absolute authority of monarch and church had already occurred in Britain—not only a political revolution that beheaded a king and thus desacralized the monarchy, but also a religious revolution that broke up sacred statues and painted representations of the sacred, thus bringing representations of sacred subjects closer to the same level as the everyday and the profane. On the paradigmatic significance of such iconoclasm in eighteenth-century English culture, see Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989). In France, however, not only did the king retain his sacred character and possess virtually unlimited authority, but the church still retained tremendous power and possessions in land and goods, and claimed an unqualified spiritual authority. In such an absolutist context, even tolerated or authorized forms needed to take indirect means to point to inadequacies, inconsistencies, and injustices; they still tended to use ironic methods and satiric forms to express criticism. 20. English Showalter, The Evolution of the French Novel, 1661–1782 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 262–347. 21. On efforts to develop a public arena in Germany, see Benjamin Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). 22. Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild, ed. David Nokes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 158. Further references to this edition are in the text.

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23. John Bender analyzes Jonathan Wild as an instance of what he sees as the juridical novel in Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 24. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 144. Further references to this edition appear in the text. 25. On Adams’s dogmatic adherance to his belief in the truthfulness of physiognomy, see Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in Fiction and History: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 104–7. 26. For the view that Adams and Joseph both follow a traditional understanding of the ethical via media, see Kevin Berland, ‘‘Satire and the Via Media: Anglican Dialogue in Joseph Andrews,’’ in Satire in the Eighteenth Century, ed. J. D. Browning (New York: Garland, 1983), 83–99. 27. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 959. Further references to this edition are in the text. 28. The same focus on middle grounds informs the defense of mixed characters that Fielding elaborates at several points in the novel (for example, 468). 29. Lennard Davis investigates the close relation between news sheets and early novelistic forms in Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 30. On the importance of contemporaneity for early English novels, see J. Paul Hunter, ‘‘ ‘News, and new Things’: Contemporaneity and the Early English Novel,’’ Critical Inquiry 14 (1988), 493–515. 31. On Richardson as an archival historian, see Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 99–136. 32. For an analysis of this shift away from public self-definition, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977), chapters 3–5. 33. For a political history of the opposition during the 1720s and 1730s, see Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 111–160, and, on the varieties of opposition theory, 151–52. On the formation of the concept of the loyal opposition in its cultural context, see Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 19–45, and, on the role of The Craftsman in particular, 4–8. 34. See Martin Battestin with Ruthe Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (New York: Routledge, 1989), 512–21. 35. It is true that Fielding wrote a piece that imitated both ‘‘A Modest Proposal’’ and ‘‘An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity’’ in The Covent-Garden Journal, no. 11, 8 February 1752. In this essay, he proposes that since the freethinkers of the Robin Hood society have declared Christianity to be a chimera, some other religion should be established to protect the rich from the poor, and none could be as serviceable as the ancient heathenism, which could include the sacrifice of the poor to ‘‘provide for, or rather to remove those redundant Members in every Society’’ (The Covent-Garden Journal, ed. Bertrand Goldgar [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988], 82). He goes on to observe that a quick death might cause less suffering than wasting away from lack of food and shelter as hundreds do each year in London. This last passage strikes a Swiftian note of indignation expressed through bleak irony, but the piece as a whole does not reach the intensity of Swift’s ‘‘Proposal.’’ Fielding’s essay lacks a counterpart to the horrifying and sober section of Swift’s ‘‘Proposal’’ in which the author in-

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cludes a long list of practical ideas that would improve the plight of the Irish poor—only to dismiss them all as idle visionary proposals with no chance of being enacted. One principal difference between Swift’s situation and Fielding’s is that Fielding could and did publicly propose changes in the law that took away some of their excessive rigor toward the poor, and some of his proposals were adopted. The political public sphere does not establish a utopia; there was much suffering and continuing cause for criticism and satire in Fielding’s world. Still, the existence of a public arena for discussions and proposals concerning policies distinguishes Fielding’s England from Swift’s Ireland; it helps account for the difference between the genres chosen by the two, and for the intensity of their effects. 36. Braudy sees in Amelia ‘‘the primacy of private history’’ (Narrative Form, 180–212); Hunter sees in the novel a ‘‘flight into the interior’’ (Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975], 192–216). 37. Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 477. 38. Ronald Paulson explores the specifics of this shift away from satire in Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, in Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 52–218, 246–65. 39. See Angus Ross, ‘‘The Show of Violence in Smollett’s Novels,’’ Yearbook of English Studies 77 (1972): 118–29, and Damian Grant, ‘‘Roderick Random: Language as Projectile,’’ in Smollett: Author of the First Distinction, ed. Alan Bold (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 129–47. 40. Aileen Douglas sees Roderick’s story as a search to have his body recognized as that of a human being. Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 43–69. 41. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouce´ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 167–68. Further references to this edition appear in the text. 42. See M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 303–436. Ronald Paulson traces scenes of grotesque physicality in Smollett’s early novels to a satiric tradition of punitive violence, Satire and the Novel, 146–65. 43. For a discussion of the ‘‘rawness, cruelty, and savagery’’ of Smollett’s narrative world and of his insistence on ‘‘perpetual revenge,’’ see G. S. Rousseau, ‘‘Beef and Bouillon: Smollett’s Achievement as a Thinker,’’ in Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1982), 88, 107. John Richetti extends Rousseau’s observation to argue that Smollett’s early novels express through their kinetic energies resentment against the injuries to merit caused by the new mobility of property and the unlimited and corrupt pursuit of self-interest in the metropolitan culture of Smollett’s time. The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (London: Routledge, 1999), 167. 44. A similar levelling of the villains and the revenger occurs in Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge plays such as Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. 45. Howard S. Buck identifies the doctor with the poet Mark Akenside, in ‘‘Smollet and Akenside,’’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 31 (1932): 10–26. Ronald Paulson has argued that the painter Pallet is based on William Hogarth, in ‘‘Smollett and Hogarth: The Identity of Pallet,’’ Studies in English Literature 4 (1964): 351–59.

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46. For a different view of the relation between satire and romance in this novel, see T. O. Treadwell, ‘‘The Two Worlds of Ferdinand Count Fathom,’’ in Tobias Smollett, ed. G. S. Rousseau and P.-G. Bouce´ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 131–54. 47. Fathom thus resembles in structure and generic combination Wieland’s Agathon, in which an extensive section that makes use of strong satiric parody of romance is succeeded by a shorter section, observing the conventions of romance that have been discredited; see chapter 4. An antecedent for both these narratives is Apuleius’s Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. 48. For a demonstration of Smollett’s authorship of this work, see the Introduction to The History and Adventures of an Atom, ed. Robert Adams Day (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), xxv–lvii. 49. The satiric strategies in the Atom are also closely related to those employed in caricature, an increasingly prominent mode of visual satire. See the prints reproduced by Day in his edition, as well as George Kahrl, ‘‘Smollett as Caricaturist,’’ in Tobias Smollett, ed. Rousseau and Bouce´, 169–200, and Byron Gassman, ‘‘Smollett’s Briton and the Art of Political Cartooning,’’ in Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 14 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 243–58. 50. On the importance of such figures in the literature of the later eighteenth century, including Smollett, see Thomas R. Preston, Not in Timon’s Manner: Feeling, Misanthropy, and Satire in Eighteenth-Century England (University: University of Alabama Press, 1975), esp. 69–120. 51. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Thomas R. Preston (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 188. Further references appear in the text. 52. Robert Hopkins focuses on the grotesque in Humphry Clinker, seeing Lismahago’s body and Bramble’s language as the most significant instances of the grotesque in the novel. For Hopkins, Bramble’s early grotesque vision prevails even at the conclusion of the novel: ‘‘Merely because Matthew is pathologically disturbed does not exclude the possibility that English society is itself pathological. . . . The world that has collapsed for Matthew Bramble is the English Augustan world.’’ ‘‘The Function of Grotesque in Humphry Clinker,’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 32 (1969): 163–77. 53. Douglas observes that the two men write the bulk of the novel, while the women are presented as ‘‘feeble correspondents.’’ Uneasy Sensations, 166. 54. Horace’s ability to be ironic at his own expense similarly qualifies the typical harshness of formal verse satire and produces a more moderate effect. 55. John Richetti locates in the Bath coffeehouse in particular the turn toward private experience that authorizes participation in public debate in this novel. The English Novel in History, 182–84. 56. If this argument is correct, the effect on women of the development of a political public sphere in Smollett’s novel parallels the effect of a political public sphere on women in French society a few decades later, according to Landes in Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Douglas writes that in Humphry Clinker, the threat posed by women to a healthy life on a rural estate can be neutralized in two ways: ‘‘Normally, sex is enough, but if it proves insufficient, death will be necessary. The death of Mrs. Baynard is as important as the three marriages with which the novel ends.’’ Uneasy Sensations, 174. 57. Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques, ed. Rene´ Pomeau (Paris: Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1987), 1213; my translation.

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58. On Candide as a parody of Cleveland and similar romance-novels, see Philip Stewart, ‘‘Holding the Mirror up to Fiction: Generic Parody in Candide,’’ French Studies 33 (1979): 411–19. 59. His exile was a result of having been insulted by a nobleman, beaten by the nobleman’s lackeys, and then imprisoned in the Bastille. See Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969), 106–8. 60. Among other accounts of the Calas and Sirven affairs, see Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics (New York: Vintage, 1965), 273–78. 61. Letter to d’Alembert, 5 April 1766, quoted in Roger Pearson, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s ‘‘Contes Philosophiques’’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 9. The translation is mine. 62. Oscar Kenshur argues that Voltaire’s tales serve as ‘‘counter-hypothetical fictions’’—fictions that not only work to disprove a conventional hypothesis, but also offer an ambiguous fiction in place of an alternate hypothesis. Dilemmas of Enlightenment: Studies in the Rhetoric and Logic of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 172–87. See also Pearson’s summary of the course of the typical tale in Fables of Reason, 34–36. 63. Voltaire, Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, trans. Donald Frame (New York: Signet, 1981), 100. Romans et contes, ed. Rene´ Pomeau (Paris: Garnier, 1966), 258. Further references to the tales are to these editions. 64. The shift of satiric focus from processes of elimination to sexual processes in Sterne, Diderot, Wieland, and other writers of the late eighteenth century may indicate an increased attention to sexuality as constitutive of identity. 65. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 2 vols. (paginated continuously), ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 258. Further references to this edition appear in the text. 66. This episode, including the bawdy play on words, is repeated at the end of Jacques. 67. See Petronius, Satyricon 140.7. For further discussion of Petronius’s indecent puns, see Palmeri, Satire in Narrative, 32–34. 68. For an extensive discussion of Sterne’s satire in Tristram Shandy, especially in its relation to Swift and other satiric predecessors, see Melvyn New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of ‘‘Tristram Shandy’’ (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1969). 69. I am thus in agreement with Robert Markley that A Sentimental Journey, unlike Tristram Shandy, ‘‘comes close to sentimentalizing the conditions of its own performance; it does not mock its generic history and narrative strategies, nor does it demythologize the genealogy of sentiment.’’ ‘‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue,’’ in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (London: Methuen, 1987), 211. 70. Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, trans. Michael Henry (New York: Penguin, 1987), 59; Jacques le fataliste et son maıˆtre, ed. Paul Vernie`re (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1970), 71. Further references to Jacques are to these editions. 71. In doing so, he closely follows a passage from Montaigne’s essay ‘‘On Some Verses of Virgil’’ (3:5), and echoes a similar passage from the final page of Tristram Shandy. 72. Denis Diderot, This is Not a Story and Other Stories, trans. P. N. Furbank

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 111–12; Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Paul Vernie`re (Paris: Garnier, 1964), 515. 73. See Miche`le Duchat, Diderot et ‘‘L’Histoire des deux Indes,’’ ou l’e´criture fragmentaire (Paris: Nizet, 1978), and Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 166– 214. 74. Christoph Martin Wieland, The History of Agathon, 4 vols. (London, T. Cadell, 1773), 3:63; Geschichte des Agathon, in Werke, ed. Fritz Martini, 5 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1964), 1:666–67. Further citations from Agathon are from these editions. 75. See chapter 4. 76. See John A. McCarthy, Christoph Martin Wieland (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 34, for an account of Wieland’s difficulties with factions in his position at Biberach, and 84–88, for similar difficulties at Erfurt. 77. In later works such as The Golden Mirror (1772) and New Dialogues of the Gods (1791), Wieland embraces a middle ground between these two alternatives in the idea of a constitutional monarchy. 78. Joachim Whaley draws attention to the overarching purview of the German states: ‘‘In other European countries the state and its institutions provided the skeleton around which other formal and informal groups congregated; but in the German principalities, the state took the form of a carapace within which the various groups in society moved.’’ The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 114. Rulers of German states could encourage or even initiate discussion of cultural, social, and educational issues, but they did so within a conservative context in which both religious and secular authorities stressed the need for obedience to the state. 79. See Werke, ed. Martini, 3:482–92. 80. Christoph Martin Wieland, Sokrates Mainomenos, oder die Dialogen des Diogenes von Sinope, in Werke, ed. Martini, 2:7–120. There is a contemporary English translation: Socrates Out of His Senses: or the Dialogues of Diogenes of Sinope, trans. M. Wintersted (Newburgh, 1797). 81. In this ‘‘Key to the Abderites’ History,’’ Wieland also refers to Hafen Slawkenbergius, Sterne’s fictional writer, as though he were a historical authority. History of the Abderites, trans. Max Dufner (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1993), 305; Geschichte der Abderiten, Werke, 2:452. Further references are to these editions. 82. In addition to the original narrative satires that he wrote, Wieland continued to work on satire as a translator. In the decade after the first full publication of the History of the Abderites (1781), he published translations of two classical satirists: Horace’s Epistles (1782) and the Collected Works of Lucian of Samosata (1788–89). Horace, of course, wrote formal verse satires; however, the satires in his second book share features with much narrative satire, including a mockery of the satirist by his interlocutor and temporary carnivalesque reversals of hierarchies. Lucian is the narrative satirist whose works most fully survive from classical antiquity to modern times, and whose narrative satire influenced authors from Erasmus and More to Swift, Voltaire, and Wieland. 83. Another work might be cited here as evidence of the continuing usefulness of satire in Germany. Alain Montandon has argued that J. K. Wezel’s Belphegor (1777), with its aggressively ironic critique showing any good deed being re-

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warded with ingratitude and jealousy, is closely related to Candide, but even more closely to Gulliver’s Travels. The striking similarities between the narratives of Swift and Wezel—the importance of grotesque physicality, the lands of small people, and the sharpness of the irony in both—indicate that the political public sphere in Germany in the 1770s was comparable to that in England in the 1720s. See Montandon, Le roman au XVIIIe sie`cle en Europe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 92–93. 84. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 85. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684– 1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 86. For a statement of this argument about Cavendish and her satire, see Mihoko Suzuki, ‘‘Margaret Cavendish and the Female Satirist,’’ SEL 37 (1997): 483–500. Suzuki argues that the ideological position of many women in the second half of the seventeenth century was fragmented in this way: an explicitly royalist or Tory commitment coexisted with countercurrents that were Whiggish or republican. See also Subordinate Subjects. 87. Discussing Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister, William B. Warner observes that near the conclusion of the work, ‘‘the final assertion of the value of vows is entirely consistent with the royalist argument that too many subjects of the Stuart monarch were finding ways to disavow their vows of loyalty to their king. But, within the central love story of Love Letters, this solution is practiced in the mode of paradox: Octavio can only affirm the value of his love by disavowing the woman he loves.’’ Licensing Entertainment, 83. 88. On the works of Manley—as well as Behn and Haywood—see Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 89. Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis, ed. Rosalind Ballaster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 132. 90. John Richetti makes this point in Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700–1739 (1969; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 123, 129. 91. See, for example, the stories of Shrewsbury and Nottingham (46, 94). 92. Richetti writes that ‘‘the dominant fable, the one which asserts itself over and over again . . . is the tragic destruction of female innocence by a masculine world of rigid economic forces summed up in [Manley’s] vituperative rhetoric by ‘avarice’ and lust.’’ Popular Fiction before Richardson, 52. 93. In Manley’s defense of her work against the charge of libel Catherine Gallagher finds evidence for the developing concept of ‘‘fiction’’ in early eighteenthcentury England. Nobody’s Story, 89–91. 94. Delarivier Manley, The Adventures of Rivella, ed. Katherine Zelinsky (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999), 112. 95. On this process of novelization and the conditions in publishing that enabled and encouraged it, see Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, and Warner, Licensing Entertainment. 96. Eliza Haywood, The Adventures of Evoaai, Princess of Ijaveo, ed. Earla Wilputte (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999), 105. 97. Unlike Job, David does not have everything restored and more given to him at the end of the narrative; he dies, and his sole surviving friend and daughter remain in poverty. The vicar of Wakefield also loses almost all, but like Job what

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he and his family have lost is restored to them—through the efforts of a benevolent landowner who has disguised himself during most of the narrative. Later, Burney’s Cecilia loses two substantial fortunes and, almost, her mind. She does not regain either fortune when she finally marries Delvile, but she does become the heiress of a smaller fortune from a distant relative of her husband. Fielding’s is the most grimly satiric of these three related plots, and Goldsmith’s the least satiric and most sentimental. Combining these two genres, Burney’s narrative retains some sense of the permanent loss that results from whimsical patriarchal injunctions; but she restores most of the fortune that her protagonist loses. 98. Many critics have noted that the romances are empowering for Arabella. See, for example, Laurie Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 62–92; and Margaret Doody, Introduction to The Female Quixote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), xi–xxxii. Citations are from this edition. 99. Noting the presence of the scandal chronicles in the speeches of Tinsel, Gallagher argues that Lennox is anxious to avoid acknowledging scandal narratives as a generic forebear, and instead represents romance as the unacceptable precursor of the novel (Nobody’s Story, 183–84). I believe that Lennox tries out various forms in the Female Quixote, and in this episode, probably referring to Manley, she indicates that the scandal chronicle is no longer useful for her. 100. Patricia Spacks argues that Arabella desires to play an important public role in the Female Quixote. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in EighteenthCentury Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 28–30. 101. On Lennox’s unrealized plans to write a history of the ‘‘Age of Elizabeth,’’ see Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670– 1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 102. Paulson has noted the parallels between Smollett’s satire and Burney’s in Satire and the Novel, 283–86, 290–91. 103. Frances Burney, Evelina (New York: Norton, 1965), 254. 104. On Holcroft, Inchbald, and Bage, see Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 105. The three men I have discussed who continued to write narrative satire in the 1750s and 1760s were not from the capital or from England: Smollett was born and raised in Scotland, Sterne and Goldsmith in Ireland. They passed most or all of their first decades on the periphery of the political nation, and their early satires sought to critique the dominant official view. For all three of these writers, travels on the Continent may have helped solidify a sense of political identity as Britons. Sterne’s participation as a celebrity in the cultural public sphere produced a conviction of cultural authority at least. Smollett, whose early satire and sense of alienation were arguably the strongest of the three, wrote a history of England, worked in the critical periodical press, and edited the Briton, a role which placed him near the center of political public life. Except for the ambiguous example of The History of an Atom, Smollett’s fictions became less satiric as he became more involved in the political establishment. Significantly, the kind of participation in the cultural and political public arena that was open to Smollett was not open to any British women at the time. 106. See, for example, the misogynous verse satire that Felicity Nussbaum has studied in The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984).

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CHAPTER 6. SATIRE AND UTOPIA IN CONJECTURAL HISTORY, 1750–1800 1. Neither do providential histories take shape around ruptures and discontinuities. In such accounts, the primal loss of paradise takes place outside human history, which then typically consists of a movement toward the regaining of paradise, especially after the rise of whichever Christian nation the historian celebrates. Precisely those general patterns in human history that the philosophical historian writes to discover are given in advance in providential history. Perhaps Thucydidean history approaches most closely to the form of philosophical history, since it is an account of a war by a general or diplomat with some first-hand knowledge of events and an understanding of the social, political, and personal losses caused by the conflict. By the time Thucydides’ narrative breaks off, we understand that a period of unique cultural accomplishment has been lost without the possibility of being recaptured. In addition, history on the Thucydidean pattern typically represents opposing perspectives in critical debates, just as philosophical history often represents a dialogue between conflicting views of history as progressive or regressive. 2. On philosophical history and its legacies, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘‘The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment,’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 27 (1963): 1667–87, esp. 1669–71. On the importance of the idea of historical stages developed by Smith and Ferguson, see Duncan Forbes, introduction to An Essay on the History of Civil Society, by Adam Ferguson (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1966), xxii–xxiv, and Andrew Skinner, introduction to The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 31–40. 3. As I argued in chapter 3, Hume’s History of England implies a view of the progress in English society in stages from the feudal to the commercial, although a clearer, and simpler, conjectural history in Hume’s writings can be found in his essays, in particular ‘‘Of the Progress of the Arts and Sciences.’’ The Natural History of Religion also belongs to this genre of historical narrative. As indicated in chapter 3, Hume’s historical narratives, including his conjectural histories, are most satiric—most given to the depiction of opposed extremes without any visible moderate norm—when his subject is religion, as in the Natural History. 4. In locating loss, and attempts to address such loss, at the heart of the historical project in the works discussed in this chapter, my account is consistent with the approach of two recent historiographers. Michel de Certeau argues that historical writing is ‘‘the endless effect of loss and debt, but it neither preserves nor restores an initial content as this is forever lost (forgotten) and represented only by substitutes that are inverted and transformed.’’ The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 323. While de Certeau analyzes the writing of history in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Jacques Rancie`re discerns a closely comparable foundation for history in Michelet and Romantic historiography: ‘‘There is history because there is a past and a specific passion for the past. And there is history because there is an absence of things in words, of the denominated in names.’’ The Names of History, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 63. 5. The jeremiad denounces the corruption of a people, and proclaims that their troubles in the present and future constitute punishments for their loss of

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virtue. Verse satire often takes the form of a sermon or harangue against contemporary cultural evils, presenting a monological attack on one set of cultural values and embracing its opposite. On the cultural uses of the jeremiad, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); for a study of the relation between satire and jeremiad, see Thomas Jemielity, Satire and the Hebrew Prophets (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), esp. 152–62 on Jeremiah and formal verse satire including Juvenal’s. 6. To draw such correspondences between history and literary form may appear to compromise the truth-claims of history. I do not deny that most historical narration is concerned to represent what has happened in a way that most fictions, including historical novels, are not. However, conjectural histories such as those of Rousseau, Ferguson, and Condorcet can have no access to records of the earliest events they seek to recount. They cannot depend on documents and related sources of evidence, as almost all other forms of history do, because their project requires imagining and reasoning about an earlier state of society, for which there may be little or no evidence and to which access can only be gained by inference. Philosophical histories do seek accurately to represent events in cultures for which there is extensive documentation. But such histories also seek to discover patterns in the developments they consider, and the patterns the historians believe they have found then shape the definition and presentation of their historical project. R. G. Collingwood bases much of his philosophy of history on the need for the historian imaginatively to reconstitute the past in order to give it narrative expression. See The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 282–302. 7. Jean Starobinski points out that the ideal of transparency in Rousseau is an originary state of natural self-sufficiency. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 22–26, and passim. Jacques Derrida argues that Rousseau identifies lost origins with the mother and with nature. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 141–52. 8. J. H. Brumfitt argues that as Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters compared contemporary France unfavorably with contemporary England, ‘‘the Sie`cle was to serve a similar purpose by emphasizing the achievement of the age of Louis XIV, the enlightened patron of the arts, and contrasting it with the artistic decadence and political inertia of the France of Louis XV.’’ Voltaire Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 48. 9. Hume’s History of England is a prominent philosophical history that has strong structural parallels with Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV. I do not discuss the History here largely because it confirms the thesis of this chapter about the tendency toward philosophical history in Britain, where the political public sphere is already strong, and I have devoted considerable attention to it in chapter 3. Little sense of cultural loss informs his History, which avoids both nostalgia and utopian longing; in terms of Kant’s analysis and the framework proposed in this chapter, therefore, the attitude of Hume’s historical narrative is neither antiquarian nor critical, but is balanced and complex. Like the History of England, even The Natural History of Religion, with its oscillation between polytheism and monotheism, gives no evidence of advance or decline. 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 12–22. 11. The ‘‘terroristic’’ attitude thus coincides with the view of Gulliver’s Houy-

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hnhnm master about human history in Gulliver’s Travels, 4, 7. See Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 179, and Werke, ed. Ernst Cassirer, 11 vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1912–22), 7:395. Further references to Kant in this chapter are to these editions. 12. There is an analogy between the conjectural historian’s attitude toward a past that he seeks either to recover or to deny and an individual’s attitude toward the death or loss of a loved or feared figure such as a parent. On mourning, and the melancholic avoidance of mourning, see Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’ in Collected Papers, ed. Joan Riviere, 5 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 4:152–70. 13. I would suggest that the construction of a unified and coherent historical narrative gives evidence of a process of working through excessive attachments or animosities to a balanced historical memory. For the concept of working through in relation to individual history and memory, see Freud, ‘‘Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through,’’ Collected Papers, 2:366–76. 14. Hume’s History of England, like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, offers an example of philosophical history in the moderate and ‘‘monumental’’ mode. Hume sees an improvement in conditions of material and moral life in modern European history, but he also regards such gains as tenuous and vulnerable; see chapter 3. 15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 115; Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Bibliothe` que de la Ple´ iade, 1959–1964), 3:171. Further references to the Discourse are to these editions. 16. By contrast, Paul de Man maintains that Rousseau does not view history as a decline, and that his text does not nostalgically wish for an uninterrupted state of plenitude before desire (‘‘The Rhetoric of Blindness,’’ in Blindness and Insight [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], 102–41, 122). To make his case, de Man posits a perfectly ‘‘non-blinded’’ author and a text that ‘‘has no blind spots’’ (139). The evidence of both parts of the Discourse points, however, to Rousseau’s dissatisfaction with the alienated condition of modern man and his nostalgia for an originary state. Rousseau’s portrayal of the natural animal-man in Part One is not a neutral and dispassionate representation of an earlier social form; rather, it constitutes an object of intense yearning by Rousseau because humans in such a state lack internal differentiation and are incapable of reflection. 17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 49. 18. Although he gives evidence of a strong strain of nostalgic regard both for the virtues of the Germans and for Rome’s republican past, Tacitus offers an example of a primitivist, to use A. O. Lovejoy’s term, who is not entirely nostalgic or melancholic. Lovejoy discusses the possibility of combining admiration for an early, savage people with respect for the accomplishments of a more recent period, such as the Roman republic. See his foreword to Lois Whitney’s Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), xiii. See also his Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), 1–11. In both these passages, Lovejoy draws a distinction between primitivist ideas and historical melancholy which parallels the distinction drawn here between Tacitus and Rousseau.

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19. See Use and Abuse, 5–8. 20. J. H. Brumfitt argues that Voltaire came to qualify, but not reverse, his original approval of the king and his time: ‘‘though Voltaire never condemns the age of Louis XIV, his early enthusiasm is tempered.’’ Voltaire Historian, 50. 21. Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques, ed. Rene´ Pomeau (Paris: Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1957), 606. References to this edition appear with the prefix OH. 22. Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV, trans. Martyn Pollack (London: Dent, 1966), 1. Further references to this edition appear in the text, followed by reference to the Oeuvres historiques. 23. Hume makes the same argument in his essay ‘‘On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences.’’ Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1987), 135–37. On this eighteenth-century commonplace that the arts must decline after having once reached perfection, see Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 153–54. 24. See Jean-Marie Roulin, ‘‘Le grand sie`cle au futur: Voltaire, de la prophe´tie ´epique a ` l’e´criture de l’histoire,’’ Revue d’Histoire Litte´raire de la France 96, no. 5 (1996): 918–33. 25. Brumfitt points out that during the composition of the Age of Louis XIV Voltaire’s ‘‘interest in the arts is tending to diminish, and his interest in ‘philosophy’ to increase’’ (49–50). 26. Voltaire’s position on the revocation in Louis XIV closely resembles that expressed by Montesquieu’s Usbek in Persian Letters (1721), Letter no. 85, where the Persian expulsion of the Armenians stands in for the French expulsion of the Huguenots. 27. Karen O’Brien notes that the originally published version of the Essai is not overwhelmingly satiric, but that the satire of superstition and injustice becomes much stronger in later editions. See Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 52. 28. The fact that Voltaire had little sympathy for the middle ages may have led, as Brumfitt says, to ‘‘a greater detachment and at times a certain superficiality. Yet it had its advantages. In the Essai, Voltaire is not constantly involved in comparisons with his own times; he has no ‘hero’ like Louis XIV’’ (62). O’Brien, in Narratives of Enlightenment, also points out that Voltaire does not regard Charlemagne as a heroic figure. 29. J. G. A. Pocock, Narratives of Civil Government, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 156. 30. Ibid., 87. 31. Ibid., 127. 32. On the doctrine of ‘‘the heterogeneity of ends’’ in the Scottish historians of the late eighteenth century, see Duncan Forbes, ‘‘ ‘Scientific Whiggism’: Adam Smith and John Millar,‘‘ The Cambridge Journal 7 (1954): 643–70, esp. 651–58. 33. Antoine-Nicholas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 92; Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progre`s de l’esprit humain (Paris: Boivin, 1933), 108. Further references to Condorcet are to these editions. 34. As Keith Michael Baker observes, the energy that Condorcet had to put into explaining the force of the obstacles to progress meant that the Sketch ‘‘came much closer to being a sociology of error than it did to a sociology of progress.’’

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Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 358. 35. Along similar lines, Baker argues that Condorcet’s extreme anticlericalism posed an obstacle to accurate historical understanding (Condorcet, 363). 36. On the close relations between satire and utopia, see Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 37. Palmeri, Satire in Narrative, 5–6. 38. As Judith Shklar formulates this point, beginning with Condorcet ‘‘the nineteenth-century imaginary society is not ‘nowhere’ historically. It is a future society.’’ ‘‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia,’’ Daedalus 94 (1965): 367–81, 375. 39. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 263. Further references to this edition appear in the text. 40. Ferguson implicitly favors, as Smith would soon propose, measures for the education of factory workers in order to counteract the stultifying effects of their work. 41. See Oz-Salzberger’s Introduction to the Cambridge edition of the Essay, 20. 42. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 1994), 1:56. Further references to this edition appear in the text. 43. J. G. A. Pocock analyzes some of the evidence for this argument in Gibbon’s history in ‘‘Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian,’’ Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. G. W. Bowersock, John Clive, and Stephen Braubard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 103–20. See also his Barbarism and Religion. 44. Pocock finds that Gibbon traces the earliest appearance of agriculture and commerce along with military and civic virtue in modern Europe to the Lombards in the twelfth century. ‘‘Gibbon and the Shepherds: The Stages of Society in the Decline and Fall,’’ Journal of the History of European Ideas 2 (1981): 193–202, esp. 199–200. 45. For an analysis of how Gibbon’s history accomplishes the work of mourning, see Palmeri, ‘‘History as Monument: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,’’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 225–45, esp. 241–43. 46. See the Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, ed. John, Lord Sheffield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 249. 47. Peter Cosgrove argues that although Gibbon is skeptical of romance, the conventions of the form underlie and give order to much of his narrative. Impartial Stranger: History and Intertextuality in Gibbon’s ‘‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’’ (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 132–59. 48. On this complication of the seamless harmony and transparency of the earlier volumes in the more complex, more undecided later volumes, see David Womersley, The Transformation of the ‘‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 169–81 and 226–33. Patricia Craddock also notes Gibbon’s increasingly complex sympathies in the last volumes and his retreat from a belief in the transparency of historical facts. Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 141, 186, 237.

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49. See Womersely, Transformation, 105–8. 50. Habermas writes that in Kant’s thought the public sphere is ‘‘the bridge between morality and politics.’’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 102. 51. Kant does not suggest suppressing positions based on superstition, zealotry, or feelings; rather, he maintains that such positions must be submitted to rational examination. 52. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and James Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 76. Kant quotes from the Tale in ‘‘Perpetual Peace’’ (102; 6:438). 53. Womersley provides a careful discussion of the penalties which Gibbon might have suffered if he were found to have written against God and religion. These consisted of exclusion from holding office, including a seat in Parliament or a sinecure with a lucrative stipend, such as the one Gibbon eventually obtained on the Board of Trade. The Transformation of the ‘‘Decline and Fall’’, 106–7. 54. As Womersley points out, Gibbon’s antagonists were confined to making attacks on the outworks of his position, his scholarship and accuracy, where his position was virtually impregnable; they were unable to attack him for the real subject of the dispute, his reduction of Christianity to a historical phenomenon. Transformation of the ‘‘Decline and Fall’’, 122. 55. See Reiss, introduction to Kant’s Political Writings, 2. 56. Habermas says that ‘‘the idea of the bourgeois public sphere attained its theoretically fully developed form with Kant’s elaboration of the principle of publicity,’’ Structural Transformation, 102. For a study of the development of a German Publikum in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, i.e., just preceding Kant’s attempts to formulate the requirement of rationality for such a public, see Benjamin W. Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). See also chapter 5. 57. The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace, 1976), introduction, n.p.

CONCLUSION 1. On this point, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 1987), 54, 64. 2. For a somewhat different emphasis—on the passivity of Scott’s protagonists—see Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). 3. Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 46 and passim. I am grateful to Hilda Smith for informing me about Wahrman’s book. 4. Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 13, 111, and passim. I am grateful to Margaret Waller for pointing out the relevance of Cohen’s book for my project. 5. This result is consistent with Godwin’s approach to Swift’s satire outside his fiction. In the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, written just before Caleb Williams, Godwin cites the Houyhnhnm assembly as a model institution of gov-

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ernment because it is founded on exhortations to reason rather than the use of force, and he credits Swift with ‘‘a more profound insight into the true principles of political justice’’ than any other writer. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 2:209. 6. Cohen finds that Balzac and Stendhal similarly attack the sentimental novel while making use of that form in their new realist novels. Sentimental Education of the Novel, 31.

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Index Abrams, M. H., 278 n. 36 accommodation: in Cleveland, 111, 113, 269; in Goethe and the Bildungsroman, 13, 172, 270; in Hume’s History of England, 300 n. 48; in philosophical history, 241, 257–58, 266; in Scott and the historical novel, 269. See also mediation, grounds of Addison, Joseph, 23 Agathon, History of (Wieland), 29, 33, 39, 41, 168–71, 185, 214–17; Agathon’s lack of autonomy, 170; and Fe´nelon, 169; and Goethe, 170; irony in, 176; narrator as historian in, 215; and Petronius, 169, 214, 307 n. 37, 308 n. 40; politics in, 215; role of pedagogue in, 169, 170; reduced utopia in, 170, 173; and Rousseau, 169–70; shift from satire to romance in, 169, 214–15; and Smollett, 315 n. 47; and Sterne, 308 n. 38; and Swift, 169. See also Bildungsroman; Emile; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Age of Louis XIV (Voltaire), 27–28, 233, 239–43; cultural history in, 240; and Gibbon, 244; golden ages in, 240–41; and Herodotus, 240; military history in, 241–42; and Montesquieu, 323 n. 26; as monumental history, 234; as philosophical history, 236, 241; role of religion in, 242; view of Louis XIV in, 241–43. See also Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; history, philosophical Alciphron (Berkeley), 295 n. 10 almanacs: conservatism of, 46; as encyclopedic, 45, 76; and essay form, 66, 69–70, 72–74, 285 n. 51; price of, 45; and shaping of citizens, 45. See also American Almanac; Merlinus Liber-

atus; Owles Almanac; Raven’s Almanac; Vox Stellarum almanacs, satiric, 39, 44–76; conceptions of history in, 44–45, 55; on deaths of almanac-makers, 58, 61; early tradition of, 47–51; and execution of Charles I, 54; leveling effect of, 47, 53–54; politics of, 74; and seventeenth-century paradigm, 73; utopian vision of, 74. See also Bickerstaff, Isaac; Comic Almanac; Merlinus Anonymous; Montelion; Pantegrueline Prognostication; Poor Richard; Poor Robin American Almanac, 63 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 12, 21 Armstrong, Nancy, 276 n. 12 Austen, Jane: Northanger Abbey, 229 Backscheider, Paula, 290 n. 27 Bacon, Francis, 285 n. 50 Bage, Robert: Hermsprong, 229 Baker, Keith Michael, 183, 323 n. 34 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 153, 196, 277 n. 20, 314 n. 42 Bayle, Pierre: Historical and Critical Dictionary, 12, 21, 24, 288 n. 1, 289 n. 17; relation to Encyclopedia and Spectator, 23 Beggar’s Opera (Gay), 187 Belphegor (Wezel), 33, 185, 317 n. 83 Bender, John, 176 n. 12 Benjamin, Walter, 20 Berkeley, George: Alciphron, 295 n. 10 Berlinische Monatsschrift, 183 Bickerstaff, Isaac [Jonathan Swift]: Predictions for the Year 1708, 44, 58– 63, 76; compared to Partridge, 60; on death of Partridge, 59, 61. See almanacs, satiric; Swift, Jonathan

347

348

INDEX

Bildungsroman, 13, 16, 153, 166–77; genealogies of, 167–68; and historical novel, 303 n. 73; irony in, 175–76; lack of autonomy in, 164–65, 170, 174, 177; and nineteenth-century paradigm, 28, 175–76; spiritual autobiography in, 172; utopias in, 309 n. 51. See also Agathon; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Blewett, David, 292 n. 47 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, viscount. See Craftsman Borges, Jorge Luis, 275 n. 3 Bourdieu, Pierre, 311 n. 8 Box, Mark, 296 n. 17 Braudy, Leo, 275 n. 7, 310 n. 56 Browne, Thomas: Religio Medici, 25 Burney, Frances, 32; shift from satire to novel, 229. See also Evelina Burton, Robert: Anatomy of Melancholy, 12, 21 Butler, Judith, 307 n. 31 Captain’s Daughter (Pushkin), 302 n. 69 Captain Singleton (Defoe), 94–95; geographical mobility in, 96; internal exile in, 97; piracy and business in, 97; tutor in, 95, 96–97 Carnochan, W. B., 274 n. 1 Carretta, Vincent, 274 n. 1, 287 n. 65 censorship, 49, 181, 184, 202, 212, 264– 65. See public spheres Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 18, 113 Charles I, king of England, 92, 136; contrasted with Gustavus Adolphus, 92 civic humanism, 297 n. 24, 306 n. 22 civil wars, English, 90, 92, 148–49, 290 n. 35; Clarendon’s history of, 90–91 Cleveland, Life of Mr. (Pre´vost), 39, 91, 108–13; accommodating of extremes, 104, 111, 113, 269; and Captain Singleton, 107; Jesuits in, 112, 113; misanthropy in, 109, 112, 113; moves toward Bildungsroman, 113; and Princesse de Cle`ves, 293 n. 65; religious extremes in, 111; and Robinson

Crusoe, 106; romance elements in, 106–7; spurious continuation of, 112–13; tutors in, 106, 111; utopias in, 100–102, 107–10, 111 Cockayne, Land of, 57, 70 Cohen, Margaret, 270 Colie, Rosalie, 278 n. 30 Collingwood, R. G., 321 n. 6 Colonel Jack (Defoe), 78, 98–100; and Bildungsroman, 103; and Courtilz’s memoir-novels, 98, 99; exile in, 100; and history, 99–100; surveillance in, 98, 100; tutors in, 95, 98 Comic Almanac, 75–76 Condorcet, Marie Jean de Caritat, marquis de, 244–48, 264. See also Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind conjectural history. See history, conjectural Cooper, James Fenimore: Last of the Mohicans, 302 n. 69 Cosgrove, Peter, 324 n. 47 counterpublic spheres, 182, 311 n. 14 Courtilz de Sandras, Gatien, 81–88, 268; relation to Montesquieu and Swift, 154. Works: Memoirs of Count de Rochefort, 82–83, 85; Memoirs of J. B. de La Fontaine, 82, 85; Mercure historique et politique, 81. See also Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan Craddock, Patricia, 324 n. 48 Craftsman (Bolingbroke): and idea of loyal opposition, 179, 192, 296 n. 19 cultural dominant, 19 d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 23 David Simple (Sarah Fielding): excluded middles in, 225–26; satire in, 226; reduced utopia in, 225 Davis, Herbert, 59 Davis, Lennard, 276 n. 12 de Certeau, Michel, 320 n. 4 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, History of the (Gibbon), 233, 254–58, 265, 267; on civic virtue, 254; and cultural paradigms, 257; on luxury, 254; as monumental history, 234, 258; as philosophical history, 236; on progress and loss in history, 253,

INDEX

255, 256; and romance, 257; and Roman empire, 254, 258; on tribal societies, 254–55; view of Christianity in, 255–57; and Voltaire, 244, 254. See also Age of Louis XIV; history, philosophical; melancholy, historical Defoe, Daniel, 39, 88–103, 268; conception of history, 102; inversions of secret history, 101; satiric and psychological histories by, 101; and wealth, 95, 100, 101–2. Works: Journal of the Plague Year, 91, 291 n. 42; Robinson Crusoe, 78, 113; Roxana, 101. See also Captain Singleton; Colonel Jack; Courtilz de Sandras, Gatien; Memoirs of a Cavalier de Graffigny, Franc¸oise: Letters from a Peruvian Woman, 162 Descartes, Rene´, 21 Diderot, Denis, 23, 185, 210–14; censorship of, 212; and Rousseau, 213; satire of civilization in, 212, 213; and Swift, 213; utopian vision of, 213. Works: Correspondence litte´raire, 212; Histoire des deux Indes, 213; Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘‘Voyage,’’ 33, 211, 212–13. See also Encyclopedia; Jacques the Fatalist; Sterne, Laurence; Wieland, Christoph Martin Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Rousseau), 158–61, 236–39; as antiquarian history, 234; and civic humanism, 306 n. 22; as conjectural history, 236–39; critique of civilization in, 158–59; and Gulliver’s Travels, 158–60, 304 n. 12; as jeremiad, 236, 239; and Juvenal’s satire, 305 n. 13; and Tacitus, 238; utopian vision in, 248; view of history in, 239 Douglas, Aileen, 314 n. 40 Dowling, William, 274 n. 1 Dryden, John: Absalom and Achitophel, 42 Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent, 229–30 Elliott, Robert C., 286 n. 54, 324 n. 36 Emile (Rousseau), 14, 153, 160–68, 170; and Colonel Jack, 305 n. 17; crit-

349

ical of satire, 160, 273; and cultural paradigms, 165; Emile’s lack of autonomy in, 164–65; excluded middles in, 160; and Gulliver’s Travels, 161–63; misanthropy in, 161, 162, 165; ‘‘Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,’’ 160–61; tutor in, 163– 64. See also Bildungsroman; Discourse on Inequality Emile and Sophie (Rousseau), 161, 167 Encyclopedia (Diderot and d’Alembert), 23, 24, 202 Enthusiasm (Schwa ¨rmerei), 168, 170, 262. See also superstition and enthusiasm Eovaai (Haywood): and the Craftsman, 224; and Discourse on Inequality, 224 Erasmus: Praise of Folly, 11–12 Essay on the History of Civil Society (Ferguson), 115, 142–45, 233, 250– 53, 265; and civic humanism, 143, 144; on commercial society, 144, 252; and cultural paradigms, 145; and division of labor, 252; and Hume, 251; on luxury, 251; and Mandeville, 145; on moderation, 143; on progress, 143, 253; and Rousseau, 145, 250– 51, 265, 304 n. 11; stages of history in, 117, 143; on tribal society, 250, 252 essay, periodical: and almanacs, 62, 66, 69–70, 72–73, 285 n. 51; and eighteenth-century paradigm, 23; and public sphere, 30, 179 Evelina (Burney), 228 excluded middles: in Bayle’s Dictionary, 21; in Cleveland, 110; in Hume’s histories of religion, 27, 134; in narrative satire, 12, 21, 43, 104, 116–17, 187, 201–3, 269; in secret histories, 26; in A Tale of a Tub, 25, 298 n. 32, 304 n. 6. See also mediation, grounds of; satire, narrative exile: in memoir-novels, 97, 100, 105, 106 Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 12, 37– 38, 115, 123–25, 145; conjectural history in, 125; and cultural paradigms,

350

INDEX

38, 125; historical progress in, 125; paradoxes in, 123; sociability in, 124; view of Sparta in, 124 Federalist, The, 31 Female Quixote (Lennox): and romances, 227; as satire, 226–27; and secret histories, 227 Fe´nelon: Telemachus, 107, 163, 166, 168 Ferguson, Adam, 40, 103, 142–45, 250– 53, 268. See also Essay on the History of Civil Society Fielding, Henry, 178, 186–94; shift from satire to novel, 181, 189–93, 269; and Swift, 313 n. 35. Works: Amelia, 192–93; Covent-Garden Journal, 313 n. 35; Jonathan Wild, 187–88; Joseph Andrews, 188–89; Journey from this World to the Next, 187. See also Tom Jones Fielding, Sarah: historical works by, 228. See also David Simple Foucault, Michel, 13, 15–20, 35–37; on epistemological frameworks, 13, 18–19; and Habermas, 34–37, 186; revisions of, 36. Works: Archaeology of Knowledge, 16; Discipline and Punish, 310 n. 55; History of Sexuality, 16; Order of Things, 15–16, 19, 20, 53. See also Habermas, Ju ¨ rgen; paradigms, cultural Franklin, Benjamin, 45, 63–66, 269; and Swift’s Bickerstaff papers, 63– 64, 272. See also Poor Richard Fraser, Nancy, 182 Fronde (French civil war), 78, 82, 86 Gallagher, Catherine, 221 Gay, John: Beggar’s Opera, 271 Gazette de Leyde, 183 genres: and cultural paradigms, 18, 25–29, 154, 268–73; as hybrids, 18, 32, 110; and public spheres, 14, 31, 180–82, 184, 205, 220–21, 224–30 Gestrich, Andreas, 183 Gibbon, Edward, 233, 253–58; Autobiography, 257–58. See also Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, History of the Gil Blas (Le Sage), 12, 38–39, 184; and

cultural paradigms, 39; shift from satire to novel in, 39 Gillespie, Gerald, 308 n. 44 Godwin, William: and Swift, 22, 271– 72, 325 n. 5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 28, 171– 77, 266, 268. See also Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Goldmann, Lucien, 20 Goldsmith, Oliver, 228, 319 n. 105 Goodman, Dena, 182 Gossman, Lionel, 305 n. 20, 306 n. 22 Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 76 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von: Adventurous Simplicissimus, 12, 167 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 12, 13, 40, 119–23, 155–57; and Discourse on Inequality, 158–60; and Emile, 161–63; excluded middles in, 120, 156, 304 n. 6; misanthropy in, 122; and Persian Letters, 156–57; view of history in, 121–22 Habermas, Ju ¨ rgen, 14, 29–37, 178–86, 220, 230; and Foucault, 34–37, 186; revisions of, 36. Works: Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 34; Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30, 178–79. See also Foucault, Michel; public spheres Hamilton, Elizabeth: Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 229 Hammond, Brean, 180 Haywood, Eliza: Love in Excess, 223; Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, 223. See also Eovaai Hazard, Paul, 288 n. 10 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24, 152; Phenomenology of Mind as Bildungsroman, 152, 303 n. 77 Herder, Johann Gottfrried von: Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 24 Hermsprong (Bage), 229 Historical and Critical Dictionary. See Bayle, Pierre historical memoir-novel. See memoirnovel, historical

INDEX

historical novel, 13, 16, 145–50; and Bildungsroman, 29, 150, 303 n. 73; moderation in, 148; progress in, 146, 148–49. See also Scott, Walter histories, secret, 26, 79–81; satiric effect of, 81 history and loss, 94, 103, 255–56, 320 n. 4, 322 n. 12. See also melancholy, historical history, conjectural, 13, 27, 34, 41–42, 244–49, 253, 259–61; in Condorcet’s Sketch, 245–49; definition of, 231; in Discourse on Inequality, 236–39; in Fable of the Bees, 38; and jeremiad, 232; in Natural History of Religion, 132–35; and public spheres, 232; satiric and utopian, 232, 266, 267. See also Condorcet, Marie Jean de Caritat; history, philosophical; Hume, David; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques History of England (Hume), 115, 135– 41, 148–49, 320 n. 3; on ancient constitution, 136, 137; and Decline and Fall, 300 n. 44; on moderate figures and positions, 135, 139–41; and Natural History of Religion, 140; as philosophical history, 135, 321 n. 9; on progress, 141; on Stuarts and Tudors, 136–38; on superstition and enthusiasm, 140, 300 n. 47; on Whigs and Tories, 137–38. See also history, philosophical history of genres: in Britain and on continent, 14–15, 29–30, 41, 178–82, 203–4, 264–65. See also uneven development history, philosophical, 27, 41–42, 232, 236, 241; in Age of Louis XIV, 241, 243; in Decline and Fall, 236; definition of, 232; in Hume’s History of England, 135; and middle grounds, 140, 232, 241, 266. See also history, conjectural history, providential, 320 n. 1 Holcroft, Thomas: Hugh Trevor, 229 Hume, David, 126–42, 266, 268–69, 320 n. 3; and eighteenth-century paradigm, 127, 151; and essay form, 127; and Fable of the Bees, 130; on luxury, 128–29; on middle class, 128;

351

and paradoxes, 126, 130; on progress, 128, 141, 151, 320 n. 3; and satire, 127, 272; on superstition and enthusiasm, 132; and Swift, 130–31, 297 n. 29, 300 n. 47. Works: Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 298 n. 33; Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 126, 29; Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 127– 32. See also History of England; Natural History of Religion Humphry Clinker (Smollett), 41; moderation in, 200; and public spheres, 200; satire of women in, 201 Hunter, J. Paul, 180, 283 n. 31, 310 n. 7 Inchbald, Elizabeth: Nature and Art, 32, 229 Jacques the Fatalist (Diderot), 29, 210–12; and Montaigne, 316 n. 71; narrator as historian in, 211; satire in, 210, 212; and Tristram Shandy, 205–6 James II, king of England, 60, 137–38 Jameson, Fredric, 17, 19, 277 n. 20 jeremiad, 232, 239, 320 n. 5 Job: in Cecilia and Vicar of Wakefield, 318 n. 97; in David Simple, 225 Jost, Franc¸ois, 309 n. 47 Kant, Immanuel, 233–35, 258–66; censorship of, 265–66; and Condorcet, 266; and cultural paradigms, 259; on extremes, 262–63; and history, 234–35; and Hume, 262; and Montaigne, 260; on public spheres, 262–64; republicanism of, 260; satire in, 260–61; sociability in, 259; and Swift, 261, 263–64; utopian vision of, 260–61. Works: ‘‘Idea for a Universal History,’’ 233, 259; ‘‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?’’ 233, 261; ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ 259–61; ‘‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’’ 235, 262–64, 265. See also public spheres; superstition and enthusiasm; Swift, Jonathan Kelly, Ann Cline, 281 n. 56

352

INDEX

Kenshur, Oscar, 282 n. 23, 304 n. 4, 316 n. 62 Kernan, Alvin, 295 n. 4 Kuhn, Thomas, 15 Laclau, Ernesto: and Chantal Mouffe, 31 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de: Liaisons Dangereuses, 185 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de: and Cleveland, 293 n. 65; Princesse de Cle`ves, 79–81, 87; Princesse de Montpensier, 79–80 La Fontaine, Jean de: Fables, 26, 271 Landes, Joan, 182 Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), 302 n. 69 Le Guin, Ursula, 267 Lennox, Charlotte, 227–28; historical writing of, 227. See also Female Quixote Le Sage, Alain Rene´. See Gil Blas Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Hamburg Dramaturgy, 32 Levine, Joseph, 275 n. 7, 279 n. 42 Liaisons Dangereuses (Laclos), 185 Licensing Act (1695), 181 Lilly, William, 46, 48 Lockwood, Thomas, 274 n. 1 Lovejoy, A. O., 322 n. 18 Lucian of Samosata, 298 n. 34, 317 n. 82 ´cs, Georg, 40, 302 n. 68 Luka luxury: in Ferguson, 251; in Gibbon, 254; in Hume, 128–29; in Mandeville, 124; in Montesquieu, 158 Mandeville, Bernard, 37–38, 116, 123– 25. See also Fable of the Bees Manley, Mary Delarivier, 222–23; imprisonment of, 223. Works: Adventures of Rivella, 223; Memoirs of Europe, 223; Secret History of Queen Zarah, 222. See also New Atalantis Markley, Robert, 316 n. 69 Marvell, Andrew: The Rehearsal Transpros’d, 42 Marx, Karl, 16 May, Georges, 88, 289 n. 15, 312 n. 18

Mayer, Robert, 278 n. 32 mediation, grounds of, 12, 41, 269; in Bildungsromane, 172, 270; in Cleveland, 104, 106, 111; in cultural paradigms, 22; in Fielding’s novels, 188–90; in Hegel’s dialectic, 24; in historical novels, 29, 147–48; in philosophical history, 241, 257–58, 266. See also accommodation; excluded middles melancholy, historical, 94, 103, 258 memoir-novel, historical, 39, 77–78, 82–83, 91, 102–4; and history, 89–94; and loss, 94, 103; and picaresque, 290 n. 27; as revision of secret histories, 102. See also Courtilz de Sandras, Gatien Memoirs of a Cavalier (Defoe), 78, 89– 94, 96, 102; and Journal of the Plague Year, 291 n. 42; and Memoirs of d’Artagnan, 91, 94; and Old Mortality, 93; political moderation in, 93; and previous histories, 90; superstition in, 94 Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan (Courtilz de Sandras), 39, 53, 78, 82–88, 95; and history, 87; patronage in, 84–85 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton), 229 Mercier, Louis Sebastien: The Year 2440, 248, 267 Merlinus Anonymous (almanac), 48– 49, 51; censorship of, 49; parodic feast days in, 49 Merlinus Liberatus (almanac), 60–62; advertisements in, 62; politics of, 60, 62. See also Partridge, John Miller, D. A., 276 n. 12 misanthropy: benevolent, in Smollett, 297 n. 26; in Gulliver’s Travels, 122; in Old Mortality, 149; opposed to commercial society, 32, 172; turn from, in Agathon, 169; turn from, in Cleveland, 109, 112, 113; turn from, in Emile, 161–62, 165. See also sociability Montaigne, Michel de, 285 n. 50, 316 n. 71 Montelion (almanac), 49–51; satire of the Rump Parliament, 50

INDEX

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 155–58. See also Persian Letters Moretti, Franco, 275 n. 6, 310 n. 55 Mouffe, Chantal. See Laclau, Ernesto narrative satire. See satire, narrative Native Americans: in Ferguson, 144; in Gibbon, 265; in Pre´vost, 108–9; in Rousseau, 161; in Smollett, 199 Natural History of Religion (Hume) 27, 40, 132–35; as conjectural history, 133, 135; polytheism and theism in, 134; as satire, 132, 134, 272; and A Tale of a Tub, 133 Nature and Art (Inchbald), 32, 229 New Atalantis (Delarivier Manley), 12, 219, 222–23; excluded middles, 223; and Petronius, 222; and Sterne, 222 New, Melvyn, 316 n. 68 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 273; and history, 234 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 229 novel, 12, 14–15; comic realistic, 26, 29, 32; of education, 168; epistolary, 30; Gothic, 18; moderation in, 13–14, 190; narrator as historian in, 190, 211, 215; and ‘‘novelization,’’ 180; proscription of, in France, 184; as public history of private life, 190. See also Bildungsroman; memoir-novel, historical; historical novel O’Brien, Karen, 300 n. 47 Old Mortality (Scott), 40, 115, 146–49; extremists and moderates in, 146– 48, 150; and Kant, 264; misanthropy in, 149; and A Tale of a Tub, 147, 149 opposition, loyal, 179, 184, 192. See also Craftsman Owles Almanac, 282 n. 16 Pantegrueline prognostication (almanac) 47–48, 51, 63. See also Rabelais, Franc¸ois paradigms, cultural 13, 15–20, 154; defined, 15; overlapping of, 154; and public spheres, 186; relation to genres, 18, 25–29, 154, 268–73; sequence of, 19. See also Foucault, Mi-

353

chel; public spheres; uneven development paradigm, eighteenth-century, 13, 21– 23, 73, 154, 268; and mediation, 172, 270; and sociability, 117; uncertainty of progress in, 117, 142. See also Encyclopedia; Hume, David; Spectator; Voltaire paradigm, nineteenth-century, 13, 23– 24, 154, 268; historical progress in, 117; and mediation, 151; organic growth in, 24, 115, 154, 156, 176, 268. See also Bildungsroman; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Scott, Walter; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship paradigm, seventeenth-century, 13, 20–21, 25–26, 154; and excluded middles, 117, 269; lack of progress in, 120; and satiric almanacs, 73. See also Bayle, Pierre; Fable of the Bees; Tale of a Tub, A Partridge, John, 46, 59–62; compared to Bickerstaff, 60. See also Merlinus Liberatus Pascal, Blaise: and hidden God, 24; and tragic satire, 279 n. 41 Paulson, Ronald, 12, 280 n. 47, 285 n. 48, 290 n. 31, 312 n. 19 Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 12, 155–58, 323 n. 26; extremes in, 156; and Gulliver’s Travels, 156–58; on luxury, 158 Petronius: in Manley, 222; in Sterne, 207; in Wieland, 169, 214, 308 n. 40 Phiddian, Robert, 62 Phillips, Mark, 299 n. 40 philosophical history. See history, philosophical picaresque: and historical memoir-novels, 83, 290 n. 27 Pocock, J. G. A., 244, 297 n. 24, 299 n. 36 Poor Richard (almanac), 39, 44, 63–66, 76; and Bickerstaff’s Predictions, 63–65; essays in, 66; politics of, 66, 76; Poor Richard improved, 66–67; and Poor Robin, 65; price of, 45. See also Bickerstaff, Isaac; Franklin, Benjamin

354

INDEX

Poor Robin (almanac), 39, 44, 51–58, 70–72, 75; on execution of Charles I, 54; and history, 55; moral sayings in, 56–57; parodic calendar in, 51–53, 56; politics of, 54, 76; and satire, 56– 57, 70–71, 72; and Spectator, 72; and Swift, 284 n. 36; utopian vision in, 57, 70. See also almanacs, satiric Pope, Alexander: Dunciad, 42 Popkin, Jeremy, 182 Potkay, Adam, 297 n. 29, 301 n. 56 Pre´vost, Antoine Franc¸ois (abbe´), 32, 104–13, 154, 269. Works: Adventures of Robert Lade, 78; History of Marguerite d’Anjou, 78. See also Cleveland, Life of Mr. Price, Martin, 304 n. 6 progress: in Condorcet, 245–48; in Ferguson, 143–45, 252–53; in Gibbon, 253–56; in Hegel, 24, 151–52; in Hume, 141–42; in Kant, 234–35, 258–61; in Mandeville, 125; in Rousseau, 159, 237–39; in Scott, 146, 148, 149; in Swift, 120–22; in Voltaire, 242–44 public spheres, 29–34, 191–93, 202–4, 212–14, 224–26, 262–66; cultural, 30, 177, 179, 185, 220; and cultural paradigms, 186; in England, 180–82; in France, 182–84, 202–3, 204, 213; in Germany, 183–84, 216–17; limitations of, 31, 179, 221, 314 n. 35; plural, 180, 185; political, 30, 41, 200; and satire, 14, 31, 180–82, 184, 191; uneven development of, 184–85, 264, 268; unitary, 32–33, 180, 184, 264. See also censorship; counterpublic spheres; Habermas, Ju ¨ rgen; Kant, Immanuel; opposition, loyal Pushkin, Alexander: Captain’s Daughter, 302 n. 69 Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 47–48, 58; and early satiric almanac, 51; Gargantua and Pantagruel, 12, 53. See also Pantegrueline prognostication Raven’s Almanac, 282 n. 16 Rawson, Claude, 275 n. 4 Religio Medici (Browne), 25 Richetti, John, 292 nn. 50 and 52

romance form, 79; in Cleveland, 104, 106–7, 111; in Decline and Fall, 257, 324 n. 47; in Female Quixote, 319 n. 98; in Ferdinand Count Fathom, 196–97; in France, 79 romantic irony, 176, 209 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 158–67, 175– 76, 236–39, 272; censorship of, 264–65; and Swift, 304 n. 12. Works: Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 14, 176, 232, 236; Social Contract, 176, 238. See also Bildungsroman; Discourse on Inequality; Emile; Emile and Sophie; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; history, conjectural salons, 182–83 satire, narrative: and British women writers 185–86, 220–30; and conjectural history, 232, 238; definition of, 11–12, 25; in England, 12, 33, 185– 201, 205–10, 269, 273; excluded middles in, 12, 21, 43, 116–17, 187, 223; in France and Germany, 12, 33, 185, 201–5, 210–20; lack of progress in, 120–22; opposition to, 127, 160, 272–73; and public spheres, 180, 191–94, 197–98, 202–5, 210, 212–14, 217–20; and utopia, 246–49. See also excluded middles; paradigms, cultural; public spheres; Swift, Jonathan satire, shift from, to conjectural history: in Condorcet’s Sketch, 233, 245–48; in Discourse on Inequality, 153, 158–60; in Emile, 160–65; in Fable of the Bees, 38, 115, 125; in Natural History of Religion, 132, 134, 272 satire, shift from, to novel or romance: in Agathon, 169, 214; in Decline and Fall, 257; in Fielding, 189–94; in Gil Blas, 38–39, 181; in Smollett, 194– 200; in Sterne, 181, 209–10 satire, shift from, to philosophical history: in Age of Louis XIV, 241–43; in Decline and Fall, 256–57; in Hume’s History of England, 135–41 satire, verse, 11, 274 n. 1

INDEX

Scott, Walter, 29, 40, 145–51, 268; accommodation in, 269; and civil conflicts, 148–49; and Hume, 303 n. 75; and nineteenth-century paradigm, 151; on progress, 146, 148; and stages of history, 145, 150; and Virgil, 303 n. 70. Works: Rob Roy, 302 n. 67; Waverley, 29, 150–51. See also historical novel, Old Mortality secret histories. See histories, secret Seidel, Michael, 295 n. 5 Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 209–10 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of, 280 n. 55 Shklar, Judith, 306 n. 22 Showalter, English, 184 Simplicissimus, Adventurous (Grimmelshausen), 12, 167 Siskin, Clifford, 310 n. 5 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Condorcet), 233, 244–48; as jeremiad, 248; and Nietzsche, 245; and Rousseau, 245, 246, 248; utopian vision in, 247–48; view of progress in, 245–48; and Voltaire, 246 Smith, Adam, 103, 143; Theory of the Moral Sentiments, 131; Wealth of Nations, 24 Smollett, Tobias, 178, 194–201; and public spheres, 198, 319 n. 105; shift from satire to novel, 181, 195–200. Works: Briton, 197–98; Critical Journal, 197; Ferdinand Count Fathom, 196–97; History and Adventures of an Atom, 198; History of England, 198; Launcelot Greaves, 198; Peregrine Pickle, 196; Roderick Random, 195–96. See also Humphry Clinker sociability, 22, 116, 142, 296 n. 22; and commercial society, 132; Kant on, 259; Rousseau on, 305 n. 18. See also misanthropy Spacks, Patricia, 319 n. 100 Sparta: in Ferguson, 144, 251; in Mandeville, 124; in Rousseau, 237 Spectator, 23, 181, 183; and eighteenth-century paradigm, 23; and

355

public spheres, 30, 31, 179. See also essay, periodical spiritual autobiography: in Bildungsromane, 170, 172 Starobinski, Jean, 321 n. 7 Stationers’ Company, 44, 57 Steele, Richard, 23, 62, 88 Sterne, Laurence, 205–11; and public spheres, 319 n. 105; shift from satire to novel, 181, 209; use of romantic irony, 209. See also Diderot, Denis; Sentimental Journey; Tristram Shandy; Wieland, Christoph Martin Stewart, Philip, 289 n. 15 subjectification: in Bildungsromane, 164, 174 superstition and enthusiasm: in Kant, 263; in Natural History of Religion, 134, 140; in Old Mortality, 148; in A Tale of a Tub, 118–19, 121. See also excluded middles surveillance, 98, 100–101, 105, 310 n. 56 Swift, Jonathan, 42–43, 58–63, 116– 23, 155–58, 271–72; and Fielding, 313 n. 35; and Godwin, 22, 271–72; and Hume, 297 n. 29; importance of, 42; and Kant, 263–64; and Poor Robin, 284 n. 36. Works: Battle of the Books, 298 n. 33; Conduct of the Allies, 297 n. 29; Contests and Dissensions in Ancient Greece and Rome, 295 n. 7; Four Last Years of the Queen, 295 n. 7, 297 n. 29; ‘‘Modest Proposal,’’ 313 n. 35; Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff, 44, 58–63, 76. See also Bickerstaff, Isaac; Gulliver’s Travels; Hume, David; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; satire, narrative; Tale of a Tub, A Tale of a Tub, A (Swift), 12, 25, 40, 62, 117–19, 120–21, 273; excluded middles in, 118–19; and history, 121; and Kant, 263–64; and public spheres, 264; and Scott, 147, 149; and seventeenth-century paradigm, 151; superstition and enthusiasm in, 117–19, 121 Tatler, 62, 88, 179, 183

356

INDEX

Telemachus (Fe´nelon), 107, 163, 166, 168 Teutscher Merkur (Wieland), 183, 217 Thucydides, 299 n. 40, 320 n. 1 Tom Jones (Fielding), 26–27, 181, 189–91; mediation in, 189–90; narrator as historian in, 190; as public history of private life, 190 travel narratives, 77; in Captain Singleton, 96–97; in Cleveland, 105, 107 tribal societies, 250, 252, 254 Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 29, 41, 185, 205–9; and Diderot, 205–6, 210–11; digressions in, 206; history in, 207–9; irony in, 206, 208; and Petronius, 207; satiric leveling in, 206–7; and Wieland, 205–6, 210, 214–15 tutors: in Agathon, 169–70; in Captain Singleton, 95, 96–97; in Cleveland, 106–11; in Colonel Jack, 95, 98; in Emile, 163–64. See also Bildungsroman; surveillance Twain, Mark, 274 n. 3 uneven development: of cultural paradigms, 17–18, 154–55; of public spheres, 12, 16–17, 178, 184–85, 264, 268 utopias, 248–49; in Bildungsromane, 309 n. 51; in Candide, 249; in Cleveland, 107–9; in Condorcet’s Sketch, 247–48; in conjectural histories, 249; in Discourse on Inequality, 248; in Kant’s ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ 260; reduced, 40, 173, 294 n. 72, 309 n. 49; and satire, 232, 235, 246–49; in satiric almanacs, 47; spatial and temporal, 249; in Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘‘Voyage,’’ 213 Villedieu, Mme de (Marie-Catherine Desjardins): Disorders of Love, 79–80 Voltaire (Franc¸ois Marie Arouet), 185, 240–44, 264, 267; censorship of, 202, 240, 265; and eighteenth-century paradigm, 171; and Pre´vost, 316 n.

58; on progress, 242–44; and public opinion, 202; and satiric form, 205; view of novels, 201–2. Works: Candide, 203–4; Essai sur les moeurs, 243–44; Ingenu, 33, 204; Philosophical Dictionary, 203; Philosophical Letters, 201; Zadig, 201, 203. See also Age of Louis XIV; history, philosophical; public spheres Vox Stellarum (almanac), 67–72, 75; essays in, 69–70; politics of, 67–68, 71; and Poor Richard improved, 69; and Poor Robin, 70 Wahrman, Dror, 270 Warner, William B., 221 Welsh, Alexander, 302 n. 66 Wezel, Johann Karl: Belphegor, 33, 185; and Swift, 317 n. 84 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 168–71, 214–20; and Diderot, 217; and Manley, 219; and public spheres, 217; and satire, 217–19; and Sterne, 317 n. 81; and Swift, 219; utopian vision of, 218. Works: History of the Abderites, 33, 218–19; Socrates out of his Senses, 33, 217–18. See also Agathon, History of; Bildungsroman; Sterne, Laurence; Teutscher Merkur Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe), 14, 28, 40, 153, 171–77; and cultural paradigms, 175; irony in, 175; and Rousseau, 175; and satire, 171, 172; and Swift, 175; Wilhelm’s lack of autonomy, 174. See also Bildungsroman; Emile William III, king of England, 148 Williams, Raymond, 17, 217 n. 16 women writers, British, 220–30; censorship of, 224, 226, 230; and public spheres, 221, 224, 226–27, 230; and satire, 32, 222–30 Womersley, David, 324 n. 48, 325 n. 53 Year 2440, The (Mercier), 248, 267 Zimmerman, Everett, 292 n. 46