Common Sense in Early 18th-Century British Literature and Culture: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics, 1680–1750 9783110343403, 9783110343359

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
1 The Discourse of Common Sense
1.1 The Argument: Common Sense as Compensation
1.2 A Short History of Common Sense in Philosophy and Criticism
1.3 The Discursive Formation of Early Eighteenth-Century Common Sense
2 The Ethics of Common Sense
2.1 Good Sense and Good Taste: The Common-Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics – Shaftesbury and Pope
2.2 Perversions of Moral Sense – The Fable of the Bees
2.3 Life Ethic and Happiness – Samuel Johnson and Rasselas
3 The Transgressions of Common Sense
3.1 “These Arrows that fly in the Dark”: Approaching Augustan Satire and Common Sense
3.2 “Good Sense Defaced”: Enthusiasm and False Learning – A Tale of a Tub and Peri Bathous
3.3 Human Nature, Reason, and Madness – A Satyr against Reason and Mankind, Gulliver’s Travels, and An Essay on Man
4 The Politics of Common Sense
4.1 The Birth of Common Sense Discourse from the Spirit of Patriotism
4.2 English Common Sense Personified – Pasquin and the Many Lives of Common Sense
4.3 Nationalist Common Sense: Liberty and Revolution
5 The Other of Common Sense
5.1 The Foreign Other – Robinson Crusoe and The Citizen of the World
5.2 The Female Other – The Rape of the Lock
6 The Afterlife of Common Sense
Bibliography
1 Abbreviated Source References
2 Historical Sources
3 Critical Sources
Author and Title Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Christoph Henke Common Sense in Early 18th-Century British Literature and Culture

Buchreihe der ANGLIA/ ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 46

Christoph Henke

Common Sense in Early 18th-Century British Literature and Culture Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics, 1680–1750

For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/36292

ISBN 978-3-11-034335-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-034340-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039497-9 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Konrad Triltsch Print und digitale Medien GmbH, Ochsenfurt Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface What does English professional football in the twenty-first century have in common with notions of common sense popular some three-hundred years before? Not much at first sight. However, at times even sports reports and commentaries about the ‘Beautiful Game’ in the British media reveal the persistence of a discursive tradition that emerged in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In a 2010 article for the football-tactics column “The Question” on the website of the British broadsheet The Guardian, Jonathan Wilson, a syndicated sports journalist for several newspapers and sports magazines, commented on the seemingly tactics-free approach to football by Harry Redknapp, at the time manager of the English Premier League outfit Tottenham Hotspur F.C. Pursuing the question whether “’Arry” Redknapp is “winging it tactically,” Wilson reviewed the popular manager’s aversion to intellectualizing the tactics of what is after all an essentially simple sport – despite all modern trends of sophisticated tactical debate in football journalism, computerized match analyses, scientific monitoring of players’ fitness values, and ever more refined match statistics. The author regarded this anti-theoretical stance not only as part of a specifically English football tradition, which he called the “Clough paradigm” (referring to the iconic Derby County and Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough), but also as deeply entrenched in the general cultural tradition of English anti-intellectualism: “In his suspicion of theory, Redknapp comes from a long English tradition that extends far beyond football. ‘Our habits or the nature of our temperament do not in the least draw us towards general ideas,’ as John Stuart Mill put it” (Wilson 2010). Of course, the talk of such an anti-theory tradition goes further back than just Victorian times. Arthur O. Lovejoy once famously called it “rationalistic anti-intellectualism” (Lovejoy 1970: 85) and placed its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when this attitude emerged as the specific character of Enlightenment thought in Britain. While Lovejoy saw the historical roots of British anti-intellectualism in a marriage of deism and classicism, philosophical empiricism in the wake of Bacon, Hobbes, and especially Locke has been given even greater emphasis in this regard. For example, the late Antony Easthope, in his last major book Englishness and National Culture, characterized English culture as “essentially empiricist” (Easthope 1999: ix). His Foucauldian approach allowed him to analyse a wide variety of texts from English culture not only where these come to an awareness of their empiricist preference for observable fact (and aversion to abstract theory and systems) – such as Wilson’s piece about the traditional English aversion to tactical strategies in football –, but also where the culturally dominant discourse of empiricism speaks through them un-

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wittingly: “This means that often today when English people (journalists, historians, novelists, poets, comic writers and others) think they are speaking in their own voices, in fact the discourse of an empiricist tradition is speaking for them” (Easthope 1999: ix). In the present study a similar approach will be adopted, even though my accentuation will differ from Easthope’s in that I view ‘English common sense’ (merely a corollary to the empiricist tradition for Easthope) as a major discursive formation in its own right. Its continuing grasp on self-concepts of Englishness and Britishness can be felt throughout the centuries up to the present day. Common sense commonly implies the ability to judge soundly and rather intuitively on practical matters of life. An abstract theory, system, or worldview will only impair or distort one’s ability to assess a situation correctly and act accordingly. George Orwell once sneered that “the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’” (Orwell 1962: 12). Jeremy Paxman, in a similar vein, described the English national character as being indifferent to theory or ideology, and blamed English empiricism and utilitarianism for it: “It is an approach which is empirical and reconciling and the only ideology it believes in is Common Sense. The English mind prefers utilitarian things to ideas” (Paxman 1998: 193). What Paxman calls “reconciling” points to another national cliché that is associated with English common sense: a sense of moderation, compromise, treading a middle ground and avoiding extreme positions. Peter Ackroyd has tried to explain similar observations by resorting to early English history: “The power of Anglo-Saxon culture springs in part from absorption and assimilation […]. This has been the pattern of the centuries, and indeed it can be maintained that English art and English literature are formed out of inspired adaptation; like the language, and like the inhabitants of the nation itself, they represent the apotheosis of the mixed style” (Ackroyd 2002: xxi). All these views are of course oversimplifications, feeding off – and feeding right back into – a store of loosely integrated and imperceptibly shifting identity traits that have been perpetuated by discourses of national character over centuries. I will argue here that the foundations for many of these stereotypical selfimages (and corresponding hetero-images held about the English by people from other countries) were laid in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through the emergence of a discourse of common sense in a specific historical situation under specific cultural conditions. This talk of common sense initially had very little to do with national character; only by continual reinforcement of discursive patterns in English cultural life and from a conducive political constellation in the late 1730s did this discourse, rather arbitrarily, begin to be firmly associated with Englishness and, by extension, Britishness. To retrace the emergence of this constant, but often also contradictory talking about and

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referring to a common or good sense, its variety and adaptability to very different situations and subject matters, as well as the role of literary texts in the dissemination of such talk – this is what interested me in this topic a long time ago. Here is what has come of it. A note on textual editions of historical texts: Besides my own research in the British Library, I have used electronic facsimile copies of many eighteenth-century texts as they have been made available in several well-known online databases in the field: Eighteenth Century Collections Online and 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers (both by Gale Cengage Learning), Eighteenth Century Journals (by Adam Matthew Digital), as well as the Internet Library of Early Journals (by the Bodleian). These invaluable tools for eighteenth-century scholars have provided me with many otherwise inaccessible texts. For convenience’s sake, I have refrained from citing electronic file references to any of these facsimiles – anybody can find them very easily in these databases. Earlier versions of sections 1, 2, and 3 of chapter II appeared as (respectively): “Before the Aesthetic Turn: The Common-Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics in Shaftesbury and Pope,” Anglia 129.1 (2011); “Pernicious Reason and Good Sense: Ethics and Common Sense in Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and Samuel Johnson’s Writings,” Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings, eds. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt (Trier, 2009); and “Life Spirals and CommonSense Aporias: Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas Revisited,” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 9 (2009). Section 2 of chapter III as well as chapter VI contain several passages and ideas that were previously published in “Self-Reflexivity and Common Sense in A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy: Eighteenth-Century Satire and the Novel,” Self-Reflexivity in Literature, eds. Werner Huber, Martin Middeke and Hubert Zapf (Würzburg, 2005). Finally, many people deserve my thanks for inspiring, supporting, enduring, or simply accompanying me on this long journey, which came to a temporary halt when an earlier version of this book was submitted for formal examination as a Habilitationsschrift in 2011, and which has now ended in the book you are holding in your hands (or reading on a screen). I am most grateful to Martin Middeke (Augsburg) for having been an inspiring and extremely supportive advisor to this project; Rolf Breuer (Paderborn) for having been a helpful mentor at its earliest stage; Albert Kümmel-Schnur (Constance) for his intellectual midwifery in a café in Berlin over a decade ago; Mel New (Florida) for continued support and inspiration; Monika Fludernik (Freiburg) for helpful suggestions for improving the book; the Augsburg Oberseminar for lively and fruitful discussion; Georg Hauzenberger (Augsburg) for providing me with important textual access; the entire Augsburg team of Martin Riedelsheimer, Anja Haslinger, Elisabeth Schmitt, Christina Schönberger and Korbinian Stöckl, as well as the editorial staff at De

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Gruyter, for their inestimable help on preparing the manuscript for publication (all remaining errors are entirely my own fault); my parents, for their unconditional support all through the years; and especially Alisa, Daniel, Sophie, and Shakespeare, for having put up with me and supporting me despite all the sacrifices they have had to make. I dedicate this book to Alisa – she knows she deserves it most. C.H. (Augsburg, May 2014)

Contents List of Illustrations

XI

 . . .

1 The Discourse of Common Sense 3 The Argument: Common Sense as Compensation A Short History of Common Sense in Philosophy and Criticism The Discursive Formation of Early Eighteenth-Century Common 30 Sense

 .

44 The Ethics of Common Sense Good Sense and Good Taste: The Common-Sense Union of Ethics 45 and Aesthetics – Shaftesbury and Pope 63 Perversions of Moral Sense – The Fable of the Bees 78 Life Ethic and Happiness – Samuel Johnson and Rasselas

. .  . . .

 . . .  .

9

The Transgressions of Common Sense 95 “These Arrows that fly in the Dark”: Approaching Augustan Satire 98 and Common Sense “Good Sense Defaced”: Enthusiasm and False Learning – A Tale of a 104 Tub and Peri Bathous Human Nature, Reason, and Madness – A Satyr against Reason and 128 Mankind, Gulliver’s Travels, and An Essay on Man The Politics of Common Sense 165 The Birth of Common Sense Discourse from the Spirit 167 of Patriotism English Common Sense Personified – Pasquin and the Many Lives of Common Sense 186 212 Nationalist Common Sense: Liberty and Revolution

.

The Other of Common Sense 227 The Foreign Other – Robinson Crusoe and The Citizen of the 228 World The Female Other – The Rape of the Lock 251



The Afterlife of Common Sense

276

X

Contents

Bibliography 287  Abbreviated Source References 288  Historical Sources 293  Critical Sources Author and Title Index Subject Index

309

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287

List of Illustrations Image 1: “The Judgment of the Queen of Common Sense,” anonymous 18th-century print (British Museum) Image 2: “The Festival of the Golden Rump,” anonymous print (The Craftsman, 28 May 1737; courtesy of The Walpole Library, Yale University) Image 3: “The Contrast,” by Thomas Rowlandson (1792, courtesy of Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014) Image 4: “The Contrast,” anonymous print (The Antigallican Songster no. 2, 1793, frontispiece)

1 The Discourse of Common Sense Come, Common-Sense, you are to awake and rub your Eyes. (Fielding 2011: 299)

1737 was an annus horribilis for the playwright Henry Fielding. His corrosively satiric plays from that year, The Historical Register for the Year 1736 and Eurydice Hissed, had offered substantial grounds for the Walpole ministry’s decision to introduce a new act for the licensing of stage plays in June 1737, which put a temporary end to the political opposition from the English theatre stage and effectively choked Fielding’s career as a dramatic author.¹ 1737, however, was an annus mirabilis for what I will henceforth refer to as British common sense discourse. The Lords Chesterfield and Lyttelton, together with the Irishman Charles Molloy and others, founded the oppositional weekly Common Sense: or, The Englishman’s Journal, the title of which was inspired by the allegorical depiction of common sense as the Queen of England in Fielding’s 1736 play Pasquin. ² Together with The Craftsman, Common Sense soon became the most important oppositional weekly in the politically combustive scene of 1730s London – a place of lively political discourse fuelled by the policies and demeanour of the controversial de facto prime minister, Robert Walpole, and propelled by innumerable newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets.³ The Common Sense weekly (just like the spin-off journal Old Common Sense – both papers existed side-by-side for almost two years after internal quarrels with the publisher had led to a division between the writers involved) was by no means exceptional in this respect. The paper’s title, however, already hints at the significance that common sense discourse had gained by that time. Chesterfield, apparently the author

 The notion, instigated by Fielding’s contemporaries and perpetuated in many of today’s literary histories of the period, that it was due to Fielding alone the 1737 Licensing Act was introduced, must be considered an exaggeration. It was more likely a mounting wave of political opposition from both press and the stage in the spring of 1737 that led to it (see Goldgar 1976: 150 – 156).  Thus in the introductory essay of the first Common Sense issue (5 February 1737): “An ingenious Dramatick Author has consider’d Common Sense as so extraordinary a Thing, that he has lately, with great Wit and Humour, not only personified it, but dignified it too with the Title of a Queen” (CS1: 4). See also Goldgar 1976: 157. – Fielding is also widely believed to be the author of two or more contributions to some of the early issues of Common Sense (see Lockwood 1983: 44).  See Black (1987) as a seminal study for this field.

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of the first issue of the original Common Sense magazine (Lockwood 1983: 44), self-consciously tried to capitalize on the growing prestige of common sense: I can’t help thinking how very advantageous it may be to a great many People to purchase my Paper, were it only for the sake of the Title.—Have you read Common Sense?—Have you got Common Sense? are Questions which one should be very sorry not to be able to answer in the Affirmative […]. (CS1: 4– 5)

Chesterfield’s punning on the irresistible appeal of the magazine’s title is indicative of the high esteem of common sense in early eighteenth-century culture in Britain. Such a rhetorical strategy obviously takes for granted the existence of a broad consensus to accept common sense as a binding value for life as well as for politics. By claiming common sense as a normative discursive element for the sphere of the political, Chesterfield wields a powerful rhetorical weapon for the magazine. As the critical political forces joining in Common Sense magazine labelled themselves ‘patriotic,’⁴ their implication is that it must be common sense to save England from the evils of corruption, opportunism, and moral degradation, for all of which the Walpole ministry was held responsible. Regardless of the specific political camp endorsed by the magazine, common sense discourse here explicitly enters the party-political arena, to reveal at the same time its relevance for constructing a cultural identity of Englishness. In a sense, 1737 marks the new birth of English common sense discourse from the budding spirit of nationalism.⁵ A quarter of a century later, in 1763, Samuel Johnson would immortalize himself as an authority of English common sense – almost single-footedly, as it were – with the simple kick of a stone. In a much quoted passage from John Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the biographer records just another lively philosophical debate between him and Johnson after visiting a church in Harwich. When asked by Boswell about the seeming irrefutability of Bishop Berkeley’s doctrine of esse est percipi – that things do not exist outside of the perceiving mind –, Johnson kicks a large stone with such force that his foot recoils from it, and exclaims: “I refute it thus” (Boswell 1980: 333). Irrespective of the fact that Johnson’s kick does not shatter Berkeley’s thesis in the least (strictly speaking, the existence

 It is remarkable that there was an apparent allegiance between the Jacobite Molloy, possibly funded by other wealthy Jacobites, and the ‘Patriot’ or Country Whig opposition, led by Chesterfield, Lyttelton, and Pitt against Walpole and the Court Whigs (see Jones 1953: 146; Lockwood 1983: 43 – 44).  On the parallels of this assertion to the research by Sophia Rosenfeld (2008, 2011), see my discussion of her work below (section 2 of this chapter), especially my comments in footnote 34.

The Argument: Common Sense as Compensation

3

of the stone before and after the painful encounter with the foot is not proven by the kick), the intention behind Johnson’s act is unmistakably clear: it goes against common sense to assume that objects exist only in the perception of thinking subjects. Accordingly, in a later scene from Boswell’s Life, Johnson has nothing but scorn for one of Berkeley’s followers: “Pray, Sir, don’t leave us; for we may perhaps forget to think of you, and then you will cease to exist” (Boswell 1980: 1085). Samuel Johnson, who dominated intellectual life in England from the mid-eighteenth century until the advent of the Romantic period, became English common sense personified to both his contemporaries and posterity. With his aphorisms, essays, and critical writings, ‘Doctor Johnson’ gained long-lasting authority not so much due to the encyclopaedic learning he acquired, but, more than anything, by virtue of his commanding moral and aesthetic judgment which always seemed to have a pragmatic seat in life. Significantly, until today, the label Age of Johnson enjoys much currency in traditional histories of English literature as to designate the time span between the 1740s and the beginnings of the Romantic period. Such labelling, however, is always questionable because it unduly stresses homogeneity and continuity within a given historical time span by reducing it to the overpowering influence of a single aspect or even a single person. Therefore the present study will not attempt to rewrite literary or intellectual history by claiming the existence of a uniform Age of Common Sense. Rather, it will be shown, with the help of numerous examples, that Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of an often contradictory and heterogeneous discourse of common sense which came to bear a lasting influence on concepts of national and cultural identity, such as ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness,’ and which continues to have an influence today in the form of cultural stereotypes and clichés.

1.1 The Argument: Common Sense as Compensation British common sense in the early eighteenth century comes in two complementary forms, a positive and a negative (corrective) one. As a notion of positives, common sense is mostly a rather loose, indistinct, and variable bundle of plain moral precepts and simple life-practical maxims in no systematic order and often riddled with contradictions, but it can also be flexibly manipulated in discourse to stand for values such as liberty, patriotism, or Anglicanism. As a corrective principle, common sense is a faculty of discrimination that largely works by contrast or ex negativo in that it enables a person to discern violations of or deviations from reasonable, sensible – in short: commonsensical – action, without the obligation to explain what common sense positively be. This is by far

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The Discourse of Common Sense

the more important function in early eighteenth-century discourse, as will be seen throughout this study. In any case, pronouncements of common sense have a broad transitive appeal: they overtly or covertly demand the consent and approval of everyone to whom they are addressed. That a common-sense verdict should appeal to all people does not mean that all human beings necessarily share the same discriminating powers of reason and understanding, but it does mean that even people with a lesser understanding shall have to give in to the judgment of common sense once they are confronted with it⁶ (if they do not, the implication is that they are in violation of common sense for reasons of either self-interest, which shows the social and implicitly moral dimension of common sense, or of mental handicap, which shows its rational dimension). Regarding its relevance for cultural life in Britain in the eighteenth century, it will be argued here that common sense acquires the status of a master discourse of both intellectual and popular thought where reason meets morals and taste, understanding meets action, and the individual meets the collective. A central idea governing my analysis is that the discursive phenomenon of common sense has specific compensatory, corrective or mediating functions for eighteenth-century British culture which, to a certain degree, make the historical contingency of its emergence and its modifications explainable. In the spheres of religion, politics, and knowledge, appeals to common sense were to facilitate consensus and compromise, but also to oust the ‘enemies to common sense’ and force them into submission in view of its apparent ‘dictates.’ The foundations for the religious dimension of common sense discourse were already laid in the English Renaissance. Even though the Reformation in England had comparatively little to do with the radical Protestant spirit of questioning traditional authority, one may well argue that by following the continental model of religious reformation, the seeds of an authority-critical sense were planted in England when Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534, despite his rather unreligious motivations. A sense of community was certainly needed during the ensuing pendulum swings between more radical Protestantism (under Edward VI) and Roman Catholicism (briefly restored under Mary I). In 1559, with the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, Elizabeth I set out to seal the replacement of the older sensus catholicus with a new Anglican sensus communis. According to the influ-

 I am well aware of the structural parallel to Immanuel Kant’s definition of aesthetic judgment in his Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) from 1790. This only goes to show the affinity of eighteenth-century common sense discourse with contemporary discourses of taste, which I will explore below in chapter II.1. Compared to a purely aesthetic judgment irrespective of moral deliberations, which was still unthinkable in the early eighteenth century, a common sense judgment is intended to be more compelling since it leaves no leeway for refusing it.

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ential interpretation by the Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker in his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1591– 95), Anglicanism represents a “threefold cord […] not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4.12) of Bible, church and reason. By offering a via media between what was seen as the two extremes of Calvinism and Roman Catholicism, Hooker advocated the Anglican Church as a reasonable compromise – common sense as avoidance of extremes.⁷ Yet, after a century of toppled monarchs, civil war, revolutions, a Puritan republic, and the restoration of the monarchy – all of which proved, among other things, that ‘religious common sense’ had yet to prevail –, post-revolutionary English society at the end of the seventeenth century yearned for internal stability and thus became a breeding ground for political common sense discourse. There was certainly a need for a social consensus that would bridge religious differences between Anglicans and Dissenters, put an end to the Jacobite threat of war and counter-revolution, find a healthy balance of power between king and parliament, and mitigate the potentially unsettling forces of social change in a commercial society into which Britain was transforming at that time.⁸ However, while common sense seemed to promise homogeneity due to its broad appeal to Englishmen as reasonable human beings to find common denominators among them, it soon became a term of contention in the politically volatile environment of the later Walpole years. What is significant, though, is that even in the most heated political battles in which common sense discourse was appropriated for political interests, the authority of common sense as a universally accepted norm was not disputed even by those who were attacked for their apparent lack of it.⁹ Its epistemic function, finally, was to sustain the tension between traditionalist views of a universal order stabilized by God, on the one hand, and the fundamental epistemic changes triggered off by the secularizing forces of Enlightenment rationalism and British empiricism, on the other. Between 1650 and 1750, several ‘revolutions’ of science took place – masterminded by Francis Bacon, promoted by the Royal Society (founded in 1660), and spearheaded by Robert Boyle in chemistry, Isaac Newton in physics, Edmond Halley in astronomy, the

 Admittedly, this is the traditional view of Hooker’s role, undisputed until the late twentieth century, but seriously challenged of late. Within the past few decades, critical research has questioned Hooker’s position as an apologist of the Anglican via media and attributed him with a leaning toward the Puritan Reformed churches. A careful assessment of Hooker’s role (which, ironically, steers another via media between the traditional and the revisionist view on Hooker) can be found in Voak (2003).  As for the philosophical and literary underpinnings of Britain’s transformation into a commercial society, see the studies by Volkmann (2003) and Scholz (2004).  This will be explored below in chapter IV.

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Dutch Hermann Boerhaave in medicine and human anatomy, and the Swede Carl Linnaeus in biology. It is obvious that these innovations of knowledge challenged traditional world-views and epistemic systems, which had been religious and medieval in essence. More than just a budding of science, however, it was an epistemic revolution determined by a new approach to thinking – the heterogeneous developments in philosophy that were to form what we call the Enlightenment. Descartes’ famous epistemological strategy of doubting stands at the beginning of a dynamic of uncertainty and change that was met with as much enthusiasm as caution. As many Enlightenment ideas were watered down, circulated, and popularized in early eighteenth-century Britain through the burgeoning culture of didactic magazines in the wake of The Tatler and The Spectator,¹⁰ so was the “prudential, equitable Method of proceeding in our Search of Knowledge, […] by Descartes called Doubting of every thing” in an issue of the The FreeThinker of 5 September 1718, where it was recommended “as the first necessary and useful Step, which ought to be taken, in order to come at Certainty” (Philips 1733: I, 231). The corrective function of common sense discourse was to absorb the all too radical thrust of such rationalist views, as can be seen in the concession which Ambrose Philips, author of The Free-Thinker, makes to common sense so as to stifle all-encompassing Cartesian doubt: Notwithstanding what has been said; we are not to think, that any one should, or indeed that they can, actually doubt of the Truth of every Proposition, he may have treasured in his Mind. Common Sense will not permit us to doubt, whether two and two make four; and whether the Whole of any thing is bigger than any one of the Parts. But a Lover of Truth will search into the Bottom of Things, with as much Diligence and Exactness, as if he doubted of them, before he pronounces them to be certain. (Philips 1733: I, 231)

While accepting the Cartesian strategy in principle, Philips is led by his ‘common sense’ to mitigate what he perceives as a dangerous radical tendency, and thus pleads for a moderate form of doubting that mediates between two equally undesirable extreme poles, namely “an Obstinacy or Perverseness of Mind, in adhering to whatever we have once given our Assent” versus “a State of Scepticism; […] with a total Neglect of Reason, and a Contempt of Knowledge, in an affected Doubting” (Philips 1733: I, 233). As in this particular example, common sense discourse sets in as a regulatory principle to mediate between the old and the new, in order to counteract those epistemic rifts and re-integrate (elements of) them into an intellectual and social mainstream. This could also backlash into

 As a seminal study on the emergence of a public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe, which was initiated in Britain, see Habermas (1962).

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a conservative concept of the conditio humana, which upheld medieval concepts of a statically ordered universe against the challenge of change posited by modern politics and science.¹¹ Arguably the classic example of this is Alexander Pope’s didactic Essay on Man (1733 – 34) with its famous argument for appreciating the human “isthmus of a middle state” (EM: ep. 2, l. 3) between God and beast, which for Pope is a plea for modesty, a warning not to fall prey to the vainglorious lure of the ‘new’ rationalist knowledge, which would be to aspire to God-like wisdom: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man” (EM: ep. 2, ll. 1– 2). It is also in An Essay on Man that Pope formulates the positive common-sense ideal of a “balance of the mind” (EM: ep. 2, l. 120) between reason and passion, which is a principle of mental sanity that “[g]ives all the strength and colour of your life” (EM: ep. 2, l. 122).¹² In short, common sense discourse, bringing with it the ideas of moderation, balance, and compromise, of a healthy via media between extremes, has a compensatory cultural function overall to ward off the perceived evils of radical change. Such a compensatory function of common sense discourse must also be assumed for the cultural sphere of aesthetics, and certainly for literature. On the one hand, common sense discourse occurs in Augustan attacks on the ‘modernization’ and commercial proliferation of writing (‘hack writing’), and thus gives specific evidence to what Michel Foucault has assumed as an important controlling procedure of discourse in general: to limit access and bring about “a rarefaction […] of the speaking subjects” (Foucault 1981: 61). On the other hand, common sense in literature and literary criticism also protects one from the prescriptive pitfalls of Neoclassicist poetics, i. e., from aesthetic dogmatism. In order to get a clearer view of this, some truisms about eighteenth-century English literature shall be reconsidered first. The so-called Augustan Age¹³ is tradi-

 Cf. also Varney (1999: 153), who captures this opposition between volatile change and ordered stability quite aptly: “Celebrants of stability and order were defining themselves against a culture marked by unprecedentedly rapid social change and volatility, with the evolution of a cash economy as against the old economy based on the value of inherited landed property, with a new and disconcerting social mobility, with the gravitation of power to the City of London, and with the development of a correspondingly opportunistic political system.”  I will return to Pope’s Essay below, at the end of chapter II.3.  I will continue to use this term as a matter of convenience throughout the present study. There simply is no other established label to clearly designate the time between c. 1680/90 and 1750, even though the underlying assumption of a Golden ‘Augustan’ Age of art and literature is more than questionable. As Monika Fludernik (1998a: 5 – 15) duly points out, there have been many attempts to revise the traditional periods of English literature with regard to the eighteenth century (some of them also for mere economic purposes in the restructuring of American lite-

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tionally regarded as an era of Neoclassicism in Britain and thus seen as sharing in neoclassical ideals of balance, order, and well-measured poetics. Well known is the Augustan appreciation for the timeless value of ancient classical literature as the highest form of poetic art, for instance in Pope’s couplet about the naturalness of classical poetic rules – “Those Rules of old discover’d, not devis’d, / Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d” (EC: ll. 88 – 89) –, or in Johnson’s maxim of good literature passing the test of time – “what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (Johnson 1968: 60 – 61). This aesthetic preference for timeless classicism in Augustan literature accords closely with eighteenth-century concepts of common sense, which are essentially universalist and ahistorical. Contrasting with the early modern revival of classicism, the eighteenth century’s fascination with a timeless consensus expressed in classical art has indeed a new historical specificity – and, in this way, an affinity with common sense discourse – in that it compensates for the threatening wind of change brought about by modern writing and knowledge, which is precisely what is at the heart of the prolific ‘ancients vs. moderns’ debate around the turn of the eighteenth century in England. Moreover, the corrective effects of common sense discourse on Augustan literature can also be traced on the level of its compliance with aesthetic rules. It is another truism that English literature between the Restoration and the onset of the Romantic period did not follow strictly the rigid poetic dogmatism of the French classicist revival of the seventeenth century. The most obvious example here is drama (while similar points could be made about other literary genres),¹⁴ where the pressure of French Neoclassicist rule was felt the strongest, and was rejected accordingly. Again, it is Samuel Johnson who, in his exemplary appreciation of ‘unruly’ Shakespeare sets the tone for moderation in the debate about obeying poetic rules: “That this [Shakespeare’s mingling of tragic and comic elements] is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature” (Johnson rature departments), ranging from the ‘long’ eighteenth century between 1660 (or 1688) and 1789 (or 1815), to the ‘new’ eighteenth century from 1650 to 1750 (see Fludernik 1998a: 8 – 9). As I have no interest in entering this debate, I will stick, for better or worse, to the traditional term to specify the period of interest for this study.  Cf. Howard Weinbrot’s monumental study Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (1993) about the establishing of a British literary identity between 1660 and 1780, in which he also shows with the example of the Pindaric ode how the adaptation of the classical pattern in late seventeenth century Britain is determined by a compensatory principle of common sense: “Commentators at least as early as Cowley in 1656, however, also knew that it would be madness uniformly to impose either the rigorous Pindaric stanza or the frivolous Pindaric subject upon British poets” (Weinbrot 1993: 7).

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1968: 67). As will be shown hereafter in much more detail, common sense discourse has an influence on aesthetic value judgments in that it mediates between extremes – here in Johnson it is between Neoclassicist rule and modern innovation, which are reconciled by the standard of ‘Nature’ as the crucial category for mimetic art. Common sense discourse thus again tries to compensate for what is perceived as the shortcomings of either extreme. Before I proceed to outline elemental aspects of common sense discourse and my method of approaching it, two historical synopses shall be given: first, a brief historical sketch of philosophical concepts of common sense up to the eighteenth century, which will already highlight some of the aspects to feature prominently in the discourse of common sense during the Augustan Age; and second, an overview of prior research in the area of the present study.

1.2 A Short History of Common Sense in Philosophy and Criticism The English term ‘common sense’ was adopted from Latin sensus communis and entered the English language as a term of translation (possibly via French) in the first half of the sixteenth century (cf. Körver 1967: 44 ff.). As a term in Scholastic psychology, it originally denoted an internal human sense (and a putative organ in the brain) that would process and synthesize the sensory data transmitted from the five external senses. Yet the term soon shifted in meaning to come to signify a shared faculty of practical everyday prudence and sound intuitive judgment. In German, common sense is mostly translated as gesunder Menschenverstand, which stresses the aspect of mental health. Generally speaking, most postRenaissance discourses of common sense show both rational and pragmatic aspects – common sense implies judgment, on practical as well as epistemological matters, that is commonly accepted as self-evident and right. The Western tradition of conceptualizing a ‘common sense’ was initiated by Aristotle’s rather indistinct concept of a κοινὴ αἴσϑησιϛ (koinè aisthesis), which is the notion of a convergence of the five human senses to form one whole in order for the mind to be able to perceive what Aristotle called ‘common sensibles’ (such as movement, number, magnitude, unity etc.). Aristotle never awarded this convergence of the senses a proper name, nor is he clear in his writings whether he regards this joint effort of the senses to be overseen by another sense in its own right.¹⁵ This concept of the unified senses was considerably

 In On the Soul (De Anima; book III, chapters 1 and 2), Aristotle grapples with the problem of

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modified in classical Latin writing, when a uniform sensus communis was conceptualized with a broad spectrum of meanings that prefigured their Renaissance counterparts sens commun in French and common sense in English. On the whole, Aristotle and Lucretius can be identified with two different, but overlapping discursive areas within this tradition. The Aristotelian one, which was largely influential in the Scholastic philosophies of Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and others, but also in the medieval Islamic tradition of Avicenna and Averroes, conceived of ‘the common sense’ as a mental faculty, or even a putative physical organ of sensory perception (located in the heart or the brain), which combines and judges individual sense impressions and thus facilitates a general understanding from the particulars of sensory data. The other tradition, building on Lucretius and Cicero’s rhetorical writings, was derived from the Epicurean concept that reason and knowledge are wholly dependent on sensory perception.¹⁶ Especially in Cicero’s writings the meaning of ‘sensus communis’ ranges from an instinctive faculty of judgment and practical prudence to common opinions and consensus as well as common feeling in the sense of a socializing faculty (see Körver 1967: 13 – 20). During scholasticism, the latter connotations of common sense were not pursued and rendered almost entirely obsolete, whereas the anatomical question of common sense as a bodily organ and its relationship to the other physical senses was of primary interest (see Körver 1967: 20 – 32; see also Milner 2011: 36 – 45 on English fifteenth-century psychology). With the onset of Renaissance humanism, due to the rediscovery and revaluation of various traditions of classical philosophy, and especially during the Reformation, the notion of common sense as a faculty of understanding and reasonable judgment resurfaced (see Körver 1967: 33 – 35) and was already used then as an instance of appeal in order to invite consent to one’s view. Before the term common sense actually entered the English language in the sixteenth century – the OED’s earliest example dates from the year 1535 (cf. Körver 1967: 47) –, it was preceded by the expressions common wit and common understanding, which already denoted synthetic faculties of judgment. Apart from the etymology and development of the term common sense itself, there is yet another classical notion already developed in Aristotelian philosophy that is of utmost importance for eighteenth-century common sense discourse in Britain: the idea of the Golden Mean. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle advan-

common sensibles, but rules out a separate sixth sense, whereas in other writings he occasionally seems to imply that there must be a synthesizing internal sense. On the complexities of Aristotle’s concept of a ‘common sense’ see Summers (1987: 78 – 89).  The argument that reason is fully derived from the senses is specifically made in book IV of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (see Piper 1977: 624– 625).

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ces his famous definition of virtue as an appropriate middle position between the vices of excess, as one extreme, and deficiency, as the other extreme diametrically opposed to the first. A virtue such as courage, for instance, is defined as a rightly measured intermediate state on the scale between the extremes of fear (= deficiency) and over-confidence (= excess) (see Aristotle 1998: 40; II.7, 1107b). Significantly, Aristotle highlights the factor of human judgment in determining the mean between the extremes – a point that will be crucial in eighteenth-century British common sense discourse: Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i. e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. (Aristotle 1998: 39; II.6, 1006b–1107a)

The “man of practical wisdom,” who determines “the mean relative to us” (i. e. relative to the purposes and necessities of human life in a community) between the extremes of having or doing either too much or too little of something, is what the eighteenth century would call the ‘man of common sense,’ who possesses this vital faculty of judgment to determine the right measure. The idea of the Golden Mean is the ethical focal point in the common sense discourse of the eighteenth century, since it seems to provide, in positive terms, the key to a happy and virtuous life in the continual balancing of pernicious extremes, while, in negative terms or as a differential category, its conspicuous absence helps identify imbalances and leanings toward an extreme. The trajectory of common sense discourse in English is also closely tied to the appearance of empiricism on the intellectual horizon of the seventeenth century. It is a widely held view that, since then, the English cultural tradition has been “essentially empiricist” (Easthope 1999: ix; see also Anderson 1968: 40; Nairn 1964: 48; Thompson 1978: 63). Antony Easthope, in his Englishness and National Culture, takes this view as a point of departure for a Foucauldian approach to empiricism as a culturally dominant discursive formation in the construction of Englishness. As Easthope argues, this discursive formation has been so tenacious since its beginnings in the seventeenth century that often today “when English people (journalists, historians, novelists, poets, comic writers and others) think they are speaking in their own voices, in fact the discourse of an empiricist tradition is speaking for them” (Easthope 1999: ix). According to Easthope, common sense is an important corollary of empiricism: contrasting with ‘dogma,’ it belongs to the key oppositions that define and structure empiricist

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discourse (besides real/apparent, fact/fiction, concrete/abstract, clear/obscure, English/French and others; see Easthope 1999: 89 – 90). In the rhetoric of British empiricist philosophy common sense plays an integral role from its very beginnings, albeit also a troubled one, as the later critique of empiricism by the Scottish common-sense philosophers clearly shows. The immediate pre-history of empiricism begins with Francis Bacon, who, with the method of induction and his grand scheme for knowledge, paved the way not only for modern science but also for its rationale in the form of empiricism. As early as in the Advancement of Learning from 1605, he grounded his plans for epistemic restructuring on the two pillars of common sense and experience: “[I]f any man, considering the parts thereof which I have enumerated, do judge that my labour is but to collect into an art or science that which hath been pretermitted by others, as matter of common sense and experience, he judgeth well” (Bacon 1974: 169; my italics). By way of the inductive method of scientific inquiry, guided by the principles of common sense and experience, and by putting findings into clear, transparent language, Bacon was convinced that reliable knowledge, free of prejudice and dogma, was possible. He advocated a common-sense ethic of clear style, the transparent representation of reality in scientific discourse, to overcome the vain excesses of contemporary scholars who violate the “lawfulness of the phrase or word” (Bacon 1974: 25): [F]or men began to hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. (Bacon 1974: 26)

In a similar way, Thomas Hobbes, in a passage from Leviathan (1651), his famous philosophical treatise of absolutism, attacked the jargon of contemporary philosophers and theologians when indulging in metaphysical speculation and juggling with abstract philosophical terms. Such terms, he maintained, are “the names of Nothing” (Hobbes 2003: 465), which are to be countered with a sober diction, free of any ornamental embellishment, that is, an ideal of “styleless style” (Easthope 1999: 70). Like Bacon before him, Hobbes pleaded for a disciplining of discourse, for banishing any non(common)sensical language that has no referent in reality. A cornerstone for the spreading of common sense discourse from the late seventeenth century onwards was the emergence of empiricism ‘proper’ with the publication of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke’s seminal work has to be seen against the backdrop of French rationalism, which not only influenced Locke’s own work but also prefigured com-

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mon sense discourse in Britain to a considerable extent. René Descartes, as is well known, arrived at his primary metaphysical truth, cogito ergo sum, in a founding act of self-reflection. From this fundamental principle, first published in his Discours de la méthode in 1637 and expounded in his famous Meditationes de prima philosophia in 1641, he set out to deduce a whole system of indisputable metaphysical truths that were to stand the test of reasonable scepticism, even if these truths were “si métaphysiques et si peu communes, qu’elles ne seront peutêtre pas au goût de tout le monde” (Descartes 1960: 50). However, as metaphysical and uncommon as these truths may seem, Descartes expressly appealed to a common bon sens of humankind as sufficient requirement for anybody to arrive at these truths. In principle, ‘good sense’ in an individual, he maintained, is all it takes to get to the bottom of truth – not the accumulated pseudo-knowledge which scholars had hitherto founded on dubious claims and unproven speculations: […] je pensai que les sciences des livres, au moins celles dont les raisons ne sont que probables, et qui n’ont aucunes démonstrations, s’étant composées et grossies peu à peu des opinions de plusieurs diverses personnes, ne sont point si approchantes de la vérité, que les simples raisonnements que peut faire naturellement un homme de bon sens touchant les choses qui se présentent. (Descartes 1960: 20)

While Descartes in this way appealed to any ‘man of good sense’ to apply deductive reasoning to his intuition in order to arrive at certain knowledge, Locke, some fifty years later, addressed his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to an even wider public, the ‘man of (mere) common sense.’ He states in his prefatory “Epistle to the Reader”: […] I think it necessary to make, what I have to say, as easie and intelligible to all sorts of Readers as I can. And I had much rather the speculative and quick-sighted should complain of my being in some parts tedious, than that any one, not accustomed to abstract Speculations, or prepossessed with different Notions, should mistake or not comprehend my meaning. (Locke 1975: 9)

With the didactic purpose of being understood by (almost) everyone, Locke advanced an empiricist philosophy of human understanding which, in some ways, ran counter to the intuitive common-sense faith in an unmediated experience of the world. He claimed, contrary to the Scholastic tradition as well as Cartesian rationalism, that there were no innate ideas, that the mind, by birth, was a tabula rasa, a “yet empty Cabinet […] to be furnish’d with Ideas and Language” (Locke 1975: 55; I.ii, § 15), all let in by the senses as the channels of communication through which subject formation is shaped by an objective outside world. Locke coined influential new terms to classify the ideas of the mind into primary

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and secondary ones as well as those derived from ‘sensation’ (perception) and ‘reflection’ (introspection). To defend his theory of ideas as the sole source of knowledge of the world, Locke performed a didactic strategy in the Essay that makes recurrent use of appeals to the common sense of his readers (even though he rarely calls it by that name), as in the following example about the logical law of the excluded third (tertium non datur): “He would be thought void of common Sense, who asked on the one side, or on the other side went about to give a Reason, Why it is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be. It carries its own Light and Evidence with it, and needs no other Proof […]” (Locke 1975: 68; I.iii, § 4).¹⁷ However, the foundations for future divergences between empiricists like George Berkeley or David Hume and common sense philosophers like Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart were already laid in Locke’s refusal to conceive of common-sense ideas as innate: “But yet I take liberty to say, That these Propositions are so far from having an universal Assent, that there are a great Part of Mankind, to whom they are not so much as known” (Locke 1975: 49; I.ii, § 4). Among this part of humanity he counted children and “Ideots” (Locke 1975: 63; I.ii, § 27), which is the reason, Locke concluded, that even self-evident common-sense truths cannot to be innate. In spite of Locke’s common sense rhetoric and his own optimistic intentions, his theory invited epistemological doubts about discerning objective reality ‘as it is,’ which were met in the two very different approaches by George Berkeley and David Hume. As is well known, Berkeley developed a theory of idealism (or immaterialism) according to which no object exists outside of the perceiving mind (esse est percipi), while our own existence is safeguarded by God as the highest mental entity. The irony here is that while this doctrine was seen by most contemporaries as a gross violation of common sense – as quoted initially, Dr Johnson famously ‘refuted’ it by kicking a stone –, Bishop Berkeley himself regarded it as a common sense weapon against atheism and scepticism, as stated in his 1713 preface to the Three Dialogues: If the principles, which I here endeavour to propagate, are admitted for true; the consequences which, I think, evidently flow from thence, are, that atheism and scepticism will be utterly destroyed, many intricate points made plain, great difficulties solved, several useless parts of science retrenched, speculation referred to practice, and men reduced from paradoxes to common sense. (Berkeley 1964: 168)

I will only mention briefly, as it is of no further concern here, David Hume’s epistemology, who in book I of A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) came to an alto-

 This proposition in fact goes back to a passage in chapter IV.4 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

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gether different conclusion with regard to the problem of scepticism. His radical empiricism was the logical consequence drawn from Locke’s theory of ideas: since the mind has no access to external reality other than through the impressions and ideas derived from the senses, there is no way for human beings to make definite statements about objective reality, not even to prove its mere existence.¹⁸ At this endpoint of empiricist philosophy, reason finally parted company with common sense, as it were. At least this was the criticism of the Scottish moral philosopher Thomas Reid expressed in An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense from 1764, which inaugurated what has been called the Scottish school of common sense philosophy, to be formed by Reid, James Beattie, Dugald Stewart, James Oswald and others.¹⁹ Common sense was considered by Reid to be an intuitive faculty of judgment of matters that are self-evident; as such it should not be opposed to reason but be its very basis. In his Inquiry, Reid strongly repudiated Hume’s scepticism on the grounds of what he identified as the ‘original sin’ of all empiricist philosophies, Locke’s non-commonsensical theory of ideas. Without giving up empiricism’s basic focus on sensory experience, Reid postulated a natural correspondence between subjective perception and objective reality, which guarantees the possibility of making true and factual statements about the latter. The epistemological dependability of the human senses, however, was not posited as a rationalistic a priori principle – the power of judgment is a divine gift. In his later Essays

 However, while this conclusion of radical scepticism was for Hume an inescapable epistemological consequence from the structure of the human mind, it has very little relevance for the moral reality of human beings. In fact, Hume was no declared enemy to common sense in practical matters of life. In the first of his philosophical essays published in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), “Of the Different Species of Philosophy,” he states that he values its practical worth more highly than that of abstract reasoning; the latter might be more accurate, but more prone to serious error, whereas the common sense philosopher can correct his mistakes more easily: “But a philosopher, who purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colours, if by accident he falls into error, goes no farther; but renewing his appeal to common sense, and the natural sentiments of the mind, returns into the right path, and secures himself from any dangerous illusions” (Hume 2000: 6).  Even though Reid and his disciples are mostly of interest to historians of philosophy today, common sense philosophy exerted a major influence on French and American academic philosophy (including C. S. Peirce’s pragmatism) in the nineteenth century, as well as on the British analytic philosopher G. E. Moore in the early twentieth century (see Grave 1960; Manns 1994; Houston 2004). – Of course, the basic epistemological questions debated by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid are still pertinent to today’s debates in epistemology, albeit in a more complex form. See Dancy (1985) for a comprehensive introduction to twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon epistemology.

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on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), he called this capacity common sense, an “inward light or sense […] given by Heaven to different persons in different degrees” (Reid 2002: 426).²⁰ Reid’s usage of common sense varied between meaning a shared mental faculty and a shared set of indisputable principles or assumptions (see Rescher 2005: 16). It is thus in the latter sense that the natural faith in the reliability of our senses belongs to a number of self-evident ‘first principles’ of the “common sense of mankind; and what is manifestly contrary to any of those first principles, is what we call absurd” (Reid 1997: 215). As if by sleight of hand, the epistemological problematic of perception thus vanishes into thin air – expelled by what must be called a rather carefree type of realism. Here common sense discourse reveals again one of its major functions: to correct an aberration from an implicit norm, in this case, ironically, an excess of empiricism as the very mode of thinking that helped to promote common sense discourse in the first place.²¹ A final influence on common sense discourse in the early eighteenth century was the philosophy of moral sense by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, a major proponent of deism in England. Shaftesbury’s philosophy, published chiefly in his collection of essays and philosophical letters under the title of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), is to be set apart from empiricism as he argued for the existence of a “natural and just Sense of Right and Wrong” (Shaftesbury 2001: II, 23) innate in all human beings, with which these are guided towards virtue in their moral judgments as well as in basic judgments of taste, unless this sense has been unnaturally numbed or blocked, e. g. by a wilful resistance to it or “contrary Affections” (Shaftesbury 2001: II, 23), With this optimistic and benevolent view of the human condition he opposed (as many others at his time) the pessimistic outlook, advanced most notoriously by Thomas Hobbes, on man as naturally driven by selfishness.

 Reid takes his cue here from Alexander Pope’s line “Good Sense, which only is the gift of Heav’n” (Pope 1951: l. 43); see also below for my discussion of Pope’s Epistle to Burlington (chapter II.1).  Immanuel Kant derided at first the philosophical discourse of common sense as an unreliable divining rod and strongly advised in metaphysical matters against “die Entscheidung vermittelst der Wünschelrute des sogenannten g e s u n d e n M e n s c h e n v e r s t a n d e s , die nicht jedermann schlägt, sondern sich nach persönlichen Eigenschaften richtet” (Kant 1993b: 138). Later he rehabilitated common sense in his redefinition of Gemeinsinn as the focal point of aesthetic judgment in his Kritik der Urteilskraft from 1790 (see also below, chapter II.1). However, German idealism and Scottish common sense philosophy were indeed irreconcilable; since the German idealist establishment (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) deeply despised what they perceived as a naive form of philosophizing, common sense philosophy could not gain ground in Germany (as opposed to France and the USA).

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While the empiricist influence on British common sense discourse largely concerns epistemological positions (the emphasis on sensory experience and observable fact as well as an aversion to high-flying speculation), Shaftesbury’s understanding of the moral sense as a sense common to humankind affects the dimensions of morals and taste in common sense, as it posits a common natural norm that is binding for moral and aesthetic judgment. Shaftesbury’s concept of a moral-cum-aesthetic sense was developed further by Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, especially by Francis Hutcheson,²² and influenced the philosophies of moral sentiments by David Hume and Adam Smith. As this important influence on common sense discourse tends to be neglected in present-day criticism, where common sense is often reduced to an epistemological concept (as which it mainly figured in the other strand of the Scottish Enlightenment, i. e. Reid’s common sense philosophy), I will devote a whole section in the following chapter to Shaftesbury and the common-sense union of ethics and aesthetics in the early eighteenth century. *** Twentieth-century research on eighteenth-century concepts of common sense is relatively sparse, but in recent years, a renewed interest in historical common sense has emerged across different disciplines in the humanities. Modern research, of which I shall now give a critical overview as far as it is pertinent to my own project,²³ begins with Arthur O. Lovejoy and his broad forays into the intellectual history of European Neoclassicism and Romanticism. In his essay “The Parallel of Deism and Classicism” from 1932, Lovejoy analyzes the convergent worldviews of the Neoclassicist veneration of ancient models of thought and the supposed progressivism of deist rationalism. He advances nine common characteristics: (1) uniformitarianism (emphasis on the universality of human nature and a “general attack upon the differentness of men”; Lovejoy 1970: 81), (2) rationalistic individualism (accessibility of truth by every human being applying universal reason), (3) the appeal to the consensus gentium (identity of

 See Kivy (2003), especially chapter IX (158 – 177) on the reception of Hutcheson’s aesthetic theory by Thomas Reid and the Scottish school of common sense.  From this overview I will exclude all studies in modern common-sense philosophy (as a branch of epistemology and analytic philosophy in the wake of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, J. L. Austin, John Searle and others), simply because it is an entirely different discursive arena that lacks a perspective on the historical development of common sense concepts other than within the specific limits of the tradition of common-sense philosophy since Thomas Reid. Some recent examples of contemporary common-sense philosophy, which also engage with Reid’s foundational writings in the field, are Lemos (2004), Rescher (2005), and Ledwig (2007).

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the ‘voice of God’ with the ‘voice of man’ throughout time), (4) cosmopolitanism (condemnation of nationalism and racism due to the universality of the nature of man), (5) an antipathy to enthusiasm and originality (as violations of the principles of reason and universalism), (6) intellectual equalitarianism (“a democratic temper in matters of religion and morals and taste”; Lovejoy 1970: 84), (7) rationalistic anti-intellectualism (aversion to abstract speculation), (8) rationalistic primitivism (timeless validity of the universal knowledge of humankind), and (9) a negative philosophy of history (incredulous of real historical progress). Lovejoy has been taken to task by modern criticism for his sweeping and brisk generalizations of historical periods, as for example in his influential concept of the Great Chain of Being as the worldview of the entire Enlightenment era – a tendency which can also be detected in this essay. First of all, his nine attributes are not always distinct and seem to reiterate the same underlying assumptions of a consensus about human nature and the universal power of reason. Secondly, as we will see in the present study, the alleged universality of a trust in reason ignores many heterogeneous anti-rationalist tendencies in the early eighteenth century that came to be attached to common sense discourse. Thirdly, some of his assumptions are unfounded and point to a general lack of evidence in his arguments, such as the claim about the age’s aversion to nationalism and racism, which, after countless critical studies on these issues in eighteenth-century Britain, needs no elaborate refutation anymore to debunk it as a fiction. However, many of Lovejoy’s points are still valuable as starting points for a genealogy of eighteenth-century common sense discourse. The attributes of rationalistic anti-intellectualism and primitivism touch directly upon standard formations of common sense discourse with which abstruse claims and absurdities of modern learning were to be rejected and practical knowledge free of prejudice and bias was to be secured through “the workings of common sense” (Lovejoy 1970: 86). A first direct attempt at charting the historical concept of Augustan common sense was made by Francis Gallaway in a chapter on “Common Sense” in his study Reason, Rule, and Revolt in English Classicism (1940). He identifies common sense as a “a rational faculty already verging on intuition and instinct” (Gallaway 1940: 49). Besides pointing out this intuitive side of ‘reason before reflection,’ there are several other merits in his outline of common sense: Even though it is implied by the very term, the communal or social dimension of eighteenth-century common sense is easily neglected in reductive discussions of common sense as an epistemological stance; therefore it is valuable that Gallaway (1940: 49) stresses the “group consciousness” implied by common sense. Another important observation is the elevated status of common sense in the early eighteenth century, when it rises from a low rational faculty to “the viewpoint

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of enlightened men,” which makes it “the essential basis of satire and comedy, expressions of group censure against individual absurdity” (Gallaway 1940: 49 – 50). Even though this hint at the function of common sense in satire is helpful, it simplifies matters considerably, as will be shown below in chapter III. Further important aspects of common sense in Gallaway’s account are its integral role in an education of manners, especially for the English gentleman (as in Lord Chesterfield’s letters of ‘polite education’ to his son), its impact on literature and aesthetics, and its opposition to fancy, speculation, and sense-less ‘deep’ learning. All these points are merely mentioned in brief by Gallaway, but his concise overview already yields a rich store of quotations on common sense from philosophy, literature, and early magazine essays from The Tatler and The Spectator. A similar overview is offered by Hellmut Bock in his article “Common Sense als Lebenshaltung und Philosophie in England” from 1953, which focuses primarily on a diachronic account of the role of common sense in English philosophy from Thomas Hobbes to G. E. Moore. He identifies Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy as the beginning of an actual English common-sense tradition in philosophy and gives a longer account of Thomas Reid’s philosophy, which he views as the culmination of ‘English’ (i. e. British) common sense.²⁴ Even though Bock’s research is sometimes sloppy and his argument riddled with sweeping nationalist claims about common sense as “das Wesenselement des englischen Volkscharakters” (Bock 1953: 123), it is meritorious for putting two important points clearly on the map: First, common sense becomes a stereotypical element of Englishness, both in the self-characterizations by English writers as well as in the hetero-images advanced in European comments on the English. Secondly, Bock states two differently esteemed meanings of common sense in the eighteenth century – one of a very basic, and thus rather base, faculty of understanding, and another one denoting an excellent practical faculty of judgment.²⁵ It is these two divergent valuations of the term that C. S. Lewis in his Studies in Words (1960) calls the ‘minimizing’ and the ‘maximizing’ views of common sense:

 Bock erroneously refers to Reid as “der Engländer” (1953: 135). This is not the only mistake in his article; Körver (1967: 11, n. 3) lists quite a few more.  See Bock (1953: 121): “Der Wertakzent verschiebt sich gewissermaßen, indem das, was früher die unterste Stufe des Menschseins ausmachte, unterhalb derer man nicht mehr Mensch war und über die sich eigentlich alle erheben sollten, nun zu einem Wert des gesunden, normalen Lebens selber wird. Man kann geradezu sagen, während er früher das Leben nach unten abgrenzte, tut er das jetzt nach oben, indem alles, was die Sphäre des Common Sense übersteigt, als minderwertig, d. h. im wörtlichen Sinn als überstiegen abgelehnt wird.”

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This permits what may be called either a maximising or a minimising view of that sense (or reason) which is common to all men. On the one hand, because it is universal, cutting across all frontiers and surviving in all epochs, it may be reverenced. On the other, if it is as common as that – like having two legs or a nose in your face – it can’t be anything very wonderful. To fall below it may be idiocy; to come up to it can’t possibly be a ground for self-congratulation. (Lewis 1967: 153 – 154)

This differentiation is indeed a helpful one when it comes to assessing the value judgments implicit in appeals to or judgments of common sense in the early eighteenth century. However, Lewis’s account of the semantic development of common sense from antiquity and the Elizabethan Age (he mentions Richard Hooker) to the eighteenth century is inaccurate when he describes it as moving from the maximizing to the minimizing usage. Common sense as a term denoting a rational faculty does not gain currency in the English language before the seventeenth century. From the end of the seventeenth century onwards, as Gallaway and Bock had already argued, the opposite movement – from minimizing to maximizing view – takes place.²⁶ No such errors can be found in the painstaking philological meticulousness of Helga Körver’s impressive doctoral thesis on the development of common sense as an English keyword in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period (1967). In her German-language study from the field of historical semantics, Körver partly adopts Lewis’s distinction between minimizing and maximizing views, but adds to it a ‘neutral’ usage of the term that neither downplays nor elevates the concept meant by it.²⁷ While this tripartite differentiation appears to be more complete than Lewis’s, its benefit for interpretation remains questiona Lewis’s error is first of all caused by falsely equating common/good sense with reason, but even then his argument is historically wrong: he claims there was “a weakening in the Renaissance conception of the dignity of Man, and a growing tendency to assign moral premisses to some faculty other than reason, so that reason (or sense) is now concerned only with truth, not also with good” (Lewis 1967: 153). To begin with, the moral philosophies of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume stand in stark contrast to such a historical distortion, as do Augustan poetry and the boom of didactic magazines in the early eighteenth century, which altogether propagate a firm grounding of morals and taste in reason.  See Körver’s definition of the neutral, value-free usage of common sense: “w e r t n e u t r a l , weil eben a l l e n Menschen gemeinsam; darum nichts Besonderes, aber auch nichts Abwertendes” (1967: 56). Though, in many textual occurrences of common sense it is rather difficult, I would argue, to distinguish a neutral usage precisely from either a (mildly) minimizing or a maximizing view of common sense, unless common sense is the very subject matter of the passage. Besides this, it is the passages that clearly show either a maximizing or a minimizing view that are of genuine interest for an interpretive approach – or for a discourse analysis that tries to sketch the inside and outside territories of common sense discourse, which is why Lewis’s binary categories are sufficient for my own analysis.

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ble, and Körver makes very little use of it later. But the strength and purpose of her study do not lie in the area of refined historical interpretation – she is neither a historian of ideas nor a literary critic –, but rather in the sifting and sorting of vast masses of historical material to bring the references to common sense into a thematic order. In a positive display of archival pedantry, Körver first outlines the different meanings and semantic shifts of common sense and its terminological predecessors in Greek and Roman philosophy as well as in mediaeval scholasticism, to arrive, via a brief detour through sens commun in France, in the era of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English writing. This historical period is the main focus of her lexico-semantic analysis, but towards the end of her study she continues to trace the semantic development of common sense in the Romantic period as well as up to the beginning of the twentieth century, which proves that, even though the heyday of public discussions of common sense seems to have been over by the end of the eighteenth century, the term established itself firmly in the intellectual and public discourses of later ages. While the side of interpretation remains underdeveloped and derivative in her study, Körver’s massive collection of material is a treasure trove for anyone interested in the historical appearance and evolvement of common sense concepts, and has proven an invaluable starting point for my own historical research in the present study. Recently, the linguistic-semantic interest in common sense displayed in Körver’s book has been revived in an extensive and far-reaching study by Anna Wierzbicka (2010). As the title Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy implies, the author is concerned with cultural-historical keywords of what she calls “Anglo English” (5), i. e. the variety of English spoken as the primary language in the geographical areas traditionally associated with that language (e. g. Britain and its former colonies). She analyzes these keywords of Anglo-English culture in a wide array of conceptual combinations and lexical collocations, always with a keen eye on historical origins and diachronic changes in meaning. As part of the semantic field of sense, Wierzbicka (2010: 328 – 367) also considers the phrase common sense, about which she makes two fundamental claims that are significant for the present context: first, that “common sense, as it is used in contemporary English, has no equivalent it in other languages and embodies a unique Anglo-English concept,” and second, that its meaning “has changed over the centuries, and the way this phrase is used now is different from the ways in which it was used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (Wierzbicka 2010: 337, 338). As for her first thesis, the author, due to her being a linguist, perhaps asserts rather forcefully the semantic singularity of common sense (as opposed to French, German or Italian equivalents, for instance), but the contention that common sense is a unique

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component of historical British culture and its Anglo-English legacy is quite in line with the results of my own rather different approach. However, her assertion that the historical origin of the present-day use of common sense in English lies in Thomas Reid’s formative philosophical works from the later eighteenth century (see above) requires critical scrutiny, especially as to the claim that the “capacity of common sense to guide people in practical matters was not yet (as far as I can see) part of the meaning of the phrase common sense as used by Reid” (Wierzbicka 2010: 358). While Reid did indeed place emphasis on the epistemological value of common sense, the practical implications of applying common sense to matters of life (and not just philosophy) were certainly already an important semantic aspect of the phrase in the early eighteenth century.²⁸ Furthermore, her rather strict distinction between common sense and good sense as different concepts²⁹ might be arguable from a standpoint of semantic rigour, but it simply does not reflect the realities of eighteenth-century usage, as my examples in the chapters below will abundantly show. Here, Lewis’s suggestion to differentiate between a ‘minimizing’ and ‘maximizing’ view of common sense (in which good sense certainly refers to the latter, whereas common sense can refer to both) seems more appropriate in light of the historical evidence. Nonetheless, Wierzbicka’s lucid analysis of the semantic nuances of common sense, but specifically the support her research lends to the view that common sense is indeed an integral part of Anglo-English culture and its tradition since the eighteenth century, corroborate the validity of my own approach. Out of many studies and articles that deal in passing with representations of common sense in the context of specific literary texts from the eighteenth century, I want to mention works by William Bowman Piper, Alan Liu, and Karen Valihora, all of which advance general reflections about the relevance of common sense discourse in the literature of that time. William Bowman Piper has written extensively about empiricism, common sense, and common courtesy in eighteenth-century English literature, and there a two texts of his that deserve specific attention here. His earlier essay “Common Sense as a Basis of Literary Style” (1977) begins in some way like the broad approaches by Gallaway and Bock before him, i. e. with an introduction to philosophical cornerstones of eighteenth-

 Cf. a typical example from 1732 in Applebee’s Journal (of 11 March) which stresses the practical nature of common sense: “That Knowledge which is most useful, and can be most readily applied to the Direction of our Affairs in the Occurrences of Life is, what is meant by Common Sense” (rpt. in Gentleman’s Magazine 1732: II, 647). More examples of this usage will be presented below, especially in chapter IV on the political discourse of common sense.  “In a nutshell, common sense had for Reid, as for present-day English, a social dimension, whereas good sense focuses on the individual” (Wierzbicka 2010: 357).

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century common sense. He then continues, though, with an exploration of a common-sense style of writing in Augustan literature that is based, according to Piper, on the “dynamics between common diction and uncommon experiences or opinions” (Piper 1977: 634), a clash that becomes particularly fruitful in satire. While Piper maintains that common sense is always closely related to common diction in Augustan literature – behind which also lies the didactic attempt to reach wide audiences for the spreading of common sense –, this common, seamless, transparent diction needs to accommodate at times the uncommon on the side of the experience and reality to be represented, which can be seen in George Berkeley’s spokesman Philonous in the dialogues with Hylas to propagate his idealist form of empiricism, or in Gulliver’s descriptions of foreign worlds in Gulliver’s Travels. What is interesting for my own study is Piper’s suggestion that the transparent, unassuming diction of common sense in Augustan writing is in fact a kind of buffering strategy to introduce new or progressive ideas in an era about which Addison complacently lamented in The Spectator no. 253 (20 December 1711): “We have little else left us, but to represent the common Sense of Mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon Lights” (Addison and Steele 1965: II, 484; also qtd. in Piper 1977: 637). I take this common sense style as another aspect of what I have outlined above as the compensatory or mediating function of common sense discourse. In his 1997 book on Common Courtesy in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Piper follows his earlier appreciation of the high value of Augustan common sense with an inclusion of ‘common courtesy’ in the bundle of cardinal virtues propagated in eighteenth-century literature and culture. As in his earlier essay, he rather apodictically determines “common sense to be the best and the most useful intellectual achievement of humankind” in the eyes of “English-speaking people of the eighteenth century” (Piper 1997: 17). Common sense, to Piper, has its firm roots in the English empiricist tradition due to its emphasis on experience and inductive probing – i. e. its sense aspect –, while it equally seeks “to establish a community of experience and, using that as a foundation, to construct a community of opinion” (Piper 1997: 21) – i. e. its common aspect. Common courtesy, which he understands as an “exercise in elegant avoidance” (Piper 1997: 15), functions as a social mode to facilitate communication in a non-confrontational atmosphere of mutual respect so that conflicting views and opinions could be exchanged in the search for a common ground of experience: “Although disagreement was always socially troublesome, no doubt, eighteenth-century authors realized it less as a problem in the maintenance of courtesy than as an opportunity, albeit a hazardous opportunity, to enhance common sense” (Piper 1997: 25). Whereas Piper certainly pinpoints an eighteenth-century ideal of polite conversation and debate, which even holds

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true as an (however unattainable) ideal for political discourse (cf. chapter IV below), the optimistic, benevolent concept of courtesy and its aesthetic reflex in transparent and elegant literary diction do not quite seem to match the forms of abrasive satire common in the early eighteenth century.³⁰ As we will see in chapter III, the relationship between norms of common sense and their strategic violation in satire is more complex than to be reduced to a mere affirmation of these norms by way of ironic contrast. An altogether different approach to common sense in the eighteenth century – and an important conceptual forerunner to my own study – was advanced by Alan Liu in his article “Toward a Theory of Common Sense: Beckford’s Vathek and Johnson’s Rasselas” (1984). Liu’s article is one of the earlier examples of the watershed in eighteenth-century studies that officially took place in 1987 when Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown proclaimed the ‘new eighteenth century’ in a move to overcome the predominant conventional paradigm of new-critical, formalist, and historicist interpretation and embrace postmodern critical theory instead.³¹ Liu, back then a young assistant professor under J. Hillis Miller at Yale, takes on board Foucault and Lacan in his comparative reading of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and William Beckford’s Vathek, which he discusses as binary opposites in an eighteenth-century cultural battle over ‘good sense’ and ‘good taste.’ Evidently, Johnson’s moral tale embodies Augustan common sense whereas Beckford’s outrageously fanciful and gruesome Gothic tale is an obsessive pre-romantic indulgence in ‘bad taste.’ Apart from Liu’s provocative deconstructive reading of Rasselas, the article is the first to chart the regulatory force of common sense discourse from a Foucauldian viewpoint. In an astute observation, Liu draws our attention to the repressive effect of common sense discourse, which is, however, achieved by transgression because the deformity violating common sense first has to be singled out for ridicule and censure before it can be repressed:

 It is in the last chapter of his book that Piper (1997: 172– 184), apparently aware of this objection, turns to Swift’s A Tale of a Tub to address the issue. At the end of a detailed analysis of the rhetorical strategies of the hack ‘Author’ persona, Piper contends that “[t]hroughout the Tale, the Author’s wilful eccentricity confronts such resistance [to common sense; C.H.] – a resistance, moreover, that implies its opposite. Swift’s satire thus commended common courtesy to his age, as it does to ours.” This ex negativo argument may do justice to the overall ironies of Swift’s satiric mode, but it seems questionable to call the exuberant and shockingly tasteless Tale an advertisement for common courtesy. I will return to the subversive self-contradictions of A Tale of a Tub below when I generally address the ambivalent relationship of Augustan satire with common sense discourse in chapter III.  See below for my discussion of Nussbaum and Brown’s The New Eighteenth Century (section 3 of this chapter).

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The discourse of common sense, in other words, discovers only the absurd, singular, or deformed […]. The common, good, and tasteful – or “central” – gives itself the hardness of stone, of Mosaic law, by spotlighting “weakness, minuteness, or imperfection” […] and then by commanding, Thou shalt not look into the light forming the image. (Liu 1984: 183)

In a highly allusive style, Liu explores the negativity of common sense criticism and already points to the regulative principles at work in common sense discourse, which are vital for my own understanding of the talk of common sense in the early eighteenth century. Liu however remains vague and overly general in his assumptions about the emergence of common sense discourse in the course of the eighteenth century, for which he accredits, among other things, Berkeley and Hume’s empiricist violations of common sense and Thomas Reid’s subsequent reaction to it. As my own study will show, the power of individuals is often overrated whenever discursive phenomena are mono-causally reduced to the influence of single speakers. What Liu correctly observes in his first sketches towards a theory of eighteenth-century common sense is the close connection of sense and taste in the eighteenth century, for which he gives evidence, in a little detour, with a quotation from Claude Buffier’s Traité des vérités premières (1724; trans.: First Truths). This conceptual link had of course been firmly established in England by Lord Shaftesbury in 1711, who is one of the key figures in Karen Valihora’s substantial doctoral dissertation, “A Genealogy of Common Sense: Judgment in EighteenthCentury Literature and Philosophy” (submitted at Yale University in 2000). Despite the title, whose mention of the term genealogy misleadingly seems to signal a Foucauldian approach to history, Valihora does not even mention Foucault once. Yet this should not take away from the fact that her dissertation is a well-executed and insightful study of the philosophical debate of judgment in the eighteenth century (in close exegesis of Shaftesbury, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, with Kant’s aesthetic theory from the Critique of Judgment pervading her argument) and the reflection of this debate in literary and art-theoretical examples between 1750 and 1820 (Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art). Concerning her choice of texts for application, Valihora’s study could pass as a companion to my own, as hers focuses solely on postAugustan texts. However, her thought-historical approach lacks an overarching theoretical framework (except for the philosophical problem of judgment) and elicits rather conventional readings, whose import – irrespective of how observant she is with regard to textual detail – is mostly limited to illustrating the problem of aesthetic and moral judgment as represented in those texts. Nevertheless, my own study owes many valuable insights to Valihora’s dissertation. Not only is

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my reading of Shaftesbury’s moral sense philosophy (in chapter II.1 below) indebted to her explication of moral-aesthetic judgment in the Characteristicks, but I also agree with a number of important points she makes: First of all, she observes that despite the ubiquity of appeals to common sense in the eighteenth century, “it is almost never assigned a definite content” (Valihora 2000: 11). Second, she centres her argument on a firmly established connection between common sense and taste in the eighteenth century: “There is an implicit appeal to a common sense in those accounts of the judgment of taste, or the standard of taste, which describe taste as a common ability” (Valihora 2000: 12). Third, she maintains that the eighteenth-century discussion of acts of judgment always implies “the ability of its members to enter into a shared perspective, a shared sense of things,” which is, however, “a potential sense of things, a sense of things that one could imagine could, indeed, be common” (Valihora 2000: 18). Finally, Valihora asserts that underlying all eighteenth-century discussions of taste is the epistemological search for a common sense as a benchmark for certain knowledge: “The judgment of taste was so important because of what was at stake; ideally it made available a kind of objectivity much more difficult to achieve in any other arena, certainly not in debates about politics, religion or morals” (Valihora 2000: 29). Since her account of the problematic of judgment is largely restricted to aesthetic theory, she is barred from a comprehensive view of the wider discursive field. What is highly valuable, though, is her astute analysis of the convergence of moral and aesthetic judgments in eighteenth-century appeals to common sense. Equally relevant to a historical analysis of eighteenth-century common sense is the far-reaching and impressively erudite history of political common sense by Sophia Rosenfeld (2011).³² Her point of departure is that the political idea of common sense is firmly associated with democracy and the common (shared) rights of the people. The most prominent historic emblem of this powerful political notion is clearly Thomas Paine’s game-changing pamphlet Common Sense from 1776. An immediate popular bestseller at the time, it not only became the manifesto of American Independence, but also marked the first peak in “the long, complex marriage between the populist (and now largely taken for granted) appeal to the people’s common sense and the political form we call democracy” (Rosenfeld 2011: 7). Significantly, Rosenfeld does not begin her historical analysis with the American conflict in the 1770s, but goes back to the earliest occur It is regrettable for the purpose of the present study that Rosenfeld’s book appeared when an earlier version of my own study was already written and submitted for formal examination as Habilitationsschrift. Nevertheless, I have tried to accommodate some of Rosenfeld’s many valuable findings and insights in the present version of chapter IV below.

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rences of common sense as a phrase of public discourse in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This move coincides to a great extent with my own approach, and her account of common sense as a highly contentious term in the political battlefield of 1730s London overlaps considerably with my discourse analysis as put forward in chapter IV.1 and IV.2 below. Rosenfeld also locates the conceptual origins of political common sense in Protestantism and the early Enlightenment: the questioning of traditional authority, ideas of toleration, and the interest in the epistemological conditions of perception shared by all human beings (cf. Rosenfeld 2011: 5). Moreover, she asserts “[t]hree large historical shifts” (Rosenfeld 2011: 9) to have facilitated the victory march of political common sense in the eighteenth century: First, urbanization on the basis of commerce, resulting in large civic places of social and intellectual exchange; second, the rise of a social species of “men of letters” (Rosenfeld 2011: 10), interested in the popularization of diverse ideas; and third, the growing tensions between censorship and freedom of speech due to the emergence of a public sphere.³³ Similarly to Piper’s analysis, Rosenfeld regards the plurality of urban public discourses in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century as a key factor in the emergence of common sense notions, but contrary to him, she also brings into view the contradictions and instabilities of common sense discourse. Not only are “common sense’s tenets […] culturally and temporally variable in content”; what is claimed as common sense is “also never really fully consensual even in its time,” and “claims about common sense are, in public life, almost always polemical: [they are] statements about consensus and certainty used to particular, partisan, and destabilizing effect” (Rosenfeld 2011: 15). In effect, Rosenfeld anticipates the general argument of the present study that common sense discourse has a compensatory or mediating function in the cultural climate of the Enlightenment when she states that one of the great challenges of the postrevolutionary era was to discover new, extralegal ways to mitigate the most extreme forms of pluralism, that is, to distinguish understanding from misunderstanding and to promote a low-level kind of consensus about basic ideas, all within the context of religious toleration and the legal deregulation of speech and print. (Rosenfeld 2011: 26)

In this way, Rosenfeld attributes a moderating, if not corrective, role to “common sense culture,” in that it is “a historically specific reaction against perceived ex Rosenfeld does not make any reference to Habermas (1962), but it is obvious from her argument that she also builds on what can be seen as the received Habermasian view of the social transformation in England towards a public sphere at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

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cesses of all kinds rooted in the religious, intellectual, and political culture of the late seventeenth century” (Rosenfeld 2011: 34). This defensive buffer against “excesses” of all sort – also those brought about by the new knowledge discourses of the Enlightenment – is of course a key point in my own argumentation here. In her perspicacious diagnosis, Rosenfeld also fully embraces the historical specificity of the emergent talk of common sense in early eighteenth-century England and is therefore able to recognize it as the manifestation of a distinctive national self-concept: “Common sense was understood to be a special ally of liberty, of course. That was one way it manifested its Englishness” (Rosenfeld 2011: 34). On the whole, Rosenfeld’s assessment of the historical emergence of commonsense ideas and their specific functions in the cultural climate of early eighteenth-century England concurs widely with my own analysis.³⁴ Nonetheless, Rosenfeld’s book differs from the present one in several respects. First and foremost, her focus is on the intellectual history of a political concept, not on literature or other aesthetic cultural practices of the eighteenth century – literary texts as meeting-points of social and cultural discourses play no role in her deliberations.³⁵ Of course, this is rather to be expected from a study in intellectual history. The methodological consequence, however, is not only a disregard of aesthetics, but also a systemic negligence concerning the exclusionary forces of common sense as a discursive regime: Rosenfeld does not focus on the specific regulatory strategies and operations by which unwanted and unacceptable statements are to be banished to an outside area of eighteenth-century common sense. Then again, her approach benefits from a wider historical and national scope than my own. Not only does the study range from the 1680s to the 1790s, to which is even added a final chapter with some episodic aspects of common-sense history up to the present time. Rosenfeld also takes a broader geographical stance by retracing the trajectory of common sense throughout the ‘Atlantic’ Age of Revolutions via its stations of London, Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, and Paris – cities in which the political value of common sense peaked and contributed, directly or indirectly, to the development of modern democracy.

 My own theory of the historical causes of the emergence of common sense discourse was developed independently of Rosenfeld’s research and was published first in Henke (2006), two years before Rosenfeld (2008) presented – for the first time, as far as I can see – the foundation of her later study, apparently without any knowledge of my prior article.  The prominent exception is Henry Fielding’s play Pasquin (see Rosenfeld 2011: 39 – 41 et passim), yet this play is merely skimmed by her for its political effrontery as a propaganda piece for the Country Whigs.

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A final mention in this critical overview is to be made of a volume of essays edited by Gavin Budge in 2007, titled Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780 – 1830. While I have so far omitted most publications pertaining to Thomas Reid’s philosophical school – simply because my interest is not in the special discourse of the Scottish common-sense philosophy of the late eighteenth century –, Budge’s introduction to the said volume shall be an exception since it contains some important remarks relevant to my overall argument. In an attempt to challenge the orthodox view that Romanticism marks a break with the British eighteenth-century tradition of empiricism and a turn towards German idealism, Budge presents a string of arguments contradicting what is to him a simplistic reduction. These come together in a re-appraisal of the influence of Scottish common sense philosophy on the Romantics, a plea also backed by the institutional hegemony of Scottish common sense in philosophy departments across Britain, France, and the USA during the nineteenth century. According to Budge, the Scottish school of common sense philosophy presented a welcome intuitionist alternative to orthodox empiricism and thus broadly shaped Romanticism in a way that has been largely neglected so far by historians of philosophy, literature, and culture alike. Intent on destroying the ‘myth’ of an idealist monoculture in Romantic philosophy, Budge perhaps overshoots the mark with his forceful case for Romantic common-sense empiricism. Nevertheless interesting in the context of the present study is Budge’s assessment of common sense philosophy “as forming a British ‘counter-Enlightenment’” (Budge 2007: 29) which has its roots in the early eighteenth century. While he merely lists religious writings by Berkeley, Butler, and Warburton from the 1730s as instances of this, his argument could be further backed with broad evidence from other literary and non-literary texts from the early eighteenth century. My own study will produce such evidence to show the compensatory epistemic function of British common sense discourse with which it counters the unrestrained progressivism of Enlightenment change. Accordingly, Budge’s warning which he issues against neglecting the relevance of common sense discourse needs to be extended (he specifically has the Scottish school in mind, while I believe his statement holds true for the whole of the eighteenth century): “as the continued political resonance of appeals to ‘common sense’ shows, the language and rhetorical techniques of the Common Sense tradition still permeate the public sphere in ways that the academy neglects at its peril” (Budge 2007: 31).

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1.3 The Discursive Formation of Early Eighteenth-Century Common Sense Some moral and philosophical Truths there are withal so evident in themselves, that ’twou’d be easier to imagine half Mankind to have run mad, and join’d precisely in one and the same Species of Folly, than to admit any thing as Truth, which shou’d be advanc’d against such natural Knowledg, fundamental Reason, and common Sense. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 92) Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race. (Vico 1984: 63) The Cause of King George is the Cause of Liberty and true Religion. In other Words, it is the Cause of common Sense, my Boy […]. (Fielding 1974: 440 – 441) […] to be born out of England, and yet have common sense! impossible! (CW: 142) The Fair Sex in general (Queens excepted) are infinitely above plain downright Common Sense; sprightly Fancy, and shining Irregularities are their Favourites […]. (Chesterfield, CS1: 4)

Talking about common sense in the eighteenth century takes place in a great variety of cultural spheres which comprise the broad discursive field of common sense. It ranges from philosophical debate (as in the Shaftesbury and Vico quotations above) to literary and satirical responses (as in Fielding and Goldsmith) as well as political and public discussion (as in the quotation by Lord Chesterfield from the Common Sense periodical). As the sample quotes above indicate, standard significations of common sense include its intuitive nature and intrinsic argumentative force (with a taint of criticism hinted at by Vico), its suggestiveness for sanctioning political causes and nationalist values, as well as attributions of gender. It thus bears on philosophy (empiricism, epistemology), ethics (moral judgment, social theory), aesthetics (poetics, theories of taste), and politics (political rhetoric, gender constructs). The present study therefore pursues the general question of how the discursive formation of ‘common sense’ could emerge so powerfully in the course of the eighteenth century in Britain and disseminate so widely across various discursive boundaries that it established itself lastingly as one of the key components of ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness.’ Concerning its ideological underpinnings, eighteenth-century common sense discourse intersects with what Easthope (1999: 62) conceives of as the “more widely dispersed forms of empiricist discourse” in England since the seventeenth century. Yet its relationship with empiricism is far from simple, even though it centres on a number of implicit ideological assumptions derived

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from basic empiricist tenets: (1) the transparency of reality (objective reality is discernible by sensory experience), (2) the universality of truth (reality can be represented in truthful statements and codified into facts with universal validity), (3) the self-evidence of basic facts (some facts do not require explanation because they are clear to everyone). The first two are simplifications of basic empiricist positions, whereas the third is where common sense discourse parts ways with the epistemological scepticism furthered by Berkeley’s and Hume’s versions of empiricism. In traditional philosophical terms, common sense discourse is based on epistemological realism. However, since common sense is not concerned with a reflection of its own epistemological rationale – this is in fact its blind spot –, a common-sense view of the world will always profess to be without bias and free of any ideological distortion: “Common Sense must be free from all Prejudice” (CS no. 24, 16 July 1737; CS1: 171). The ideal of common-sense judgment is thus described by Shaftesbury as “being sedate, cool, and impartial; free of every biassing Passion, every giddy Vapor, or melancholy Fume” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 35). Due to their common ideological foundations, common sense discourse shares with empiricism certain stylistic features, specifically a transparent style (Easthope 1999: 93 – 96). Whoever speaks or writes common sense, promotes a stylistic preference for plainness, transparency, clarity, symmetry, balance and order. Furthermore, common sense has a marked affinity for the stylistic devices of irony and epigram, both of which are used to indicate its firm hold in transparent and knowable reality – either indirectly, as in the inverted propositional mode of verbal irony, or directly, as in epigrammatic speaking whose neat, ordered, balanced phrasing is to imitate mimetically the structure of a reality perceived to be equally ordered and balanced as well as codified in common knowledge. With regard to irony, Easthope (1999: 97) shrewdly remarks that it is a means of referring to reality which “affirms a sense of collective identity by excluding an other, discriminating insiders from outsiders, those party to the irony from those stuck with a literal reading.” Such discrimination through irony finds its strongest expression in the literary genre of satire, with which common sense has a strong aesthetic association. Eighteenth-century satires by Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, or Goldsmith all have a normative basis in common sense – it is from this seemingly firm ground that absurdities, excesses, excrescences, follies, conceitedness, affectation, hypocrisy, madness, or vanity could be censured. Whatever the context or specific field of knowledge in which it appears, common sense discourse always exerts a regulatory effect on the relationship between addressers and addressees. It implies, if not demands, the existence of a broad discursive community subsumed under the aspect of ‘common,’ a community that is to accept statements made within that discourse as true. Here it is

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helpful to recall for a moment relevant aspects of Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse. As any other discourse in society, common sense discourse has to be grasped as a social phenomenon with ambivalent features. On the one hand, it may be analysed as a structure, an ordered system, of acceptable statements about a certain field of objects. This objective field is constituted by, and only comes into being through, the very existence of that discourse which in turn delimits the field against other possible discursive fields with which it might intersect (such as certain overlaps in the eighteenth-century discursive fields of common sense, reason, nature, virtue, liberty etc.). On the other hand, a discourse has to be seen as an event in time, or a series of such events, that is ultimately beyond the control of individual speakers. Since an event in its historical contingency can never be fully anticipated or planned, the production of discourses in every society is, according to Foucault (1981: 52), “at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.” The procedures of controlling and delimiting discourses are governed by external and internal principles. Besides the internal principles regulating the ‘inside’ of a discourse, such as commentary, the author-function, and organization into disciplines (Foucault 1981: 56 – 61), Foucault names three external ‘principles of exclusion’ which determine the very boundaries between the inside and outside of a discourse: prohibition, reason/madness, and true/false (Foucault 1981: 52– 56). Especially the latter of these three principles has become preeminent for the construction of discursive knowledge in Western culture as it gives expression to an all-pervasive ‘will to truth’ that is seemingly dissociated from an arbitrary exertion of power or coercive impulses of desire, while it is in fact only a displaced and thinly disguised ‘will to power.’ Foucault (1981: 56) therefore asks in a Nietzschean fashion: “although since the Greeks ‘true’ discourse is no longer the discourse that answers to the demands of desire, or the discourse which exercises power, what is at stake in the will to truth, in the will to utter this ‘true’ discourse, if not desire and power?” The ‘will to truth’ appears to Foucault (1981: 56) as “that prodigious machinery designed to exclude.” It is the master principle of exclusion, as it were, because it overshadows the other two external discursive principles: “truth undertakes to justify the prohibition and to define madness” (Foucault 1981: 56). The discourse of common sense, it must be stressed, clearly features all three principles of exclusion. First, it operates through prohibition. As inclusive and universal as the eighteenth-century notion of a ‘common sense of mankind’ may seem, it crucially presupposes the existence of its opposite, of a position outside of itself from which no speaking is allowed (or at least will not be heard): whatever is supposed to be not part of the

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‘common’ is its necessary flipside and to be banned from discourse. Secondly, common sense discourse is inextricably bound to the distinction between reason and madness, between reasonable, sensible speech and foolish, befuddling babble. Thirdly, common sense discourse is definitely a truth-generating discourse: it produces ‘true’ statements about what is deemed to be commonsensical thought, judgment, or behaviour.³⁶ Whatever is rejected as violating common sense is thus excluded from it and belongs to “the space of a wild exteriority” (Foucault 1981: 61) when viewed from the inside of common sense discourse. Significantly, though, common sense discourse – in contrast to other contemporary discourses like medicine, law, or natural philosophy – does not veil these principles of exclusion and their operations, but in fact specifically addresses them (especially the distinction between reason and madness) as its pivotal mode of generating knowledge. In other words, common sense discourse not only operates on principles of exclusion, but functions as one itself. Common sense talk in the eighteenth century assumes the shape of a normative discourse, which means that it operates on rather rigid principles of inclusion and exclusion. It is thus both self-serving (for those that try to empower themselves through its use) and repressive (of those excluded from it). The present study will try to chart both the inside and the outside of the eighteenth-century discourse of common sense, while considering the historical-cultural functions which this discourse performs due to its specific inside-outside divisions. On the inclusive side, it seems, common sense discourse has a powerful homogenizing or synthesizing function for society, especially when confronted with such cultural changes and epistemic rifts as those taking place during that time in Britain in the domains of religion, science, commerce, politics, or demographics. Here, common sense primarily serves as a principle of synthesis: it gains discursive force in order to compensate for controversial changes that threaten the value-claims of traditional world-views and ideologies, and thereby helps to fuse old and new. In dialectical terms, the Enlightenment project of Western Europe had made the world not only more open and interesting, more explorable and exploitable, but also less familiar and certain, less homely

 Significantly, this discursive operation is still present in statements critical of or even denying the existence (or relevance) of common sense. In such statements, the same implicit assumption of inherent truth-value is at work, even though the limits of the addressed discursive community affirmative of them may be smaller than in statements claiming, for example, the universality of common sense for all of humankind. It only goes to show that common sense discourse lays bare and emphasizes the basic truth-generating function of referential statements, which implicitly appeal to the addressee to agree with them (i. e. their conative function), and thus to share a discursive community (their phatic function).

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and intellectually secure. The idea of a ‘common sense of mankind’ promised to offer firm ground, an instinctive anchor to hold on to in the rough waters of social and cultural change. By attempting to accommodate radically changing world-views and conflicting discourses to the practicalities of life, common sense turns into a flexible ‘melting pot’ discourse, combining elements of empiricism, rationalism, traditional Christian ethics, practical thinking (concomitant with the rise of British commercial spirit), everyday prudence and emotionality (in the forms of intuition, sympathy and fellow feeling). In fact, the protean versatility of common sense discourse, i. e. to take on board whatever is of relevance in a given context, already hints at its status as an ‘interdiscourse’³⁷ – a term that will be expanded on below. However, due to this discursive adaptability, common sense reveals itself to be rather the opposite of what it purports to be, namely a historical, culture-bound construct, whose claim to timeless universality only veils power structures projected by nationalist desires and hegemonic interests. With regard to its inclusive operations, eighteenth-century common sense comes in at least two forms, distinguished by C. S. Lewis as the ‘minimizing’ and ‘maximizing’ views of common sense. Lewis understands the former as a basic apperception of reality, often meant in a more or less derogatory way, and contrasts it with a highly valued faculty of judgment, the ‘maximizing view’ of common sense, also referred to as ‘good sense’ (see Lewis 1967: 153 – 154). In issue no. 259 of The Spectator (27 December 1711), the difference between the two is explained as follows: “that which we call Common Sense suffers under that Word; for it sometimes implies no more than that Faculty which is common to all Men, but sometimes signifies right Reason, and what all Men should consent to” (Addison and Steele 1965: II, 508). Common sense in the maximizing view combines, in a rather diffuse way, elements of rational thinking, prudence, everyday wisdom, and taste within a high standard of judgment which invites common consent. By contrast, common sense in the minimizing view merely produces truths that are self-evident and supposedly plain to see for everyone, but whose claims to being irrefutable are even more forceful. The excluding operations of common sense discourse are even more significant because its main function, especially in the lively political debates of the early eighteenth century, is just that: to exclude and prohibit from discourse ideas, acts, behaviour, or speakers that are not in agreement with some notion of what is commonsensical (i. e. whatever appears irrelevant, impractical, unrea-

 That is apart from a special discourse of common sense philosophy emerging in Scotland in reaction to David Hume’s controversial empiricist philosophy.

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sonable, meaningless, subversive, or potentially dangerous). Common sense as a principle of exclusion often triggers a disciplinary rhetoric against excesses, extremes, anomalies, follies, madness, or any other deviation from its fuzzy norm. It is so remarkably fuzzy, though, that contemporaries have difficulty defining it in any positive terms whatsoever. In an issue of Common Sense (no. 66, 6 May 1738) it is described as “a Kind of negative Wisdom, which every Man has when he does not expose his Follies” (CS2: 82). Thomas Reid, the inaugurator of the Scottish school of common sense philosophy, likewise observed in 1785 “that the province of common sense is more extensive in refutation than in confirmation” (Reid 2002: 433), by which he means that the ‘man of common sense’ involuntarily notices violations of this principle, while he is at a loss what is positively in accordance with it. Despite its appearance as an integrative universal concept – as implied by the adjective common –, common sense has a repressive hegemonic aspect, which is strongly hinted at in the metaphors and tropes found in eighteenth-century common sense discourse. Besides the much used phrase of the ‘dictates of common sense,’ the personification of common sense as a neutral arbiter or unprejudiced judge presiding at a tribunal or court trial becomes a commonplace in the early eighteenth century. In an philosophical treatise of obscure authorship, called The Infallibility of Humane Judgement by one Mr. Lyons (apparently quite a popular tract since it was printed in several editions between 1720 and 1725),³⁸ the author uses common sense as a synonym of rational judgment³⁹ and characterizes it as a reductive principle to arrive at the truth of any matter: The way then to discover Truth, is to consider how Things appear to general Common Sense; that is to say, to indifferent Persons; and to stand with Resolution to the Result that is made on such Consideration. To prove the Truth of your Work, and shew that you have apprehended justly, and resolv’d equitably, according to the true Dictates of your Judgment, take this Sentence of Common Sense, (that is to say, the Result which is made on a rational Examination of

 Each new edition, from the second (1720) to the sixth (1725), saw substantial additions. I quote from the second edition entitled The Infallibility of Humane Judgment; Its Dignity and Excellency: Being: A New Art of Reasoning and Discovering Truth, by Reducing All Disputable Cases in Philosophy, Morals, Politicks, or Religion to General, Irresistible, and Self-Evident Truths (1720), which was published anonymously. Later editions state “Mr. Lyons” as the author of the tract, which is emendated in most library catalogues to “J. Lyons.”  In a rather indistinct way, Lyons subsumes common sense and judgment under the main concept of reason: “Reason is the distinguishing Excellency, Dignity, and Beauty of Mankind. […] This Reason is known to us also by the Names of Judgment, Light of Nature, Conscience, and Common Sense; only varying its Name according to its different Uses and Appearances, but is one and the same Thing” (Lyons 1720: 59).

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the Case) and reduce it into form by writing it down, and ’twill be found a plain, irresistible, and self-evident Truth, fitted for the general Reason of Mankind; that is, such as every Man’s common Sense and Reason can’t help acknowledging. (Lyons 1720: 65)

This seemingly practical instruction in the use of rational judgment features important constitutive aspects of common sense discourse: the exclusion of bias and prejudice (“indifferent Persons”), the coercive nature of common sense judgments (“the true Dictates of your Judgment”), the strategy of reducing a matter to its essential points (“reduce it into [the] form [of] a plain, irresistible, and self-evident Truth”), and the law-court imagery (“this Sentence of Common Sense”). In the first issue of the Common Sense weekly from 1737, this imagery is invoked by Lord Chesterfield as the magazine’s master trope: As to the Design of my Paper, it is to take in all Subjects whatsoever, and try them by the Standard of Common Sense. – I shall erect a Kind of Tribunal, for the Crimina Læsi Sensus Communis, or the Pleas of Common Sense. […] Let not the Guilty hope to escape, or the Innocent fear being puzzled, delay’d, ruin’d, or condemn’d. (CS1: 5)

The goal of the weekly magazine is “to rebuke Vice, correct Errors, reform Abuses, and shame Folly and Prejudice, without Regard to any Thing but Common Sense” (CS1: 8). Common sense is “a Condition of Mind which more People stand in Need of being reduced to, than kept up in. Remove the Excrescences of Affectation, Fashion, Party, and Passion, and the Man will of himself subside into Common Sense […]” (CS2: 81). It is needed to fight man’s inclination “to branch out into Extreams […], unless some judicious Hand takes the Trouble to prune their Luxuriances, and by that Means make them bear the Fruits of Common Sense” (CS2: 82). A similar botanical image is later used by Thomas Reid to reject as a wrong turn in the progress of knowledge any theory or philosophical system that contradicts the intuitive truths of common sense: “Philosophy […] has no other root but the principles of Common Sense; […] severed from this root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots” (Reid 1997: 19). Such metaphors from botany or medicine – as a cure for “Epidemical Frenzies” (CS2: 85) – present common sense as a discourse defining normality: on the inside is mental and social sanity, on the outside madness as an abnormal growth or epidemical disease. As a consequence, common sense discourse, in warding off the abnormal ‘other,’ tends to promote orthodox self-concepts. Here it intersects with discourses of collective identities, e. g. cultural, national, or gender identity. As universally valid as common sense claims profess to be, particular notions of Englishness or Britishness have been sustained by relying on “the old solid English standard of Common Sense” (CS1: 6), i. e. by the conviction that common sense was more

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generously granted to English people (or Britons) than to any other nation. Such a notion is satirized, for instance, in Oliver Goldsmith’s epistolary fiction The Citizen of the World. Lien Chi Altangi, Goldsmith’s fictional Chinese traveller, testifies to the significance of common sense in a collective self-concept of Englishness, when he is greeted with surprise at his good understanding: “Strange, […] to be born out of England, and yet have common sense! impossible! He must be some Englishman in disguise; his very visage has nothing of the true exotic barbarity” (CW: 142). Goldsmith lays bare the questionable exclusivity with which common sense is claimed as a clichéd element of national character. Such clichés are juxtaposed with a universal concept of common sense, divested of all “those differences which result from climate, religion, education, prejudice, and partiality” (CW: 40).⁴⁰ Besides playing into the formation of cultural and national identities, common sense discourse also affects gender concepts and stereotypes. Even though Henry Fielding, in his play Pasquin, personifies common sense a queen (which harks back to the myth of an English Golden Age under Elizabeth I),⁴¹ this should not condone the fact that eighteenth-century common sense discourse is primarily gendered in the opposite way. Common sense is perceived to be a male domain – their ‘vanity’ and ‘affectation’ exclude women from entering this discursive field. In turn, men are implied to be on the ‘inside’ of common sense, which is propagated as an element of male gender identity. The exclusionary operations of common sense discourse can be so rigid that common sense as a concept becomes orthodox and dogmatic – quite ironically so, since dogmatism is the very thing to which common sense seems to be diametrically opposed. As some of the master tropes of common sense discourse are moderation, compromise, and the middle way or ground, dogmatism falls into the category of an extreme to be avoided. (A historical case in point would be the self-perception of the Anglican Church as the middle-ground between the extremes of dogmatic Catholicism and absurd forms of radical Protestantism.)⁴² In

 While Altangi’s ‘foreign’ view (arguably representing Goldsmith’s own experience as an Irishman in England) leads to some deflating of English cultural superiority, this insight into cultural difference does not result in a radical insight into cultural relativism, but the renewed belief in fundamental common-sense standards of ‘human nature’ beyond all “prejudice and partiality” (CW: 22). – This will be pursued in much more detail in chapter V.1 below.  Of course, Queen Common Sense in Fielding’s play also alludes to Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, who warded off Jacobite claims to her succession and made way for the Protestant Hanoverian line of monarchy. Queen Ignorance, on the other hand, another important allegorical persona in the play, might have reminded contemporary audiences of Pope’s Goddess of Dulness from The Dunciad.  In Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub this constellation is aptly represented by the allegorical tale of the three brothers. The character of Martin, who represents Anglicanism as the middle

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a list of binary oppositions characteristic of empiricist discourse, Antony Easthope (1999: 90) lists dogma as the very opposite of empiricism’s preference for common sense. Despite such an anti-dogmatic stance, the insistence on exclusive common-sense truths and principles has a dogmatic side itself. Clifford Geertz (2000: 84), in his anthropological analysis of common sense as a cultural system, goes as far as to assert: “As a frame of thought, and a species of it, common sense is as totalizing as any other: no religion is more dogmatic, no science more ambitious, no philosophy more general.”⁴³ So far no distinction has been made as to the social spheres in which common sense discourse arises, nor to the pragmatic situations and uses in eighteenth-century culture. In this context, it is useful to differentiate between three main categories of common sense discourse: common sense as (1) a special discourse, as in empiricist philosophy and in the emerging common-sense school of philosophy in Scotland, (2) an interdiscourse, manifesting itself in literature, journalism, religion, politics, and virtually all other fields of culture in the eighteenth century, and (3) a rhetorical trope, mainly as part of political discourse, or with a political-polemical purpose in other discourses.⁴⁴ Common sense as a ‘special discourse’ shall be understood here as pertaining to the actual discussion of concepts of common sense within a more or less institutionalized framework of intellectual scholarly debate (as for instance in the Scottish school of common sense philosophy). Common sense as mere rhetoric occurs primarily in the social sphere of politics and becomes a fashionable rhetorical commonplace in the course of the eighteenth century. Appeals to the indisputable guiding value of common sense are frequently used to support one’s own political position, while ostracizing any opposition to it at the same time. In this way,

position between the two extremes of Catholicism (Peter) and Puritanism (Jack), is described by Swift as being moderate, e. g. in restoring his father’s coat from Peter’s ornamental excrescences or in rejecting Peter’s dogma of transubstantiation as well as Jack’s mad excesses of selfcastigation. – This will be pursued in much more detail in chapter II.2 below.  See also Tingle (2001: 305), who refers to J. G. Fichte’s romantic criticism of common sense as “a form of dogmatism. It supplies knowledge, in the form of ‘ready-mades’.” A good modern-day example of dogmatic common-sense argumentation comes from a study in analytic philosophy by Noah Lemos (Common Sense: A Contemporary Defense), who, in a discussion of Bishop Berkeley’s claims to the tradition of common sense philosophy, rigorously excludes him from it: “Denying the existence of material objects excludes one from the common sense tradition. You do that and you are out” (Lemos 2004: 11).  Of course, such taxonomy is not to imply that these categories are separate entities and wholly independent discursive domains; on the contrary, they are tightly interwoven. Nevertheless, a distinction as to the different occurrences of common sense discourse in eighteenthcentury Britain helps to throw light on its pervasiveness as a cultural phenomenon.

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common sense rhetoric exploits the powerful principles of exclusion at work in discourse. For the most part, though, common sense has the status of an ‘interdiscourse.’ The term was originally coined by Jürgen Link and Ursula Link-Heer (1990) to address the particular discursive mode of literature in modern Western societies. Their approach suggests a social co-existence of ‘special discourses’ (largely identical with Foucault’s concept of discourse) and ‘interdiscourses’, the latter of which function to mediate between the former and re-integrate elements that would otherwise be ‘lost’ within the segregated discursive practices of special discourses. Link and Link-Heer’s theory is inspired by conventional insights of European social history, rather than aiming at radical discourse analysis, which can be seen from the fact that they claim a growing demand for re-integrating interdiscursivity in modern societies that are characterized by continuous social differentiation in the form of a broadening division of labour and rapid specialization of knowledge (Link and Link-Heer 1990: 95). Their test case for interdiscursivity is literature, which functions both as a special discourse, with its own rules of discursive formation (e. g. literary genres, structural patterns, linguistic devices), and as an interdiscourse in that it constantly integrates elements of other special discourses within itself. Although common sense discourse can have counterdiscursive functions as well, for example in the historical field of political opposition, and has, as I have stated above, a ‘countering’ function overall in that it corrects or compensates for shortcomings of other discourses that are dominant or growing in power, it would be overstating the point to ascribe to it a predominantly counterdiscursive purpose, because from the point of its historical emergence on, common sense discourse rather quickly becomes a dominant force in the eighteenth century.⁴⁵ For the purpose of the present study, therefore, the term ‘interdiscourse’ shall be adapted in order to address and take into account the numerous processes of mediation and re-integration with which common sense discourse incorporates other discursive elements. Again, as with the dogmatic aspect of common sense, there is an apparent paradox at work here. While common sense professes to express timeless, universal truths and an unchanging intuitive faculty of sound judgment

 Perhaps, then, early eighteenth-century common sense discourse could be described within the theoretical framework of cultural ecology as transforming from a counterdiscourse into a reintegrative interdiscourse in a relatively short amount of time. Even though a cultural-ecological analysis of common sense discourse might yield significant results in respect of a comprehensive cultural ecology of the early eighteenth century, I will not pursue this terminology here because I am more interested in the power-related processes of discursive inclusion and exclusion in Foucault’s sense. – For the theory of literary and cultural ecology see Zapf (2002).

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in practical matters of life, it is in fact just the opposite: in a historical world, common sense is an interdiscursive phenomenon that is subject to perpetual (though often imperceptible) historical change, especially with regard to the ever-new elements of ‘self-evident’ knowledge that it processes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was able to lay bare this interdiscursive phenomenon quite succinctly: “Common sense […] differs in different ages. What was born and christened in the schools passes by degrees into the world at large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table” (Coleridge 1954: 63 n.). *** As may have become clear from this outline of my approach to common sense discourse in the early eighteenth century, my own study aligns itself with the by now firmly established tradition of the ‘new’ eighteenth century, which was inaugurated in a collection of essays with the programmatic title The New Eighteenth Century in 1987. The editors Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown called for “a new kind of eighteenth-century studies” that would make “radical breaks with the past in its confrontation with theory and politics, especially new feminisms, Marxisms, and historicisms” (Nussbaum and Brown 1987: 9). They stressed the need for a shift of emphasis towards theory and ‘the periphery,’ i. e., a move away from the traditional focus on the dominant culture, which was to “supply a more inclusive view of the period than those which are limited to the dominant culture alone” (Nussbaum and Brown 1987: 3). With their modern critical-theory emphasis on politics, Nussbaum and Brown further called for “the formation of a broad and systematic critique of ideology […], fully situated in history and culture, and informed by debates concerning class, gender, and race” (Nussbaum and Brown 1987: 20), which was to concur with an interdisciplinary approach under the premise of such a revisionist political agenda. All this was radical and provocative a quarter of a century ago, but has become an established reality by now,⁴⁶ at the end of the turn from literary to cultural studies, and has led to the gradual ousting of an older generation of historicist and formalist eighteenth-century studies.⁴⁷ The look at the margins of eight-

 Steve Newman (2009: 116), in a very recent account of key critical texts in contemporary eighteenth-century studies, concludes “that ‘the new eighteenth century’ heralded two decades ago has largely come to pass.”  Howard Weinbrot comes to mind here, whose angry rebuttal of ‘new’ tendencies in eighteenth-century studies in a review was used by Nussbaum and Brown in their introduction to The New Eighteenth Century to sharpen their own position and repeat it with renewed vigour. Weinbrot, however, has continued to publish extensively and impressively on the ‘dominant culture’ of the eighteenth-century English literature; see especially Weinbrot’s Britannia’s Issue:

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eenth-century life has in fact become the ‘dominant culture’ of eighteenth-century criticism, the most productive force of which have arguably been studies operating within the paradigm of a postcolonial critique of colonial practices.⁴⁸ Now that the dust has settled on the new eighteenth century and the Young Turks have become the Old Guard, to use Steve Newman’s expression in the context,⁴⁹ my own study approaches the early eighteenth century with a Foucauldian terminological paradigm that used to be on the periphery, but is now at the centre of literary studies, whereas the overarching focus of my analyses – common sense – is an aspect that used to be at the centre of eighteenth-century studies (at least as a subspecies of reason in the conventional Age-of-Reason and Enlightenment criticism), but is now rather on the periphery of interests. In fact, even my method of approaching certain subject areas, such as the ethics and aesthetics of common sense in chapter II.1, will run along very traditional – and thus by now: marginalized – lines of critical inquiry, which is why I think proper, before we proceed any farther, to acquaint the reader (in Fielding’s eminently parodiable words) that I intend to digress through this whole study from a strict Foucauldian discourse-analytical framework as often as I see necessity and occasion. Clearly, the central governing notion throughout this study is that the phenomenon of common sense in the eighteenth century is best conceptualized as a Foucauldian discourse that, even though it is impacted by individual texts and speakers, is ultimately beyond their control and, in turn, informs the speakers and their utterances in its discursive field. But just as the talk of common sense has interdiscursive qualities because it incorporates and is readily adaptable to other discourses, the present study is also interdiscursive with respect to incorporating elements of other theoretical paradigms and interpretive methods, i. e., elements of new historicism (in chapter II.2 on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees), deconstruction and psychoanalysis (in chapter II.3 on Johnson’s Rasselas), historical formalism (on satire in chapter III), political-historical and literary-rhetorical analysis (throughout chapter IV), postcolonial studies (in chapter V.1 on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), as well as feminist gender studies (in chapter

The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (1993) and Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (2005).  For recent examples see the introduction to this methodological and thematic complex in Kaul (2009), as well as the collection of essays in Carey and Festa (2009).  Newman notes, not without relishing the irony, “that three of the contributors to The New Eighteenth Century have served or are serving as presidents of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ACECS), an organization roundly criticized for its conservatism in the introduction to the volume” and wonders “whether the Young Turks have once again been transformed into the Old Guard, betokening a shift in the future” (Newman 2009: 116).

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V.2 on Pope’s Rape of the Lock). This variety of approaches is owed to my interest in textual criticism. I do not merely want to write a genealogy of common sense discourse in the early eighteenth century, but also conduct close(r) readings in order to appreciate the aesthetic or political specifics of a given text, for which I then choose whatever method or theoretical framework appears relevant to it in its respective context. As it were, this happy mix of methods and eclectic embrace of theories springs from a pragmatic attitude that itself breathes the spirit of common-sense compromise and balance. But such common sense on the meta-level of methodology bears a merely structural resemblance to the notions of common sense held by the Augustans – Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and all contemporary theorists and critics would very easily become the targets of commonsense satires of academic learning.⁵⁰ The following chapters trace the trajectory of common sense discourse in early eighteenth-century Britain in the form of four broad complexes whose division indicates different functional effects of common sense discourse, rather than themes, which often overlap. I call these effects ethical (which implies aesthetic), transgressive (as corrective), political (in patriotic constructs of the nation), and repressive (of otherness). This division into four respective chapters and the corresponding allocation of historical and literary texts discussed in them is not to suggest that the said effects could always be neatly separated or would in fact appear anywhere in a pure form. Often they are two sides of the same coin, as in the interdependence of the repressive and transgressive/corrective effects of common sense discourse. That they are separated here is for reasons of individual highlighting and economical grouping of texts. The historical course of common sense discourse is followed here largely in diachronic succession from 1700 to 1750, even if occasionally some pendulum movements in time cannot be avoided, either in backward direction (e. g. to the 1670s and Rochester’s satire on humankind in III.3) or forward direction (to the time after 1750, when discussing Rasselas in II.3, The Citizen of the World in V.1, and especially in my account of the political dimension of common sense in the revolutionary peaks towards the end of the century in IV.3). As to the selec-

 Historically, the attack on the complacent ‘common-sense’ criticism of liberal humanism was the highly politicized agenda at the beginning of the ‘critical theory’ revolution in Englishliterature departments (see Belsey 1980: 1– 36). The pendulum has certainly swung back, though, in the early twenty-first century: ‘common-sense’ approaches like Antoine Compagnon’s Literature, Theory, and Common Sense (2004) testify to an ongoing fatigue with theory in literary and cultural studies – a trend which has also facilitated the most recent turn of cultural studies towards the practical implications of Bruno Latour’s sociological actor-network for analyses of material objects in social networks.

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tion of texts in this study, I venture a compromise between the ‘dominant culture’ – that is, well-known texts by the well-known male literary greats of the age, such as Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith – and ‘the periphery,’ which consists in historical texts by Mary Wortley Montagu, the Lords Chesterfield and Hervey, an allegorical novel by Herbert Lawrence, a plethora of lesser known magazine essays, anonymous polemical and political pamphlets, satiric and patriotic songs, occasional poems, obscure philosophical tracts and the like. The obvious commonality of all these divergent texts written primarily between 1700 and 1750 is that they bear the marks of common sense discourse in them, evidently to varying extents. Allowing for such heterogeneity with regard to selected texts shows again that my primary interest is not formalist, which would have called for a more homogenous selection of texts from a particular genre (even though I will remark on formal-aesthetic repercussions of common sense discourse over and over again). Instead, I share the new historicist stance on the fruitfulness of an interpretive approach that brings together canonized literary classics with obscure or hardly known texts from various cultural areas of the time. Even though the Greenblattian notions of writing a cultural poetics or reconstructing the circulation of social energy through cultural artefacts (see Greenblatt 1988: 1– 20) are not chosen here as interpretive paradigms, Louis Montrose’s programmatic statement about the purpose of an analytic crossing of literary texts and other forms of writing equally applies to this study: “its collective project is to resituate canonical literary texts among the multiple forms of writing, and in relation to non-discursive practices and institutions, of the social formation in which those texts have been produced” (Montrose 1986: 6). The rationale of such an approach, I would argue, is not to level down the value of literary texts so that they would disappear in an indistinct mass of historical writing; instead they are to be viewed as privileged interdiscursive manifestations that process, bundle, condense, or subvert other dominant discourses of the cultural-historical period in which they are embedded.⁵¹ Such a juxtaposition of literature with different forms of writing, then, is a pragmatic and productive way of yielding interpretive results that illuminate both the canonized classics and the discursive formations out of which they arose.

 See Scholz, who similarly speaks of literary texts as “privilegierte Manifestationen des kulturellen Imaginären der jeweiligen Epoche” (2004: 8), and Jochen Hörisch, who emphasizes the special interdiscursive qualities of literature to be more than the sum total of its discursive components: “Gerade weil Literatur über den immanenten Code passend/unpassend bzw. stimmig/unstimmig (und z. B. nicht über den wissenschaftlichen Code richtig/falsch) prozediert, kann sie wissen, was außerliterarischen Diskursen entgeht” (Hörisch 1996: 47).

2 The Ethics of Common Sense Common sense discourse is primarily about judgment. As judgments occur in ethical and aesthetic contexts, common sense discourse traverses eighteenthcentury discourses of taste and morals, which converge in the classical union of beauty and moral usefulness, while they are still firmly rooted, up to Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham at least, in the Christian opposition of vice and virtue. Taste and morals thus become almost indistinguishable, which is why common sense verdicts not only tell the practical/reasonable from the impractical/ foolish, but also right from wrong, as well as the beautiful/useful from the ugly/useless. Furthermore, even though common sense discourse lays moral emphasis on inclusion, consensus, and community-building, there are clear limits to this. Common sense judgments therefore have a flipside of exclusion and repression – of everything that cannot be integrated and accommodated. Finally, an ethic based on common-sense judgments might reveal its shortcomings when it comes to tackling the meaning of life and existence. As far as this becomes a topic in eighteenth-century literature, it will be of concern here. In the following three sections, I will attempt to sketch the range of ethical and aesthetic questions negotiated in Augustan common sense discourse. The first section retraces the complex relationship between sensory, moral, and aesthetic concepts of a ‘common sense’ as they occur in the moral philosophy of the early eighteenth century. My prime example to be analysed in some more detail is Shaftesbury’s influential concept of an aesthetic-cum-moral sense, which he claims to be a universal ‘common sense of all mankind.’ An exemplary look at Alexander Pope’s didactic poetry will reveal in how far an Augustan poetics and its aesthetic norms (such as ‘nature,’ ‘balance,’ ‘refinement’ etc.) are informed by such a common-sense standard. The second section turns to what is excluded by the moral norms of eighteenth-century common sense discourse. Here my case in point is Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, which will be compared to selected writings by the popular icon of eighteenth-century common sense, Samuel Johnson. It will become clear that despite Mandeville’s attempts at hijacking common sense discourse in the form of manipulative rhetoric, his writings violate its ethic and aesthetic foundations. In the final section of this chapter, I shall revisit Samuel Johnson’s oriental tale Rasselas with the aim to show that a common sense attitude to life – for which Johnson was famed, after all – has to break down in the infinite melancholy loop of a circular narrative about the search for happiness.

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2.1 Good Sense and Good Taste: The Common-Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics – Shaftesbury and Pope Rien n’est beau que le vrai. (Nicolas Boileau, 1695) And thus, after all, the most natural Beauty in the World is Honesty, and moral Truth. For all Beauty is Truth. (Shaftesbury, 1711) “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (John Keats, 1819)

The Augustan marriage of ‘good sense’ and ‘good taste’ is one of old. In Plato’s Theætetus dialogue, a distinction is made between mere perception (aisthesis) and knowledge (episteme) from sensations: Socrates argues that it is not our senses that perceive things – and thus arrive at knowledge about the world – but our soul (psyche), which relies on the sensations registered by the senses. Besides objective qualities like “being and not-being, difference, similarity and self-identity, number” (Summers 1987: 77), the soul also apprehends, by way of immediately reflecting on the sensations registered, what is beautiful/ugly and good/bad (see Summers 1987: 77). Not only does Socrates’ ‘psyche’ anticipate what was afterwards conceptualized by Aristotle and the later scholastic tradition as the internal ‘common sense’ that unifies and interprets the various sensory data of the five external senses. Arguably this is also the first occurrence of the idea of a link between moral and aesthetic judgment, both of which are issued from the soul, or the common sense. In fact, the two thousand year-old notion prevailing from Aristotle until the end of Renaissance times, that the common sense is a sensory faculty (or even distinct organ) in the brain, prefigures eighteenth-century public discourses of a rational common sense and its ethical-aesthetic implications. In the early seventeenth century, Robert Burton, in his encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy, captures the scholastic notion of ‘sensory’ common sense once more – as one of the three inner senses besides fancy and memory –, but in such a way that points to the shift in meaning that is already underway: Inner senses, are three in number, so called because they be within the braine-panne, as Common Sense, Phantasie, Memorie. Their objects are not only things present, but they perceave the sensible Species of things to Come, Past, Absent, such as were before in the Sense. This common sense is the Judge or Moderator of the rest, by whom we discerne all differences of objects; for by mine eye I doe not know that I see, or by mine eare that I heare, but by my common Sense, who judgeth of Sounds, & Colours: they are but

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the Organs to bring the Species to be censured, so that all their objects are his, & all their offices are his: The forepart of the braine is his Organ or seat. (Burton 1989: I, 152)

The moderating function Burton ascribes here to the common sense in the brain has been preserved in the later notion of rational common sense as a judge and moderator in ethical and aesthetic matters, where it is to even out extremes in thought and action, as well as to forego aberrations in aesthetic representation. It is in the course of the later seventeenth century, then, that the meaning of common sense fully evolves into a higher mental faculty. In 1696, the deist free-thinker John Toland comes to identify it as a combination of all rational faculties in the mind and equates it thus with human reason in general: Every one experiences in himself a Power or Faculty of forming various Ideas or Perceptions of Things: Of affirming or denying, according as he sees them to agree or disagree: And so of loving and desiring what seems good unto him; and of hating and avoiding what he thinks evil. The right Use of all these Faculties is what we call Common Sense, or Reason in general. (Toland 1995: 9)

Toland’s description captures, as if in fast-forward motion, the discursive shift from the sensory concept of common sense in the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition (“a Power or Faculty of forming various Ideas or Perceptions of Things”) to the rational concept of common sense, to which ethical dimensions (“of loving and desiring what seems good unto him; and of hating and avoiding what he thinks evil”) are central. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the discourse of common sense had finally emancipated itself from its medieval tradition and entered public debate in questions of morals and taste. This development must also be seen as a reaction to the culture-historical changes in eighteenth-century Britain, where religious traditions, political stability, social hierarchies, and epistemic certainties were challenged by dissenting movements, renewed threats of revolution, a burgeoning middle class, and the advent of modern science, respectively. Generally speaking, such a cultural climate of change poses an ethical problem, out of which arises the search for a compass of right action, the desire for a broad, over-arching, community-building principle that promises to facilitate consensus among Britons. Significantly, this principle of common national consent was to be found via the detour of establishing the common ground for all humankind to agree on. This is precisely the function of common sense discourse in all of its various formations and intersections with other epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic discourses of the Enlightenment. ***

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The moral dimension of common sense discourse in the first half of the eighteenth century is well captured in the popular didactic words of Sir Richard Steele in The Spectator (no. 259, 27 December 1711), who calls it “right Reason, and what all Men should consent to” (Addison and Steele 1965: 508), thus making it a moral-rational imperative to follow common sense. An indication of this congruence of ethics and reason is the close discursive link between ‘common sense’ and ‘common honesty’ in public consciousness, vividly exemplified in an issue of the Common Sense journal (no. 24, 16 July 1737): “I take Common Sense and Common Honesty to be so near a-kin, that whenever I see a Man turn Knave, I shall not stick to pronounce him a Fool” (CS1: 171). To be honest is simply a moral dictate of common sense. Formative in the shaping of a moral common sense is the deist philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, as laid out in his main work Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711).⁵² On the one hand, common sense is for Shaftesbury, just as for John Locke and most other contemporaries, a basic human faculty of rational understanding, the lack of which would endanger a person to be pronounced mad: Some moral and philosophical Truths there are withal so evident in themselves, that ’twou’d be easier to imagine half Mankind to have run mad, and join’d precisely in one and the same Species of Folly, than to admit any thing as Truth, which shou’d be advanc’d against such natural Knowledg, fundamental Reason, and common Sense. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 92)

On the other hand, Shaftesbury insists that common sense is not only a purely rational faculty but also the very basis of morality.⁵³ Philosophy, speculative rea-

 A concise overview of the influence of the deism of Edward Herbert of Cherbury on Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy and concept of moral (common) sense can be found in Von der Lühe (1995: 642).  In the following analysis of Shaftesbury’s writings, I will often use the terms moral sense and common sense interchangeably. Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (2000: 88 – 89) seems to distinguish strictly between them and claims that Shaftesbury valorizes the former by using the Latin term sensus communis for it, while mistrusting the latter by regarding it as no more than common opinion, thus variable and unreliable. However, I would argue that such a distinction, even in Shaftesbury’s “Sensus communis” essay, is not as consistent as Schmidt-Haberkamp makes it out to be, and that the possibility of common sense serving as a platform for agreement in debate is not at all ruled out by him. When Schmidt-Haberkamp represents the gist of Shaftesbury’s “Sensus communis” essay as “ein klares Nein” (88) to the validity of common sense, she reduces common sense to common opinion in way that is not genuine to the text. Indeed, the attacks on common sense in section I.6 of the essay are put forward within quotation marks, as they are the sophist arguments of a gentleman of the club who reveals himself to be a sceptic. By overlooking Shaftesbury’s satirical tone, Schmidt-Haberkamp fails to acknowledge

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son, and erudite learning are in fact of little relevance for leading a truly honest and virtuous life. To remain an honest person, Shaftesbury argues, one should rather stick to common sense: The truth is; as Notions stand now in the world, with respect to Morals, Honesty is like to gain little by Philosophy, or deep Speculations of any kind. In the main, ’tis best to stick to Common Sense, and go no further. Mens [sic] first Thoughts, in this matter, are generally better than their second: their natural Notions better than those refin’d by Study, or Consultation with Casuists. According to common Speech, as well as common Sense, Honesty is the best Policy […]. An ordinary Man talking of a vile Action, in a way of Common Sense, says naturally and heartily, “He wou’d not be guilty of such a thing for the whole World.” But speculative Men find great Modifications in the case; many ways of Evasion; many Remedys; many Alleviations. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 83)

Shaftesbury’s claim that a refined education may distort one’s moral common sense reflects well-known anti-intellectual prejudices and the love of amateurism, which were widespread in Augustan Britain,⁵⁴ although the aristocrat Shaftesbury was himself treated to a thorough classical education and much refined learning. Quite in contrast, though, to the empiricist conviction of an original tabula rasa state of the human mind, he insists that there is in human beings an innate moral sense or feeling which enables them to tell right from wrong: Sense of Right and Wrong therefore being as natural to us as natural Affection itself, and being a first Principle in our Constitution and Make; there is no speculative Opinion, Persuasion or Belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy it. That which is of original and pure Nature, nothing beside contrary Habit and Custom (a second Nature) is able to displace. And this Affection being an original one of earliest rise in the Soul or affectionate Part; nothing beside contrary Affection, by frequent check and controul, can operate upon it, so as either to diminish it in part, or destroy it in the whole. (Shaftesbury 2001: II, 25 – 26)

Shaftesbury’s assertion that only “contrary Habit and Custom (a second Nature)” can distort man’s original and natural sense of right and wrong not only anticipates Rousseau’s romantic belief in natural human goodness, but it also high-

his warning against the dangerous consequence of rejecting common sense altogether, i. e. philosophical scepticism and moral relativism (see Shaftesbury 2001: I, 50 – 52; see also chapter III.1 below for a more detailed discussion in the context of satire).  Arthur O. Lovejoy in “The Parallel of Deism and Classicism” from 1932 famously identified “rationalistic anti-intellectualism” (a deep suspicion towards “any view difficult to understand”) and “rationalistic primitivism” (the purity of common sense in “the men of the first ages”) as being among the pre-eminent characteristics of the Augustan Enlightenment in Britain (Lovejoy 1970: 85 ff.).

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lights the important ethical facet of British common sense discourse – albeit one that potentially causes considerable theoretical friction since Shaftesbury’s belief in an innate idea of morality surely clashes with empiricist convictions. However, a discourse is not to be measured by standards of logical or systematic consistency. If we take Michel Foucault’s notion seriously that a historical discourse analysis must take into account discontinuous sequences and sudden ruptures, which undermine the historiographic paradigm of continuity, totality, and homogeneity (see Foucault 2002: 13 – 17), then such shifts, inconsistencies, and internal contradictions in the discourse of common sense in Augustan England are not only be expected, but also testify to its variability and tenacity through time. To complicate matters further, common sense discourse at this time not only intersects with moral philosophy, but also with booming discourses of taste and the beginnings of aesthetic philosophy.⁵⁵ Again, Shaftesbury’s treatise is a key factor in this crossover. In fact, Shaftesbury deduces the existence of an innate moral sense from the inevitable judgment of taste that always takes place whenever the mind apprehends an object.⁵⁶ In the process of sensory perception, the perceiving mind not only registers shape, colour, number, proportions of the whole and its parts etc., but involuntarily also beauty, ugliness, harmonious balance or deformity. This aesthetic sense is bound to what Shaftesbury calls “natural affection,” i. e. an immediate emotive or sensual response to the object of perception in the perceiving subject. In other words, the apprehension of a beautiful object in the mind as a pleasing one forces itself instantly upon the perceiving subject – and this applies not only to inanimate objects, but just as much to other subjects, their actions and their perceived sentiments: The Mind, which is Spectator or Auditor of other Minds, cannot be without its Eye and Ear; so as to discern Proportion, distinguish Sound, and scan each Sentiment or Thought which comes before it. It can let nothing escape its Censure. It feels the Soft and Harsh, the Agreeable and Disagreeable, in the Affections; and finds a Foul and Fair, a Harmonious and a Dissonant, as really and truly here, as in any musical Numbers, or in the outward Forms or Representations of sensible Things. Nor can it with-hold its Admiration and Extasy, its Aversion and Scorn, any more in what relates to one than to the other of these Subjects.

 Joseph Addison, in his essay on taste (The Spectator no. 409, 19 June 1712) and even more in his influential series of essays on “The Pleasures of Imagination” (The Spectator nos. 411– 421 from 1712), did a great deal to popularize notions of the aesthetic and educate his readers in matters of taste.  Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Burlington seems to suggest a reverse order of precedence between taste and (common) sense. While Shaftesbury views responses of taste as more immediate, but deriving from the same sense, Pope distinguishes between the two and assigns the primary role to ‘good sense’: “And something previous ev’n to Taste—’tis Sense: / Good Sense, which only is the gift of Heav’n” (Pope 1951: ll. 42– 43).

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So that to deny the common and natural Sense of a Sublime and Beautiful in Things, will appear an Affectation merely, to any-one who considers duly of this Affair. (Shaftesbury 2001: II. 17)

For Shaftesbury, the key to moral virtue lies in the next cognitive step: the aesthetic responses and accompanying affections (admiration, ecstasy, aversion, scorn etc.) need to be made the object of another act of reflection on the status of the affections at work. This takes an act of will – thus the room for virtue to command this. Once set in motion, such second-order (or self) reflection will undergo the same aesthetic process and involuntarily cause another aesthetic response and emotive affection. The purpose of this double aesthetic response – the first one immediate and involuntary, the second one from an act of will – is to take notice of what is worthy or honest; and make that Notice or Conception of Worth and Honesty to be an Object of his Affection […]: for thus, and no otherwise, he is capable of having a Sense of Right or Wrong; a Sentiment or Judgment of what is done, thro’ just, equal, and good Affection, or the contrary. (Shaftesbury 2001: II, 18)⁵⁷

Since the whole process of perception-apprehension-reflection hinges upon principles of taste, which Shaftesbury deems natural and universal, the “Sense of Right or Wrong” must be just as natural and universal, and truly a common sense. Of course, Shaftesbury has to allow for empirical differences in taste stemming from individually varying degrees of sensibility and perceptiveness, which are also partly due to acquired experience and cultural refinement, but he insists that there is indeed a universal sense of beauty, sublimity, and their opposites, independent of subjective preferences.⁵⁸ An essential analogy for

 See also Valihora (2000: 80 – 83) for a more detailed analysis of the workings of Shaftesbury’s concept of virtue.  Hans-Georg Gadamer points out in Wahrheit und Methode that the idea of a universal common taste might seem paradoxical and empirically absurd, given the heated public debates about differing judgments of taste in the eighteenth century (Gadamer 1990: 40). However, many moral philosophers saw in the analysis of taste a via regia to conceptualizing a moral common sense. Even Kant discusses the claim of a common sense of judgment – yet only to restrict it exclusively to the area of aesthetic judgment, and to turn it, devastatingly, into a subjective claim to an ‘objective’ consensus, a ‘sharable’ perspective, a fiction ultimately. Kant’s ingenuous innovation in the Kritik der Urteilskraft from 1790 was to conceive of common sense as “die Idee […] eines Beurteilungsvermögens […], welches in seiner Reflexion auf die Vorstellungsart jedes anderen in Gedanken (a priori) Rücksicht nimmt” (Kant 1993a: 144/§40). Common sense “sagt nicht, daß jedermann mit unserem Urteil übereinstimmen werde, sondern damit zusammenstimmen solle” (Kant 1993a: 81/§22; see also Gadamer 1990: 40 – 47; Valihora 2000: 29 – 31). As

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Shaftesbury is that between the beautiful and the good. He asserts as irrefutable fact that our taste appreciates moral truth as the greatest natural beauty: And thus, after all, the most natural Beauty in the World is Honesty, and moral Truth. For all Beauty is Truth. True Features make the Beauty of a Face; and true Proportions the Beauty of Architecture; as true Measures that of Harmony and Musick. In Poetry, which is all Fable, Truth still is the Perfection. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 89)

The relationship between the senses of beauty and moral truth is in fact not one of analogy but of identification.⁵⁹ To judge moral actions, according to Shaftesbury, is to use the same common sense as in judgments of taste. This is possible because both moral and aesthetic judgments are based on the same values of beauty, such as harmony, balance and wholeness. An example of this would be that in sound moral judgments we also value the larger whole (the common good) more highly than the individual part (anyone’s private good, e. g. our own self-interest).⁶⁰ In the wake of Shaftesbury, it is Frances Hutcheson who develops further the idea of a moral sense and its analogy to aesthetic experience.⁶¹ For Hutcheson,

subjective as any judgment of taste ultimately is, Kant acknowledges its common appeal here as well – and thus, implicitly, its ethical claim to consensus.  This ‘confusion’ of the ethical with the aesthetic has been criticized as the cardinal error in Shaftesbury’s philosophy, but, as Valihora argues, “Shaftesbury’s description, however, does not represent a confusion at all, and it is essential to our understanding of the way in which eighteenth-century intellectuals understood what moral judgment was, and why they understood it through the all-important analogy with the judgment of taste” (Valihora 2000: 13).  Shaftesbury puts it this way: “If there can possibly be suppos’d in a Creature such an Affection towards Self-Good, as is actually, in its natural degree, conducing to his private Interest, and at the same time inconsistent with the publick Good; this may indeed be call’d still a vitious Affection […]. On the other side, if the Affection towards private or Self-good, however selfish it may be esteem’d, is in reality not only consistent with publick Good, but in some measure contributing to it; […] ’tis so far from being ill, or blameable in any sense, that it must be acknowledg’d absolutely necessary to constitute a Creature Good” (Shaftesbury 2001: II, 13).  Contrary to Shaftesbury’s identification of taste and morals, Hutcheson merely sees an analogy in the operations of moral and aesthetic senses and thus separates them systematically. – In 1761, Henry Home, Lord Kames in Elements of Criticism (London, 1839), argues again for the actual identity of moral sense and aesthetic sense as one common standard of disinterested morality and taste: “This conviction of a common nature or standard and of its perfection accounts clearly for that remarkable conception we have of a right and a wrong sense or taste in morals. It accounts not less clearly for the conception we have of a right and wrong sense or taste in the fine arts. A man who, avoiding objects generally agreeable, delights in objects generally disagreeable, is condemned as a monster; we disapprove his taste as bad or wrong because we have a clear conception he deviates from the common standard. […] we are so

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in short, moral and aesthetic judgments spring from the same principle of disinterestedness and detachment: just as pure aesthetic judgments invite consent due to their arising out of a disinterested attitude towards the beautiful (or ugly) object, pure moral judgments, facilitated by the same common sense, spring from the same principle of disinterested and unbiased judgment, which is crucial for moral judgments to be accepted as objective and binding.⁶² This is, as Karen Valihora has convincingly argued, the strategic motivation for achieving a union of ethics and aesthetics in common sense discourse: The judgment of taste was so important because of what was at stake; ideally it made available a kind of objectivity much more difficult to achieve in any other arena, certainly not in debates about politics, religion or morals […]. In fact, the judgment of taste provides the model for arriving at any kind of objective judgment. It is predicated on the fact that the arts provide a forum for judgments that are disinterested, detached and distanced. Even more than this, though, the judgment of taste is assumed to be an objective one to the extent that it finds an intersubjective validity, to the extent that all can agree on it. (Valihora 2000: 28 – 29)

Moral philosophers like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson – and after them David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) and Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759 – 90) – turned to aesthetic experience for inspiration to solve what Valihora describes as “the most crucial and pressing [philosophical] problem of the eighteenth century”: “arriving at ‘a just judgment’” (Valihora 2000: 17). This was a problem that needed to be solved by the Enlightenment, as much as it was thrown up by it in the first place. Shaftesbury is an apt case in point since his deism – the conviction of a natural re-

constituted as to conceive this common nature to be not only invariable but also perfect or right; and consequently that individuals ought to be made to conform to it” (450; qtd. in Savile 1977: 310). – Kames’s view of an identical common sense in matters moral and aesthetic did not remain undisputed within Scottish philosophy. James Beattie, who popularized Thomas Reid’s rational common sense philosophy in An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, continues to distinguish common sense from taste, since the latter be developed from a “kind of sensibility [that] may be much improved by habit: although there are, no doubt, in respect of this, as well as of all other modifications of perception, original and constitutional differences in the frame of different minds” (Beattie 1983: 39).  See Hutcheson (1971: 112): “We must then certainly have other Perceptions of moral Actions than those of [private] Advantage: And that Power of receiving these Perceptions may be call’d a Moral Sense, since the Definition agrees to it, viz. a Determination of the Mind, to receive any Idea from the Presence of an Object which occurs to us, independent of our Will.” Hutcheson declares disinterested benevolence the legislative principle of the moral sense, and proceeds to formulate the proto-Utilitarian ethical ideal of “the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers” (Hutcheson 1971: 180).

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ligious knowledge, inborn and perfectly reconcilable with human reason – is inspired by a liberating Enlightenment spirit – against overbearing church structures, against the narrow-mindedness of scriptural revelation –, while the flipside of the coin is a loss of certainty and an increase of responsibility on the part of the enlightened individual to give meaning to his or her life. In this regard, the Enlightenment, much as it was fuelled by a utopian vision of progress, betterment, and a new social contract, is tantamount to relinquishing a ‘common’ sense of old, a stable feeling of community in a fixed and hierarchically ordered world, however stifling and repressive. The talk about a ‘common sense of mankind’ in eighteenth-century Britain reflects this general problematic under the specific historical conditions of British cultural and intellectual life that I have pointed out before. The discourse of taste is therefore an important element in the search for consensus, as it takes on what Hans-Georg Gadamer has called a “gesellschaftsbindende Funktion” (Gadamer 1990: 45) and reflects a progressive movement of democratization. This is because a common taste, its nourishment and its refinement through education, creates a new society that defines itself through the “Ideal einer Bildungsgesellschaft” (Gadamer 1990: 41). Good taste, then, is the very opposite of subjective preference or private whim. Instead, it facilitates a collective social identity irrespective of birth and social rank, as Gadamer stresses: Geschmack ist nicht nur das Ideal, das eine neue Gesellschaft aufstellt, sondern erstmals bildet sich im Zeichen diese[s] Ideals des ‚guten Geschmacks‘ das, was man seither die ‚gute Gesellschaft‘ nennt. Sie erkennt sich und legitimiert sich nicht mehr durch Geburt und Rang, sondern grundsätzlich durch nichts als die Gemeinsamkeit ihrer Urteile oder besser dadurch, daß sie sich überhaupt über die Borniertheit der Interessen und die Privatheit der Vorlieben zum Anspruch auf Urteil zu erheben weiß. Im Begriff des Geschmacks ist also ohne Zweifel eine Erkenntnisweise gemeint. Es geschieht im Zeichen des guten Geschmacks, daß man zur Abstandnahme von sich selbst und den privaten Vorlieben fähig ist. Geschmack ist daher seinem eigensten Wesen nach nichts Privates, sondern ein gesellschaftliches Phänomen ersten Ranges. Er kann sogar der privaten Neigung des Einzelnen wie eine richterliche Instanz entgegentreten, namens einer Allgemeinheit, die er meint und vertritt. Man kann eine Vorliebe für etwas haben, was der eigene Geschmack zugleich verwirft. (Gadamer 1990: 41)

The irony in the case of the Earl of Shaftesbury is that the society of ‘good sense’ and ‘good taste’ he implies is not really democratic-egalitarian, but modelled on a conservative ideal of aristocratic liberty, in which social harmony, balance, and order are to be preserved and defended against “what Riot and Excess naturally produce in the World” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 89). Whenever Shaftesbury talks about “Justness of Thought and Style, Refinement in Manners, good Breeding, and Politeness of every kind” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 7) and presupposes a com-

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mon aesthetic standard of beauty among humankind, one cannot help but think of members of his own sheltered aristocratic class, with whom the standard of refined taste had always lain, rather than the ‘common man’ exposed to the necessities of life.⁶³ However, regardless of how much weight Shaftesbury actually had in the public debate about taste (there were numerous reprints of his Characteristicks between 1711 and 1790 alone),⁶⁴ it seems clear that the new bourgeois Bildungsgesellschaft, which was developing throughout the century, emulated the formerly aristocratic ideals of taste and refinement. And so it proves to be the same for Shaftesbury as for anybody else claiming common sense for their discourse: that the appeal to common sense is not so much an appeal to an empirical fact, but, in the words of Valihora, “an appeal to a potential sense of things, a sense of things that one could imagine could, indeed, be common” (Valihora 2000: 18)⁶⁵ and – it needs to be added – that ought to be common. This is the ethical impulse in every invocation of common sense. *** If “all beauty is truth,” as Shaftesbury has it, and the “most natural Beauty in the World is Honesty, and moral Truth,” then such a moral view of taste calls for a moral prescription of art. This is nothing new, of course. Ever since Horace’s Ars Poetica and its famous line “aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae,” a morally didactic or edifying aim has been prescribed as an indispensable element of good literature. In the era of seventeenth-century French Neoclassicism, under the aegis of rationalism, Nicolas Boileau famously states: “Rien n’est beau que le vrai” (Boileau 1966: 134). In a way, Shaftesbury reverses this slogan when he claims that all beauty is (morally) true, but it is perhaps less a reversal than a reinforcement of an equation of what are identical terms to him. It is only a century later, in John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” that this quotation of Neoclassicist poetics receives a new subversive spin due to the unmistakable hint of aestheticism contained in Keats’s poem.

 Such criticism of Shaftesbury’s aristocratic ideology has been voiced most fervently (and perhaps most narrow-mindedly as well) by Terry Eagleton: “[M]oral sense theory testifies to a bankrupt tendency of bourgeois ideology, forced to sacrifice the prospect of a rational totality to an intuitive logic. Unable to found ideological consensus in its actual social relations, to derive the unity of humankind from the anarchy of the market place, the ruling order must ground that consensus instead in the stubborn self-evidence of the gut” (Eagleton 1989: 38; cf. also Valihora 2000: 83, n. 39).  Cf. Valihora 2000: 73.  This is, of course, the insight Kant has had long before (see above, footnote 58).

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For my discussion of a morally charged discourse of common sense, it is important to see how such prescriptions of taste play out in Augustan literature and its criticism of art. As will be seen, the operations of exclusion facilitated by aesthetic common sense work along the same lines and show similar structural features as in other areas of common sense discourse. One of the first prescriptions of art expressly to claim common sense as a fundamental critical norm occurs in the dramatic criticism by the late Restoration critic Thomas Rymer. As a translator of René Rapin’s Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes (1674), he was a major transmitter and proponent of French Neoclassicism in England. In simple terms, Rymer equates Aristotelian poetics with plain common sense.⁶⁶ This equation is established at the outset of his treatise The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d and Examin’d by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the Common Sense of All Ages (1678), where Rymer finds fault with plot composition in English drama, whose defects, he says, are plain to see for everybody: “And certainly there is not requir’d much Learning, or that a man must be some Aristotle, and Doctor of Subtilties, to form a right judgment in this particular; common sense suffices” (Rymer 1956b: 18).⁶⁷ Common sense and reason are used almost interchangeably in Rymer’s writing, with the minor difference perhaps that common sense primarily designates the faculty of judgment in the critic, while reason is the faculty on the part of the playwright that is needed to avoid fanciful deficiencies in dramatic plots. While fancy is an indispensable ingredient in dramatic art, reason must nonetheless have primacy in order to curtail fancy: Fancy leaps, and frisks, and away she’s gone; whilst reason rattles the chains, and follows after. Reason must consent and ratify what-ever by fancy is attempted in its absence; or else ’tis all null and void in law. However, in the contrivance and æconomy of a Play, reason is always principally to be consulted. Those who object against reason, are the Fanaticks in Poetry, and are never to be sav’d by their good works. (Rymer 1956b: 20)

 By Aristotelian poetics Rymer in fact implied its rationalist expansion by French Neoclassicist scholars, which led, among other things, to the rigid formulation of the three dramatic unities. – With the general association of classical literature with ‘natural’ common sense, Rymer prefigures the young Alexander Pope in his pronouncement of classical poetics as “Nature methodiz’d.” I will return to this in a few paragraphs below.  Joan C. Grace has criticized Rymer’s argumentative logic as a form of “uncommon common sense” because it argues for dramatic common sense to neglect venerated models of the English dramatic tradition in favour of an Aristotelian view that is claimed to be natural: “Rymer’s particular kind of uncommon common sense, however, tends to presuppose some familiarity with Aristotelian theory, although he denies that such knowledge is necessary. […] Rymer regards the rules as the codification of common sense, or ‘Nature methodized.’ The opinions of Aristotle and the conclusions of common sense are demonstrably the same” (Grace 1975: 35 – 36).

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The basic strategies of eighteenth-century common sense discourse are already visible in this plea for reason: as a principle of exclusion, common sense – or reason, for that matter – moderates extremes by banning elusive flights of fancy and fighting fanaticism in poetic art. In fact, Rymer’s rigid propositions for commonsensical drama are full of warnings against the dangers of an unrestrained imagination: In framing a Character for Tragedy, a Poet is not to leave his reason, and blindly abandon himself to follow fancy; for then his fancy might be monstrous, might be singular and please no body’s maggot but his own, but reason is to be his guide, reason is common to all people, and can never carry him from what is Natural. (Rymer 1956b: 62)

The “reason […] common to all people” is an obvious paraphrase of a universal and natural common sense, which needs to keep in check potentially “monstrous” fancies spawned by one’s idiosyncratic “maggots.” However, Rymer’s claim of Neoclassicist common sense becomes so dogmatic that it passes off several generations of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as deficient and noncommonsensical.⁶⁸ Exemplary here is his devastating verdict of Shakespeare’s Othello that due to its mixing of comic and tragic elements is branded by him as a farcical failure: “There is in this Play, some burlesk, some humour, and ramble of Comical Wit, some shew, and some Mimickry to divert the spectators: but the tragical part is, plainly none other, than a Bloody Farce, without salt or savour” (Rymer 1956a: 164). In Rymer’s attempt to bypass the English dramatic tradition of the last hundred years in favour of a new era of English drama that would emulate Greek models and stick to Neoclassicist rules of tragedy,⁶⁹ he ironically violates the very principles of common sense that he claims to be at the heart of commonsensical drama. Rymer, especially in A Short View of Tragedy from 1693, is a fanatic himself, a dogmatic theorist of ‘natural’ drama pertaining to reason, whose radical views are at variance with the principle of moderation prevalent in the emerging common sense discourse of the eighteenth century.

 “[…] our Poets have forc’d another way to the wood; a by-road, that runs directly cross to that of Nature, Manners and Philosophy which gain’d the Ancients so great veneration” (Rymer 1956b: 18).  See Grace (1975: 39): “By the time Rymer writes A Short View of Tragedy, his position has become so extreme that he insists that the method of English drama be abandoned in favor of a return to the model of Aeschylus. For Rymer, the whole question ultimately reduces itself to the fact that since Greek tragedy excels the English, it is only common sense for the English to imitate the Greeks.”

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Despite Rymer’s dogmatism and its conceivable rejection by other critics and playwrights, the conceptual connection between Neoclassicism and aesthetic common sense would remain alive. In the context of Shaftesbury’s equation of beauty and truth in his treatise on “Sensus Communis,” he recapitulates Aristotelian aesthetics and emphasizes the idea that art must avoid peculiarity and singularity, and instead labour to produce the most perfect example of a kind (cf. Shaftesbury 2001: I, 90 – 91). This is also where common sense comes in as an arbiter of taste: Every just Work of theirs [good artists; C.H.] comes under those natural Rules of Proportion and Truth. The Creature of their Brain must be like one of Nature’s Formation. It must have a Body and Parts proportionable: or the very Vulgar will not fail to criticize the Work, when it has neither Head nor Tail. For so Common Sense, according to just Philosophy, judges of those Works which want the Justness of a Whole, and shew their Author, however curious and exact in Particulars, to be in the main a very Bungler. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 91)⁷⁰

In other words, like Rymer he believes that a “very vulgar” form of common sense is all that it takes to notice the aesthetic deficiencies of an openly disproportionate work not conforming to “Nature’s Formation.” Evidently, common sense is used here as a synonym of taste in its most ordinary form. As a faculty of aesthetic judgment, it is most effective in discerning whatever violates the basic principles of well-formed composition. Thomas Reid will later remark about this ‘negative’ phenomenon of common-sense judgment that “the province of common sense is more extensive in refutation than in confirmation” (Reid 2002: 433). Obviously, judgments of taste and rational common sense coincide in this principle, which is confirmed by Gadamer, who also notices the “peculiar” phenomenon that bad taste is generally easier to discern than good taste: Es ist merkwürdig, daß wir vorzugsweise für dieses negative Phänomen im unterscheidenden Wählen des Geschmacks empfindlich sind. Seine positive Entsprechung ist nicht eigentlich das Geschmackvolle, sondern das für den Geschmack Unanstößige. Das ist es vor allem, was der Geschmack beurteilt. Geschmack ist geradezu dadurch definiert, dass er durch das Geschmackswidrige verletzt wird und es so meidet, wie alles, was mit Verletzung droht. Der Begriff des ‚schlechten Geschmacks‘ ist also kein ursprüngliches Gegenphänomen zum ‚guten Geschmack‘. Vielmehr ist dessen Gegenteil, ‚keinen Geschmack‘ zu haben. Guter Geschmack ist eine Empfindlichkeit, die alles Auffällige so naturhaft mei-

 In the same year, Alexander Pope expresses the same thought in An Essay on Criticism: “In Wit, as Nature, what affects our Hearts / Is not th’ Exactness of peculiar Parts; / ’Tis not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty call, / But the joint Force and full Result of all” (EC: ll. 243 – 246).

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det, dass seine Reaktion dem, der keinen Geschmack hat, schlechthin unverständlich ist. (Gadamer 1990: 42)

Gadamer duly points out that sensibility (“Empfindlichkeit”) is a necessary prerequisite for someone to have good taste – a term that becomes the catchword in the still interwoven discourses of taste and morals in the second half of the eighteenth century. But more important in the present context is Gadamer’s observation that good taste will avoid anything striking, garish, or overly conspicuous (“alles Auffällige”). Again we find a similar principle of exclusion as in non-aesthetic domains of common sense discourse, which always works towards the segregation of extremes, extravagances, and eccentricities, in order to settle for a finely balanced compromise or an inconspicuous mean. Much as common sense discourse may seem to be compensatory in this process, the rhetoric of censure with which ‘non-sense’ or ‘bad taste’ stand to be corrected tends to be rigorous, its own indisputable standards categorical, apodictic, and discriminatory. In the quotation above, Shaftesbury, in his reference to “Nature’s Formation,” mentions the most eminent aesthetic standard of Augustan Neoclassicism. Nature with a capital N is indeed the most ubiquitous, powerful and indistinct norm in Augustan writing when it comes to defining the original worthy of copying in the mimetic process, i. e. what content and in what form good art should imitate.⁷¹ Significantly, for a writer to make reference to ‘Nature’ had apparently become so fashionable by 1710 that the English hack writer Charles Gildon (and later enemy to Alexander Pope) protested: Nature, Nature, is the great Cry against the Rules. We must be judg’d by Nature, say they, not at all considering that Nature is an equivocal Word, whose Sense is too various and Extensive ever to be able to appeal to since it leaves it to the Fancy and Capacity of every one to decide what is according to Nature and what not. (Gildon 1974: 220)

But the fuzzier the meaning, the more popular the word. Despite this rallying cry against the discursive instrumentalization of a fashionable catchword, Alexander Pope, at the young age of twenty-three, publishes his Essay on Criticism just a

 Cf., as a classic, Arthur O. Lovejoy’s “‘Nature’ as Aesthetic Norm” from 1927, who presents the reader with an intricate classification into five different areas of meaning: (a) N. as object(s) of representation in art; (b) N. as a system of material and immaterial essences; (c) N. as a cosmic order or power; (d) N. as in the aesthetic attribute of “naturalness”; (e) N. as the publicly accepted way of things. His last category is the most relevant for common sense discourse (see Lovejoy 1970: 69 – 77).

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year later. In this remarkable manifesto of Augustan poetics, Pope propagates ‘Nature’ as the all-important yardstick for art (within the framework of an Aristotelian concept of mimesis, which is of course taken for granted as the irrefutable basis of art): First follow Nature, and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art. (EC: ll. 68 – 73)

Nature is as blatantly undefined here as Gildon had complained before. However, Pope does imply a stable universal order of ‘Nature’ that is the source of truth for both life and art (“Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, / One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light,”), as well as the existence of a natural standard of beauty. Like Shaftesbury, Pope hints at natural standards of taste, by which to abide – in aesthetic judgments both as a writer and a critic – is promoted to an aesthetic imperative of common sense. Correspondingly, in his later mock treatise Peri Bathous, or: The Art of Sinking in Poetry, Pope makes it clear that bad art is defined by the very lack of aesthetic-cum-moral sense. In the overall ironic mode of this manual of bad poetry, Pope’s hack-writer persona Martin Scriblerus recommends bathetic art for its violations of Aristotelian mimesis and its dark, impenetrable style – and conversely implies the values of good art as the very opposite of Martin’s pronouncements: He is to consider himself as a grotesque painter, whose works would be spoiled by an imitation of nature, or uniformity of design. He is to mingle bits of the most various, or discordant kinds, landscape, history, portraits, animals, and connect them with a great deal of flourishing, by heads or tails, as it shall please his imagination, and contribute to his principal end, which is to glare by strong oppositions of colours, and surprise by contrariety of images […]. His design ought to be like a labyrinth, out of which nobody can get you clear but himself. And since the great art of all poetry is to mix truth and fiction, in order to join the credible with the surprising; our author shall produce the credible, by painting nature in her lowest simplicity; and the surprising, by contradicting common opinion. (PB: 201)

In the mode of ironic inversion, Pope reinforces here a principle of mimetic realism that conforms to the joined Augustan standard of morality and taste. Moral decorum forbids representing “nature in her lowest simplicity,” just as aesthetic common sense prevents the implausibility of “contradicting common opinion” for the mere sake of surprising the reader or audience.

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This ‘naturalization’ of the vagaries of taste into an apparently timeless common-sense norm has a political edge to it which plays out in one of the most pervasive intellectual debates of the time. Pope’s conviction, clearly derived from French Neoclassicism and Thomas Rymer’s arguments,⁷² that this natural standard has been realized in art to its fullest and most perfect potential long before in ancient Greece and Rome, is his way of throwing his hat into the ring of the ongoing Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in Augustan England. He expresses this early on in his career in An Essay on Criticism: Those Rules of old discover’d, not devis’d, Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d; Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain’d By the same Laws which first herself ordain’d. Hear how learn’d Greece her useful Rules indites, When to repress, and when indulge our Flights: […] Be Homer’s Works your Study, and Delight, Read them by Day, and meditate by Night; Thence form your Judgment, thence your Maxims bring, And trace the Muses upward to their Spring; Still with It self compar’d, his Text peruse; And let your Comment be the Mantuan Muse. When first young Maro in his boundless Mind A Work t’outlast Immortal Rome design’d, Perhaps he seem’d above the Critick’s Law, And but from Nature’s Fountains scorn’d to draw: But when t’examine ev’ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same: […] Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; To copy Nature is to copy Them. (EC: ll. 88 – 93, 124– 135, 139 – 140)

With the didactic climax in the final couplet, Pope – almost in a structural analogy to Shaftesbury’s identification of taste and moral sense – hyperbolically identifies Nature with Homeric art (just as Virgil, the “Mantuan Muse,” found “Nature and Homer” to be “the same”). At the same time, Pope strikes the fatal blow to all ‘Moderns,’ whose belief in Progress has them vaingloriously

 See Pope’s praising remark on Rymer in Spence (1820: 172– 173): “[Rymer] is generally right, though rather too severe in his opinions of the particular plays he speaks of; and is, on the whole, one of the best critics we ever had.”

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think they can excel ancient Greece. This looking back to the Homeric Achsenzeit as the unsurpassed realization of an ideal of aesthetic common sense seems much like a form of aesthetic self-imprisonment (which room does it leave the Augustan artist?), or even a form of self-defeat, at least so from a modern perspective. However, I read this as also stemming from a compensatory, at times reactionary, impulse conveyed by common sense discourse to counter the challenges of rapid change in turbulent intellectual times. The task of the poet, according to Pope, is not to rival the Ancients and surpass their aesthetic designs, which is bound to be a futile endeavour. Instead, the poet should merely follow the example of the Ancients and do his best to emulate and update them⁷³ – quite in line with Pope’s most famous couplet from the Essay on Criticism: “True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest” (EC: ll. 297– 298). The recipes for good art with which Pope presents his readers in An Essay on Criticism, but also in his Epistle to Burlington, not only prototypically capture the Augustan taste and common sense aesthetic, but they are also prime examples of the tropes and other discursive elements to be found in most variants of common sense discourse. “Avoid Extreams; and shun the Fault of such, / Who still are pleas’d too little, or too much” (EC: ll. 384– 385) is the practical advice Pope gives out in the Essay on Criticism, drawing on standard tropes of a common sense aesthetic. Moderation, balance, harmonious proportion, the right measure, the middle way – these are also the values put forth in Pope’s Epistle to Burlington, in which, in his praise of Lord Burlington’s architectural achievements, he lectures about the principles of good art: To build, to plant, whatever you intend, To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend, To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot; In all, let Nature never be forgot. But treat the Goddess like a modest fair, Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare; Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d, Where half the skill is decently to hide. He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds. […]

 A popular form of Augustan literature up to 1750 is in fact the imitation of an ancient poetical form with an updated content, written in the spirit of the original: Pope wrote imitations of Horace, Swift and Johnson imitations of Juvenal, just to name a few examples.

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Still follow Sense, of ev’ry Art the Soul, Parts answ’ring parts shall slide into a whole […]. (Pope 1951: ll: 47– 56, 65 – 66)

Good taste has to “follow sense, of ev’ry art the soul” in order to produce good art. The goddess “Nature” must not be “overdress[ed],” but presented as a “modest fair”; the right proportions have to be maintained to have “[p]arts answ’ring parts […] slide into a whole.” All these metaphors belong to the usual store of common sense tropes, but at the same time they veil as much as they reveal in terms of a concretization of the basis of aesthetic judgment. ‘Sense-less’ art, in turn, is that which has lost its right measure and given in to the lure of a false magnificence, which only insults common sense and good taste. For such aberration, Pope gives the example of the megalomaniacal villa of the spendthrift Timon of Athens from Plutarch’s Lives: At Timon’s Villa let us pass a day, Where all cry out, “What sums are thrown away!” So proud, so grand of that stupendous air, Soft and Agreeable come never there. Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdignag [sic] before your thought. To compass this, his building is a Town, His pond an Ocean, his parterre a Down: Who but must laugh, the Master when he sees, A puny insect, shiv’ring at a breeze! Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around! The whole, a labour’d Quarry above ground. (Pope 1951: ll. 99 – 110)

The judgment of taste that Pope makes here about the disproportionate size of Timon’s estate is one that invites common consent due to its strategic link to an implied moral value, here the censure of the vice of luxury or squandering of money (“What sums are thrown away!”). This shows the precedence of the moral judgment, which, in a second step, triggers and informs a corresponding judgment of taste. Nonetheless, the bond between moral and aesthetic sentiments remains firm and unbroken, even if Pope and Shaftesbury apparently disagree about their logical order in the act of judging. What is ruled out here pointblank – due to a strict common-sense judgment – is the sheer possibility of aesthetic pleasure arising from a violation of morally infused aesthetic norms, such as the overwhelming size of an object. Quite obviously, an Augustan common-

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sense aesthetic is still a far cry from an appreciation of the Romantic sublime less than a century later.⁷⁴

2.2 Perversions of Moral Sense – The Fable of the Bees On Saturday, 9 March 1728, the London Evening Post printed the following note at the end of the ‘Home News’ section: On Friday Evening the first Instant, A [sic] Gentleman, well dress’d, appeared at the Bonefire [sic] before St. James’s-Gate, who declared himself the Author of a Book, entituled, [sic] The Fable of the Bees: And that he was sorry for writing the same: and recollecting his former Promise, pronounced these Words: I commit my Book to the Flames; and threw it in accordingly. (FB: II, 23)

It is doubtful whether the described event actually took place, but if it did, it was certainly not the Dutch-English physician and writer Bernard Mandeville who consecrated his notorious book The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits to the flames. The newspaper note is part of a prank played on Mandeville by a certain Alexander Innes, an English clergyman, who had published a wordy refutation of Mandeville’s book earlier that year. In the preface to that tract, Innes had challenged Mandeville by claiming the latter had given a promise, namely, “to Burn that Book at any Time or place your Adversary should appoint, if any Thing should be found in it tending to Immorality, or a Corruption of Manners” (Innes 1739: xxxix–xl). Accordingly, Innes had appointed the first of March for the burning as “the smallest Atonement you can make, for endeavouring to corrupt and debauch His Majesty’s Subjects in their Principles” (Innes 1739: xl–xli). What was it then that had sparked Innes’s ire, that had made Mandeville a ‘man-devil,’ as odious to the public as a Machiavelli or Hobbes? What was it about Mandeville’s book that later sparked critical responses from virtually every writer concerned with ethics and economics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them Berkeley, Voltaire, Hume, Smith, Malthus, and Marx?⁷⁵ – Mandeville had been propagating the idea that private vices, such

 Before the beginning of Romanticism proper, the way for an appreciation of the sublime in Britain is certainly paved by Edmund Burke’s philosophical essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). See Fludernik (1998b) for a critical discussion of the sublime in British eighteenth-century aesthetics.  See the authoritative list of references to Mandeville in F. B. Kaye’s edition of the Fable (FB: II, 418 – 453).

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as pride, greed, envy, and luxury, are indispensable for a national economy to flourish, and that, in turn, full obedience to self-denying virtues would weaken, impoverish, and eventually destroy a society. By 1728, the year of Innes’s invective, Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees had become a voluminous, ever expanding tract grown out of a small doggerel verse, “The Grumbling Hive,” in which Mandeville had first publicized his notorious doctrine. Back in 1705, however, when the original poem was first published, his verses had largely escaped public notice, which also holds true for the first book version of The Fable of the Bees in 1714, to which Mandeville added lengthy philosophical essays masquerading as explanatory “Remarks.” It was only after the 1723 edition of the Fable that the book achieved enormous notoriety and was condemned as a public nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex (see Harth 1989: 10 – 11, and Goldsmith 2000: 71– 72). Mandeville had overshot the mark, even for liberty-loving Britons, by including an essay that attacked the wide-spread hype of charity schools for the education of poor children by the social reform movement. To him, charity was generally detrimental to the welfare of the state because of “promoting Sloth and Idleness” (FB: I, 267); charity schools were particularly harmful as the poor should be rather kept ignorant so they would be willing to carry out the simple tasks of hard manual labour that society required of them.⁷⁶ The outrage caused by his cynical stance soon spread over to the general evaluation of Mandeville’s views, which now received fresh attention in the wake of this provocation. Consequently, Mandeville was vilified as ‘Man-Devil,’ as in this anonymous couplet: “And if GOD-MAN Vice to abolish came, / Who Vice commends, MAN-DEVIL be his Name.”⁷⁷ It is in this context that Alexander Innes saw it fit to ridicule Mandeville in a fashion reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s mischievous Partridge hoax. Swift, under the pseudonym of ‘Isaac Bickerstaff,’ had choked the career of the popular astrologer John Partridge by first prophesying and then publicly announcing Partridge’s death, despite the latter’s desperate protestations (see Quintana 1955: 90 – 91). This must have been inspiration to Innes to imitate Swift⁷⁸ by publicizing the news of a book-burning. Even if Innes’s prank seems to be but a cheap

 “To make the Society happy and People easy under the meanest Circumstances, it is requisite that great Numbers of them should be Ignorant as well as Poor. Knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our Desires, and the fewer things a Man wishes for, the more easily his Necessities may be supply’d” (FB: I, 287– 288).  The Character of the Times Delineated (1732: 10), qtd. in Harth (1989: 8).  Mandeville himself was aware of the parallel to Swift’s celebrated pamphlets from twenty years before. Cf. Mandeville’s preface to the second volume of The Fable of the Bees (FB: II, 26 – 27), which appeared in 1729.

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version of Swift’s hoax,⁷⁹ the rationale behind the two is certainly the same: to attack what is perceived to be an absurdity and a violation against common sense. In the preface mentioned above, Innes contends that the most effectual refutation of Mandeville’s doctrine of ‘private vices, publick benefits’ is to simply point out that it goes against common sense: […] one who attempts to confute you, must pass his time but very indifferently, when you have impos’d that fatal Necessity upon him, that he cannot do it to purpose, but by telling you frankly, that you are guilty of the most notorious Contradictions, and maintain such Things as cannot be reconcil’d to common Sense […]. (Innes 1739: xvi)

To expose such violations of common sense and bring into derision those responsible for them was part of the habitus, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term, of eighteenth-century ‘men of letters’ in Britain. The Mandeville-Innes affair serves as a classic example of intellectual strife in the first half of the century, when claims to truth and rhetorical superiority were increasingly fed by a discourse of common sense – a cultural discourse which finds its congenial literary mode most often in satire.⁸⁰ Some twenty years after Innes’s hoax, Samuel Johnson published The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) as the first poem to bear his own name on the title page. From that time onwards, the biographer-lexicographer-poet-essayist-critic ‘Dr Johnson’ began to establish himself as the undisputed scholarly and moral authority of his time. By his contemporaries he was soon regarded as the embodiment of common sense. In this respect, there is almost no stronger contrast possible than between Johnson and Mandeville, who was a considered a gross offender against common sense and an arch-enemy of religious and moral values. By contrast, Johnson’s moral convictions were deeply rooted in traditional Christian ethics of virtue, which he propagated in many didactic writings. English common sense came to be personified by Johnson due to the authoritativeness of his judgment, which was based on erudite learning, a lucid and balanced argumentative style and an inimitable knack for epigrammatic phrase.⁸¹

 Innes, like Swift, manages to exploit the denunciatory potential of public media. However, while Swift ingeniously highlights the absurdity of astrological prophesies, namely by defeating Partridge with his own arguments, Innes fails to ‘destroy’ Mandeville. Apart from giving the public a good laugh, Innes’s trap is too obvious and Mandeville’s supposed retraction too improbable, let alone that the hoax lacks the Swiftian punch-line of self-inflicted defeat.  I will come back to the connection between common sense discourse and eighteenth-century satire in the next chapter.  On Johnson as a focal point of common sense projections in criticism see Chapin (1979), Harrison (1971), Weidhorn (1967), and Liu (1984).

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In the following, I will take a look at the opposing ethical and social concepts of Mandeville and Johnson, as well as their differing views on human nature, which were also convergent to an extent. As some overlaps between Johnson and Mandeville have been noted before, especially regarding their views on the potential benefits of private luxury for the whole of society, my approach here will be different. Mandeville’s ‘notorious doctrine’ shall be resituated in the cultural context of common-sense discourse in order to demonstrate his complicity in it. As different as they are, Mandeville and Johnson have to be seen as facets of the same intellectual movement in Britain, that is, a form of Enlightenment whose potential for radical change is somewhat mitigated by the commonsense discourse of the time. As will be seen, Mandeville and Johnson appear as flipsides of the same coin: they respectively embody the inclusive and exclusive discursive principles of common sense. Johnson uses very little of the popular rhetoric of common sense since he entertains ethical views that are based on a commonly accepted Christian morality. By contrast, Mandeville, much as he tries to exploit the prestige of common-sense discourse by using its rhetoric to sell his views on society, cannot persuade his contemporaries because his views are not in accordance with the moral consensus of the time. *** Since Adam Smith’s theory of the ‘invisible hand,’ Western economies have been greatly impacted by the ideology that economic laissez-faire, somewhat miraculously, will lead to a nation’s highest prosperity. Half a century before Smith, Bernard Mandeville, in the The Fable of the Bees, advanced a related theory in the form of an immensely provocative paradox, namely that the egoistic pursuit of self-interest by individuals is to the advantage of the common good. A physician by trade and philosopher by vocation, the Dutch-born free-thinker published several political and social tracts during his lifetime, such as Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness (1720), Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1732), or a pamphlet advocating the usefulness of brothels, Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724), published under the pseudonym of ‘Phil-Porney.’ None of these publications, to be sure, caused such a stir as The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. “The Grumbling Hive,” the nucleus of The Fable of the Bees, unfolds Mandeville’s economic paradox of ‘private vices [for] publick benefits’ in the guise of an animal fable. Mandeville sets out by evoking chauvinistic clichés about England when he describes a “Spacious Hive well stockt with Bees, / That liv’d in Luxury and Ease,” in which

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No Bees had better Government, More Fickleness, or less Content: They were not Slaves to Tyranny, Nor rul’d by wild Democracy; But Kings, that could not wrong, because Their Power was circumscrib’d by Laws. (FB: I, 17)

It turns out, however, that all members of the bee state are depraved, not only those ‘knaves’ who openly commit felonies, but also lawyers, physicians, priests, soldiers, ministers, judges – all ‘bees’ are corrupt and primarily concerned with enriching themselves: These were call’d Knaves, but bar the Name, The grave Industrious were the same: All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, No Calling was without Deceit. (FB: I, 19 – 20)

While this seems to be the kind of satire familiarized by a Swift or Pope – the censure of vicious or absurd behaviour from the viewpoint of reason, decorum or civil virtues –, Mandeville is not a satirist in the usual sense.⁸² He is quite free of irony when he states: Thus every Part was full of Vice, Yet the whole Mass a Paradise; Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars, They were th’ Esteem of Foreigners, And lavish of their Wealth and Lives, The Balance of all other Hives. (FB: I, 24)

Mandeville contends that a striving society with vicious individuals is not just a coincidence (an anomaly, an aberration) in the development of social systems, but rather the only way for such a society to attain wealth and ensure economic growth – not just for the rich, who become even richer, but also for “the very Poor [who] / Liv’d better than the Rich before” (FB: I, 26). Avarice, pride, vanity,

 See also Philip Pinkus (1975), who argues, quite against the then fashionable trend to read Mandeville as a satirist in the tradition of Swift, that The Fable of the Bees essentially is no satire, even if Mandeville makes use of satirical means here and there in the whole of his book to reinforce his overall point: “Every satiric passage in the Fable is subordinated to the paradox that private vices make public benefits” (Pinkus 1975: 204).

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envy, and inconstancy (in fashion and taste) to him are the engines of a prosperous society.⁸³ Mandeville then goes on to contrast this flourishing mercantile society with a primitive Golden Age in which all vice is abandoned in favour of virtue. The beehive-state, by divine intervention, mutates into a moral Eden – a process which is initiated when the moral corruption of society is loudly deplored by those who have prospered most from it: How Vain is Mortal Happiness! […] While every one cry’d, Damn the Cheats, And would, tho’ conscious of his own, In others barb’rously bear none. One, that had got a Princely Store, By cheating Master, King and Poor, Dar’d cry aloud, The Land must sink For all its Fraud […]. (FB: I, 26 – 27)

Such outcries of moral hypocrisy bring about the downfall of the beehive-state as they provoke divine intervention to eradicate all evil in the beehive. Ironically, the rigorous assertion of Christian virtues results in a society in the state of decay: all trades are slowly undone because “Content, the Bane of Industry, / Makes ’em admire their homely Store, / And neither seek nor covet more” (FB: I, 34– 35). The price to pay for absolute virtue is a society that is morally just, but economically and politically ‘dead’: poor and utterly defenceless against external military dangers. The bees are thus forced to seek shelter in the primitive abode of a “hollow Tree,” albeit “Blest with Content and Honesty” (FB: I, 35). Mandeville’s conclusion in “The Grumbling Hive” could not be any clearer: the

 “The Root of Evil, Avarice, That damn’d ill-natur’d baneful Vice, Was Slave to Prodigality, That noble Sin; whilst Luxury Employ’d a Million of the Poor, And odious Pride a Million more: Envy it self, and Vanity, Were Ministers of Industry; Their darling Folly, Fickleness, In Diet, Furniture and Dress, That strange ridic’lous Vice, was made The very Wheel that turn’d the Trade.” (FB: I, 25)

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rigorous pursuit of virtue is sheer folly; it is a utopian fiction that is vain and useless: Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive To make a Great an Honest Hive. T’ enjoy the World’s Conveniencies, Be fam’d in War, yet live in Ease, Without great Vices, is a vain EUTOPIA seated in the Brain. (FB: I, 36)

Even before the storm of public indignation broke loose in 1723 (after his adding of the polemical “Essay on Charity and Charity Schools”), Mandeville tried to defend his views on the nature of man and society in the preface to The Fable of the Bees and in a long series of small essays called “Remarks.” But it seemed mere lip service to his critics when he claimed that the Fable had been utterly misunderstood as an argument for encouraging vice, and that it was intended instead as a realistic account of personal vices as a necessary evil conducive to the welfare of society.⁸⁴ All the same, Mandeville was berated for being an unchristian cynic, a ‘man-devil,’ whose views, as has been seen in Innes’s response, were seen as heresy and a threat to the moral underpinnings of society and church. It is striking, though, if not ironic, that Mandeville’s image of ‘man’ does not even differ fundamentally from that of his critics, since it is essentially Christian: in a postlapsarian world all human beings are fallible sinners constantly tempted by vice. What infuriated most contemporaries, then, was Mandeville’s practical denial of virtue as the path to social prosperity and his adamant claim that even the most virtuous human acts of altruism spring from such vices as vanity and egoistic self-love.⁸⁵ In modern terms, Mandeville’s ethical ideas are stuck between deontological and utilitarian ethics, between a morality based on personal virtue and one contingent upon the consequences of one’s actions. While he persistently insists,  “When I assert, that Vices are inseparable from great and potent Societies, and that it is impossible their Wealth and Grandeur should subsist without, I do not say that the particular Members of them who are guilty of any should not be continually reprov’d, or not be punish’d for them when they grow into Crimes” (FB: I, 10).  “Ashamed of the many Frailties they feel within, all Men endeavour to hide themselves, their Ugly Nakedness, from each other, and wrapping up the true Motives of their Hearts in the Specious Cloke of Sociableness, and their Concern for the publick Good, they are in hopes of concealing their filthy Appetites and the Deformity of their Desires; while they are conscious within of the Fondness for their darling Lusts, and their Incapacity, barefac’d, to tread the arduous, rugged Path of Virtue” (FB: I, 234– 235).

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throughout the Fable, on the necessity of private virtues as an ideal for individual action, his social ethics are nonetheless utilitarian, owing to his pragmatic insight that vices will always be stronger motives for individual action than virtues. Public well-being is the foremost goal of society, so evil acts or vicious behaviour are permissible if their effects are a benefit for society. This can be seen, according to Mandeville, in the greed for luxury, which facilitates employment in manufacture and service, or even in the male desire for fornication, which not only offers impoverished women employment as prostitutes, but also has appeasing effects in some areas of society (Mandeville mentions sailors who would otherwise make attempts on “the Honour of our Wives and Daughters” [FB: I, 96]). As to his overall ethical outlook, Mandeville actually reveals himself to be an adherent to moral relativism when he claims “that things are only Good and Evil in reference to something else, and according to the Light and Position they are placed in” (FB: I, 367). *** The moral relativism of the free-thinking Mandeville could not be any further from Samuel Johnson’s strong moral convictions. James Boswell, Johnson’s faithful companion and devoted biographer, describes religion as “the predominant object of his thoughts” (Boswell 1980: 51).⁸⁶ Throughout his life, Johnson assiduously tried to meet the “unremitting demands of charity and virtue, the strenuous duties and regulations of the Christian life” (Woodman 1993: 13). This is reflected in many of Johnson’s innumerable writings; in the following, I will use his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes and an undated sermon attributed to him as cases in point. In general, Mandeville’s analysis of the omnipresence of vice in society is not too far removed from Johnson’s portrayals of human life; it is however in evaluating the state of things, i. e. the moral conclusions they each draw from such a diagnosis, that they are clearly opposed. Johnson published his first grim account of the corruption of society by ubiquitous vice anonymously in his early poem London (1738), an imitation of Juvenal’s Third Satire. Eleven years later, in the much more elaborate The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson presents, again in the form of Juvenalian satire, a kaleidoscope of human vice manifesting itself in the vain pursuit of profane desires which all cause ultimate discontent: the goal of reaching human happiness is always frustrated and turned into its opposite. The poem works its way through wishes for wealth, greatness, power, knowledge, longevity and beauty, which are associated by

 As to Boswell’s glorifying canonization of Johnson, see Schwalm (2007: 345 – 361).

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the lyric I with the vices of avarice, greed, ambition, pride and vanity. Throughout the poem, for example in the descriptions of historical examples of restless ambition for power (such as Cardinal Wolsey or Charles XII of Sweden) or of the scholar’s false pride of learning and ambition for renown, the lyrical I assumes an authorial vantage point of God-like objectivity, from which he sternly observes the human condition, “with extensive view, / Survey mankind from China to Peru”; Johnson 1964: ll. 1– 2). Man is described, in accordance with the all-pervasive vanitas theme of the poem, as “wav’ring man, betray’d by vent’rous pride,” “[s]hun[ning] fancied ills, or chas[ing] airy good” (Johnson 1964: ll. 7, 10): How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice, Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice; How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress’d, When vengeance listens to the fool’s request. (Johnson 1964: ll. 11– 14)

In The Vanity of Human Wishes (as in London before), the very lack of virtue is the cause of a nation sinking, not its rigorous enforcement, as in the ending of Mandeville’s topsy-turvy beehive parable. For Johnson, as life-embracing as he was – never a teetotaller and always fond of food and company –, the only solution to put an end to the vain human pursuit of happiness was to be found in the Christian faith, which is to put one’s earthly desires in their place for the prospect of a heavenly afterlife. In The Vanity of Human Wishes, the ‘authorial I,’ as it could be called, commands the addressee of the poem to turn to heavenly authority and to redirect his or her desires to the only cause that promises lasting, i. e. everlasting, happiness: Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind, Obedient passions, and a will resign’d; For love, which scarce collective man can fill; For patience sov’reign o’er transmuted ill; For faith, that panting for a happier seat, Counts death kind Nature’s signal of retreat: These goods for man the laws of heav’n ordain, These goods he grants, who grants the pow’r to gain; With these celestial wisdom calms the mind, And makes the happiness she [i. e. Nature] does not find. (Johnson 1964: ll. 359 – 368)

Here Johnson employs terms from economic discourse (“goods,” “pow’r to gain”) and transfers them to a spiritual context in order to underline the contrast between a vain pursuit of material happiness, related to vice, and the rewarding

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pursuit of spiritual happiness, which only virtue, firmly anchored in religious faith, can bestow. Interestingly, Johnson did not leave it altogether at such a pious, self-denying and world-renouncing Christian ideal of happiness in afterlife. In a sermon written for an old friend he unfolds a utopian vision of a happy state based on the thorough establishment of virtue. He claims in it that “general piety might exempt any community from [the] evils [of life]” (Johnson 1978: 55). His utopian vision of a virtuous society is thus diametrically opposed to Mandeville’s idea of the decaying beehive after the introduction of virtue: But a community, in which virtue should generally prevail, of which every member should fear God with his whole heart, and love his neighbour as himself, where every man should labour to make himself “perfect, even as his Father which is in heaven is perfect,” and endeavour, with his utmost diligence, to imitate the divine justice, and benevolence, would have no reason to envy those nations, whose quiet is the effect of their ignorance. If we consider it with regard to publick happiness, it would be opulent without luxury, and powerful without faction; its counsels would be steady, because they would be just; and its effort vigorous, because they would be united […]. The encroachments of foreign enemies, they could not always avoid, but would certainly repulse, for scarce any civilized nation has been ever enslaved, till it was first corrupted. (Johnson 1978: 60 – 61)

“[P]rivate men” in such a virtuous society, Johnson continues, would “be industrious to improve [their] property,” “assist [their] neighbour,” and “endeavour after merit” (Johnson 1978: 61). Children would honour their parents as these would be virtuous and just. Grief would be more moderate because nobody would lack a friend for consolation. Social subordination would be unproblematic (“insolence would be separated from power, and discontent from inferiority”); and difference of opinion would not turn into quarrels (“every man would dispute for truth alone”; Johnson 1978: 61). Due to a lack of pride and obstinacy, there would be no more persecution, just as there would be few disputes about property because nobody would want to enrich him or herself at someone else’s expense. Care and solicitude would practically disappear without the existence of false friends or public enemies. There would be no more immoderate desire for riches as vanity would be expunged; “fear of poverty would be dispelled” (Johnson 1978: 61). In general, Johnson addresses with his scenario the problem of theodicy, i. e. the existence of evil in a world created by God as the source of all good. With regard to Mandeville’s belittling ‘Eutopia in the brain,’ his caricature of virtuous primitivism, Johnson’s Christian utopia is its direct opposite: Such is the state at which any community may arrive by the general practice of the duties of religion. And can Providence be accused of cruelty or negligence, when such happiness as

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this is within our power? Can man be said to have received his existence as a punishment, or a curse, when he may attain such a state as this; when even this is only preparatory to greater happiness, and the same course of life will secure him from misery, both in this world and in a future state? (Johnson 1978: 62)

Johnson here fleshes out an unattainable ideal of Christian wishful thinking, an extravagance that is hardly reconcilable with the common-sense pragmatism with which he typically addressed life’s problems. This utopian ideal is nonetheless significant as to proving the importance Johnson places on virtue for the secular world. While virtue must be anchored in religion, it has its vital function for improving secular life. *** To associate Mandeville with common sense might seem surprising at first. His socio-ethical views in The Fable of the Bees are often seen as antiShaftesburian,⁸⁷ and thus anti-commonsensical. As we have seen, Shaftesbury’s concept of an innate sense for both moral and aesthetic judgment is an important strand in the discourse of ‘common sense’ in the eighteenth century. Mandeville, however, also makes frequent use of common-sense appeals, ironically in order to gain approval for his supposedly non-commonsensical views. To elaborate on this, two main points about Mandeville and his entanglement with common-sense discourse shall be raised here. The first is concerned with content: it is the charge that Mandeville’s social description violates common sense, a charge substantiated by Samuel Johnson’s statements about Mandeville’s theory. The second point is to do with form, i. e., Mandeville’s strategy of defence against his critics, where he frequently reverts to common-sense rhetoric in order to justify his views. Apart from frequent accusations of religious heresy against Mandeville,⁸⁸ the charge that his doctrine violates common sense was a persistent line of attack. As quoted above, Alexander Innes found Mandeville “guilty of the most notorious Contradictions, and maintain[ing] such Things as cannot be reconcil’d to common Sense” (Innes 1739: xvi). Common sense is invoked here as an infallible intuitive standard from which Mandeville’s central paradox – “private vices, public benefits” – deviates simply because it is a paradox. If common sense en-

 As Irwin Primer (1975) has shown, Mandeville in his earlier Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness (1720) borrows heavily from Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.  See the accusatory letter by “Theophilus Philo-Britannus” that Mandeville quotes in full length as part of his 1724 “Vindication” of The Fable of the Bees (FB: I, 386 – 401).

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tails “the ordinary ability to keep our selves from being imposed upon by gross contradictions, palpable inconsistencies, and unmask’d imposture” (Amhurst 1726: 111) – as Nicholas Amhurst (better known as ‘Caleb D’Anvers,’ writer of the oppositional magazine The Craftsman) defines it in 1726 –, then Mandeville’s startling paradox is dubious per se, regardless of whether the reasoning that leads to the paradox appears sound or not. There is a negative echo of Mandeville’s doctrine, which appeared to eradicate the difference between vice and virtue altogether, in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man in 1734, when he scolds: Fools! who from hence into the notion fall, That Vice or Virtue there is none at all. If white and black blend, soften, and unite A thousand ways, is there no black or white? Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; ’Tis to mistake them, costs the time and pain. (EM: ep. 2, ll. 211– 216)

Pope’s common sense position on the ‘dangerous absurdity’ of Mandeville’s doctrine could not be any clearer. It would receive its philosophical foundation later in Thomas Reid, according to whom any conclusion violating common sense must be wrong and must consequently invalidate the reasoning supporting it.⁸⁹ In Mandeville’s case, his arguments could thus be passed off as irrelevant because their overall conclusion denigrates the public consensus that vice is to be suppressed or prosecuted. Samuel Johnson’s response to Mandeville is not quite as simple. In the only direct comment on Mandeville in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Johnson clearly opposes his system, even though he partly agrees with him on the beneficial effects of luxury in a commercial society and the potentially negative side-effects of charity: “You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompence of their labour, than when you give money merely in charity” (Boswell 1980: 948). This would promote idleness rather than industry among the poor. Johnson does give Mandeville credit for his realistic account of the weaknesses in human nature, but ultimately rejects his conclusions for society: “I read Mandeville forty, or, I believe, fifty years ago. He did not puzzle me; he opened my views into real life very much. No, it is

 See Reid (2002: 433): “But it is possible, that, by setting out from false principles, or by an error in reasoning, a man may be lead to a conclusion that contradicts the decisions of common sense. In this case, the conclusion is within the jurisdiction of common sense, though the reasoning on which it was grounded be not; and a man of common sense may fairly reject the conclusion, without being able to shew the error of the reasoning that led to it.”

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clear that the happiness of society depends on virtue” (Boswell 1980: 948). Instead of leaving it at a sweeping argumentum sensus communis in the fashion of Reid, Johnson identifies Mandeville’s definitions of vice and virtue as the fault lines in his reasoning: The fallacy of that book is, that Mandeville defines neither vices nor benefits. He reckons among vices everything that gives pleasure. He takes the narrowest system of morality, monastick morality, which holds pleasure itself to be a vice, such as eating salt with our fish, because it makes it taste better; and he reckons wealth as a publick benefit, which is by no means always true. Pleasure of itself is not a vice. (Boswell 1980: 948)

As Malcolm Jack has pointed out, Johnson put his finger on the “extremely puritanical premise” (Jack 2000: 91) in Mandeville’s ascetic concept, which equates virtue with self-denial.⁹⁰ This helps Mandeville reinforce his criticism of moral hypocrisy, but to Johnson it is clearly a distortion of the truth to represent virtue and pleasure as mutually exclusive, which inevitably leads to paradoxical claims violating common sense. As for the utilitarian aspect of Mandeville’s social doctrine, Johnson will not deny that vicious acts may sometimes produce common good, but the individual act, he insists, remains vicious: It may happen that good is produced by vice; but not as vice; for instance, a robber may take money from its owner, and give it to one who will make a better use of it. Here is good produced; but not by the robbery as robbery, but as translation of property. (Boswell 1980: 948)

This might seem like a quibble about words, but it makes all the difference to the moralist Johnson. He asserts a “commonsensical standard for evaluating the morality of an act” (Miner 1958: 163), i. e. a norm based on private virtue which remains within the bounds of Christian ethics. As mentioned above, there is yet a second aspect of Mandeville’s involvement with common sense, which relates to his ambivalent argumentative strategy. Mandeville takes a decidedly anti-common-sense stance in The Fable of the Bees when he ridicules Shaftesbury’s plea for a ‘middle way’ between self-interest and disinterestedness. Shaftesbury, in the Characteristicks, had called for moderation, restraint and control of the so-called ‘self-passions’ in order not to let them grow into vices that are harmful to society:

 See also Miner (1958: 160), who, relying in this point on F. B. Kaye’s introduction to The Fable of the Bees (FB: I, xxxviii–lxxvi), refers to Mandeville’s “Remarks” K, L, M, and Q in the Fable.

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Now these Affections [of “Interestedness and Self-love”; C.H.], if they are moderate, and within certain bounds, are neither injurious to social Life, nor a hindrance to Virtue: but being in an extreme degree, they become Cowardice,—Revengefulness,—Luxury,—Avarice,—Vanity and Ambition,—Sloth;—and, as such, are own’d vitious and ill, with respect to human Society. (Shaftesbury 2001: II, 80 – 81)

To Mandeville, such common-sense gentleman ideals are not realistic and ultimately an obstacle to social progress: That boasted middle way, and the calm Virtues recommended in the 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. (FB: I, 333)

Quite ironically, by satirizing Shaftesbury’s position, Mandeville performs the ‘test of raillery,’ which Shaftesbury recommends as a critical method to determine whether a proposition is true and in accordance with common sense: if ridicule fails, the idea must be true (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 7– 9).⁹¹ By applying the ‘test of raillery’ to Shaftesbury, Mandeville debunks the Earl’s aristocratic ideal of common sense by the very method that is supposed to confirm it. Apart from this critical confrontation with Shaftesbury’s moral sense, Mandeville’s rhetorical strategy in fact embraces common-sense discourse in an attempt at coaxing the reader into agreeing with his views. It is a parasitic strategy since Mandeville is obviously opposed to common-sense morality while he nevertheless seeks to exploit the discursive and aesthetic means associated with it. To begin with, The Fable of the Bees, even though it is not a satire on the whole, contains many satirical swipes at the hypocrisy of the moral do-gooders. Yet, satire, the preeminent literary mode of criticism in the eighteenth century, professes to have common sense as its moral or aesthetic norm (paradigmatically so in Pope and Fielding, as well as in Swift), against which anomalies and absurdities are profiled for ridicule and condemnation.⁹² Mandeville appropriates the rhetorical weaponry of satire to employ it strategically for his own agenda. The same function can be attributed to his use of appeals to the common sense of his readers, which were becoming immensely popular in public communication at that time. Many examples of this rhetoric can be found throughout The Fable of the Bees: he addresses “all Men of Sense and Sincerity” (FB: I, 402); “all Men of Sense” must be “ready to confess” that everybody is sub-

 See my detailed analysis of this truth-testing ‘method’ in chapter III.1.  See below, chapter III.1.

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ject to pride (FB: I, 124); or: a “Man of Sense, Learning and Experience […] will always find out the difference between Right and Wrong in things diametrically opposite” (FB: II, 221). To be sure, Mandeville jumps on the bandwagon of common-sense rhetoric which enjoyed a growing popularity in magazine essays, philosophical tracts, or parliamentary debates in the eighteenth century. Such claims to ‘men of sense’ occur at such a high frequency in his book that they form a persistent rhetorical strategy. Clearly, though, Mandeville seldom appeals to the common sense of the common man, but, in a move to subvert common-sense discourse from within, to an elitist ‘common’ sense – one that still shares in the overall ideological assumptions of common-sense discourse, such as the transparency of reality, the self-evidence of basic facts, or the universality of truth, but that at the same time requires a more probing, and thus profounder, insight into the truth of things: The Fable of the Bees was design’d for the Entertainment of People of Knowledge and Education, when they have an idle Hour which they know not how to spend better: It is a Book of severe and exalted Morality, that contains a strict Test of Vertue, an infallible Touchstone to distinguish the real from the counterfeited, and shews many Actions to be faulty that are pawm’d upon the World for good ones […]. I am satisfied that it has diverted Persons of great Probity and Virtue, and unquestionable good Sense; and I am in no fear that it will ever cease to do so whilst it is read by such. (FB: I, 404– 405)

It is in fact the debunking of received notions, customary views, and commonplace conventions that Mandeville aims at in The Fable of the Bees. Thus common sense discourse is used by Mandeville to communicate something that goes beyond the common sense of his contemporaries. Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees is in many ways the antithesis of eighteenthcentury common sense while at the same time remaining deeply entangled in its discursive strategies. The relevance of common-sense discourse in the context of the eighteenth century may become clearer if common sense is conceived as a powerful synthetic concept combining reason, morals, taste, and feeling with pragmatism and a desire for consensus. Common sense discourse, bringing with it the idea of moderation, of a ‘healthy middle way’ between extremes, has a compensatory cultural function overall. Viewed in this light, Samuel Johnson is such an iconic figure for British eighteenth century culture because he represents a middle way, a compromise, between conservative and progressive cultural elements. As an enlightened Christian moralist with a well-balanced and irresistible sense of judgment in moral and aesthetic matters, he combines within himself virtually all elements of good sense, i. e. common sense in the maximizing view. By contrast, Mandeville’s case represents the flipside of the coin,

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that is, how common sense discourse functions equally as a powerful ‘principle of exclusion,’ to use Michel Foucault’s term. Not only does common sense boast a claim of universal validity, but it also promotes identity, sameness, homogeneity, and sanity over difference, otherness, heterogeneity, and madness. As mentioned before,⁹³ the paradigmatic metaphor of common sense judgment in this respect is the tribunal, which is “to rebuke Vice, correct Errors, reform Abuses, and shame Folly and Prejudice” (CS1: 8). Whoever is thus tried by the tribunal of common sense is placed outside of this discourse as being its ‘Other,’ which Mandeville certainly was when the critical attacks against him would not cease. His response here, as has been shown, is ambivalent. On the one hand, he does make strategic use of common-sense rhetoric in order to profit from its hegemonic status for ‘making sense,’ i. e. for producing statements accepted as true. On the other hand, he subverts common-sense discourse by addressing an intellectual elite of ‘men of good sense,’ because the nature of his doctrine is irreconcilable with the moral consensus of his time. Therefore Mandeville’s social ethics represent an excrescence in the cultural climate of the early eighteenth century and were unmistakably associated with the radically progressive elements of Enlightenment, which British common-sense concepts tried to keep at bay. This is after all, in the fitting words of critic E. G. Hundert, Mandeville’s true “Enlightenment identity” (Hundert 1994: 15).⁹⁴ And this is his legacy still to this day, in a world of global markets whose potential for continuous growth, driven by unrestrained human greed, is potentially without limits – or so it seems.

2.3 Life Ethic and Happiness – Samuel Johnson and Rasselas Johnson’s short novel Rasselas, ever since it was first published in a two-volume edition in 1759, has enjoyed a long and extensive critical debate. Certain key issues have proven to be especially controversial, for instance the question whether Rasselas contains a religious, and thus hopeful, message or a primarily secular one, expressing despair. Religious readings of the tale tend to identify a moral lesson about the vanity of secular human desires in the face of the more important Christian ‘choice of eternity,’ advocated in the penultimate chapter of the tale. According to secular readings, Johnson’s narrative is a gloomy expression

 See above, chapter I.3.  He also argues there, quite persuasively, that Mandeville’s paradox captures “the unique and uniquely disturbing paradoxes of modernity” (Hundert 1994: 15).

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of the absurdity of human existence in its futile search for happiness and meaning.⁹⁵ To recapitulate: Rasselas is the story of an Abyssinian prince of the same name who lives in a “Happy Valley” of material affluence and manifold diversions, secluded from the rest of the world by an encircling mountain ridge. Discontented and bored with his life of plenty, Rasselas embarks, together with his mentor Imlac (a wise old poet), his sister Nekayah and her maid Pekuah, on a journey along the course of the River Nile in order to find a “choice of life” that ensures permanent happiness. Their quest leads them through various parts of the Middle East where they encounter many different ways of human life; however, no way of life seems to warrant perfect and lasting happiness. In the end, in the notorious “Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded,” the happiness-seekers resolve, rather inconclusively, to return to Abyssinia – whether to the Happy Valley or elsewhere is left open. Much critical attention has been devoted to the narrative structure of Rasselas. Emrys Jones was one of the first critics to interpret the ending with its inconclusive conclusion as an aesthetically purposeful coda, supplying an appropriate formal closure to a text that shows the openness of life: “The book therefore contrives to be both a closed and an open system; the demands of literary form and the demands of life are both met” (Jones 1967: 400). As will be argued here, this tension between closure and openness is actually one between linear teleology and circular repetition, or, in other words, the contrast between a teleological quest for happiness (which remains unfulfilled) and its circular (or rather spiral) repetition. Desire in the quest for happiness may attach itself to ever varying objects (hence the ‘openness’ of life), but it can never be fully satisfied. In fact, it limits life’s openness, as the circle of desire cannot be broken – in this sense, Rasselas never leaves the circular confines of the (Not So) Happy Valley. Common sense, typically considered Johnson’s domain, is of no help in resolving the paradox of life, i. e. in breaking the circle of desiring. If one compares Rasselas to conventional eighteenth-century wisdom about the importance of common sense for the right pursuit of happiness, the contrast will become clear. In Applebee’s Journal of 11 March 1732, common sense is described as indispensable for a happy life: “The Blessings of Common Sense are seldom considered, tho’ the Happiness of Life depends more upon it than on any other Sense whatsoever […]” (rpt. in Gentleman’s Magazine 1732: II, 647). Alexander Pope offers similar advice in An Essay on Man. After presenting the problem of defining happiness (“Those call it Pleasure, and Contentment these”), he pre-

 This debate is retraced perceptively in Tomarken (1989: 5 – 37).

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scribes rather vaguely to follow “Nature” and “Common Sense,” which should suffice to keep a sane mind and thus make happiness attainable by everybody: Take Nature’s path, and mad Opinion’s leave, All states can reach it, and all heads conceive; Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell, There needs but thinking right, and meaning well; And mourn our various portions as we please, Equal is Common Sense, and Common Ease. (EM: ep. 4, ll. 29 – 34)

In Johnson’s Rasselas, though, common sense fails to achieve a compromise between the opposing ‘extremes’ the text offers as possible ‘choices of life.’ Rasselas therefore implies the ineffectiveness of common sense for addressing questions of happiness and the ‘choice of life’ – there simply is no practical common-sense recipe for lasting happiness. However much the search for happiness in the tale is garnished with common-sense advice from the sage Imlac and others, common sense can at best help avoid extremes (such as outlined in the chapter about “The Dangerous Prevalence of the Imagination”), but it can never provide a positive ‘choice of life.’ Ultimately, Johnson’s Rasselas stages life as an aporia of desire – this will be my last point of analysis in what follows here. As will be seen, a fixed meaning of life and ever-lasting happiness on earth are shown to be unattainable while, at the same time, the very desire for such closure seems unquenchable. This paradox is presented in Johnson’s narrative not as static, but as dynamic with repetitive features. While life is in constant flux and “some desire is necessary to keep life in motion” (HR: 33), it is also a cycle of desires whose continual fulfillment can never supplement the fundamental lack that characterizes being in this world. Accordingly, in Rasselas, life’s cyclical dynamism takes the form of an aporetic narrative, in which the linear quest motif and all generic expectations of romantic closure are ironically subverted and ultimately frustrated – in favour of a plot which hints at a linear-circular pattern of repetition best described as a spiral. *** To generations of readers, Samuel Johnson has embodied authoritative eighteenth-century common sense like nobody else. To offer orientation in a complex world by tempering novelty with tradition is a task that Johnson performs but too well, and it is one that is clearly associated with common sense as a mediating faculty of good judgment. As has been mentioned before, common sense discourse moderates the linear-progressive trajectory of Enlightenment modern-

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ity by insisting on unchanging elements in the human experience of life that are universal to all men (and women, even if these were of lesser concern for most eighteenth-century advocates of common sense). While Johnson promotes knowledge and learning in his writings, and embraces social and economic progress, he is also deeply critical of all tendencies in culture to overthrow traditional Christian morality or to neglect established values on the grounds of mere novelty or for the Faustian sake of knowledge per se. This can be seen in Johnson’s critical stance towards the usefulness of the progress made by the new natural sciences: [T]he innovators whom I oppose are turning off attention from life to nature. They seem to think, that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars. Socrates was rather of opinion, that what we had to learn was, how to do good, and avoid evil. (Johnson 2010: 119)

Johnson’s attention to life and the practical ethical dimension of knowledge can be traced in almost all of his writings; his only piece of longer prose fiction, the oriental tale Rasselas, is certainly no exception here. Rasselas presents different ways and walks of life, functioning as Sinnangebote – as touchstones of a meaningful existence resulting in happiness – for the travellers, which are negotiated in the form of binary oppositions: rich vs. poor, young vs. old, uneducated vs. learned, hedonistic vs. ascetic or stoic, early vs. late marriage, etc. These have been analyzed as dichotomies, bipolar alternatives, as a principle of “broken antithesis” (New 1985: 85)⁹⁶ – implying, in all of these cases, that neither pole is favoured by the narrative as a promising path to a lasting form of happiness. As will be argued in what follows, Johnson employs a rhetorical strategy which reveals that the complexities of life cannot be unravelled by common sense. Common sense as a consensual norm typically opts for a reconciliation of extremes, for a middle way, a via media, a compromise between dichotomous poles. Since this is not available in Rasselas – even though common sense is administered here and there by the sage Imlac and other personae in Johnson’s text –, it becomes clear that to the problem of happiness there are no commonsensical solutions. Common sense discourse becomes relevant in Rasselas in at least two forms, distinguished by C. S. Lewis as the ‘minimizing’ and ‘maximizing’ views of common sense, the basic apperception or understanding of the world, often understood in a more or less derogatory way, and the highly valued faculty of judicious

 New’s analysis of the principle of the broken antithesis in Rasselas is inspired by Wasserman (1975).

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judgment, ‘good sense.’⁹⁷ Johnson employs the minimizing view of common sense in the following passage from Rasselas, which concerns irreconcilable opposites: There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either. […] No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile. (HR: 110)

Interestingly, the self-evident logical principle of common sense in the minimizing view – opposites cannot be identical – inspires in this passage a whole chain of images that have an ethical dimension for human life, which is actually the domain of ‘good sense’ (i. e. common sense in the maximizing view). In ethical matters, the logical principle of mutually exclusive opposites is by no means selfevident. On the one hand, this shows the tight link between the two complementary views of common sense. On the other hand, the relevance of this imagery for solving Rasselas’s problem of happiness is questionable, if not altogether spurious. Nekayah, who utters these images after philosophizing about the right age for a happy marriage, states a problem, not a solution. The problem is a polarity of opposites that occurs in different shapes and forms throughout the entire narrative, e. g. living in the Happy Valley (in the country) versus living in Cairo (in the city), as suggested by the metaphor of “the source and […] the mouth of the Nile” in the quotation above.⁹⁸ That human life in Rasselas consists of “irreconcilable dichotomies” (Campbell 1990: 265) and that the “classical via media […] is [an]other ideal cosmic principle that Johnson crushes” (Wasserman 1975: 10), have been much reiterated claims in the criticism of Rasselas. Peter New has called this dialectic the strategy of the “broken antithesis.” While eighteenth-century writing, as he rightly explains, “proceeds so generally by means of antithesis that it may be regarded as a convention,” and readers are most often “steered towards a middle choice which will avoid the disadvantages of both extremes,” Rasselas offers no synthesis that would emerge from the chain of dialectic oppositions presented in the text, because Johnson constantly devalues both sides of any dichotomy and leaves the travellers (and readers alike) “with no clear hope that there may

 See chapter I.2 above.  Cf. the corresponding analysis of this passage in Campbell (1990: 265).

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be a possible middle” (New 1985: 85 – 86).⁹⁹ This is indeed surprising for an author like Johnson who is considered an authority in matters of common sense, all the more so since common sense (in the maximizing view), as a faculty of excellent judgment, was clearly associated with balance, compromise, restraint, and a moderation of extremes – indeed, with just the healthy and sane middle way that Johnson seems to withhold from Rasselas’s fictional world. While the “Fruits of Common Sense” (CS2: 82)¹⁰⁰ are to be borne by pruning the unhealthy extremes of life – eccentricities, extravagancies, follies, or, more severely, madness –, in Rasselas, these fruits seem unavailable as the travellers take into view one extreme after another. What remains most out of reach in a postlapsarian universe is certainly the fruit of lasting happiness which would reverse the Fall. However, it would be false to claim that Rasselas is altogether free of affirmative common sense discourse. On the contrary, Johnson would not be Johnson if the narrative did not present the reader with many a sparkling epigram, uttered by Imlac as well as other characters, and the odd common-sense lecture on human nature. The point is that such instances of common-sense wisdom, whenever they appear in the text, deal with rather limited problems that do not touch directly upon the issue of lasting happiness. In other words, common sense may correct follies and erroneous beliefs, or cut down to size disproportionate concepts (or mere impostors of wisdom, like the Aviator in chapter 6, the wise man in ch. 18, or the hermit in ch. 21), but they fail to set up a positive value in its stead. Imlac’s warning against the “Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination” in chapter 44 may serve here as a case in point: Disorders of intellect […] happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity; but while this power is such as we can controll and repress, it is not visible to others, nor considered as any depravation of the mental faculties: it is not pronounced madness but when it comes ungovernable, and apparently influences speech or action. (HR: 150 – 151)

 See also Hinnant (1988: 86), who gives a good summary of the pervasive oppositions in Johnson’s tale that govern various levels of meaning (narrative action, symbolism, conceptual structure).  Common Sense no. 66 (6 May 1738).

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The lesson to be learned is that soaring “flights of fancy” might end in delusion, as in the case of the Astronomer who believes he can direct the course of the stars with his will. Before, Imlac had already presented the vain and impractical pyramids of Egypt as monumental tokens of the extremes to which “that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life” (HR: 118) can take human beings. The passage above shows the usual signs of common-sense diction: Imlac warns of “insanity,” is inimical to “airy notions,” and promotes instead “sober probability”; he argues for restraint and “control”; he universalizes (“There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason”); he even prefaces more daring claims with modifying disclaimers (“Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state”). How seriously these moral lessons are to be taken, coming from a character who by no means may be simply considered Johnson’s mouthpiece,¹⁰¹ is hardly relevant at this point. What is significant, though, is that common sense is shown to be “a Kind of negative Wisdom, which every Man has when he does not expose his Follies” (CS2: 82). Imlac merely preaches a negative principle – caution against the dominance of imagination – but states no positive principle for a right balance between reason and imagination.¹⁰² Common sense, as a sobering cure, is supposed to help avoid extremes that evidently cause unhappiness, but the state of not being unhappy is not the same as positive happiness – it is even an altogether unsatisfactory state when lasting happiness is one’s actual aim. Hence, common sense discourse in Rasselas serves Johnson as an important disillusioning device to debunk false ideals, clear up muddled notions, and pass some sobering advice about life (“a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed”; HR: 50). Probably not every epigram, not every didactic speech, expresses a serious moral lesson – the text is often ironic –, but many of them do. However, a common-sense recipe for lasting happiness in life is not to be found among them. On a higher level, one may argue this is indeed the common-sense solution to the struggle with life’s meaning. It is only in this way that F. R. Leavis’s praise of Rasselas for its “moral centrality and pro-

 Imlac’s non-commonsensical enthusiasm for the vocation of the poet in chapters 10 – 11, checked by Rasselas’s ironic remarks, is an example frequently quoted in this respect.  Rasselas does offer some positives as well – “palliatives” to the human condition, as New (1985: 125 – 131) calls them. Next to religion these are moral virtue, knowledge, and human company. Especially the latter one is important for an analysis of common sense discourse in Rasselas, since the Astronomer regains his common sense through the sympathetic and compassionate company of the travellers, who become his friends. Common sense, as common sentiment and a sense of company, becomes more and more important in the later eighteenth century, leading up to the cult(ure) of sensibility.

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found commonsense” (Leavis 1952: 115) makes sense. The ending of the tale (which will be examined more closely in what follows) suggests that the happiness-seekers may search as long as they live without ever finding a positive solution to the problem of happiness – thus, in this particular question, it can only be common sense that there can be no common-sense solution to this problem. Ironically, such a message would once more reconfirm common sense as a negative principle, one that is, as we have seen before, “more extensive in refutation than in confirmation” (Reid 2002: 433). *** Rasselas addresses linear and circular aspects of life through an abundance of textual elements describing either a line or a circle, or both at the same time. In fact, many symbolic expressions of movement through time and space paradoxically combine aspects of linearity and circularity. Thus, protracted progression in time performs a curve caving in on itself in space, while circular spatial movement is presented as having a linear-progressive temporal dimension. In short, line and circle combined become a spiral, a progressive circular movement or a circularly winding progression (see also Middeke 2009). The dynamic figure of the spiral can be traced in Rasselas on many levels. It finds its master symbol in the River Nile, which, as a recurrent leitmotif throughout the narrative, is charged with ambivalent, if not contradictory, meanings with regard to the different contexts in which it appears. Overall, as will be seen, the spiral in Rasselas is a potent emblem of human life, which takes its linear course in time, while it is at the same time constituted by repetitive natural cycles, repetitions with a difference, and a continual doubling of beginnings and endings. Lines, straight or curved, are frequently found in Rasselas. Straight lines appear for instance in human-made structures such as columns, towers or turrets (in the palace of the Emperor of Abyssinia in the Happy Valley, or in the house of the Astronomer), where they mostly represent a removal or withdrawal from reality and everyday life. The book charting the treasures hidden in the columns of the Emperor’s palace is kept in the adjoining tower, out of reach for anyone but “the prince who stood next in succession” (HR: 11). Furthermore, the Astronomer in chapters 40 ff. has withdrawn from reality into the turret of his house, from which he not only watches the stars but also deems himself able to direct the course of the sun and command the weather. By contrast, curved or winding lines are primarily linked to nature, such as in the pastoral idyll of the “rivulet, that wantoned along the side of a winding path” (HR: 78) or in the Nile itself, whose meandering path the company of Rasselas follow on their journey from the source of the Blue Nile in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) northwards to its mouth near Cairo in Egypt.

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The Nile is a powerful, albeit ambivalent symbol in Rasselas. ¹⁰³ As a dynamic symbol of life, the Nile stands for change and mutability, for opportunity and imponderability, for agency and passivity, as well as for life cycles and natural rhythms. Life as a “wider horizon” (HR: 60) of opportunity reveals itself after Rasselas, Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah have dug a passage through the mountain in order to escape from the Happy Valley. They behold “the Nile, yet a narrow current, wandering beneath them” (HR: 60). Thus at the beginning of their journey, life’s opportunities still seem dim and distant, but Rasselas, taking in the prospect of the Nile “with rapture” (HR: 60), expects life to expand just as the Nile will keep swelling along its course. Later, though, after experiencing plight and discontent in the lives of many families, Nekayah voices disillusionment in a lament apostrophizing the Nile: “Tell me if thou waterest, through all thy course, a single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmurs of complaint?” (HR: 93) Much as life entails misery, to withdraw from it in seclusion from society is not a satisfactory option either, as the travellers learn from the discontented hermit, who lives “at such a distance from [a] cataract [of the Nile], that nothing more was heard than a gentle uniform murmur” (HR: 80) – to distance oneself from the tumult of life cannot procure lasting happiness. When Pekuah is abducted by the Arab tribe, this event in itself accentuates the element of chance in life, which eludes human control and free will since it is as incalculable as the sudden twists and turns of the Nile. As Pekuah is held captive by the Arab chief in his “strong and spacious house built with stone in an island of the Nile” (HR: 136), her being forced into passiveness signifies an involuntary suspension from the dynamic flow of life.¹⁰⁴ At first, she is able to enjoy the conversations with the Arab chief and “the splendour of the prospect” of the Nile, “the crocodiles and river-horses,” at which she looks “with terrour, though [she] knew that they could not hurt” her (HR: 137). Yet, as time passes with the delay of her release, her stationary status amidst the constant flow of the Nile terrifies her since it seems she “must end [her] days in an island of the Nile” (HR: 141). Clearly, then, to make a ‘choice of life’ is much complicated by the fact that life may resist human will. Such a resistance to human volition is further stressed in passages from Rasselas where the Nile functions as a synecdoche of nature in general. Here, it epitomizes nature’s adversity to human aspirations, in particular any feeble at-

 Campbell views the Nile and other manifestations of water in Rasselas as fluctuating symbols between the poles of flight and confinement (see Campbell 1990: 265). Before him, the Nile has been stressed as a symbol of life by Wasserman (see Wasserman 1975: 12).  Pekuah’s captivity bears similarities in this respect to Rasselas’s confinement in the Happy Valley.

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tempts at mastering nature. To survey and gauge the Nile in its entirety, as the vainglorious Aviator in the Happy Valley plans to do on his first flight (“How easily shall we then trace the Nile through all his passage”; HR: 26), or to command the Nile at one’s liberty, as the mad Astronomer believes he is capable of (“the Nile has overflowed at my command”; HR: 145), springs from the human desire to transcend one’s own natural limitations. Both the Aviator and the Astronomer are put in their places for their attempted or imagined transgressions, as the one falls into a lake when trying to fly and the other is cured of his delusion by the caring company of friends. Moreover, human life appears entirely insignificant in the face of Nature as a transcendental signified. The ever-repeating annual inundation of the Nile literally transcends the transience of human life, of which the wistful old man whom the travellers meet towards the end of their journey is painfully aware: To me the world has lost its novelty: I look round, and see what I remember to have seen in happier days. I rest against a tree, and consider that in the same shade I once disputed upon the annual overflow of the Nile with a friend who is now silent in the grave. I cast my eyes upwards, fix them on the changing moon, and think with pain on the vicissitudes of life. (HR: 155)

Natural time cycles – such as the Nile’s annual overflow or the moon’s route across the sky, repeating themselves relentlessly and infinitely – contrast sharply with the temporally linear and finite course of individual human life. While the Nile is traditionally considered a mythical life-giving force associated with creation (its annual inundation washes fertile mud onto its banks),¹⁰⁵ here it represents a circular temporal concept of eternal return that renders linear human teleology pointless and vain. In view of these symbolic correctives to human volition in the ‘choice of life,’ it is important to take into account the much-debated issue of Rasselas’s narrative form. The route the travellers take along the banks of the Nile is the geographical setting for a tale that invites expectations of teleological closure through the convention of the oriental romance, to which Rasselas seems to belong, as well as the quest motif inherent in the search for happiness in life. The apparent linearity of this course is reinforced by strong biblical overtones in Johnson’s narrative. It has often been noted that the Happy Valley is a secular version of the Garden of Eden, and that the outside world beyond the mountains

 Cf. the entry on “Inundation” at Saqqara.nl (accessed 15 May 2014).

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allegorizes a postlapsarian existence¹⁰⁶ in which one has the freedom, which is as well a predicament, to make a ‘choice of life,’ just as Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost have “The World […] all before them,” to decide “where to choose / Their place of rest” (Milton 2009: bk. 12, ll. 646 – 647).¹⁰⁷ The reference to the inundation of the Nile in Rasselas’s final chapter, which has the travellers stuck in Cairo, even brings to mind associations with the biblical Flood, so that Rasselas bears characteristics of a Noah in an antediluvian world: the whole array of dichotomous experiences Rasselas and his fellow travellers make in preparation of their ‘choice of life’ resembles Noah’s choice of animals by twos, i. e. dichotomous pairs (of male and female), for survival after the Flood. Any expectations of teleological closure are disappointed, however, as Rasselas does not conform to romance conventions, nor does the quest reach its secular telos. The finality and closure of a linear-teleological plot is forestalled in an ending which announces the eventual return of the travellers to Abyssinia, who know that “[o]f these wishes that they had formed […] none could be obtained” (HR: 176). Yet, teleological closure is substituted with a geographical closure – as an ersatz – in the travellers’ resolve to go back to the point, or at least the country, of their departure. But even this form of circular closure is ambiguous due to the textual crux that their precise destination in Abyssinia is simply not clear,¹⁰⁸ making a return to the Happy Valley possible, though rather unlikely. Going back to the Happy Valley in order to remain there would imply the quest’s utter failure: as becomes obvious in the initial chapter of Johnson’s narrative, to Rasselas the Happy Valley means prison, not paradise – the loss of Eden/innocence is irreversible. More likely, then, the travellers’ return to Abyssinia indicates a lifelong circular repetition of the quest for happiness, which, with the added dimension of time, performs the figure of a spiral.¹⁰⁹

 Cf. Smith (1996: 627– 628), who also views the overall plot structure as a repetition of the story of the Fall, more precisely a repetition of the kind that J. Hillis Miller (in Fiction and Repetition) has called Platonic.  See also Wasserman (1975: 19).  Cf. Sherburn (1959), who was the first to draw attention to the fact that Johnson’s text does not state that travellers return to the Happy Valley, thereby starting a new debate about Rasselas’s ending.  Tomarken claims the most important ramification of discovering that the travellers do not return to the Happy Valley was that “the tale could no longer be viewed as circular in structure” (Tomarken 1989: 23). Two objections need to be made here. First, such a claim neglects the fact that the travellers do intend to return to Abyssinia, even if it is not to the Happy Valley. Second, with regard to the overall question Johnson’s text pursues about lasting happiness, rather the opposite is true: the inconclusiveness of Rasselas’s ending suggests that the quest has not come, and will not come, to an end. Had Johnson finished the story instead with Rasselas’ settling in

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Earl R. Wasserman, in an excellent analysis of Rasselas’s embeddedness in the ethical and aesthetic discourses of its time, has made it clear that the standard pattern of teleological closure in eighteenth-century novels was never purely linear, but always a spiral course back to the point of departure, however on a morally (and often economically) higher level – to reach this higher level is the actual telos of the narrative plot. This popular pattern of a “Fortunate Fall” in a secular world was prefigured by Milton’s religious version of it in Paradise Lost: Man falls and, happily, enters the world of trials in order that, through experience and the test of his virtues, he may earn the redemption, not to return to Eden, but, better, to ascend to Heaven and dwell with his Father. (Wasserman 1975: 16 – 17)¹¹⁰

In a secular narrative, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Richardson’s Pamela, or Fielding’s Tom Jones, the “end of the spiral plot is not the attainment of Heaven, but the security of the best there can be on earth” (Wasserman 1975: 18). Such closure is indeed what Rasselas and Nekayah set out to achieve in their quest for lasting happiness on earth. Johnson’s narrative, however, shows that this telos is unattainable on earth. In its stead, the penultimate chapter offers the ‘choice of eternity’ as a religious solution to a secular problem. It is Princess Nekayah who voices this modified, displaced telos after a visit to the catacombs and Imlac’s comforting speech about the immortality of souls: “‘To me,’ said the princess, ‘the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity’” (HR: 175). Wasserman concludes, adding to the interpretive tradition commenced by Boswell,¹¹¹ that Johnson in fact frustrates the secular version of the Fortunate Fall and instead reclaims the archetypal form for the religious sphere: Johnson has, in effect, rescued the original Christian pattern of the Fortunate Fall from the novelistic secularized version, which he has formally repudiated. Man does not leave Paradise Hall or the Happy Valley to repossess it securely through the acquisition of wisdom; he

the Happy Valley, this would have indicated a strictly geographical circle, but would have also signaled a definite end to the quest for happiness, i. e. a linear plot structure.  Wasserman also points out quite correctly that long before Milton the spiral plot pattern had already been an archetype of the classical epic, to be found e. g. in the Odyssey or the Aeneid, where the hero ‘falls’ from an initial state of felicity, embarks on a recuperative journey, and eventually manages to secure happiness and wisdom on a higher level.  “Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal. Rasselas […] may be considered as a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon the interesting truth, which in his Vanity of Human Wishes he had so successfully enforced in verse” (Boswell 1980: 242).

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acquires Heaven through the wisdom that the “choice of eternity,” not the “choice of life,” is essential. (Wasserman 1975: 25)

Hence, the return of the travellers to Abyssinia, indicated in the very last sentence of Rasselas, is to Wasserman no more than “Johnson’s ironic bow to the closed circular plot, emptying it of meaning” (Wasserman 1975: 21). However, such downplaying of the significance of the ending is uncalled for. The spiral movement of a repetitive search for happiness on earth – spiral because it is cyclic and progressive through time – is by no means empty of meaning, but indeed significant as it refers to the aporetic circularity of desire for secular happiness. This requires an explanation that takes the assumed didactic purpose of Rasselas as its point of departure. Some critics have tried to view Rasselas as a novel of disillusionment, comparable to Voltaire’s Candide or Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale. In such a view, then, the unattainability of perfect happiness on earth through any ‘choice of life’ is not so much a frustrated telos of the story, but its actual educational lesson. That this is one of the major didactic purposes Johnson intended for his readers is certainly common ground among most critics.¹¹² Less clear, however, is the question of what consequences arise from such a lesson for Rasselas’s characters (and for readers alike, even though this shall not be our focus here). Fred Parker seems to argue that the repetitive circle of searching for a ‘choice of life’ is broken at the end of the novel: What this return [to Abyssinia] implies is that the quest for the choice of life has been recognized as simplistic, and outgrown. The party now recognizes that the answer to the question of how to live,? [sic] is not of a kind to be given by any conceivable encounter with the next moral celebrity. In that sense, at least, an illusion has been set aside. (Parker 1997: 140)¹¹³

 Not for all, though. A recent voice of dissenting criticism is Jeffrey Barnouw (2004), who force-reads Rasselas as an exercise in satirical irony. According to Barnouw, none of Rasselas’s characters have actually learned anything from their pursuit of the choice of life since throughout the text they remain passive observers of life rather than active agents and do not learn from first-hand experience. The actual moral lesson would be that happiness lies in a vita activa. Such a reading is, however, an overstatement for at least two reasons. First, the travellers are simply more active than Barnouw allows them to be, and, second, no active pursuer of life they encounter pronounces himself a thoroughly happy person.  In a similar vein, Peter New stresses the aspect of education, as a loss of innocence, in the character of Rasselas: “But despite the long-lasting naivety which afflicts all men in ways often apparent to others and occasionally to themselves, Rasselas will never return to the state of immaturity […]” (New 1985: 84).

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This might be true. Still, the question remains what the travellers will do after their return to Abyssinia, whether they will not embark on yet another voyage, like Lemuel Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe, to view the ways of the world and keep the circle in motion. Even if this is strictly unanswerable, Rasselas contains many elements suggesting that human desire, in its most general form, is not only the root of the problem, but that it cannot be overcome and in fact repeats itself interminably in varying manifestations. The circularity of desire lurking from Rasselas’s narrative plot finds its metonymic analogy in textual elements signaling doublings, circular movements, and repetitive cycles. Natural cycles feature prominently in Rasselas; the annual overflow of the Nile has already been mentioned. However, inundations are further doubled in Rasselas with regard to the inundation of the Happy Valley during “the rainy season, which in these countries is periodical” and which “confined all the princes to domestick amusements” (HR: 30). This not only foreshadows all the inundations of the Nile mentioned later in the story, but also provides a specific link to the ending: the travellers are again “confined to their house” (HR: 175) by an inundation (the Nile’s) where they ponder what to do. Interestingly, it is due to the confinement during the first inundation of the Happy Valley that “the attention of Rasselas was particularly seized by a poem, which Imlac rehearsed, upon the various conditions of humanity” (HR: 30), which leads to his becoming Rasselas’s mentor. Imlac is a poet and sage who was “born in the kingdom of Goiama, at no great distance from the fountain of the Nile” (HR: 31), which, according to the Nile’s prevailing symbolism of life in Rasselas, gives him special credibility for passing on wisdom about life. Before he settled in the Happy Valley, he himself had undergone the same pursuit of happiness which Rasselas is about to begin. Clearly, Johnson utilizes the pre-established archetypal mentor-pupil relationship to explore the question of secular happiness in Rasselas. But Imlac also has his own interests in leaving the Happy Valley. Stirred up by the encounter with the young and probing Rasselas, he seeks to overcome stasis and re-enter the dynamism of life himself. Therefore, in effect, Imlac repeats his own search for happiness in yet another spiral loop.¹¹⁴ Such repetitive loops in Rasselas point to the fact that the human desire for happiness cannot come to a permanent standstill, that this desire and the various options offered in the narrative to fulfill it are in fact only metonymical ex-

 Earl Wasserman makes a similar observation about Imlac as well as the hermit in chapter 21 of the book, whose life spirals between the poles of an active life in the midst of society and the solitude of a recluse (cf. Wasserman 1975: 11).

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pressions of a fundamental structure of desire in human subjects which is constitutive of life. Rasselas himself becomes aware of this structure of desire when he observes some goats nearby (in a scene that might have inspired Friedrich Nietzsche to a similar observation in the second of his Untimely Meditations):¹¹⁵ What […] makes the difference between man and all the rest of the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporal necessities with myself; he is hungry and crops the grass, he is thirsty and drinks the stream, his thirst and hunger are appeased, he is satisfied and sleeps; he rises again and is hungry, he is again fed and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fullness. The intermediate hours are tedious and gloomy; I long again to be hungry that I may again quicken my attention. […] I can discover within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy. (HR: 13)

Human desire – going beyond the mere gratification of instinctive appetites – is circular insofar as it moves from object to object for satisfaction (“glutted with its proper pleasure”), without ever truly dispelling the feeling of being “pained with want.” To describe this in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, Johnson glimpses in Rasselas at the subject’s fundamental lack, the unbridgeable gap within the human psyche between desire and its absolute fulfillment, from which any concrete objects of desire are always metonymically deferred (cf. Lacan 1977: 175). In the repeated search for the ‘choice of life’ in Rasselas, the circularity of human desire turns into a spiral movement around the fundamental lack of existence (the desire of the Other for Lacan), a center that may be approached asymptotically, but can never actually be reached. Satisfying the desire for a specific object will never satisfy desire itself. It is this aporia of human desire that is demonstrated in Johnson’s narrative. The image Johnson finds for this irresolvable paradox is given at the end of the tale when the party’s “various schemes of happiness” (HR: 175) are listed by the narrator. While Pekuah, Nekayah, and Rasselas voice ‘choices of life’ according to which they want to preside, respectively, over a convent, a college of learned women, and a kingdom, Imlac and the Astronomer have made no particular plans:

 “Betrachte die Heerde, die an dir vorüberweidet: sie weiss nicht was Gestern, was Heute ist, springt umher, frisst, ruht, verdaut, springt wieder, und so vom Morgen bis zur Nacht und von Tage zu Tage, kurz angebunden mit ihrer Lust und Unlust, nämlich an den Pflock des Augenblickes und deshalb weder schwermüthig noch überdrüssig. Dies zu sehen geht dem Menschen hart ein, weil er seines Menschenthums sich vor dem Thiere brüstet und doch nach seinem Glücke eifersüchtig hinblickt” (Nietzsche 2004: 248).

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Imlac and the astronomer were contented to be driven along the stream of life without directing their course to any particular port. Of these wishes that they had formed they well knew that none could be obtained. (HR: 176)

To yield to life’s imponderable twists and turns, with which Imlac and the Astronomer wish to content themselves, has been interpreted by some critics as the wise recommendation Rasselas sends out to his readers. Accordingly, Paul Fussell identifies the wish for mere drifting as “the commonsense norm against which the wishes of their young friends are seen to be both vain and corrupt” (Fussell 1971: 243). Such a claim, however, is not warranted by anything in Johnson’s text, and the preceding analysis has already shown that common sense in Rasselas fails to set a positive standard of meaning. In fact, on a close reading, the passage quoted above states that the impossibility of attaining happiness through any of these wishes applies also to the ‘non-wishes’ of the two older men. In other words, the aporia of desire manifests itself here in the unattainability of the wish not to wish, of the desire not to desire.¹¹⁶ Making a ‘choice of life’ to become perfectly happy is therefore tantamount to the illusion that the circle or spiral of desire could at some point arrive at a definite end. But, as Imlac teaches Rasselas even before they leave the Happy Valley, “some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he, whose real wants are supplied, must admit those of fancy” (HR: 33). Life, then, is desire, and perfect happiness, as a state ending all desire, is death. This equation would sound cynical or, rather, nihilistic to Johnson if he did not believe that the circularity of desire could be disrupted in an altogether different world. Thus, death, the linear and inevitable end of all desire, is revalued as the beginning of a new life in which perfect happiness is guaranteed. This simple inversion – death is life – is echoed in the epigrammatic pun of Imlac’s warning against hedonism: Pleasure, in itself harmless, may become mischievous, by endearing to us a state which we know to be transient and probatory, and withdrawing our thoughts from that, of which every hour brings us nearer to the beginning, and of which no length of time will bring us to the end. (HR: 167)

 Cf. Liu (1984: 201– 202), who argues, in a complex analysis of Johnson’s tale, that the impossibility of wishing not to wish, as stated at the very end of Rasselas, undercuts the moral of the story given in the very first sentence, that is, not to listen to the “whispers of fancy” or pursue the “phantoms of hope” (HR: 7).

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Just as Tristram Shandy becomes painfully aware that the time to write his novel is limited by his own lifetime (“Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen”; TS: II, 754),¹¹⁷ the young travellers are made aware by Imlac that happiness on earth is insignificant in comparison with happiness in Heaven, that the ‘choice of life’ is irrelevant in view of the ‘choice of eternity.’ Ultimately, the pursuit of happiness (as the end of desire) and the appropriate ‘choice of life’ that Rasselas so wishes to make, are deconstructed by Johnson to be empty signifiers. Surprisingly perhaps, this is a point in which devout Christian morality and post-structuralism converge. At the same time, the pursuit of happiness in an attempted “balance of the mind” (EM: ep.2, ll. 120) appears in Rasselas as the infinitely receding endpoint of common-sense ethics.

 For further interesting aspects of Tristram Shandy as an unlikely companion text to Rasselas see Jones (1967: 392– 394), Wasserman (1975: 3 – 4, 22), and de Voogd (1987).

3 The Transgressions of Common Sense In good earnest, when one considers what use is sometimes made of […] Wit, and to what an excess it has risen of late, in some Characters of the Age; one may be startled a little, and in doubt, what to think of the Practice, or whither this rallying Humour will at length carry us. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 41) Enough has Satire vicious Times bewail’d, Error expos’d, and at Corruption rail’d; Satire herself, a public Grievance grown, Nor spares the Altar, nor reveres the Throne; Flatt’ring the People with insidious Praise, The Heart to alienate, the Arm to raise, To shake Obedience, insult legal Pow’r, Subvert the State, and Anarchy restore. (Guthrie 1739: 5)

Words can kill – even though they may not achieve it literally, as Isaac Bickerstaff, alias Jonathan Swift, had tried by satirically pronouncing the astrologer John Partridge dead in 1708 – 09,¹¹⁸ they can accomplish it figuratively. Perhaps with such a case in mind, Joseph Addison, in one of the early issues of The Spectator (no. 23, 27 March 1711), felt the need to moralize against a growing evil in the still emergent public sphere of English pamphlet and magazine culture: “Lampoons and Satyrs, that are written with Wit and Spirit, are like poison’d Darts, which not only inflict a Wound, but make it incurable” (Addison and Steele 1965: I, 97). Destroying a person’s name by anonymously publishing a vitriolic piece of ridicule had become a fashionable means of personal confrontation. In the satirist, such verbal sniping attacks betray “a base, ungenerous Spirit, […] a barbarous and inhuman Wit” (Addison and Steele 1965: I, 97) that viciously enjoys hurting his target while he himself remains invisible. Addison’s metaphorical rhetoric of the many “Evils which arise from these Arrows that fly in the dark” (Addison and Steele 1965: I, 97) is quite revealing in the light of Robert Elliott’s argument about the magical origin of satire in archaic rituals of berating individuals, in which the spoken word is supposed to be imbued with

 Swift, in an impersonation of a rival astrologer, had first foretold that Partridge’s death was in the stars, and then followed this up with the announcement that his prediction had come true and his rival had passed away. When Partridge publicly protested, Swift published yet another pamphlet, The Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., in which he pushed the prank even further by wittily arguing that Partridge’s claims to his being still alive must in fact be viewed as proof of his death. – See Quintana (1955: 90 – 91).

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magical power to drive away evil influences.¹¹⁹ Moreover, Addison’s moral essay is an indication of a growing anxiety – among morally minded citizens, and certainly so in the social circles invested with political power – over what could be called, with a nod to Shaftesbury, the ‘Age of Raillery’ and its potentially pernicious and subversive effects.¹²⁰ The tension between the age’s noble didactic purpose of moral reform, which, according to Piper (1997) was to be reflected in an Augustan poetics of common courtesy, and the base and vicious means to which satirical authors often resorted, can be described, according to Lessenich (2012: 72), as a considerable “gap between the theory and the practice of Augustan satire.”¹²¹ At the end of the 1730s, after more than a decade of rampant satirical slander on Sir Robert Walpole’s Whig ministry in magazine essays, pamphlets, political poetry and on the stage, it is “Satire herself,” professing to expose social errors and public nuisances like folly and corruption, that is now “a public Grievance grown,” threatening to “Subvert the State, and Anarchy restore” (Guthrie 1739: 5), as the author of a contemporary poem exclaims. Such mounting counter-pressure on satire did not quite yet lead to the end of the so-called Age of Satire, with Alexander Pope’s final version of The Dunciad still to appear four years later. But the synchronicity of the glory days of English satire and the formative years of common sense discourse in Britain begs the question of their relationship, which is, as I shall argue in the following, not free of contradictions. The following analyses will deal primarily with the earl of Shaftesbury’s concept of raillery, Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Alexander Pope’s Peri Bathous: or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, the earl of Rochester’s Satyr against Reason and

 See Elliott (1972). – The metaphor of satire’s hurtful arrows used by Addison is actually a modification of Joseph Hall’s famous Elizabethan description of the disciplining harm of satire: “The Satyre should be like the Porcupine, / That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line. / And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye, / Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily” (Virgidemiarum, bk. V, satire 3, ll. 1– 4, qtd. in Elliott 1972: 103).  A decade before Addison, one of the first notable texts to attack satire – significantly, by using the satiric weapon of wit himself – was Sir Richard Blackmore’s Satyr against Wit (1700); cf. Griffin (1994: 16).  Lessenich (2012: 72) summarizes the clash as follows: “The gap between the theory and the practice of Augustan satire was wider than in the case of other literary genres. To teach and improve the adversary, renouncing all verbal and physical injury and destruction, was the new programme of the new Augustans, constantly threatened and violated by the time-honoured Classical and Renaissance tradition of harsh literary invective. Satirical deviating from the poetics and theory of satire, however, exposed the new Augustans to imputations of personal interest, cruelty, and uncontrolled passions, especially from the quarters of more sentimentally inclined theorists of satire.”

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Mankind, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Pope’s Essay on Man. They will show how common sense is discursively constructed as the implied basis from which follies, vices, absurdities, and extreme behaviour are attacked. Special emphasis will lie on satires of ‘modern learning,’ criticized so vehemently in the ‘ancients-versus-moderns’ debate at the time. That the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries found fault with many occurrences of ‘false learning’ and ‘false reasoning’ is, I would argue, not so much the effect of a prevailing Enlightenment climate, but rather the result of the opposite and rather conservative impulse to curb the proliferation of knowledge brought about by enlightened science and philosophy. No other type of writing testifies to this defence mechanism against free-wheeling epistemic innovation as much as Augustan satire. While political satire, such as Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel with its emphasis on the particulars of current political events, is certainly influential in the establishment of satire as a major literary genre in Augustan times,¹²² it is the type of general satire targeting the follies, vices, and aberrations inherent in ‘human nature’ which is of special significance here. I read such satires not primarily as criticisms of universal and timeless faults of human nature, which they appear to be at face value, but as criticisms of cultural faults that come to a boiling point at a particular historical age. In all of this, a careful look will be taken at tensions and contradictions between eighteenth-century satire and common sense discourse. These can come in the shape of expressly voiced criticism of common sense itself, as in Rochester’s Satyr, or they appear in a far more complex form in Pope’s and Swift’s satires, where transgressions of common sense are retaliated by redoubled transgressions of common sense. Ostensibly, such counter-transgression in the rhetorical mode of irony is sanctioned as an appropriate means to beat the enemy at his own game. Ultimately though, at least in the case of Swift, it reveals satire’s precarious double bind: extreme and overly excessive aggression against non-common sense will make the aggressor fall prey to the very evils he is fighting, and he will leave the common ground of common sense itself.

 As Connery and Combe (1995: 5) have observed, it is satire’s “historical specificity, its torrential references to the peculiarities of the particular individuals in the society that it represents,” which often poses problems for the modern reader (and for the formalist critic) to fully appreciate it.

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3.1 “These Arrows that fly in the Dark”: Approaching Augustan Satire and Common Sense The common feature of all satire is attack. Satire criticizes with the implied moral purpose to enlighten, warn, reform, no matter how sincerely or insincerely it does this. Universal criticism of human nature, general censure of the times or groups of people, as well as personal ad hominem attacks can only go beyond downright slander or the merely comical, i. e. can only be effective as a form of moral criticism, if they take recourse to some common evaluative ground between the (implied) author and the (implied) reader – a collective store of values, shared by the producer and recipient of the satiric text, which the target of satire is shown to violate. Only then will the hurt inflicted by satire become harmful, as it turns the group sharing the values implied by the satiric text against the individual and threatens to exclude him or her from the group. In this structure we can glimpse already the same principle of exclusion that is at work in common sense discourse: whatever (or whoever) deviates from the common ground established in the implied satiric bond between author and reader, is singled out, put on the spot, and forced out. However, beyond the structural imperative that there should be a common ground between author and reader, many satires remain rather hazy about where this common ground precisely lies. Much criticism on satire since Renaissance times has dwelled on the bipolar rhetorical structure of satire (especially in formal verse satire). It features prominently in John Dryden’s 1693 Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, and was later put by twentiethcentury critics into the deceptively balanced formula of a thesis/Part A (the criticized vice) versus an antithesis/Part B (the opposing virtue).¹²³ This antithetical rhetorical structure of satire does not aim at sublation into a synthesis, the opposing positions are not to be fused into a compromise or mediated position. Instead, the poles clearly have a Manichean structure, that is, they remain hierarchically opposed, with the implied moral effect of the text to bring about a victory of ‘good’ Part B over ‘evil’ Part A beyond the confines of the satiric text, i. e. in the extratextual social reality to which satire is closely tied. As to the opposition of thesis and antithesis in satire, Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe (1995: 6) speak of a “militant disunity,” which will not permit a fusion of opposites:  Cf. e. g. Randolph (1942: 368 – 384). The Yale New Critics of the 1950s (e. g. Maynard Mack, Alvin Kernan, Robert C. Elliott, Ronald Paulson) regarded this rhetorical strategy as essential for satire in general, even if the antithesis/‘Part B’ of satire is mostly minimal or merely implied; cf. Griffin (1994: 28 f.).

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Perhaps more than any other genre, satire is constructed or structured on the basis of oppositions or hierarchies; in satire, these oppositions are represented in their extremes in order to achieve maximum tension. The most common rhetorical figures of satire – irony, paradox, and oxymoron (all three based upon opposites) – are those that maximize the imaginative tension of the text and produce in the reader a consequent sense of discomfort. (Connery and Combe 1995: 6)

But it is not only the disjunction of extremes that causes tension and unease in the reader. In fact, the opposites of satire, at least on a quantitative textual level, are seldom balanced or given equal room: the critical thesis almost always outweighs the moral antithesis, to the extent that in many Augustan prose satires the moral antithesis becomes hardly or not at all visible on the textual surface. This puts a considerable interpretive strain on the reader of especially those satires which are not only exclusively devoted to critical attack, but also written throughout in the form of ironic dissimulation, such as Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters or Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Swift famously states in the author’s preface of The Battle of the Books that Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind of Reception it meets in the World, and that so very few are offended with it. But if it should happen otherwise, the Danger is not great […]. (Swift 2010b: 142)

This is not only an ironic hint at the power of satire, which can indeed become offensive and cause mischief to those who become the butt of it. Swift’s lookingglass metaphor also gestures, perhaps involuntarily, at the ‘negativity’ of satire’s preferred modus operandi: Just as the author’s face does not appear in the mirror, the antithesis, the value system that is actually propagated, can often only be deduced ex negativo from the faults and follies that are exposed in the satiric text. As a result of a missing or faintly developed antithesis, Connery and Combe state (not without hyperbole) that “satire tends towards open-endedness, irresolution, and thus chaos” (Connery and Combe 1995: 5). The impression of satire’s rhetorical disunity is further reinforced on a formal aesthetic level. Whereas most verse satire between 1660 and 1750 can still be assigned to either of the two poles of formal verse satire in the Roman tradition, the wittily comical Horatian or the gravely castigating Juvenalian mould,¹²⁴ prose satire in the eighteenth century has no clear genre models to follow. How-

 John Dryden in his Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire famously coined the formula that “Juvenal Excels in the Tragical Satyre, as Horace does in the Comical” (Dryden 1974: 74).

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ever, it does make sense, I would argue, to adopt the stylistic poles of Horatian and Juvenalian satire for the discussion of prose satire with regard to the severity and range of their criticism. As will be seen below, it is satire at the harsh, corrosive Juvenalian end of the spectrum, regardless of whether it is in verse or in prose, that comes into conflict with Augustan common sense discourse. Obviously, such a distinction for prose satire only refers to the critical intention perceived in the text, not to formal features per se. In the wake of the twentieth-century theoretical groundwork of Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin,¹²⁵ the term Menippean satire has been applied to many prose satires (such as Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels) in order to find a generic term for the discordant and often carnivalesque mixing of different genres, styles, and discourses (Bakhtin) as well as the creative “combination of fantasy and morality” (Frye 1957: 310) at work in those texts. Exact definitions of Menippean satire, though, even the validity of the term itself as a genre label, are a complicated and controversial terrain¹²⁶ – one that we need not enter here. It should be sufficient to note that satire – primarily of the narrative variant, but also verse satires such as Dryden’s MacFlecknoe or Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, written in the mock-heroic form – has no formal generic shape by default, but instead mostly adopts other genres and styles, often in the mode of irony or downright parody. Thus, “satire’s parasitic appropriation of other forms” (Connery and Combe 1995: 5) emphasizes its formal disunity and, together with its often complex rhetorical structure, can make it difficult to positively identify the implied value system of the satiric text, which is, after all, the common ground that author and reader are supposed to share. Despite these difficulties, it seems that Augustan satire generally implies a moral common ground that amounts to more than just structural parallels to common sense discourse (i. e., in their principle of exclusion, which was already noted here at the beginning of this section). In fact, Augustan satire is infused with common sense discourse on the level of content, themes, and plot. That ‘universally shared’ notions of common sense are indeed the normative basis for both author and reader in eighteenth-century satire was claimed early by Frances Gallaway: Common sense was the viewpoint of enlightened men, the concurrence of competent judges in contrast to the eccentricities of the individual who followed whim and singularity. In

 Cf. Frye (1957: 230 – 231, 308 – 314); and Bakhtin (1984: 114– 119).  For two recent attempts at writing literary histories of Menippean satire, in the contexts of eighteenth-century English literature and comparative European literature respectively, see Weinbrot (2005) and von Koppenfels (2007).

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this aspect common sense was the essential basis of satire and comedy, expressions of group censure against individual absurdity. (Gallaway 1940: 50)

This will have to be scrutinized with care. Superficially, the emphasis on the collective aspect of satire’s implied norms and their coinciding with common sense concepts is persuasive. Gallaway rightly makes us aware of the normative impulse in both literary satire and common sense discourse, which both encircle and delimit non-conformity and single it out as deformity, while they tend to avoid offering positive maxims. I argue, however, that satire’s full potential of destruction, as it unfolds for instance in some of Pope’s and most of Swift’s satires, ultimately runs counter to the common sense basis it apparently propagates.¹²⁷ Before this tension can be fully revealed, it will be helpful first to trace the discursive connection between common sense and satirical ‘raillery’ outside of literary satire, in the early eighteenth-century essays of the third earl of Shaftesbury. *** The discursive linkage between common sense and satire at the beginning of the eighteenth century is given shape by the gentlemanly philosophical writings of Lord Shaftesbury on common sense and raillery. In his “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” from 1711, written in the form of a letter to an aristocratic friend, Shaftesbury provides a rationale to the ex negativo truth-seeking that is at the core of both satiric criticism and common sense judgments, which he calls the “test of raillery.” Although he rarely mentions ‘satire’ directly in his essay – and in fact speaks out warningly against the public trend of coarse lampooning and “that gross sort of Raillery, which is so offensive in good Company” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 41– 42) –, he regards “true Raillery” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 42), when pursued in “the Liberty of the Club, and [in] that sort of Freedom which is taken amongst Gentlemen and Friends” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 48), as an infallible instrument of testing the validity of any argument or proposition. If we take this litmus test of polite gentlemanly raillery – contrary to the “gross” variety exercized on the Restoration stage or by the man in the street – as a blueprint for satire, it is clear that it is rather Horatian in kind, because even the most unrestrained raillery should use “decent Language to question every

 This phenomenon is partly attributable to the historical discursive shift taking place in the dominant meaning of common sense, which can be described as a gradual move away from ‘common sense’ as a near-synonym of reason to a privileging of ‘common sense’ as an ideology of empathetic, emotional sensibility in the social sphere. (I will comment on this again in chapter VI below.)

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thing, and [make] an Allowance of unravelling or refuting any Argument, without offence to the Arguer” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 45). As Shaftesbury resents both “harsh Severity, and […] aukard Buffoonery” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 43),¹²⁸ it is by the free application of polite wit and humour that “true” raillery will make any false argument look ridiculous: There is a great difference between seeking how to raise a Laugh from every thing; and seeking, in every thing, what justly may be laugh’d at. For nothing is ridiculous except what is deform’d: Nor is any thing proof against Raillery, except what is handsom and just. And therefore ’tis the hardest thing in the World, to deny fair Honesty the use of this Weapon, which can never bear an Edge against her-self, and bears against every thing contrary. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 80)

Quite in line with the confounding of moral and aesthetic judgment that is characteristic of Shaftesbury’s thinking, his rhetoric is revealing in its metaphorical depiction of the ridiculous as deformity. (Understood literally, this term seems to be informed by experiences from eighteenth-century cultural life of a rather coarse type, even though freak shows at public fairs presumably did not belong to the repertoire of appropriate entertainments for aristocratic gentlemen.) Significantly, though, it is again a negative principle at work in the test of raillery: whatever is “handsome and just,” and thus immune to ridicule, is only revealed to be so negatively, that is by the absence of anything provoking legitimate mockery. Throughout his essay, Shaftesbury is struggling to explain on what grounds a polite gentleman is able to judge legitimate ridicule from illegitimate slander or silliness. His initial attempt at an explanation is circular and evasive: “To describe true Raillery wou’d be as hard a matter, and perhaps as little to the purpose, as to define Good Breeding. None can understand the Speculation, besides those who have the Practice” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 42). In other words, it is practical experience that enables one to judge correctly in these matters, and those who have attained this faculty of judgment use it intuitively without much reflection. Of course, such circumlocution is also a fitting description of common sense. So it is in no way surprising that Shaftesbury’s essay leads up to a discussion of this term, which begins with his account of a lively debate among his aristocratic friends, which are suddenly thrown upon the problem of defining common sense:

 It should be noted that such a plea for moderation is in itself clearly an element of common sense discourse.

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We had been a long while entertain’d, you know, upon the Subject of Morality and Religion. And amidst the different Opinions started and maintain’d by several of the Partys with great Life and Ingenuity; one or other wou’d every now and then take the liberty to appeal to Common Sense. Every-one allow’d the Appeal, and was willing to stand the trial. No-one but was assur’d Common Sense wou’d justify him. But when Issue was join’d, and the Cause examin’d at the Bar, there cou’d be no Judgment given. The Partys however were not less forward in renewing their Appeal, on the very next occasion which presented. No-one wou’d offer to call the Authority of the Court in question; till a Gentleman, whose good Understanding was never yet brought in doubt, desir’d the Company, very gravely, that they wou’d tell him what Common Sense was. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 50)

The description of this scene displays the canonical imagery employed to describe the operation of common sense in Augustan times: In the setting of a courtroom, common sense is personified as an unbiased arbiter or judge to whom the different parties make their appeals. However, as everyone involved is adamant they have common sense on their side, the authority of the judge suddenly becomes questionable. Shaftesbury, assuming the persona of the sceptical questioner, plays devil’s advocate and contemplates the relativity and, thus, unreliability of common sense: If by the word Sense we were to understand Opinion and Judgment, and by the word common the Generality or any considerable part of Mankind; ’twou’d be hard, he said, to discover where the Subject of common Sense cou’d lie. For that which was according to the Sense of one part of Mankind, was against the Sense of another. And if the Majority were to determine common Sense, it wou’d change as often as Men chang’d. That which was according to common Sense to day, wou’d be the contrary to morrow, or soon after. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 50 – 51)

Looking at the spheres of religion, politics, and moral philosophy, the questioner likewise only finds difference and no identity in what is viewed as common sense among various religious sects, statesmen, and political parties. The diabolical argument culminates in the Hobbesian or Mandevillian view of ethical relativity: “And some even of our most admir’d modern Philosophers had fairly told us, that Virtue and Vice had, after all, no other Law or Measure, than mere Fashion and Vogue” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 51). It is here that Shaftesbury’s text turns into satire itself, as the author implies that such a relativist view is absurd and thus contrary to common sense itself. In this way, the test of raillery has been performed on common sense itself, or, more precisely, on the very argument that there is no common sense, and has rendered it to be false, because such a view violates common sense. It does not appear to occur to Shaftesbury that this is circular reasoning; at least, the circularity of the argument seems negligible since the intuitive authority of common sense is ultimately more binding

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than any coercion exerted by pure logic. In the end, Shaftesbury is not able to offer a solution to the difficulty of defining common sense, but proceeds to assert as an axiom that common sense is indeed the yardstick for proper raillery, and that it can overcome the radical scepticism that threatens to undermine the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate ridicule. Shaftesbury’s aristocratic discussion partners, he assures us, are intelligent enough to see through the sceptic’s lure and continue to appreciate the worth of raillery as an exercise of common sense: They seem’d better Criticks, and more ingenious, and fair in their way of questioning receiv’d Opinions, and exposing the Ridicule of Things. And if you will allow me to carry on their Humour, I will venture to make the Experiment [i. e., the test of raillery; C.H.] thro’out; and try what certain Knowledg or Assurance of things may be recover’d, in that very way, by which all Certainty, you thought, was lost, and an endless Scepticism introduc’d. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 52)

Shaftesbury’s apology of raillery, as one might call it, thus ends here in a rather stubborn declaration of its legitimacy. If we take his procedure of raillery as a model for appropriate satire, we can see, though, how its critical method of ascertaining truth and morally right behaviour ex negativo repeats itself on the level of the underlying moral ground that is supposed to give it stability: If common sense can only be determined ex negativo (if at all), satire’s legitimacy is suspended in infinite regression. To stop this circularity and see through it as a false problem, you merely need common sense.

3.2 “Good Sense Defaced”: Enthusiasm and False Learning – A Tale of a Tub and Peri Bathous Satire in Augustan times is recognized, and embraced by many quarrelsome minds, as arguably the sharpest and most effective non-physical weapon to harm an adversary with the declared purpose of seeking truth, justice, and moral reform. Common sense discourse is essential in facilitating this purpose, as attacks from a normative position of rightfulness on anything appearing (or made to appear) excessive, deviant, or extreme, align themselves with the fundamental structural opposition to be perceived in common sense discourse: that between centre and periphery, balance and bias, norm and deviation.¹²⁹ How-

 It must be stressed at this point that an analysis of the effects of common sense discourse on the surface structures of satiric texts need not concern itself too much with the ‘deeper’

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ever, what can be shown in a discourse analysis of common sense elements in satire is how those elements are often arrayed in a way that contradicts the structural principles of common sense, which makes Augustan satire an inherently “transgressive form” (Connery and Combe 1995: 10 – 11). In the following section, this will be shown with the help of instances of satire directed against ‘enthusiastic’ religious dissent, false learning, and excesses of badly written poetry. In all of these cases the impulse to moderate social and cultural change – an impulse that is conservative, compensatory, at times reactionary – plays off against an optimistic Enlightenment ideology of progress. A major element of cultural change in post-Renaissance Europe was religious dissent. The Reformation spawned new orthodoxies, such as the Anglican Church in England, but was further fragmented, under the continued influence of Enlightenment rationalism and deist free-thinking, into an ever-growing number of sects and denominations, as well as potent factions within the established churches, such as the advent of latitudinarianism in the Church of England.¹³⁰ In the early eighteenth century, after the Glorious Revolution had put a rather fragile end to an age of virulent religious conflicts, the situation was complex and confusing, and on the verge of renewed radicalization, as the political dangers of unchecked religious dissent and enthusiasm in the spirit of Enlightenment libertarianism and progress still posed a considerable threat to Anglican hegemony. Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters is a powerful testimony to the defence mechanisms with which an Anglican majority discriminated against Puritan dissenters, and to which Defoe himself was exposed. Religious dissent was generally dismissed as ‘enthusiasm,’ the fervent or obsessive pursuit of an unorthodox religious system. John Locke castigated enthusiasm in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as “founded neither on Reason, nor Divine Revelation, but rising from the Conceits of a warmed or over-weening Brain” (Locke 1975: 699). A religious conceit becomes enthusiastic when it develops a dynamic to negate all common sense: “For strong conceit like a new Principle carries all easily with it, when got above common sense, and freed from all restraint of Reason, and check of Reflection, it is heightened into a Divine Authority, in concurrence with our own Temper and Inclination” (Locke 1975: 699). The deist Shaftesbury, himself far from being an orthodox Anglican, expresses his own reservations about enthusiastic forms of religious thought and expression. In his “Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” to his friend Lord Somers, he motives behind satire. In other words, whether the ulterior purpose of moral reform is its ‘true’ motive or rather a pretext for ‘immoral’ aggressive drives is secondary to my analysis.  See Griffin (1992) for a seminal study of latitudinarian rationalism as well as Haakonssen (1996) for the further historical development in the eighteenth century.

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argues that religious follies are best removed in the light humorous spirit of satirical raillery. In his analysis of enthusiasm, Shaftesbury follows Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, who had established a firm discursive link between religious melancholy and enthusiasm (being one of the two main expressions of religious melancholy, next to atheism),¹³¹ when he claims that enthusiasm is but the flipside of melancholy. The best antidote to both is a ridiculing spirit to break their solemnity, as Modes and Fashions, so Opinions, tho ever so ridiculous, are kept up by Solemnity: and that those formal Notions which grew up probably in an ill Mood, and have been conceiv’d in sober Sadness, are never to be remov’d but in a sober kind of Chearfulness, and by a more easy and pleasant way of Thought. There is a Melancholy which accompanys all Enthusiasm. Be it Love or Religion (for there are Enthusiasms in both) nothing can put a stop to the growing mischief of either, till the Melancholy be remov’d, and the Mind at liberty to hear what can be said against the Ridiculousness of an Extreme in either way. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 9)

Again, we find the structural ingredients of common sense discourse in Shaftesbury’s proposed cure for enthusiasm and melancholy sadness: he describes them as two related extremes that can be levelled by “a sober Kind of Chearfulness,” which makes the liberated mind see the fallacy of its aberrations. Cheerful raillery, however, can only subsist in a free-thinking atmosphere, Shaftesbury asserts; only then will it perform a remedial function in the fight against enthusiasm, nonsense, and madness, and restore to common sense those who are affected by these ills: I am sure the only way to save Mens Sense, or preserve Wit at all in the World, is to give Liberty to Wit. Now Wit can never have its Liberty, where the Freedom of Raillery is taken away: For against serious Extravagances and splenetick Humours there is no other Remedy than this. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 13)

True religious belief, in turn, must be reconcilable to reason and common sense. Shaftesbury clearly shares John Toland’s deist rationalism when he argues that discerning religious truth is not a matter of divine or mystical inspiration, but depends first and foremost on one’s own capacity for impassionate judgment:

 See Burton (1994: III, 337): “For methods sake I will reduce them [i. e. the causes of religious melancholy; C.H.] to a twofold division, according to those two extreames of Excesse and Defect, Impiety and Superstition, Idolatry and Atheisme.” This distinction was adopted and refined in 1656 by Henry More in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus: or A Brief Discourse of the Nature, Causes, Kindes, and Cure of Enthusiasm, excerpts of which can be found in Probyn’s Jonathan Swift: The Contemporary Background (1978: 16 – 25).

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For to judg the Spirits whether they are of God, we must antecedently judg our own Spirit; whether it be of Reason and sound Sense; whether it be fit to judg at all, by being sedate, cool, and impartial; free of every biassing Passion, every giddy Vapor, or melancholy Fume. This is the first Knowledg and previous Judgment: “To understand our-selves, and know what Spirit we are of.” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 35)

Being sedate, cool, impartial, and free of impassioned bias – Shaftesbury here formulates an ideal of judgment that dominates common sense discourse in the first half of the century. Evidently, discursive elements from traditional medicine (“splenetick Humours,” “giddy Vapor, melancholy Fume” are reminiscent of humour theory and ancient physiology) still play an imaginative role, but the main tenor here is rationalist. In fact, with his emphasis on “sound Sense” here and elsewhere in his writings, Shaftesbury expresses his benevolent belief in a natural sense of judgment (over the more cerebral form of reason championed by Toland)¹³² as the common-sense ground for true religion and, thus, defence against superstition and unreason. *** Enthusiasm is also one of the main targets of criticism in Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), but Swift pursues a line of attack greatly differing from Shaftesbury’s: not only does it come in a different form, i. e. satiric fiction, but it is also darker and more aggressive, and thus contrasts sharply with the earl’s benevolent optimism. In fact, Shaftesbury’s deism – the attempt at reconciling rationalism with Christian faith, with the consequence of undermining the importance of divine revelation and church institutions – comes under attack itself in Swift’s satire.¹³³ A Tale of a Tub is certainly one of the most formidable satires ever writ-

 Cf. Heinemann (1950: 47), about the friendship between Shaftesbury and Toland and their philosophical relationship: “Both follow the ‘natural light,’ but the one interprets it as sense, especially as moral sense, the other as reason.”  Shaftesbury’s rationalistic and all too optimistic outlook on man’s innate virtuousness, which had been published by his friend John Toland in the form of an unauthorized version of Shaftesbury’s manuscript An Inquiry Concerning Virtue in Two Discourses in 1699, becomes a target of satire in A Tale of a Tub, where Shaftesbury, Toland, Lord Somers, and other Neoplatonist rationalists and free-thinkers are implied as being among the annoying ‘moderns’ ridiculed in the text. Shaftesbury’s own “Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” to Lord Somers must be seen, to some extent, as a reaction to Swift’s Tale, as is evidenced by Shaftesbury’s indignant remarks in private letters, in one of which he refers to Swift’s satire as “that detestable writing of that most detestable author of the Tale of a Tub” (qtd. in Craven 1992: 101). For further information about how Swift parodies and ridicules Shaftesbury’s philosophy in A Tale of a Tub, especially in the “Digression on Madness,” see Craven’s excellent analysis in his chapter on

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ten in the English language, and perhaps one of the prime examples of Menippean satire in English literature.¹³⁴ It shows an abundance of rhetorical strategies, tropes, and discursive formations characteristic of the emergent discourse of common sense, and endorses an idea of religious orthodoxy that is made to appear as a common-sense compromise between the two opposing extremes of traditional unenlightened superstition and radical enthusiastic dissent, both of which are criticized as absurd fictions. For that purpose, Swift forms a twopronged attack in A Tale of a Tub: to condemn “the numerous and gross Corruptions in Religion and Learning” (TT: 5) as his author-persona clarifies in the “Apology” (prefaced to every edition of the text since its fifth edition in 1710). The first agenda comprises severe censure of the follies of Roman Catholicism and Christian non-conformism, such as Calvinism and other ‘enthusiastic’ forms of Protestantism, the second is a full-blown attack on ‘modern learning,’ as presented in the kind of crude hack-writing proliferating in London’s Grub Street after the lapse of the Press Licensing Act in 1695 (see Black 1987: 9). Both of these targets have an obvious political dimension: First of all, the age’s sensitivity to religious strife was high due to a history of political turmoil and revolutionary chaos in seventeenth-century England. Both reactionary ‘Popery’ and revolutionary ‘enthusiasm’ posed a major threat to the fragile political stability at the turn of the century – the one in the form of a Jacobite revolution from France by possible pretenders to the throne, the other as another uncontrollable outbreak of radical religious-as-political opposition (which was to be prevented by the ‘licensed’ toleration of Protestant dissent prescribed in the 1689 Act of Toleration). Secondly, the proliferation of writing in a free publishing market had an obvious political dimension because of its uncontrollability and unmanageability. Being a major driving force behind the emergence of what Jürgen Habermas calls the modern public sphere (see Habermas 1962: 38 – 55, 69 – 78), it was a worrying signal of cultural decay to conservative intellectuals such as Swift, an alarming symptom of enemy forces rising in the ongoing intellectual

“Shaftesbury: Virtue Trampled” of his Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness (Craven 1992: 85 – 108).  See Howard D. Weinbrot’s extensive discussion of A Tale of a Tub in his Menippean Satire Reconsidered (115 – 161). Generally, Weinbrot defines Menippean satire as “a form that uses at least two other genres, languages, cultures, or changes of voice to oppose a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy” (2005: 6). He categorizes Swift’s text more specifically as a “Menippean satire of addition,” which “enlarges a main text with new generally smaller texts that further characterize a dangerous world” (2005: 6).

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‘battle between the ancients and the moderns.’¹³⁵ Since the modern hacks, in the eyes of Tory intellectuals,¹³⁶ were guilty of an irreverent arrogance toward ancient classical learning or, what is worse, of a dim-witted ignorance of the ancients, their appearance on the public scene can be seen a factor of discursive instability. It is this conundrum of factors in a volatile cultural situation which provokes the ascendancy of common sense discourse as a potentially corrective and compensatory force, while on an individual basis it facilitates empowerment to those who are ‘inside’ this discourse and are able to gain social acceptance through it. It is irrelevant whether the young Swift was in any way aware or prescient of this; what is interesting here is how these discursive strands unfold in a dense literary satire that is both an expression and a subversion of this emergent discourse of common sense. The two political agendas in the Tale, as outlined above, effect two rather different narrative modes which cancel out a consistent narrative voice and thus add to the disjunctive complexity of A Tale of a Tub. On the one hand, in the episodes of the actual ‘tale’ of the Tale the primary genre is allegorical narrative: the three brothers Peter, Martin, and Jack, who differ in interpreting their father’s will about a coat he has bequeathed to them, represent Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and dissenting Protestantism respectively. Through the way that Peter (i. e., the Pope) corrupts the will (i. e., the Bible) and embellishes the coat (i. e., enlarges the institutions of the Church), Swift criticizes pompous Catholic institutionalism. Protestantism, in turn, is described as bifurcating into the moderate and legitimate form of Lutheran Anglicanism (with Martin/Luther being very careful in restoring the coat to its original state) and the absurd and illegitimate forms of individual enthusiastic dissent (with the fanatic Jack/ Calvin tearing the coat to pieces while trying to strip away all its ornaments). On the other hand, in the many paratextual and digressive sections of the Tale, the narrative mode is not allegory, but malignant parody: the boastful ped-

 As part of a larger controversy at the end of the 17th century, the actual debate that led to Swift’s Battle of the Books (1697) and A Tale of a Tub (1704) was inaugurated by Sir William Temple, Swift’s employer in the 1690s, who had written an essay advocating the superiority of ancient learning over its modern forms. Richard Bentley and William Wotton, chief representatives of the Moderns in this specific debate, wrote devastating replies to Temple’s slightly dilettantish pamphlet, which then provoked Temple’s secretary, Swift, to assist him by writing the counter-attacking satires.  Swift, at the time of writing A Tale of a Tub, had rather Whiggish notions of government, but already a Tory-leaning aversion to religious dissent (as tolerated or even promoted by freethinking Whig circles), before he was eventually converted a Tory by Robert Harley (the later earl of Oxford) in 1710, at the politically opportune time of Harley’s Tory ministry; see Quintana (1955: 67– 98).

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antries of “Swift’s Hack narrator” (Byrd 1984: 513)¹³⁷ lampoon Grub-Street publications of preposterous ‘modern learning’ and thus have to be read as a sustained irony – Swift of course means the opposite of what he has his unreliable narrator say:¹³⁸ “’Tis a great Ease to my Conscience that I have writ so elaborate and useful a Discourse without one grain of Satyr intermixt […]” (TT: 29). Swift’s subversive irony could not be more obvious than in this self-reflexive act of metacommunication. In the allegorical tale of A Tale of a Tub Swift draws on important elements of English common sense discourse, such as impartiality, moderation, and sober realism. When Swift in the Tale’s “Apology” cleverly claims the author “had endeavour’d to Strip himself of as many real Prejudices as he could” (TT: 5), he takes recourse to impartiality as one of the typical values common sense should entail: “Common Sense must be free from all Prejudice” (CS1: 171), as the oppositional weekly journal Common Sense (no. 24, 16 July 1737) will categorically state some thirty years later. Furthermore, the related virtue of moderation figures prominently both in the sense of composed rational behaviour and a preference for a middle road to steer clear of extreme positions. Accordingly, Martin, who represents Lutheranism – and, by extension, Anglicanism – as the middle ground between the two extremes of Catholicism and Puritanism, is described by Swift as being moderate in restoring his father’s coat from Peter’s ornamental ex-

 Reading A Tale of a Tub as a double-voiced discourse in this sense (as Phillip Harth has exemplarily done in his Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of A Tale of a Tub, 1968: 2 ff.) is of course already an interpretation, which is however supported by Swift’s “Apology”: “[…] some of those Passages in this Discourse, which appear most liable to Objection are what they call Parodies, where the Author personates the Style and Manner of other Writers, whom he has a mind to expose” (TT: 7), implying that others – the allegorical sections – are not to be considered parodies. Cf. for a different view Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1960), in which he argues that A Tale of a Tub can be subsumed under a unified theme, structure, and voice, so as to read even the allegorical passages as stemming from the hack narrator and, thus, as fully ironic. This, however, would invalidate the thrust of the argument against Catholicism and religious fanaticism. However, the narrative voice is not always consistent in each section due to recurring intrusions of the hack’s voice in the allegorical sections, e. g. in section IV where the hack expects that “this Treatise of mine shall be translated into Foreign Languages, (as I may without Vanity affirm, That the Labour of collecting, the Faithfulness in recounting, and the great Usefulness of the Matter to the Publick, will amply deserve that Justice)” (TT: 68).  If there ever was an ideal type of unreliable narrator in the stricter sense of Wayne Booth and Seymour Chatman, it would be the narrator of the Tale’s digressive sections: he violates the moral norms of the implied author (cf. Booth 1983: 158 – 159), which is conveyed in “a secret communication” between the implied author and implied reader “behind the narrator’s back” (Chatman 1978: 233).

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crescences: “the first Heat being over, his Violence began to cool, and he resolved to proceed more moderately in the rest of the Work” (TT: 89). Significantly, though, an elaborate treatment of Martin’s – and thus the later Church of England’s – fate after the Reformation is missing from the published version of the Tale, and has only survived in the form of the apocryphal “The History of Martin” from Swift’s notes.¹³⁹ There are probably several reasons why Martin’s history was not included as a section in its own right, as opposed to Peter and Jack’s adventures, which are discussed at length in sections IV (Peter) and VI/XI (Jack). For the most part, “The History of Martin” is but an uninspired enumeration of English monarchs from Henry VIII to William III with regard to their relationship to ‘Martin,’ i. e. Anglican-Lutheran Protestantism – it would have taken Swift some effort to raise this to the same level of witty ingenuity in which the published Tale excels.¹⁴⁰ Most importantly, though, the omission of outlining Martin’s theological position strengthens the aggressive efficacy of Swift’s satire. The bipolar rhetorical structure of satire, as we have seen above, typically forms an unresolved dialectic in a state of utmost tension, as satire contrasts a critical thesis with a remedial antithesis, a synthesis of which seems impossible. At the same time, to render the attack more effective, the critical exposure of the thesis is usually given much more room in the satiric text than propagating the antithesis, up to a point of totally omitting the latter. In A Tale of Tub, Swift follows this principle by neglecting Martin’s history as the antithesis in the overall satiric structure; however, on another level, Swift complicates matters by leading a two-pronged attack against both Catholicism and nonconformist Protestantism, which are clearly antithetical to each other, only to be resolved by the moderate synthesis of tradition and innovation in the form of Anglicanism. In other words, the Tale’s antithesis is a synthesis out of two opposing extremes – thus, the argumentative structure of the Tale is informed by both the ternary logic of a common-sense compromise and satire’s generic bipolarity, since two opposing evils are countered with a third position. That those two religious evils have much in common anyway, “[f]or, the Phrenzy and the Spleen of both, having the same Foundation” (TT: 128) is but a structural repetition of the two-pronged attack that the entire text of A Tale of a Tub performs by

 See Angus Ross and David Woolley’s Oxford World’s Classics edition, in which it is included (TT: 142– 146) and raised to the status of official text, just as some other shorter additions.  A further difficulty arises from the confounding of Martin (= Lutheranism) with “Lady Besses Institution” (= Church of England) in Martin’s account – a simplifying move for which “the Author finds himself embarassed,” but to which he feels compelled because of “his inviolable respect to the sacred number three” (Swift 2010c: 264).

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lumping together religious extremes with false learning (hack writing), since both represent to Swift a modern aberration, a deviation from ancient wisdom. In this context, the Anglican ‘restoration’ of the true faith, signalled by the sartorial symbolism of Martin’s careful restoration of the coat, is clearly marked as a return to ‘ancient’ common sense. The conceptual figure of restoration as a ‘return to sense’ in the allegorical tale points the way to yet another aspect of Augustan common sense discourse: the sobering quality of an empirical reality that is viewed, in principle, as transparent and knowable through experience. As much as the philosophical tradition of empiricism is shaped by the ‘moderns’ Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, to all of whom Swift had quite a complicated intellectual relationship, it is definitely an important factor in the making of Augustan common sense – and as such it can be traced in the Tale as well, where it appears as a sobering weapon to deflate illusion and deception, as a means to detect artifice and fraud. This is the basis of Swift’s hilarious satire of the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, represented in a dinner scene with Peter, Martin, and Jack, where the former tries to make the others believe that the bread they are having is actually delicious mutton: But the other could not forbear, being over-provoked at the affected Seriousness of Peter’s Countenance. By G—, My Lord, said he, I can only say, that to my Eyes, and Fingers, and Teeth, and Nose, it seems to be nothing but a Crust of Bread. Upon which, the second put in his Word: I never saw a Piece of Mutton in my Life, so nearly resembling a Slice from a Twelve-peny Loaf. Look ye, Gentlemen, cries Peter in a Rage, to convince you, what a couple of blind, positive, ignorant, wilful Puppies you are, I will use but this plain Argument; By G—, it is true, good, natural Mutton as any in Leaden-Hall Market; and G— confound you both eternally, if you offer to believe otherwise. Such a thundring Proof as this, left no farther Room for Objection. (TT: 76)

While in this scene the arbitrary authority of tradition still outweighs common sense (notably one that is expressly linked to empiricism in the mentioning of the senses), the two brothers soon let their common sense get the better of them and liberate themselves from Peter’s fraudulent despotism. While the tale of the three brothers directly hinges on important elements of common sense discourse to lend validity to the critical agenda, the satire on modern writing and learning in the digressive sections of the Tale is a tour de force of multi-levelled irony, which overshadows the attack on religious extremism by virtue of its extreme self-reflexivity. A Tale of a Tub is self-reflexive in that it is mostly about writing – i. e., about the Hack’s own act of writing, about styles and genres of writing as well as other written texts. Apart from the remnants of fictional plot and characters in the allegory of the three brothers, Swift’s satire is

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a prime example of self-reflexive metaliterature: hetero-referential in its intertextual relation to other texts and discourses outside itself (which however often bear self-reflexively upon it), and self-referential in that the act of the text’s writing is its own topic. Having said this, it is however important to emphasize that the self-reflexivity so brilliantly displayed in Swift’s text is what is actually under ironic attack from an implied vantage point of common sense, without which the satire would simply not work. In A Tale of a Tub self-reflexivity is supposed to add to the satiric purpose, since it is singled out by Swift as the visible mark of the vainglorious arrogance of modern writers who by blindly subscribing to the ideology of modernity disrespect tradition and claim authority due to mere hindsight – just as the Hack does: “But I here think fit to lay hold on that great and honourable Privilege of being the Last Writer; I claim an absolute Authority in Right, as the freshest Modern, which gives me a Despotick Power over all Authors before me” (TT: 85). How preposterous the moderns’ claim to superiority is, and how much they despotically abuse their power as authors, is indicated by the Hack’s tendency towards frequent digressions, which is, in fact, the Tale’s most remarkable narrative strategy and surest sign of the Hack’s authorial inadequacy – only to be matched in eighteenth-century literature by the mind-boggling narrative deferrals in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. ¹⁴¹ The gross violations against clarity of style and argumentative linearity – the typical trademarks of a common-sense style¹⁴² – are even further increased by digressing from a digression already begun, hence revealing a Chinese-box structure behind which, by a process of potentially endless layering, lurks the logical paradox of mise en abyme. This is a ground the Hack hesitates to tread: “But not to Digress farther in the midst of a Digression, as I have known some Authors inclose Digressions in one another, like a Nest of Boxes […]” (TT: 81). Yet his “Digression in Praise of Digressions” (section VII) comes close to that. Although there is no nested structure in that section with regard to a multiplication of narrative levels or a complication of text time, the Hack’s ‘metadigression’ insinuates a conceptual mise en abyme. Significantly, his propaganda that “the Com-

 Henry Fielding, of course, is also known for his strategic use of digressions, as e. g. in the metacommunicative announcement at the beginning of The History of Tom Jones (1994: 37, bk. I. ii): “Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to acquaint thee, that I intend to digress, through this whole History, as often as I see Occasion […].” However, digressions in Fielding are subject to as much narratorial control as plot and characters. – As to the very different uses of self-reference and metafictional technique, I have closely compared A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy in Henke (2005).  See above (chapter I.2) on the influence of the early seventeenth-century empiricist tradition (Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke) on the stylistic dictates of common sense discourse.

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monwealth of Learning is chiefly obliged to the great Modern Improvement of Digressions” as showing “the late Refinements in Knowledge” (TT: 95) self-reflexively points to the Hack’s narrative rationale, while it thus exposes Swift’s satiric target to ridicule by way of authorial irony again. All the mad dealings of the Hack, his self-conceited boastfulness and his blatant inadequacies as a writer who cannot properly organize his material, make him an outcast to common sense. A Tale of a Tub, therefore, “actually involves its readers in a notable failure and, indeed, a perversion of this ideal,” as William Bowman Piper (1977: 625) notes. The point is, of course, that the reader cannot help but notice this perversion of the common-sense ideal to be Swift’s target of criticism. As a satiric antithesis, common sense in the Tale’s digressions is not shown, but merely implied by sustained authorial irony. At the same time, though, A Tale of a Tub betrays a strong force to counteract common sense principles: a grim fierceness and a lack of moderation in the means of attack, which is recognizable as the hallmark of Swiftian satire. There are many instances where the satire in the Tale becomes excessive, and the censorious charge of absurdity seems to fall back on the accuser on the grounds of his own absurdity. Two especially notorious examples from Swift’s text may illustrate this excess of aggression. The first one, based on the satiric technique of wilfully misunderstanding a figurative phrase in a literal way in order to bring out its absurdity, forces upon the reader shocking images of a flayed woman and a dissected ‘beau’ – for the purpose of flaying modern philosophers for their superficiality.¹⁴³ In a passage that is peppered with dense ironies operating on multiple levels of allusiveness, Swift’s hack-writer persona clownishly favours the superficiality of appearances in order to reach a state of happiness by being well deceived, whereby Swift, on another level, derides the modern science of anatomy and their impious and perverse practices of “cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing” (TT: 111) dead bodies: Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the Carcass of a Beau to be stript in my Presence; when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected Faults under one Suit of Cloaths: Then I laid open his Brain, his Heart, and his Spleen; But, I plainly perceived at every Operation, that the farther we proceeded, we found the Defects encrease upon us in Number and Bulk: from all which, I justly formed this Conclusion to my self; That whatever Philosopher or Projector can find out an Art to sodder and patch up the Flaws and Imperfections of Nature, will deserve much better of Mankind, and teach us a more useful Science, than that so much in present Esteem, of widening and exposing them (like him who held Anat-

 Swift has his hack writer sarcastically commend “that Wisdom, which converses about the Surface” over “that pretended Philosophy which enters into the Depth of Things” (TT: 111).

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omy to be the ultimate End of Physick.) And he, whose Fortunes and Dispositions have placed him in a convenient Station to enjoy the Fruits of this noble Art; He that can with Epicurus content his Ideas with the Films and Images that fly off upon his Senses from the Superficies of Things; Such a Man truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the Sower and the Dregs, for Philosophy and Reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined Point of Felicity, called, the Possession of being well deceived; The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves. (TT: 112)

The overall mode of speech is irony, which is employed to bring out, to morbidly funny effect, the preposterous folly of the hack writer, who pseudo-scientifically infers from the dissection of human body parts that the surface of things is to be preferred to their depth. The irony is most blatant when the hack commends the Epicurean state of being well deceived as a “sublime and refined point of felicity,” as the peaceful state of “being a fool among knaves” – nobody in their right mind would argue such a view contrary to all moral common sense, the passage implies. However, like in many other instances in this “digression on madness” (section IX of the Tale), the irony is twisted into inverted irony – that is to say, it becomes direct criticism in a double inversion – when the hack attacks the fashionable modern science of anatomy, a criticism apparently shared by Swift, though for quite different reasons. The cleverness of Swift’s rhetorical strategy lies in the fact that the hack criticizes experimental anatomy for trying to be a ‘deep’ science, whereas the actual criticism implied seems to be that anatomy is distasteful and unnecessary because its materialist scope goes only skindeep. Either way, modern science becomes the butt-end of Swift’s reactionary ridicule: it is superficially materialist since it mistakes the different layers of physical matter for the depth of things (as in anatomical dissection), which is ironically proven by the foolish Hack, who in taking the metaphor of depth literally concludes that a nice surface is to be preferred to such gross material depth. Most importantly for our context here, Swift is willing to sacrifice good taste and manners by treating his readers (and the Shaftesburies of the world with their refined sensibilities)¹⁴⁴ to distasteful and obscene images of mangled and pierced bodies in order to bring out the madness and lack of common sense in the domain of modern learning. Another case in point for Swift’s excess of satiric aggression is the most memorable invention of the “Learned Æolists” (TT: 99), who find religious inspiration through winds. This biting attack on the unorthodox practices of enthusiastic dissenting sects has unmistakable scatological overtones. Not only is the

 Cf. Craven (1992: 97– 98), who records Shaftesbury’s indignant reaction to the barbarity of the passage in question.

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reliteralization of ‘inspiration’ as ‘wind’ carried as far as the Aeolist priest’s receiving inspiration through “a secret Funnel […] convey’d from his Posteriors” and discharging it by his face “bursting […] into a Foam,” thus delivering “his oracular Belches to his panting Disciples” (TT: 102). The analogy becomes even more graphic in that the Aeolists have “female officers” (an obvious swipe at ordaining women priests) “whose Organs were understood to be better disposed for the Admission of those Oracular Gusts, as entring and passing up thro’ a Receptacle of greater Capacity, and causing also a Pruriency by the Way” (TT: 102). With passages like these in mind, the “Liberty to his Pen” (TT: 5) of which Swift speaks in the Tale’s “Apology” sets free phallic associations of a rather deviant sort. Clearly then, A Tale of a Tub is too excessively allusive and multi-levelled to pass for a straightforward satire. Or, if satire “is an excess in itself,” as Ronald Paulson (1967: 258) has claimed, it is rather an over-fulfilment of the genre. At any rate, A Tale of a Tub is one of the most striking examples of the transgressiveness of satire, given its apparent grounding in common sense: Showing an excess of critical weaponry (e. g. hyperbole, lack of decorum, tasteless imagery, and potentially monstrous analogy), it sets out to fight the very thing of which it makes use, namely “excess” as a deviation from the common sense standards of moderation and taste.¹⁴⁵ Ultimately, A Tale of a Tub stands out as one of the most artful satires of a century replete with them. It brims with a whole range of self-reflexive, metafictional, and proto-novelistic elements in which Swift exuberantly indulged. Apparently, the structural oddities of the Hack’s section are presented to the reader as a sustained irony so that they can be discerned as excesses of folly and madness from the supposedly firm ground of common sense. But the Tale’s contamination with rhetorical excess does not come without the price of potential self-defeat. Certainly, common sense in A Tale of a Tub, wherever it is implied, corresponds largely to the Augustan standard that was evolving at the time, especially in its emphasis on sound rational judgment and a firm grounding in empirical reality. This norm is most clearly discernible in the sober middle way of Anglicanism represented by Martin, which is contrasted with the gross distortions of the Christian faith brought about by Peter’s fraudulent pompousness and Jack’s

 An analogous conclusion – that Swift was of the devil’s party without knowing it, as it were – has been drawn by Atkins (1983), who claims that Swift’s attack on modern learning is undercut by the Hack’s insightful remarks on the indeterminacy of meaning and the lack of authorial control in writing: “In the Hack, as in Swift’s own declarations, appears a complex mixture of blindness and insight, which complicates the usual binary opposition. The supposedly insightful (i. e., satirical) text may then appear most blind in condemning the blind but insightful Hack” (Atkins 1983: 117).

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mad zeal. As for the Tale’s hack narrator and the design of the many digressions, the norm according to which the narrator and his views are to be judged can only be inferred ex negativo. In general, ironic satire, which shares this phenomenon with its modern fictional offspring ‘unreliable narration,’ depends on a shared frame of reference between author and reader to function as the interpretative key for the text’s ironic meaning. In A Tale of a Tub, the key norm of common sense becomes conspicuous in the hack’s frequent violations of it, by the principles and style of his writing as well his presumptuous and insolent posture. However, the way in which A Tale of a Tub plays with its readers and their need for elucidation of the ‘darker’ hints of the hack narrator¹⁴⁶ (which are mostly Swift’s satiric swipes at the offenders of ‘modern’ or occult learning) shows both the self-reflexivity of Swift’s satiric endeavour as well as his pleasure in being as secretive and ‘dark’ as the authors he criticizes. In this respect he sacrifices the common-sense principles of clarity and transparency for an intellectual and markedly aesthetic excess – which makes his text a metaliterary satire that stops short of being an experimental novel. *** Given the flood of vicious lampoons spreading on the streets of London in the early decades of the eighteenth century, it is not surprising that the satiric boom was a cause of alarm for contemporary moralists. In fact, just a year after the publication of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, who, as we have seen, endorsed (light-hearted) raillery as the principle of proper satire, Joseph Addison condemns satire in The Spectator (no. 451, 7 August 1712) as “a kind of National Crime” because even “the finest Strokes of Satyr which are aimed at particular Persons, and which are supported even with the Appearances of Truth, [are] the Marks of an evil Mind, and highly Criminal in themselves” (Addison and Steele 1965: III, 88). By contrast, Shaftesbury’s ideal of satiric raillery is clearly informed by Dryden’s earlier praise of Horace’s satiric art: “yet still the nicest and most delicate touches of Satire consist in fine Raillery,” says Dryden

 Cf. the implicitly self-referential request by the hack for future critics to go hunting for allusions: “I desire of those whom the Learned among Posterity will appoint for Commentators upon this elaborate Treatise; that they will proceed with great Caution upon certain dark points, wherein all who are not Verè adepti, may be in Danger to form rash and hasty Conclusions […]” (TT: 73). Ironically, due to the obscurity of some of its allusions, the Tale invited comment and annotations by its opponents immediately after its first edition. Swift decided to pirate the Observations upon The Tale of a Tub (1705) by William Wotton and other material by Richard Bentley to travesty an apparatus of pedantic notes on his text (published with the fifth and all subsequent editions of the Tale).

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(1974: 70), and such “fineness of raillery” prevents it from being offensive: “A witty Man is tickl’d while he is hurt in this manner and a Fool feels it not” (Dryden 1974: 71). Thus for Dryden, in general, “Satire is of the nature of Moral Philosophy; as being instructive” (Dryden 1974: 55) – a viewpoint with which Shaftesbury concurred. Often enough, though, this moral rationale of satire was but the fig leaf for personal vendettas and aggressive struggles for self-assertion against enemies or rivals. A classic example of this, even if it definitely goes beyond the coarser type of lampoon common in Augustan pamphlet culture, is Alexander Pope’s Peri Bathous: or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, first published in 1727 as part of the joined Miscellanies by Arbuthnot, Gay, Pope, and Swift. With this satiric pamphlet, Pope coins the term bathetic (from Greek bathos for ‘depth’) for unintentionally ludicrous art or linguistic expressions that fail to achieve the intended effect of greatness. Being a parody of pseudo-Longinus’ Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), Pope’s short prose text feigns to be a helpful practical manual for writers to arrive at the opposite end of sublime height, that is, “to lead them as it were by the hand, and step by step, the gentle downhill way to the Bathos; the bottom, the end, the central point, the non plus ultra of true modern poesy” (PB: 196). Pope satirically perpetuates the ancients-versus-moderns debate in the usual Tory fashion, as he ironically praises “our every-way-industrious moderns, both in the weight of their writings, and in the velocity of their judgments,” for “so infinitely excel[ling] the said ancients” (PB: 196). However, the moral task of correcting the vice of bad writing, as implied by Pope’s mock treatise, is mostly no more than an excuse for devastating ad hominem attacks against literary adversaries and personal enemies (such as Richard Blackmore or Ambrose Philips; see Johnston 2005: 219 – 222). Peri Bathous, just as The Dunciad to a large extent, reflects the aggressive rivalries on a literary market in which poets competed for patronage and public fame. For Pope’s own personal battles, the moral and aesthetic norms generated by Augustan common sense discourse¹⁴⁷ serve him as a weapon to attack opponents. By using textual samples from Blackmore, Theobald, or Cleveland and deriding them as perfect examples of bathetic art, Pope betrays an aggressive eagerness that pays mere lip service to the supposed morality of satire. As instructive as Peri Bathous might be with regard to the later chapters being used as a handbook of rhetorical tropes,¹⁴⁸ the vitriol it unleashes compromises the common-sense norms by which it is ostensibly inspired.  See above, chapter II.1.  Apparently, Samuel Johnson saw in this a redeeming aspect of Pope’s malicious lampoon, as he told Spence: “though written in so ludicrous a way, [Peri Bathous] may be very well worth reading seriously as an art of rhetoric” (qtd. in Johnston 2005: 200).

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The allegory of sinking to the depth of embarrassment and shame by failing to reach the (aesthetic) height aspired to is informed, if not by the myth of Icarus, by pseudo-Longinus himself, who warns against the danger of “producing the opposite to the effect intended” (qtd. in Johnston 2005: 200). “[H]ow near the Frontiers of Height and Depth, border upon each other,” is an insight offered also by the Hack in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, when “Man,” on his flight of fancy, “[w]ith the same Course and Wing […] falls down plum into the lowest Bottom of Things” (TT: 103). In Peri Bathous, Pope’s hack-writer persona, Martinus Scriblerus, shows his half-learning by blaming the influence of the “Latins, [who] as they came between the Greeks and us, make use of the word Altitudo, which implies equally height and depth” (PB: 196). The engendering ploy behind Pope’s mock treatise is to represent height and depth not as opposites on a linear scale, but as part of a circle where they border on each other. Against the Manichean hierarchy of good ‘sublime’ art over bad ‘bathetic’ art, Pope’s Scriblerus suggests that the sublime and the bathetic are to be valued on a par, as different but equally desirable effects in poetry – with the latter having the great advantage to all modern poets of being the path less explored and therefore much preferred: “that while a plain and direct Road is paved to their ὕψος, or sublime; no track has been yet chalked out, to arrive at our βάϑος, or profund” (PB: 196). Such a descent into the underworld of sense and taste bears a strong analogy to Umbriel’s descent into the Cave of Spleen in Pope’s A Rape of the Lock: The dark and irrational passions on display there correspond to the mire of bungled poetic expression and confused thought in Peri Bathous – both deviate from commonsense norms of sound reasoning and finely balanced taste. By describing bathos as “entirely the gift of nature” (PB: 200), Pope brings in the commonly accepted benchmark for mimetic art, seemingly to add weight to Martinus’ preposterous explication of bathetic rules, but in fact only to denounce the bathetic writers as natural dunces whose innate ‘genius’ is to produce miserable aesthetic failures: I grant that to excel in the Bathos a genius is requisite; yet the rules of art must be allowed so far useful, as to add weight, or as I may say, hang on lead, to facilitate and enforce our descent to guide us to the most advantageous declivities, and habituate our imagination to a depth of thinking. Many there are that can fall, but few can arrive at the felicity of falling gracefully; much more for a man who is amongst the lowest of the creation at the very bottom of the atmosphere, to descend beneath himself, is not so easy a task unless he calls in art to his assistance. (PB: 200)

Here devastating insult is combined with topsy-turvy logic to inflict maximum damage: a natural fool who is already “amongst the lowest of the creation at

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the very bottom of the atmosphere” needs Scriblerus’s rules to be able to “descend beneath himself” and reach the “true Profund” (PB: 200). It is not only such claims of the bottomless lows to which ‘modern’ writers sink that are to discredit and heap ridicule on them, but also the quirky logic of the argument itself, which is to represent the befuddled pseudo-rational thinking typical of all the moderns. In this respect, Pope adopts the satiric strategy that his friend and Scriblerus-Club comrade Swift employed so masterfully in A Tale of a Tub, that is, to parasitically inhabit modern writing as the host that is to be destroyed from within. This parasitic strategy informs both argument and form of Peri Bathous. In chapter III, Pope ridicules materialist philosophy by having Scriblerus argue that “Poetry is a natural or morbid secretion from the brain” (PB: 198) and that therefore “Nascimur poetæ” (PB: 199) has to be taken literally: everyone is born a poet and therefore has to vent and discharge his or her worst poetry as often as possible. Another case in point is Scriblerus’s taxonomy of the different kinds of bathetic writers in the form of rather unflattering, animal-type categories in chapter VI: 1. the flying fish; 2. the swallows; 3. the ostriches; 4. the parrots; 5. the “didappers”; 6. the porpoises; 7. the frogs; 8. the eels; 9. the tortoises (see PB: 206). In the first place, the very act of likening people to brute animals is already an insult. Not only in the mediaeval chain of being were animals placed well below human beings, but also in the more recent discussion about whether higher animals were capable of some form of ratiocination it was generally concluded that humans are the only rational beings on earth. Any appearance of reasonable behaviour in animals was explained as stemming solely from instinct, as argued in an encyclopaedia article from 1722: The Cause of which Actions [i. e. seemingly premeditated action; C.H.] can be referred to nothing else but Natural Inclination and Instinct, by which Animals are instigated to such and such Motions: So that this or that whole Brutal Species is carried with one Propension, and there is found the same Force and Impulse in all of that Kind. (Curzon 1722: II, 3)

Besides the general slur of implying that his rivals are beings without sense or reason, Pope visibly savours the opportunity that each specific label gives him to heap even more ridicule and scorn onto rival writers on account of their unseemly and unbecoming metaphorical analogies to characteristics of animals. There are the “flying fish” among authors, “who now and then rise upon their fins, and fly out of the profund; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom” (PB: 206); or the ostriches, “whose heaviness rarely permits them to raise themselves from the ground” (PB: 206); or the eels, who “are obscure authors, that wrap themselves up in their own mud, but are mighty nimble

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and pert” (PB: 206). However, the very categories themselves (eerily reminiscent of the odd Chinese taxonomy of animals that Michel Foucault quotes from Borges in the preface to The Order of Things; see Foucault 1994: xv) are a parody of the growing trend in the sciences of the time towards taxonomic ordering. If we follow Foucault’s concept of taxinomia as the foremost principle of order in the configuration of knowledge during the Classical age (1650 – 1800), then taxonomy “treats of identities and differences; it is the science of articulations and classifications; it is the knowledge of beings” (Foucault 1994: 74).¹⁴⁹ Scriblerus’s ‘ontological’ taxonomy of animal writers appears to categorize them by virtue of their subtle differences and identities, whereas in truth they are all the same to Pope – annoying rivals – and alluded to with ever the same purpose – to destroy their reputation. That Pope uses for his slander the ordering principle of contemporary science is not seriously intended as a gesture of legitimization; on the contrary, it ridicules the pedantic methods of the ‘moderns’ to dissect the world and lose one’s common sense in the process of it. Scriblerus is a modern in this respect, just as Swift’s Hack in A Tale of a Tub, and Pope clearly shares Swift’s deep suspicion of modern science (which the latter expressed most vividly in his satire of the Royal Society in book III of Gulliver’s Travels, published one year before Peri Bathous). Pope’s special coinage of the bathetic as ‘ludicrously deep’ is also a result of the implicit value judgments of an existing common sense discourse that values clarity of thought and expression but rejects speculation and false learning – Pope already hints at this in his Essay on Criticism in his prescriptions for critics: True Taste as seldom is the Critick’s Share; Both must alike from Heav’n derive their Light, These born to Judge, as well as those to Write. […] Nature affords at least a glimm’ring Light; The Lines, tho’ touch’d but faintly, are drawn right. But as the slightest Sketch, if justly trac’d, Is by ill Colouring but the more disgrac’d, So by false Learning is good Sense defac’d; Some are bewilder’d in the Maze of Schools, And some made Coxcombs Nature meant but Fools. In search of Wit these lose their common Sense, And then turn Criticks in their own Defence: […]. (EC: ll. 12– 14, 21– 29)

 Other principles of order are mathesis (calculus) and genesis (genetic taxonomy), which are often combined in the scientific systems of knowledge at the time.

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Pope’s expressions of the “light” derived from “Heav’n” and Nature’s “glimm’ring light” hark back to the pre-established opposition between light (sense) and dark (nonsense), which can be traced as far back as Plato’s Republic at least (e. g. the metaphor of the sun as source of intellectual illumination or the parable of the cave). This opposition finds its direct ironic inversion – of course with the same value judgment implied – in section X of A Tale of a Tub when Swift’s Hack praises the “Republick of dark Authors,” which prefer “Night being the universal Mother of Things” to the light of day, and where “wise Philosophers hold all Writings to be fruitful in the Proportion they are dark” (TT: 120). To this established oppositional metaphor Pope adds the notion of the bathetic as the opposite of high and sublime by building on the already existing connotation of deep as ‘dark’ – a connection that Swift also made in the Tale when the Hack boastfully proposes “that every Prince in Christendom will take seven of the deepest Scholars in his Dominions, and shut them up close for seven Years, in seven Chambers, with a Command to write seven ample Commentaries on this comprehensive Discourse” (TT: 119). In this ridicule of false learning and scholarly overinterpretation, the extremes of depth (“deepest Scholars”) and width (“ample Commentaries”) are combined satirically with fairy-tale atmosphere (“every Prince in Christendom”) and mystic wholeness (the sacred number “seven”) for ‘bathetic’ effect, as Pope will later call it. In defining the bathetic as an extreme that backfires into the opposite direction, Pope utilizes pre-existing concepts in the everyday discourse of a ‘common sense of mankind,’ which closely associate intellectual depth with a kind of height that sets one above others, but also aloof from them. A typical example of this common wisdom appears in a passage from an alphabetical almanac of The Worthies of Devon from 1701 about the career of one Ezekiel Hopkins, later to become Lord-Bishop of Derry in Ireland. Hopkins loses an election as the rector of a parish, “which we ought not to esteem as the least Disparagement to this excellent Person; rather as an Argument of his deep Learning, which lay above the reach and judgment of vulgar Hearers” (Prince 1701: 409). Depth (“deep Learning”) equals height (“above the reach”). Because it is beyond the grasp of ‘common people,’ intellectual height/depth leads to the depth of a fall – social bathos, as it were, is an observation from empirical reality which informs Pope’s satire of the art of sinking in poetry. In Peri Bathous, the play with binary extremes (high vs. low, sublime vs. bathetic, uniform vs. deformed, common vs. uncommon) is complex and often ambiguous, because the conventional hierarchies of value implied by them (i. e., high better than low, uniform better than deformed etc.) come under pressure in Pope’s satire through the influence of common sense discourse, which urges the author to opt for a balance between extremes and thus, almost involuntarily, challenge notions of sublimity and excellence in art. Common sense

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discourse explicitly occurs in Peri Bathous in the satirical first maxim of bathetic art, i. e. to avoid all common sense: And I will venture to lay it down, as the first maxim and cornerstone of this our art, that whoever would excel therein, must studiously avoid, detest, and turn his head from all the ideas, ways, and workings of that pestilent foe to wit and destroyer of fine figures, which is known by the Name of common sense. His business must be to contract the true goût de travers; and to acquire a most happy, uncommon, unaccountable way of thinking. (PB: 200 – 201)

In this passage, the disguise of ‘Scriblerus’ becomes rather threadbare when a punning Pope diagnoses modern writers with the ‘gout’ of false taste and confused thinking due to their lack of common sense. While common sense is set up as an ideal here¹⁵⁰ that stands in direct opposition to bathos, affairs are more complicated in other parts of the text where common sense is placed squarely between sublimity and bathos. The characteristic affinity of common sense discourse with figures of moderation, compromise, the middle way, the golden mean – in short, the perfect balance between extremes – inscribes itself in the metaphor of the “things for the mere use of man,” which holds a seemingly worthless middle position between the natural sublime and the natural profound: The Sublime of nature is the sky, the sun, moon, stars, etc. The Profund of nature is gold, pearls, precious stones, and the treasures of the deep, which are inestimable as unknown. But all that lies between these, as corn, flowers, fruits, and animals, and things for the mere use of man, are of mean price, and so common as not to be greatly esteemed by the curious: it being certain that any thing, of which we know the true use, cannot be invaluable: which affords a solution, why common sense hath either been totally despised, or held in small repute by the greatest modern critics and authors. (PB: 200)

By ironic inversion, common sense, or “any thing, of which we know the true use,” is praised by Pope as the golden mean between extremes of sublimity and profundity. Hence, common sense as the golden mean is not only superior to bathetic art, it also seems preferable to any aspiration to sublimity. With this figurative arrangement, however, Pope’s satire has entered an argumentative minefield: If sublime art is to be shunned in favour of settling for an aesthetic middle ground, as common sense discourse suggests, Pope’s satire is in danger

 See also Piper (1977: 626), who quotes this passage from Peri Bathous as evidence of the common sense ideal in Augustan literature, but fails to notice the tensions with classical ideals of literature in Pope’s satire.

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of arguing against the interests of its author, which is to set himself (and likeminded members of the Scriblerus Club) above the masses of middling authors competing in the publishing market. Hence, the common-sense norm of the golden mean is treacherous in the realm of art since it might be easily mistaken for mediocrity. Accordingly, Pope must hurry to exclude literary mediocrity from the normative prescriptions of common sense discourse – by having Scriblerus praise it in the ironic hyperbole of satire: It is therefore manifest that mediocrity ought to be allowed, yea, indulged to the good subjects of England. Nor can I conceive how the world has swallowed the contrary as a maxim, upon the single authority of that Horace? Why should the golden mean, and quintessence of all virtues, be deemed so offensive only in this art? Or coolness or mediocrity be so amiable a quality in a man, and so detestable in a poet? (PB: 199)

How seductive this ironic plea for mediocrity was to commonsensical Augustans – that is, how easily the irony could miss its mark or be even altogether missed here –, is suggested by the fact that Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary states “moderation, temperance” as sense 2 in the entry on mediocrity (even though this sense is marked as already obsolete).¹⁵¹ In order to avoid any misunderstanding or confusion, Pope must make it clear that the mediocrity of modern writers is in fact well below any common-sense standard of poetry or art: The Physician, by the study and inspection of urine and ordure, approves himself in the science; and in like sort should our author accustom and exercise his imagination upon the dregs of nature. This will render his thoughts truly and fundamentally low, and carry him many fathoms beyond mediocrity. For, certain it is, (though some lukewarm heads imagine they may be safe by temporizing between the extremes) that where there is a triticalness or mediocrity in the thought, it can never be sunk into the genuine and perfect Bathos, by the most elaborate low expression: It can, at most, be only carefully obscured, or metaphorically debased. But ’tis the thought alone that strikes, and gives the whole that spirit, which we admire and stare at. (PB: 207)

Any “temporizing between the extremes” by opponents is a dangerous situation for the satirist who wants to fight bad writing and false learning with the discursive weaponry of common sense – i. e., the very propaganda of ‘temporizing’ between extremes. That is why Scriblerus advises the mediocre authors to stay clear of any state in which they could be mistakenly taken for possessing common sense. In a fashion reminiscent of Swift, with regard to both scatological overtones and mocking swipes at modern experimental science, Pope draws here  See the discussion in Johnston (2005: 200).

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on drastic imagery to throw mud at whoever could threaten his own status and self-image as a poet. Again in the mode of ex negativo argument, he emerges from Peri Bathous as a master poet far above to the masses of mediocre authors, but still in touch with common sense standards. Peri Bathous, with its entertaining examples of rhetorical blunders, its ridiculous recipes for formulaic poetry, its quirky catalogues of writers and tropes, utilizes common sense discourse and its associative conceptual links as the basis of a satire that appears to be instructive in its attempt at ridding the country of “these kinds [of writers of which] we have the comfort to be blessed with sundry and manifold choice spirits in this our island” (PB: 206). But common sense discourse, with its inherent dynamic towards a broadly shared vision and uniform judgment, causes inevitable tensions in a text that strives to set its author above the masses of all those mediocre authors he ridicules. In this respect, Pope perverts common sense as an aesthetic and moral norm by instrumentalizing it for the ulterior purpose of self-promotion. Ultimately, Pope’s continual invocations of common sense in many of his writings indirectly point to his constant awareness of being an outsider as a Roman Catholic poet. His pleas for common sense seem to have, at least in part, a compensatory function with regard to his own marginalized status – they are the flipside of his almost obsessive crusades against successful ‘enemy’ writers, of whose bathetic inadequacies, in his view, the reading public must be made aware or reminded.¹⁵² A strong sense of identity, a sense of ‘them’ versus ‘us,’ is certainly at the core of his anxiety over the masses of mediocre writers swamping England, which also comes to bear in Scriblerus’s ironic advice “that all and every individual of the Bathos do enter into a firm assotiation […], whereof every member, even the meanest, will some way contribute to the support of whole” (PB: 230). The idea of a trade union of bathetic writers, light-heartedly mocked by Pope in Peri Bathous, must have actually been a veritable nightmare for him. Only a year later, Pope indeed published a sketch of such a nightmare vision in the first version of The Dunciad, his most ambitious mock-epic poem, in which the “Goddess of Dulness” holds sway over large parts of the dominion of English literary life. It contains an infernal scene of Dantean dimensions in which the

 Erskine-Hill (1981– 82: 136) has argued that Pope’s universalist or ecumenical spirit has “much to do with his experience of sectarian narrowness and upbringing in a persecuted church.” While this is in line with Pope’s insistence on common sense as a principle of overcoming faction, it does not account for his tireless fight against rival authors, which, as I am suggesting here, is a reflex stemming from a defensive paranoia that is also attributable to the same minority experience.

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chaotic realm of Dulness is described as the hell of bad writing – here in the final 1743 version of The New Dunciad: Here to her Chosen all her works she shews; Prose swell’d to verse, verse loit’ring into prose: How random thoughts now meaning chance to find, Now leave all memory of sense behind: How Prologues into Prefaces decay, And these to Notes are fritter’d quite away: How Index-learning turns no student pale, Yet holds the eel of science by the tail: How, with less reading than makes felons scape, Less human genius than God gives an ape, Small thanks to France, and none to Rome or Greece, A past, vamp’d, future, old, reviv’d, new piece, ‘Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Shakespear, and Corneille, Can make a Cibber, Tibbald, or Ozell. (Pope 1963: 290, ll. 273 – 286)

Colley Cibber, the notoriously bad poet laureate, Lewis Theobald, the Shakespeare scholar whose impertinence it was to criticize Pope’s own Shakespeare translation, and John Ozell, the translator and Whig supporter, represent the literary establishment of the early 1740s, whom Pope envied their success, as much as he despised their perceived scholarly pedantries or poetic shortcomings – either out of piqued pride or from well-principled haughtiness. In using them as the spearheads of a whole generation of writers seduced by Dulness, they all are indiscriminately portrayed as enemies to good sense (they “leave all memory of sense behind”) and good taste in Pope’s self-righteous universe. That the vicious ad hominem attacks in Pope’s satiric writings led to retaliations paid in the same coin, is quite understandable, especially if those attacked were former friends of Pope’s, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Being a Whig supporter and eulogist of Walpole’s ministry, she was ridiculed in several of Pope’s imitations of Horace’s satires as a dumb Sappho, until she (together with Lord Hervey) hit back at him in a 1733 poem in which she accused him of being a cynical misanthrope with a “gross lust of hate”: Satire should, like a polish’d razor keen, Wound with a touch, that’s scarcely felt or seen: Thine is an oyster-knife, that hacks and hews; The rage, but not the talent to abuse; And is in hate, what love is in the stews. ’Tis the gross lust of hate, that still annoys, Without distinction, as gross love enjoys:

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Neither to folly, nor to vice confin’d, The Object of thy spleen is humankind: It preys on all who yield, or who resist: To thee ’tis provocation to exist. (Wortley Montagu 1970b: 465)¹⁵³

Besides the fact that Lady Mary obviously tried to discredit Pope by all means and thus overshot the mark herself in the final couplet of this passage, the charge of misanthropy is a serious one. Pope’s lapses into vicious aggression betray misanthropic tendencies that are perhaps typical of corrosive satire altogether, but which are hardly reconcilable with the standard of good sense advocated in Pope’s works, a standard whose moral dimension at the time is inseparable from a Christian ethics of virtue. Strong tinges of misanthropy and cultural pessimism are unmistakably present in the bleak ending of the The New Dunciad. Pope’s growing fear of being surrounded and finally overrun by crowds of dunces culminates in the apocalyptic vision of England as a chaotic cultural wasteland under the total reign of Dulness: And make one Mighty Dunciad of the Land! […] Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All. (Pope 1963: 403, 409; ll. 604, 653 – 656)

This grim scenario of England’s cultural exhaustion, a prophecy of inevitable entropy rather than a warning against preventable errors, might be attributed to Pope’s awareness of his own physical exhaustion due to advanced age and failing health. It does tie in, yet, with the deep suspicion of human nature that lurks behind the strongest and most memorable Augustan satires, in which common sense is presented as an ideal, but almost unattainable norm that contrasts starkly with the moral infirmities of human nature.

 Commentators who were personally unaffected by Pope’s attacks also took him to task for his quarrelsomeness; thus Patrick Guthrie in his poem Candour: Or, An Occasional Essay on the Abuse of Wit and Eloquence, who concedes: “’Tis granted, P—e! thy Poetry’s divine, / Nerves in each Thought, and Musick in each Line” (1739: 7), but goes on to moralize: “To pry, to rail, to menace, and accuse, / Seem not the Marks of a celestial Muse, / Vengeance to wake, and Coals of Wrath to blow, / The Province is of Man’s infernal Foe” (1739: 8).

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3.3 Human Nature, Reason, and Madness – A Satyr against Reason and Mankind, Gulliver’s Travels, and An Essay on Man Satire can target many different things. It may be riddled with “torrential references to the peculiarities of the particular individuals in the society that it represents,” as Brian Connery and Kirk Combe (1995: 5) have put it; but it may also aim at exposing what is perceived by the satirist as the collective or general faults of society, if not universal defects of humankind. According to Douglas H. White and Thomas P. Tierney, such ‘satires on mankind’ primarily attack flattering delusions about what it means to be human, i. e., they criticize “the inaccuracy or unsoundness of popular or conventional attitudes, descriptions, and understandings with which the species reflects on itself” (White and Tierney 1987: 28). Satires on humankind debunk the distorted self-images commonly held by the majority of people in a contemporary cultural context, which the satirist often deems to be universal delusions. Of all those human attributes constructed as universal and unchanging, the most common satiric target is human pride, which the satirist tries to expose as vain and unfounded. The historical context of Augustan satires on humankind is significant here. In the intellectual climate between 1660 and 1740, human pride was given an immense boost by Enlightenment philosophies optimistically asserting the almost boundless powers of reason – an optimism that seemed to be confirmed by the revolutions in a ‘natural philosophy’ that was no longer based on religious, but on rationalist principles, such as Newtonian physics, Boylean chemistry, and the scientific achievements of the Royal Society in England. During that time, notable satires on humankind – Nicolas Boileau’s Satire VIII (On Man, 1666) in France, the Earl of Rochester’s Satyr against Reason and Mankind (1675), John Oldham’s Satyr against Vertue (1679), or Jonathan Swift’s controversial portrayal of humankind in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), even in Alexander Pope’s didactic poem An Essay on Man (1733 – 34), which still partly belongs in this tradition – directed their criticism against transcendental reason as the cornerstone of an inflated human self-image. These satires ultimately expose the greatness of human reason as a discursive chimera whose rigorous pursuit is inimical to life. Unrestrained, lofty reasoning is detrimental to both body and soul, because (in Rochester’s line of attack) it detaches us from our natural appetites and bodily needs, and (in Swift’s assessment) it may create bewildering absurdities, leading to folly or downright madness. Notions of common sense play an ambivalent role in such satiric reflections on human nature and reason; in fact, the tension between common sense and polemical criticism is greater in satires on humankind than in any other form

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of satire.¹⁵⁴ On the one hand, the Augustan concept of ‘man’ – self-congratulatory and optimistic in its reliance upon the powers of reason, and wary of the dangers of passion turning into vice – is buoyed by common sense discourse. On the other hand, common sense serves as the basis for all-encompassing attacks against faults in human nature in eighteenth-century satires on humankind – either to uphold a very high ideal of common sense in a world in which “Common Sense is no such common Thing” (CS1: 3) or to undermine all self-conceited optimism about human perfection, especially concerning an all too happy trust in reason. It is often from a distinction between reason and (common) sense that satires on humankind develop their critique of the vainglorious belief in human reason, as pure reason is shown to be overturned by a more modest ideal of common sense as a practical life principle. In fact, the discourse of common sense draws much of its strength from anti-rationalist and anti-intellectual forces in Augustan culture. However, by looking at Rochester’s Satyr against Reason and Mankind as an early example of anti-rationalistic satire, it will become clear that at the beginning of the Augustan period the understanding of common sense is still fluid and loosely adaptable, open even to a sensualist appropriation by a libertine poet, before it emerges as a standard of practical rational judgment and life-affirming principle in one of the central discourses to shape an entire cultural period. *** One of the most crushing disparagements of reason, as well as the human pride therein, is A Satyr against Reason and Mankind, written in 1675 by John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, known as a notorious libertine at the Restoration court of Charles II. The poem has often been regarded as an imitation of Nicolas Boileau’s Satire VIII (On Man), with which it shares striking structural parallels, but

 Nash (1995) has argued that the preeminence of Augustan satire as a popular literary form coincides with the discovery of half-men and feral beings which challenged existing notions of the differences between humans and animals. Thus the ‘false’ etymological derivation of satire as stemming from the fabled Greek ‘satyrs’ may have more truth to it than formerly assumed, since it indicates the subversive representational strategy especially in satires on humankind: “At the same time that early modem science sets about discovering in Nature the physical embodiment of the legendary satyr—half-man, half-beast—English literary history marks itself as ‘an age of satire.’ The Wild Men, Feral Children, Satyrs, Orangs, and Apes of eighteenthcentury natural history represent a dangerous and degraded vision of ourselves against whom we define the category, Human. The satirist, metaphorically reenacting the liminal predations of these creatures, subverts this reassuring boundary formation by revealing the bestial within the human” (Nash 1995: 95 – 96). See also Nash’s extended study Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (2003).

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which is less daring and ambitious than its English counterpart.¹⁵⁵ Rochester’s famed satire in the corrosive Juvenalian mode is of interest here insofar as it anticipates the function and effect of common sense discourse in later satires, while it does not claim to have common sense as its antithetical basis. In fact, ‘common sense’ as a term mentioned in the poem is not a high ideal of practical judgment that combines reason, virtue, and good taste, but a rather low practical principle of human self-interest in the Hobbesian philosophical tradition, free of any consideration of moral virtue, which points the way to the heresies of Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. ¹⁵⁶ Nonetheless, I will argue in the following analysis that the rhetorical strategy at work in Rochester’s poem is very much akin to that suggested by common sense discourse in later Augustan satires, which again shows their unmistakable structural analogies. In the place of common sense in later eighteenth-century texts, Rochester posits ‘right reason’ (originally a scholastic term), which he provocatively defines against the doctrinal grain of the influential Cambridge Platonists,¹⁵⁷ but which, ironically, is the very term that will be used by Sir Richard Steele (in The Spectator) some thirty years later as a synonym of an ideal rational-cum-moral standard of common sense. Therefore, even though Rochester clearly differs in moral terms from the common sense norms to be established after him, his poem exemplifies the semantic shifts in an emerging discourse of common sense. The trenchant attack on fetishized reason in Rochester’s Satyr immediately sets in at the start of the poem when the speaker takes recourse to a trope from the tradition of Menippean satire, also to be found in Boileau’s Eighth Satire where mad Paris life is viewed from the point of view of a sane ass (see von Koppenfels 2007: 102– 109). It is the idea that animals are superior to human beings since the former are not mislead by reason which the latter have contrived as a sixth sense to overrule the other five senses and animal instinct:

 See Davies (1969) for a summary and re-evaluation of the parallels between Boileau and Rochester. The question of Rochester’s originality has had a long history of critical debate, especially his indebtedness to Hobbes’ disillusioned views of human nature, but also to Montaigne’s Essais and La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes; cf. Johnson (1975: 365 – 373, esp. 366 – 367).  See above, chapter II.3.  The seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists played an important role in the latitudinarian movement within the Anglican Church, as they argued for the compatibility of faith and reason. They revered human reason as an innate faculty with which the human mind was furnished by God to discern truths and moral principles. For example, Nathaniel Culverwell in his Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652), the first treatise published by any of the Cambridge group, calls human reason an ‘intellectual lamp’ from God. – See Hutton (2002: 308 – 319).

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Were I (who to my cost already am One of those strange prodigious creatures Man) A spirit free to choose for my own share, What case of flesh and blood I pleas’d to wear; I’d be a Dog, a Monky, or a Bear. Or any thing but that vain Animal Who is so proud of being Rational. The Senses are too gross, and hee’ll contrive A sixth to contradict the other five: And before certain Instinct will preferre Reason, which fifty times for one does erre. (Rochester 1999: 57; ll. 1– 11)

Man, the “vain Animal / Who is so proud of being Rational,” is derided for his foolish pride – although, not because such pride lacks the virtue of modesty, but due to man’s fallacy of letting reason overrule the “gross” bodily senses. As becomes repeatedly clear throughout the poem, it is a libertine sensuality that informs the Satyr’s preference for the pleasures of the senses over rational principles. Reason, in its latitudinarian union with Christian faith, is treated in the satiric poem as synonymous with puritanical morality. Following a hedonist agenda, Rochester continues to discredit glorified human reason as a dangerously misleading chimera: Reason, an Ignis fatuus of the Mind, Which leaving Light of Nature, sense, behind; Pathless and dangerous wandring wayes it takes, Through Errours fenny boggs and thorny brakes: Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain Mountains of whimseys heapt in his own brain; Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down Into doubts boundless Sea, where like to drown, Books bear him up a while, and make him try To swim with bladders of Philosophy: In hopes still to o’retake th’ escaping Light, The Vapour dances in his dazled sight, Till spent, it leaves him to Eternal night. (Rochester 1999: 57; ll. 12– 24)

In an obvious attack on the Cambridge Platonists’ exalted metaphor of the rational “Light of Nature,” Rochester scorns human reason as an “Ignis fatuus of the Mind,” an alluring but deceptive fiction, and redefines “sense” as the true light of nature. By using the ever effective satiric technique of literalizing a metaphorical concept to ridicule it, he turns the ‘light of nature’ into the nat-

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ural phenomenon of the will-o’-the-wisp, the bluish nocturnal light caused by burning gases emanating from boggy ground, which becomes the basis for his own apt metaphor of the lost wanderer who is led astray into inhospitable and dangerous territory. The high-flying rationalist who leaves his sense behind is drawn into fenny bogs and led up mountains of whimsies, until he drops into a sea of doubt in which philosophy is supposed to keep him afloat. Rochester further subverts the light-of-nature metaphor by leaving the rationalist wanderer stranded in “Eternal night” in the wilderness, while “th’ escaping Light” of chimerical reason, but also of his own life, is slowly fading. “That all his life he has been in the wrong” (Rochester 1999: 58; l. 28) will only dawn on the misguided follower “bewilder’d in the Maze of Schools” (as Pope will call this state of rational confusion later in An Essay on Criticism; cf. EC: l. 26) when all his futile reasoning is about to cease for good: “Hudled in dirt the reasoning Engine lies” (Rochester 1999: 58; l. 29). In this image, Rochester combines to chilling effect the conventional vanitas theme with a drastic reminder of the bodily materiality of the human mind in order to emphasize its insurmountable limitations. What is of specific interest for our purpose of a genealogy of British common sense discourse is the Satyr’s concept of sense, which is put in opposition to fallacious reason. Even though Rochester’s ‘sense’ is clearly anti-rational and sensualist – and thus not identical with highly esteemed ‘good sense’ or ‘common sense’ of Pope and his contemporaries –, it fulfils the same rhetorical function as in the eighteenth-century discourse of common sense: to serve as a conceptual antidote to false reasoning. This is further emphasized by the antithetical dialogical structure of the Satyr. After establishing the argument against reason in lines 1– 45 of the poem, Rochester introduces in lines 46 – 71 “some formal band and beard” (Rochester 1999: 59; l. 46), a philosopher-cleric, who strongly objects to the speaker’s raillery against reason; he instead praises human reason for being able to “take a flight beyond Material sense; / Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce / The flaming limits of the Universe” (Rochester 1999: 59; ll. 67– 69). The cleric dismisses mere sense as bound to matter, i. e. to the world of material bodies, while reason belongs to the superior sphere of the mind and is thus virtually unbound. It is against such a vainglorious concept of disembodied, omnipotent reason that the speaker protests: “tis the very Reason I despise” (Rochester 1999: 59; l. 75). Instead, the speaker puts forward his alternative concept of “right reason” to counter the false reasoning of the cleric: Thus whilst against false Reasoning I enveigh, I own right reason, which I would obey; That Reason which distinguishes by Sense, And gives us Rules of Good and Ill from thence:

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That bounds Desires with a reforming Will, To keep them more in vigour, not to kill. Your Reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy, Renewing appetites yours would destroy. (Rochester 1999: 59 – 60; ll. 98 – 105)

Rochester’s “right reason […] which distinguishes by Sense” seems to have both an empirical and an ethical dimension to it, albeit with a marked difference from the “right Reason, and what all Men should consent to” (Addison and Steele 1965: II, 508) defined by Steele in The Spectator (no. 259, 27 December 1711) as a synonym of common sense. The empirical aspect is evident in the Satyr’s emphasis on the ‘facts’ of the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, as implied at the beginning of the poem – in this respect, Rochester’s right reason based on sense impressions is still reconcilable with common sense discourse, which will also stress the empirical basis of knowledge and judgment to guard oneself against speculative reasoning devoid of any grounding in observable reality. However, as an ethical authority for “Rules of Good and Ill,” right reason in Rochester’s Satyr lacks Steele’s social dimension of consent, which makes it a rather personal affair of pursuing selfish pleasures. Just as with Rochester’s prior subversion of the latitudinarian ‘light of nature’ metaphor, the satiric antithesis to human reason advanced here is a provocative and essentially hedonist caricature of the metaphysical discursive tradition of ‘right reason’ prevailing up to Rochester’s times.¹⁵⁸ His rules of good and ill are supposed to keep desires “in vigour,” they are to help enjoy and renew the appetites, and thus represent a counter-concept to the puritanical morality justified by the Cambridge Platonists.

 The traditional understanding of ‘right reason’ subverted by the speaking I is that of scholastic philosophy, as Ronald W. Johnson (1975: 370) explains: “The persona’s right reason is not the traditional right reason of scholastic philosophy (grounded in a one, true, and good universe, perceiving essences, oriented toward metaphysics as much as ethics); on the contrary, the persona’s right reason is epistemologically empirical (‘That reason which distinguishes by sense’) and ethically pragmatic (‘Those creatures are the wisest who attain / By surest means, the ends at which they aim’).” With regard to the ethical implications of Rochester’s ‘right reason,’ Christopher Tilmouth in his study Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (2007), has rightly cautioned against the ambiguity of Rochester’s usage of sense: “References to ‘Sense’ as a determinant ‘of Good and III’ in this period are inevitably ambiguous, the judgements issuing from such a standard varying according to whether or not sense is taken to include prudential assessments of an action’s long-term effects” (Tilmouth 2007: 351). But it is neither the long-term effects of good and ill that Rochester has in mind in this passage, nor does he contemplate good and ill according to what is best for the community, but primarily, it seems, in view of what is more or less conducive to gratifying the self’s personal wishes and desires.

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There is, however, a significant aspect 0 f Rochester’s re-definition of right reason that is typical of all later formations of common sense discourse: the idea of moderation. Christopher Tilmouth has correctly emphasized Rochester’s insight in the necessity of a curtailing of desire, especially to avoid the danger of an unhealthy excess of it that can consume the self: In Rochester’s view (as it is developed here), desires should be bounded, mixed with the self-imposed pain of restraint, this, first, so as to avert the disappointments of unbridled fruition dramatized in the lyric tradition, and secondly, because otherwise desire’s infinitude threatens to overwhelm the self. Moderation guarantees the ‘vigour’, the actual power to please, of those appetites which are, in some form, indulged. Pleasure thus remains the goal, but on the understanding that an instrumental capacity of reasoning must measure out what will truly succeed in achieving that goal. (Tilmouth 2007: 352)

Such an instrumental capacity of ‘right reason’ comes very close in kind to the basic logic of eighteenth-century common sense: Rochester simply says it is common sense to moderate one’s desires to keep them alive since an excess of pleasure will eventually kill them, which is a concept that Sigmund Freud will reformulate in the twentieth century as the necessity to bind the impetuous pleasure principle by the pragmatic foresight of the reality principle to defer the gratification of immediate desires for the eventual reward of achieving longer lasting pleasure. But the lack of a collective moral dimension of pleasure – “the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers” (Hutcheson 1971: 180), as Francis Hutcheson will famously call it half a century later – is quite apparent. The “reforming will” of which the speaker speaks in the context of bounding desire is an act of volition by the self for the self – an utterly selfish act, indicated by the goal of “renewing appetites,” and thus in defiance of the social dimension of Augustan common sense morals. To put it in a nutshell, Rochester’s argument appears to be commonsensical because it follows the logic of moderation inherent in the emergent discourse of common sense, but its libertine hedonism is in fact diametrically opposed to the Christian morality paired with common sense discourse at the time, especially since Rochester reduces ‘sense’ to sensory responses and, ultimately, to sensuality.¹⁵⁹

 The Satyr’s suggestion of moderating desire to continually reinvigorate pleasure is not only decidedly hedonist, but also describes, I would argue, an advanced form of libertinism. Christopher Tilmouth overstates the point slightly when he argues that the poem “develops a broadly Epicurean ideal of governance in opposition to latitudinarian theologians’ concepts of right reason, but in its emphasis on self-discipline and moderated hedonism this ideal is also implicitly opposed to contemporary notions of libertinism” (Tilmouth 2007: 345). There is certainly a wariness in Rochester’s poem of the self-consuming dynamic of freely acting on spontaneous

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To complicate matters, the term common sense surfaces in the poem somewhat as a cynical counterpart to right reason, which helps explain dishonesty and egotistic ‘knavery’ as an essential part of the human condition. In the perfectly Hobbesian middle part of the poem, the speaker continues the theme of comparing human beings to animals to destroy all self-conceited and boastful notions of human gloriousness. He paints a picture of homo homini lupus where “savage man also does man betray” (Rochester 1999: 60; l. 130) by means of false “smiles, embraces, friendship, praise” (Rochester 1999: 60; l. 138). Man does all this, concludes the speaker, “Not through Necessity, but Wantonness” (Rochester 1999: 61; l. 138), though ultimately from “Base Feare! The source whence his best passion came, / His boasted Honour, and his dear bought Fame: / That lust of Power, to which hee’s such a slave” (Rochester 1999: 61; ll. 143 – 145). It is in this context that Rochester expands the satiric attack from human reason to common sense, which is presented as a reaction of human fear: Meerly for safety after fame we thirst; For all men would be Cowards if they durst. And Honesty’s against all common sense; Men must be Knaves, tis in their own defence. Mankind’s dishonest, If you think it fair Among known Cheats to play upon the square, You’ll be undone— (Rochester 1999: 61; ll. 157– 163)

The Hobbist Rochester conceives of common sense as a form of prudent pragmatism that is derived from the social experience of human struggle marked by amoral selfishness and fear for life. In claiming that honesty is against common sense, there is also satiric criticism of the Augustan association of common sense with ‘common honesty’:¹⁶⁰ in Rochester’s terms, such a moral nexus is delusional, wishful thinking at best, but certainly not realistic as to the true motivations of human action. This becomes clear at the end of the poem, in the so-called “Addition,” seemingly an apology for the harsh criticism “hurl’d / At the pretending part of the proud World” (Rochester 1999: 62; ll. 174– 175), but in fact a reinforcement of the satiric attack in ironic terms. The speaker presents the apparent ideal of “a meek humble Man of honest sense” (Rochester 1999: 63; l.

impulses of lust, but the imperative of enjoying one’s appetites is undisputed. Rochester’s ‘right reason’ is not about reaching a state of Epicurean ataraxia, but rather proscribes the maximization of pleasure by a careful pruning of desire.  “I take Common Sense and Common Honesty to be so near a-kin, that whenever I see a Man turn Knave, I shall not stick to pronounce him a Fool” (CS1: 171).

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216), a paragon of extreme virtue that is inhuman in itself – and he knows it, as he cheekily claims: “If such there be, yet grant me this at least, / Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast” (Rochester 1999: 63; ll. 224– 225). Contrasting with the hypocrisy of the power-hungry and sexually promiscuous clergy, the ideal of “honest sense” still refers to the churchman (see Rochester 1999: 62– 63; ll. 191– 215). It is the hypothetical ideal of a thoroughly honest and virtuous priest, “Whose Preaching peace does practice Continence; / Whose pious life’s a proof he does believe / Mysterious Truths, which no man can conceive” (Rochester 1999: 63; ll. 216 – 219). Such “God-like men” (Rochester 1999: 63; l. 220) simply do not exist; not only are they impossible to find among the clergy, but even less so among ordinary human beings – if someone like that truly existed, he would be a man who differs more from other men than man from beast.¹⁶¹ Evidently, “honest sense” is an unattainable fiction, mostly nothing but a hypocritical façade, behind which lurks selfish common sense. If one compares this disillusioned understanding of common sense to the hedonist concept of right reason advanced earlier in the poem, their relationship could be described as complementary. On the one hand, they are both rooted in human selfishness: Rochester’s right reason is a principle of economizing one’s selfish desires, and his common sense is only ‘common’ because as a principle of selfish prudence it is commonly found in every human being – the common good plays no role in it after all. On the other hand, the two concepts differ considerably in the value placed on them in the poem: right reason is posited as an ideal of rightly measured pleasure, while common sense helps avoid pain, being a necessary means of self-defence in a hostile world. Rochester’s Satyr against Reason and Mankind is thus partly a defence of libertinism against moralistic reason – inasmuch as the former is based on economizing hedonistic pleasure for lasting enjoyment – and partly, as Ronald W. Johnson has called it, “an indictment of all mankind as inevitably dishonest on the basis of common

 In this particular point, my reading comes to a conclusion that is opposed to Paul C. Davies’s argument. He sees in the final section of the poem (after l. 173) a dialectical, typically Augustan synthesis between the libertine “I” and the rationalist “formal band and beard” in the main part of the poem and views it as Rochester’s final compromise on the matter of appetites versus reason. Even though this synthetic middle position would correspond to the argumentative strategies of the common sense discourse that become so dominant in the decades after Rochester’s poem, it is not warranted by the poem itself. Nor is the view put forward by Cousins (1984: 429 – 439) that “Rochester’s cautious balancing of ideas in the satire is emphasized by his epilogue to it.” A “cautious balancing” of contraries implies a certain equality of legitimacy between then, which is simply not the case in the poem: In his state of ultra-realistic disillusionment, Rochester clearly rejects reason and the ensuing concept of virtue as misleading fictions.

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sense” (Johnson 1975: 373). Rochester’s common sense, however, is not the common sense of Alexander Pope, and by the same token his right reason is neither the right reason of the Cambridge Platonist nor that of Steele. Yet, the structural similarities of right reason’s plea for moderation with the same urge in common sense discourse are intriguing, even more so as they have a common enemy: false reasoning, being an excess detrimental to a sane life. What Rochester calls common sense, in turn, is but a very base and cynical version – an extremely minimizing view, to use C. S. Lewis’s distinction (Lewis 1967: 153 – 154)¹⁶² – of the pragmatic faculty of judgment to be so highly praised in the decades to come. In this respect, Rochester’s satire has no basis in common sense, neither as its reforming antithetical satiric principle, nor as being identical with the Augustan moral-cum-rational ideal of judgment. Rochester’s common sense is a provocative heresy, as is his pessimistic Hobbesian outlook on humankind altogether. On close inspection, A Satyr against Reason and Mankind is no conventional Augustan satire at all, because it is stripped of any true intention of moral reform on the basis of man’s common sense. Rochester probably would have welcomed a world in which his understanding of right reason could gain ground to promote the gratification of appetites as a principle of happiness, but he does not seem to rate the chances of ever realizing such ‘moral’ reform very highly. The poem intends to pique the self-conceited followers of false reason and open their eyes to the truth, to make them see through the emperor’s new rational clothes, as it were. But there is no real potential for improvement in Rochester’s portrayal of humankind: his vision remains bleak, as human faults appear incorrigible. This however seems to be a generic problem of all satire on humankind,¹⁶³ whose argumentative logic is always precarious: if the criticism is to apply to all human beings, it must also self-reflexively apply to the satirist (and to his or her satiric mouthpiece). Hence, strictly speaking, satires on humankind are an exercise in self-loathing, because if the satirist exempted himself from the criticism, this would contradict and invalidate the satiric argument altogether. There is no such danger in Rochester’s satire, I would argue: even though his Satyr shows glimpses of yearning for a better world that is honest and not

 See above, chapter I.2.  With respect to the sweeping attack on humankind in Boileau’s Satire VIII, this problem was already lamented by Joseph Addison in The Spectator no. 209 (30 October 1711): “What Vice or Frailty can a Discourse correct, which censures the whole Species alike, and endeavours to shew by some Superficial Strokes of Wit, that Brutes are the most excellent Creatures of the two? A Satyr should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and make a due Discrimination between those who are, and those who are not, the proper Objects of it” (Addison and Steele 1965: II, 321).

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hypocritically opposed to bodily pleasures, it ends in the bleak realization that such a world is unattainable. Ronald W. Johnson has observed that the “persona’s role is reflexively ironic throughout: he wants to be a beast but knows he is a man; he satirizes wits but is himself witty; he rights reason only to perceive that reason demands one be a knave,” but that this role “is only a mask for the persona’s identity as a pathetic human in Rochester’s bleak vision of mankind” (Johnson 1975: 371). This is certainly true, but it seems wrong to infer from this an ironic distance between persona and author. Rather, Rochester is very much aware of the fact that, despite seeing through the bubble of moral hypocrisy, he is subject to the same ‘faults’ of selfishness as those he criticizes in his poem – only perhaps with the self-ironic difference that, in this poem, he at least tries to be sincere about this insincerity. *** The satire on humankind in the fourth book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has been viewed as a variation on Rochester’s critique in A Satyr against Reason and Mankind (see Fabian 1982: 319, 329 ff.).¹⁶⁴ The severe censure of human pride and the critique of the Enlightenment fetish of reason are certainly commonalities between the two texts, but the focal points of the satiric antithesis is altogether different. While Rochester’s satire pleads for liberation from the constraints of moralizing reason and aims at the body as a source of legitimate pleasure, Swift’s satire castigates the pervasive lack of moral rectitude and denigrates the body as unclean and deformed. While Rochester redefines ‘right reason’ as a pleasure-yielding economy of the senses in the individual, Swift demonstrates the ambivalence of a claim to reason in self-seeking individuals. While Rochester’s lyric speaker thunders against presumptuous reason, Swift’s Gulliver serves a complex and flexible tool to either give voice to a criticism of human self-conceit or become himself the very target of this criticism. While Rochester’s ‘common sense’ amounts to nothing more than the expediency of personal advantage, common sense discourse in Gulliver’s Travels has an ambivalent role: whereas it is the rational-pragmatic agent for Swift’s censure of political corruption and the absurdities of modern learning, common sense is strangely insignificant in the tragedy of human reason in the fourth book of the Travels, while it is clearly transgressed as a norm by the satire’s aesthetic.

 As evidence for a connection that was already drawn by Swift’s contemporaries, Fabian quotes the motto from The Kingdom of Horses, a ‘key’ to Swift’s book, published anonymously shortly afterwards: “Here, Rochester’s Remarks made good, at least, / Man, differs more from Man; than Man from Beast” (qtd. in Fabian 1982: 329).

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Gulliver’s Travels has a complex satiric structure consisting of multiple targets, often multi-layered and superimposed within a specific character or element, which allow for multiple critical perspectives that are not always consistent and free of contradiction. In the descriptions of the courts of Lilliput, Laputa, and Luggnagg, or of the Academy of Lagado and the sorcerers’ island Glubbdubdrib, topical references to English politics and institutions of the early eighteenth century abound, which is why critics have been hunting for such allusions in the text for centuries.¹⁶⁵ Further complexity arises out of the frequent changes of satiric perspective since each of the four books offers a new defamiliarizing angle – the warped view from above of the miniaturesized Lilliputians, the warped view from below of the giant-sized Brobdingnagians, the warped view through time in Glubbdubdrib (the historical past) and Luggnagg (the immortal Struldbrugs), and finally the warped view of human and animal existence in Houyhnhnm-land.¹⁶⁶ What corresponds to this flexible change of perspective is Swift’s manipulative handling of Gulliver as the main character and homodiegetic narrator of the book, who, in his recording of the strange ways of the countries he visits, is often the representative of the marvelling reader, but is also frequently out of tune with either the implied reader’s or implied author’s norms (as far as the latter become clear at all, which poses of course a major interpretive problem in book IV). Over large stretches of book I (in Lilliput) and occasionally in book III (his disgust with modern history in Glubbdubdrib), Gulliver seems to be the author’s mouthpiece, his vicarious satirist, whereas in books II, III (for the most part), and IV the reader suspects him of being the butt of satire when Swift ridicules Gulliver’s gullibility, of which his telling name serves as a warning throughout the book, and his eventual madness.¹⁶⁷ In the end, Gulliver is as much a fictional character as a satiric per-

 This started immediately after the first publication of Gulliver’s Travels with the publishing of various keys to the book that identified, very schematically and often without much justification, numerous elements as allegorical references, satiric nods and swipes. Historical and biographical reference-hunting in the Travels has never died out ever since; today it partly continues under different theoretical paradigms, such as the New Historicism. A recent example of historical micro-criticism would be Womersley (2008: 108 – 123). For an overview of historicalpolitical criticism up to the late 1980s, see Downie (1989: 1– 19). A valuable study of the broader political context of Gulliver’s Travels is F. P. Lock’s The Politics of Gulliver’s Travels (1980). A perceptive reader’s companion with a focus on the politics of the Travels is Ronald Knowles’s Gulliver’s Travels: The Politics of Satire (1996).  See also Fabian (1982: 326): “Gulliver’s Travels erweist sich damit als eine in Raum und Zeit auf perspektivische Effekte abgestellte Satire.”  In book II, Gulliver’s petty national pride about England is exposed in his conversations with the King of Brobdingnag. In book III, Gulliver falls for the ‘projectors’ at the Academy of

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sona in the Latin sense of the word: a variable mask which Swift chooses at will to put on or take off.¹⁶⁸ Finally, Gulliver’s Travels is a complex rewrite as well as parody of various genres and models of writing, from ancient epics (Gulliver as a modern Odysseus/Ulysses) and Menippean animal fable (in book IV) (see von Koppenfels 2007: 109 – 116) to the modern genres of utopian fantasy (e. g. Thomas More’s Utopia), travel writing (e. g. William Dampier’s A Voyage Around the World from 1697, as in the parody of nautical jargon at the beginning of book II), and realist adventure novel (Robinson Crusoe).¹⁶⁹ Due to this very mixed bag of genres and their variable functions in the text – sometimes in positive emulation, often as mischievous parody – Gulliver’s Travels can be considered an apt example of modern Menippean satire (see Weinbrot 1993: 1– 19 and von Koppenfels 2007). For all these reasons, Bernhard Fabian once called Gulliver’s Travels, perhaps a little too readily, a “Satire der totalen Relativierung” (Fabian 1982: 322). The world of Gulliver’s Travels might indeed give the impression of ‘total relativity’ if one takes into account the bewildering variety of critical readings to which Swift’s text has lent itself through time. However, a total relativity of values is probably the opposite of what Swift indented to express in his satire on humankind. There is every indication that “this absurd Vice” (GT: 444) of human pride is the foremost target of his satire, as expressed at the very end of the text in Gulliver’s reflection about his potential reconciliation with human ‘Yahoo-kind’: My Reconcilement to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those Vices and Follies only which Nature hath entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the Sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-munger, a Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traytor, or the like: This is all according to the due Course of Things: But, when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately

Lagado and has selfish and naive dreams about immortality, before he is disillusioned by meeting the actual Struldbrugs (book III, chapter 10). In book IV we can safely say, despite all the controversy about the interpretation of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, that Gulliver’s preference of horses to his family defies all norms of rational behaviour.  See Rawson (1973: 129): “Swift’s ‘masks’, and especially Gulliver, are sometimes spoken of as fully-fledged characters, but they are all much too crude, and need to be. […] Their crudeness, their heavy adaptability to the twists and turns of ironic self-expression, their transparently twodimensional quality provide the elbow room and a kind of solid base for the complex and nervous agilities of Swift’s own voice to deploy themselves.” – See also Knowles’s diagram of the dialectic of Gulliver’s Travels, in which he stresses the fundamental opposition between Swift as an Anglican Tory and Gulliver as a Puritan Whig (1996: 59).  For an extended discussion of the mixture of genres and their specific functions see Guilhamet (1987: 139 – 163).

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breaks all the Measures of my Patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such an Animal and such a Vice could tally together. (GT: 443 – 444)

Certainly, this scathing attack on human pride has more than a tinge of misanthropy to it (“when I behold a Lump of Deformity”), and it is coming from a homodiegetic narrator who to the reader at this point is deeply suspicious of being unreliable due to obvious signs of his derangement, e. g. in rejecting his family for the company of common horses – which is the caveat that the ‘soft school’ of criticism of Gulliver’s Travels has issued against jumping to conclusions concerning Gulliver’s judgments in book IV (see Clifford 1974: 33 – 49, esp. 35 – 37).¹⁷⁰ Yet it is undeniable that the censure of pride in Gulliver’s attack on ‘Yahoo-kind’ is in keeping with both Christian humility and the common thrust of satires on humankind since antiquity; moreover it is an expression of Swift’s personal conviction, as can be gathered, for instance, from Swift’s well-known letter to Alexander Pope of 29 September 1725, in which he mentions the almost finished Travels and promises to demonstrate in it the “falsity of that Definition animal rationale, and to show it should be only rationis capax” (Swift 2001: 607). Just as the vice of human pride can be made out as the general thesis of Swift’s satire (in book IV and elsewhere in the Travels), so can its antitheses, at least in glimpses. In whatever way the Houyhnhnms and their ideal of reason may be evaluated – whether as a genuine or an ironic ideal, to which I will return below –, C. J. Rawson has correctly pointed out that a “Houyhnhnm state may be unattainable to man, but there are norms of acceptable, though flawed, humanity which do not seem, in the same way, beyond the realm of moral aspiration” (Rawson 1973: 22). Among these Rawson counts the Portuguese captain in book IV (of which I will also say more below); the original historical laws and institutions of Lilliput in chapter 6 of book I, “not the most scandalous Corruptions into which these People are fallen by the degenerate Nature of Man” (GT: 87);¹⁷¹ the modest and unassuming

 In an influential essay, James Clifford gives an overview of the critical responses to Gulliver’s Travels by distinguishing them into a ‘hard’ and a ‘soft’ school of criticism. The distinction is mainly based on the contrary approaches to the Houyhnhnms in book IV: “Central to the ‘hard’ school approach is the conviction that the Houyhnhnms do indeed represent some kind of an ideal” (Clifford 1974: 43), whereas the soft school insists that both “Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos represent unattractive extremes to be avoided in a search for a stable, central norm” (Clifford 1974: 45). The soft school approach, if it is correct, would make Gulliver’s Travels another example of an eighteenth-century satire informed by common sense discourse. I will return to this below.  In III.6, a similar satiric antithesis is put forward, though ironically framed by Gulliver’s disapproval, in the political theory developed at the Academy of Lagado: “These unhappy People were proposing Schemes for persuading Monarchs to chuse Favourites upon the Score of

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kingdom of Brobdingnag in book II, despite the disgust Gulliver feels for the giants’ bodies and their “narrow Principles and short Views” (GT: 193);¹⁷² as well as the veneration for “English Yeomen of the old Stamp” in the “Simplicity of their Manners” and “true Spirit of Liberty” (GT: 303 – 304). By the same token, Swift’s conservative position in the Ancients-versus-Moderns debate becomes visible as yet another satiric antithesis when Gulliver, quite free of authorial irony, presents to the reader in “Brutus; […] his Ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the Younger, Sir Thomas More” a “Sextumvirate” of ancient political and philosophical wisdom “to which all the Ages of the World cannot add a Seventh” (GT: 291– 292). Conversely, as many commentators have remarked, the Travels’ sections about the Academy of Lagado perpetuate and reinforce the satiric common-sense attacks on modern learning that were already of central concern to Swift in A Tale of a Tub. The absurd scientific experiments conducted in the Travels’ satiric version of the Royal Society – extracting sunbeams from vegetables, turning human excrement into food, building houses by starting with the roof etc. – show Swift’s contempt for science and its preposterous pretension to innovation and progress.¹⁷³ The same scornful judgment is passed on modern history on the magic island of Glubbdubdrib: After finding out in a time travel through the last hundred years “how the World had been misled by prostitute Writers, to ascribe the greatest Exploits in War to Cowards, the wisest Counsel to Fools, […] Chastity to Sodomites, Truth to Informers” (GT: 298), Gulliver feels nothing but disgust: “How low an Opinion I had of human Wisdom and Integrity, when I was truly informed of the Springs and Motives of great Enterprizes

their Wisdom, Capacity and Virtue; of teaching Ministers to consult the publick Good; of rewarding Merit, great Abilities, and eminent Services; of instructing Princes to know their true Interest, by placing it on the same Foundation with that of their People […]” (GT: 275).  Gulliver’s criticism of the king’s refusal to learn about the use of gunpowder is clearly a satiric inversion by irony. When he further comments on the king’s ‘foolishness,’ his argument betrays his false values: “that a Prince […] should from a nice unnecessary Scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no Conception, let slip an Opportunity put into his Hands, that would have made him absolute Master of the Lives, the Liberties, and the Fortunes of his People” (GT: 193). Gulliver himself is a satiric target throughout book II, as he presents himself there as a narrowminded ‘Little Englander.’  How stubborn Swift was in his disdain for what to him was ‘absurd’ modern learning, can be gauged from the fact that he failed to see the lasting value of Newton’s revolution in physics, already highly respected in all of Europe. When he has Aristotle rise from the dead through the magic powers of the Governor of Glubbdubdrib, the Greek philosopher, presented as an undisputed ancient authority on knowledge, bashes Newton’s law of gravitation: “He predicted the same Fate [to vanish as a mere fashion of learning; C.H.] to Attraction, whereof the present Learned are such zealous Asserters. He said, that new Systems of Nature were but new Fashions, which would vary in every Age” (GT: 296).

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and Revolutions in the World, and of the contemptible Accidents to which they owed their Success” (GT: 299). Although his verdict here, by its contiguity to the beginning of the paragraph, applies to the modern history of humankind, it clearly anticipates Gulliver’s universal misanthropy in book IV. In a ‘hard school’ reading of Gulliver’s Travels, the unmistakably misanthropic tendencies displayed in Gulliver’s attitude throughout his stay in Houyhnhnmland have been chiefly understood as highlighting the harshness of Swift’s criticism of humankind. Accordingly, by acting misanthropically with a fervour bordering on madness, Gulliver becomes Swift’s means to shock his readers into the insight that humankind falls short, by a large degree, of the ideal of reason represented by the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver’s hatred of his own family would then be the culmination of a shock-and-awe strategy that is heralded much earlier in book II for the first time. When the King of Brobdingnag interprets English history and politics, rendered to him in the form of Gulliver’s self-exposing chauvinistic panegyric, as “the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, and Ambition could produce,” he cannot help but consider “the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth” (GT: 188, 189). Through Gulliver himself as its representative, self-conceited English patriotism becomes the butt of extremely harsh satire here, but the defamatory attack is restricted to a specific ethnic or national community. Just as Gulliver at this point of the Travels merely feels treated unfairly by an ‘overreacting’ foreign king with no apparent authority to speak on the matter, English readers in Swift’s time could still pull out of the mounting criticism on account of its ostensible unfairness (why should only the English be vermin?). It is only later in Houyhnhnm-land that Gulliver (and with him the reader) are confronted with a much broader attack on all of humanity. In a structural repetition of the conversations with the king of Brobdingnag in book II – and in an inversion, by the way, of the relationship between protagonist and Cicerone character in utopian fiction¹⁷⁴ –, Gulliver tells his Houyhnhnm master about human life and ways. The perfectly reasonable and virtuous Houyhnhnm master is appalled at such blatant violations of reason as reported by Gulliver about humankind. Vices such as falsehood, deception, or greed, as well as neg-

 While it is usually the function of a Cicerone character from the utopian world to guide the uninformed protagonist (as the representative of the reader) through the new world and make him acquainted with its social and cultural makeup, here it is Gulliver who becomes the Cicerone figure for the king of Brobdingnag and the Houyhnhnms to learn about Gulliver’s corrupt world. – For more information on the Cicerone figure and an introduction to the theory of utopian fiction see Pfister and Lindner (1982: 11– 38).

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ative social consequences such as poverty, prostitution, or wars, are all unthinkable to the Houyhnhnms and even unrepresentable in their language. Swift’s concept of reducing the view of human existence from a proud animal rationale to a modest animal rationis capax is stated here explicitly by Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master: But, when a Creature pretending to Reason, could be capable of such Enormities, he dreaded lest the Corruption of that Faculty might be worse than Brutality itself. He seemed therefore confident, that instead of Reason, we were only possessed of some Quality fitted to increase our natural Vices; as the Reflection from a troubled Stream returns the Image of an ill-shapen Body, not only larger, but more distorted. (GT: 367)¹⁷⁵

As the seed of self-realization is finally planted in Gulliver, he begins to adopt the idea that it is in the nature of human beings to abuse their share of reason to make them even more vicious. This notion is echoed when he is shown to have developed an intense loathing for Yahoo-like humanity which turns into misanthropy and self-loathing: When I thought of my Family, my Friends, my Countrymen, or human Race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in Shape and Disposition, perhaps a little more civilized, and qualified with the Gift of Speech; but making no other Use of Reason, than to improve and multiply those Vices, whereof their Brethren in this Country had only the Share that Nature allotted them. When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form in a Lake or Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self; and could better endure the Sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own Person. (GT: 420)

According to the paradigm of the ‘hard school’ reading, the accusatory message that humans make “no other Use of Reason, than to improve and multiply […] Vices” is a clear indicator of an ideal norm of ‘perfect’ reason that is represented by the Houyhnhnms, however unattainable it might be to human beings. In Houyhnhnm-land, perfect reason is a moral ideal, but from a human point of view it is also a utopian ideal. If human beings could abide by it, reason would inevitably lead to a peaceful, harmonious, and stable co-existence in human communities. Gulliver, infused with the ideal of moral reason represented by the Houyhnhnms, becomes a dogmatic idealist and turns veritably mad over the in-

 The idea of a reduced and widely abused form of reason in humans is repeated by the Houyhnhnm master in a later conversation with Gulliver: “That, he looked upon us as a Sort of Animals to whose Share, by what Accident he could not conjecture, some small Pittance of Reason had fallen, whereof we made no other Use than by its Assistance to aggravate our natural Corruptions, and to acquire new ones which Nature had not given us” (GT: 389).

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sight that he as a human being will never be able to reach such perfection – this in itself is still one of the strongest arguments on the side of the ‘soft school’ critics of Gulliver’s Travels, who regard the perfection of the Houyhnhnms as a piece of satiric irony. Gulliver’s aversion to the ‘Yahoos’ in his own country, after returning to his family and home in England, is certainly the acme of his misanthropy, but also of his madness in the eyes of his family members and other fellow human beings: At the Time I am writing, it is five Years since my last Return to England: During the first Year I could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell of them was intolerable: much less could I suffer them to eat in the same Room. To this Hour they dare not presume to touch my Bread, or drink out of the same Cup; neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the Hand. The first Money I laid out was to buy two young Stone-Horses, which I keep in a good Stable, and next to them the Groom is my greatest Favourite; for I feel my Spirits revived by the Smell he contracts in the Stable. My Horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four Hours every Day. They are Strangers to Bridle or Saddle; they live in great Amity with me, and Friendship to each other. (GT: 434– 435)

Gulliver’s psychotic aversion to human contact – conveyed, as so often in Gulliver’s Travels, by referring to repulsive aspects of the body – as well as his abnormal affinity to horses amount to the description of a man that by eighteenth-century standards has lost his common sense. It is Swift himself who advanced in the voice of the hack writer in the ambivalent section IX of A Tale of a Tub a matching explanation of madness: [I]f the Moderns mean by Madness, only a Disturbance or Transposition of the Brain, by Force of certain Vapours issuing up from the lower Faculties; Then has this Madness been the Parent of all those mighty Revolutions, that have happened in Empire, in Philosophy, and in Religion. For the Brain, in its natural Position and State of Serenity, disposeth its Owner to pass his Life in the common Forms, without any Thought of subduing Multitudes to his own Power, his Reasons or his Visions; and the more he shapes his Understanding by the Pattern of Human Learning, the less he is inclined to form Parties after his particular Notions; because that instructs him in his private Infirmities, as well as in the stubborn Ignorance of the People. But when a Man’s Fancy gets astride on his Reason, when Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses, and common Understanding, as well as common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes, is Himself, and when that is once compass’d, the Difficulty is not so great in bringing over others; A strong Delusion always operating from without, as vigorously as from within. (TT: 110)

No doubt this account of madness serves Swift to ridicule the contemporary vapour theory of madness, and by way of that, the ‘revolutionary’ modern achievements of science, religion, and politics altogether. The rhetorical strategy here is

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brilliantly subversive in that it makes the Hack unwittingly deconstruct the foundation of his own worldview – that the Moderns are superior to the Ancients – since his own camp’s theory proves it to be madness.¹⁷⁶ In order to hammer this point home the rhetorical mode in the latter part of this passage becomes wholly ambiguous. When the hack describes how the modern man begins to think himself self-sufficient and separates himself from “the common forms,” only to revert more and more “to his own Power, his Reasons, or his Visions,” the ironic mask begins to crumble. Finally no more irony, to my mind, is traceable in the last part of the passage when the narrator, by then Swift’s own voice, describes the consequences of fancy ‘getting astride’ on reason and common sense being “Kickt out of Doors”: the self-immunizing isolation of the madman, making himself the “first Proselyte” of his idiosyncratic non(common)sense, is complete. Swift’s serious point here is that common sense has a social dimension and serves as an antidote to airy, self-isolating speculations.¹⁷⁷ Gulliver, in turn, is presented by Swift as someone shying away from this social dimension: he has done so for many years during his travels, because he has been an isolated foreigner in the strange countries he has visited, and every return home before his final one just saw him restless after a short while to embark on yet another sea voyage at the first possible opportunity. In other words, if we try to take Gulliver for a plausible fictional character and not just a flexible satiric persona, his development throughout the book is one to be described as a gradual loss of common sense, which results in misanthropic psychosis. This transition in him is already hinted at upon his return from Brobdingnag in book II, when in his first encounter with normal-sized human beings, after having lived among giants for several years, he deems the sailors “the most little contemptible Creatures I had ever beheld” (GT: 212).¹⁷⁸ Finally, at the end of book IV his loss of grip on human reality is unmistakable. Only the prolonged community with his family, which he cannot stand initially, alleviates some of the symptoms; but even after five years at home “the Smell of a Yahoo continu[es to be] very offensive” (GT: 443) to him.

 To underline his slander of the Moderns, Swift even makes the Hack admit to having once been a member of “that honourable Society” (TT: 113) of Bedlam, London’s famous mental asylum.  The argumentative parallel to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas has often been noted: the deranged astronomer, isolated in his distorted outlook on reality, has his common sense restored by a healthy infusion of social life with the group around Imlac and Rasselas. – See above, chapter II.3.  The captain of the ship rescuing Gulliver tellingly imputes his strange behaviour “to some Disorder in my Brain” (GT: 212).

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What does this say about the role and value of common sense in Gulliver’s Travels? C. J. Rawson correctly maintains: “Whichever way we interpret book iv, man is placed, in it, somewhere between the rational Houyhnhnms and the bestial Yahoos. He has less reason than the former, more than the latter” (Rawson 1973: 22). But this middle position alone – a typical structural feature of common sense discourse due to its economy of avoiding extreme positions – does not make Gulliver a man of common sense; the contrary is the case due to Gulliver’s psychosis at the end, which begs the question whether common-sense compromises might even be a target of Swift’s satire. When “common Sense” is mentioned by the mad Gulliver in his letter to his cousin Sympson – in which the former ludicrously complains to the latter that more than six months after the publication of his travel account the book has not yet had the desired effect of seeing “Party and Faction […] extinguished; Judges learned and upright; Pleaders honest and modest, with some Tincture of common Sense” (GT: 10) – or when the narrow-minded Gulliver is prematurely accredited with “good Sense” by the queen and several courtiers of Brobdingnag in book II (GT: 142, 144), these occurrences of common sense discourse are rather ironic. If, according to the ‘hard school,’ Houyhnhnm reason is really an ideal norm to be upheld by the satire, then common sense is devalued as a lower human faculty since Gulliver’s loss of it in the end is provoked by his contact with an ideal of reason with which he cannot cope. Such an orthodox ‘hard school’ reading is not fully convincing, though, since Swift in none of his texts ever reveals himself to be an idealist; on the contrary, he seems to be bitterly opposed to the enthronement of reason in deist philosophy. In A Tale of a Tub, for instance, the hack writer sneers at the worship of reason in what appears to be just a thinly disguised authorial voice: For, what Man in the natural State or Course of Thinking, did ever conceive it in his Power, to reduce the Notions of all Mankind, exactly to the same Length, and Breadth, and Heighth of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil Design of all Innovators in the Empire of Reason. (TT: 108)

In all fairness, the modern deist “empire of reason” in A Tale of a Tub is tantamount to false reasoning; hence it is but a caricature of reason compared to the high moral ideal represented by the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels. However, the society of the Houyhnhnms is not without its flaws either as their strict rule of reason appears extremely rigid, if not tyrannical at times. When Gulliver’s master criticizes that English “Institutions of Government and Law were plainly owing to our [i. e. human; C.H.] gross Defects in Reason, and by consequence, in Virtue; because Reason alone is sufficient to govern a Rational Creature” (GT:

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390), the very notion of reason as the only principle to govern a purely rational being is not in accordance with the ordinary Augustan view of man, according to which passion, though it is to be kept under the firm control of reason, is an indispensable component of human existence – Pope belabours this point in many passages of An Essay on Man, e. g. in epistle II: “On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, / Reason the card, but Passion is the gale” (EM: ep. 2, ll. 107– 108). Even if the Houyhnhnms stand for pure reason, in itself a noble faculty, as an exclusive norm for life it strikes one as simply un-human, as a lopsided reduction. The poised Houyhnhnms have (or show) no feelings: as an example of this, Gulliver tells the story of an elderly Houyhnhnm female who did not mourn on the day her partner died but “behaved herself at our House, as chearfully as the rest: She died about three Months after” (GT: 414). Moreover, the Houyhnhnms are not presented in a very favourable light when they calmly and rationally debate at their general assembly the proposition to exterminate all Yahoos because they regard these as “the most filthy, noisome, and deformed Animal which Nature ever produced” (GT: 408). Even without a present-day post-Holocaust sensitivity, such a plan seems chillingly cruel and profoundly un-Christian (not that the Houyhnhnms are supposed to be Christians, but the implied moral foundation of Gulliver’s Travels certainly is, which is what matters in an assessment of the role of the rational equines in the text). All in all, Houyhnhnm-land is far from being a perfect utopia. In a ‘soft school’ reading of book IV, then, both Yahoos and Houyhnhnms are understood to be extremes that need careful balancing to find a viable middle way of right moral behaviour, as Swift’s satire seems to imply. This preference for a middle-of-the-road position is clearly what common sense discourse would suggest – Kathleen Williams, in her study Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (1958), which inaugurated the ‘soft school’ of Gulliver’s Travels criticism, calls it “the acceptable and vital compromise between two sterile extremes” (Williams 1967: 178). There are two immediate problems with such a common-sense reading of Gulliver’s Travels. Firstly, Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are certainly hierarchically valued oppositions in Gulliver’s Travels, but does the fourth book really suggest that a compromise between them is desirable? The Yahoos are too disgusting, too detestable, too repulsive to offer anything substantial in this potential compromise. The being of a Yahoo – Yahooness, as it were – seems unfit for compromising: even a small ingredient of Yahooness irredeemably taints and corrupts the being that has a share in it, regardless of how much Houyhnhnm reason is there to counterweigh it. At least this is how Gulliver feels, who considers himself not to be in a middle position between Yahoos and Houyhnhnms since he is weighed down by his inescapable Yahooness. This throws up the second problem with the ‘soft school’ reading: If the

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Houyhnhnms represent no feasible norm for human beings, where is this norm to be found in Gulliver’s Travels? It is certainly not in Gulliver himself, who cannot distinguish between Yahoos and humans any more and pathologically identifies himself with the Yahoos. The most common answer in ‘soft school’ criticism is the Portuguese captain Pedro de Mendez, by whom Gulliver is taken on board of a ship after having been expelled from Houyhnhnm-land. Don Pedro manages to poke, at least temporarily, Gulliver’s hard crust of repugnance for Yahoos and Yahoo-like humans: he strikes Gulliver invariably as “a very courteous and generous Person,” “a wise man” with a “very good human Understanding,” so that it amazes Gulliver to “find such Civilities from a Yahoo” (GT: 430 – 432). Without Don Pedro’s gentle and careful imposition on Gulliver – he keeps Gulliver from committing suicide, takes him back to Europe, and puts him up in his house in Lisbon –, Gulliver might have never returned to the human world, let alone England, so Don Pedro’s benevolent fellow feeling lessens Gulliver’s physical aversion temporarily, even though it does not affect his growing misanthropy: when persuaded by Don Pedro to step outside the house in Lisbon to mix with the public on the street, Gulliver states that “I found my Terror gradually lessened, but my Hatred and Contempt seemed to increase” (GT: 432). While fellow feeling and common sense fail to make a lasting impact on Gulliver, who in his deranged state is completely unreliable at this point as to representing the moral norms of the text, Don Pedro is nevertheless significant for the reader and the interpretation of the satire. Michael DePorte asserts that “[i]t is Don Pedro, more than Gulliver’s absurd pride in the last pages, that makes the experience of Houyhnhnm Land so hard to evaluate. Were Don Pedro omitted, or made a villain, Gulliver’s conviction that all men are selfish, grasping Yahoos would stand unchallenged” (DePorte 1975: 94). It seems indeed as if Don Pedro was thrown out by Swift as a lifeline to the reader to be spared from despair over the depraved state of humankind as experienced from Gulliver’s distorted viewpoint. However, Don Pedro’s appearance in the text is limited to a mere three to four pages, his character remains very sketchy, and just as he cannot cure Gulliver from his misanthropy and self-isolation, his overall function seems to be nothing more than a palliative to the satire’s bleak insight into human depravity and moral weakness. Another attempt at recovering a common-sense norm from the dialectic oppositions in Gulliver’s Travels has been made by F. P. Lock, who in his ‘soft school’ reading of the political dimension of the Travels has argued that Gulliver’s Travels in fact contains a positive common-sense norm, at least in the domain of politics. Political common sense in Gulliver’s Travels is to be found in Brobdingnag: “The politics of the King of Brobdingnag, like Swift’s own, are the politics of common sense” (Lock 1980: 132). As Lock reminds us, the king

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is heaped with praise in the text (sometimes also in the inverted form of Gulliver’s criticism that is ironically undercut by his unreliable judgment) for possessing an “excellent Understanding” (GT: 178), for being a family man and a lover of peace, and for being “as learned a Person as any in his Dominions” (GT: 145), that is, he is neither a learned pedant nor an uncultured person, but represents the right measure, a quality of common sense. His policies come across as generally wise and just, even when he is wrongfully criticized by Gulliver for his “narrow Principles and short Views” (GT: 193) on refusing to learn the art of making gunpowder. In retrospect, Gulliver is even able to bestow some faint praise on Brobdingnag as the least condemnable of all ‘Yahoo’ societies he has visited: “the least corrupted are the Brobdingnagians, whose wise Maxims in Morality and Government, it would be our Happiness to observe” (GT: 438). However, Lock is quite right in pointing out that Swift, by offering the positive example of a judicious and commonsensical handling of government, created a backward-looking ideal of a pre-Enlightenment state that is nostalgic rather than seriously future-oriented: “They seem arrested at an early stage of the Renaissance: they have printing but make little use of it, they have not discovered any new worlds with their attendant complications. Thus Brobdingnag should be seen not so much as a practical scheme for reform in contemporary England as a nostalgic evocation of a vanished golden age” (Lock 1980: 148). What is more, the Brobdingnagians are satirically refracted in their repulsive bodily features: their giant size, their smell, their coarse indecencies. Strictly speaking, this is only how they appear to the unreliable narrator Gulliver because of his difference in size, but the distortion through size certainly contributes to blurring the shining example of prudent statecraft and does not make it an efficacious antithesis if it is intended as such. David Rosen and Aaron Santesso correctly maintain, regarding the role of allegory in Gulliver’s Travels: “Swift’s fantastic landscape and characters offer no clear and consistent pattern” (Rosen and Santesso 2008: 19). Common sense discourse in Gulliver’s Travels has several different facets, but remains profoundly ambivalent. It plays a typical role in the Travels’ satire of political corruption (especially in Lilliput in book I) and of modern learning in the Academy of Lagado in book III, where it supplies the antithetical basis for censuring a specific behaviour as foolish, absurd, irrational, or morally depraved – in short, as violations of an Augustan standard of common sense that is mostly implied ex negativo, but occasionally appears like a flickering image in an expository passage (e. g. the laws and institutions of old Lilliput in I.6) or by ironic inversion (e. g. Gulliver’s disapproval of commonsensical political principles in III.8). Common sense also seems to be implied in the description of Brobdingnag’s political system, even if it hardly manifests itself as dis-

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course on the linguistic surface of the text, but rather as a principle to be associated with Brobdingnag’s government. However, as regards the central satire on human pride, no clear common-sense route out of the quagmire of the fourth book is offered: man, who proudly deludes himself to be an animal rationale, is only an animal rationis capax, forever barred from attaining perfect reason. Realizing this, Gulliver falls from one delusional system into another by reducing humankind (including himself) to an animal sine ratio whose presence becomes repulsive to him. Don Pedro might figure as a hint at a common-sense position between those two extremes – to accept the human condition as imperfect and try to ameliorate it by acts of practical benevolence –, but his quasi-angelic appearance in the Travels is too fleeting and exceptional to indicate a general norm. Finally, as in all of Swift’s greatest satires, common sense is defied on an aesthetic level. The Menippean satiric form of a wild mix of parodied genres (including, as already mentioned above, elements of classical epic, animal fable, utopian fantasy, and the new realist novel) signals an exuberant excess of the creative imagination, which is diametrically opposed to the plain simplicity of a common-sense style as was emerging in the novelistic paradigm of empirical realism at that time.¹⁷⁹ Ironically, then, but somewhat understandably, it is the rich fantasy of Gulliver’s Travels, rather than the ascetic intention to curb human pride, that has fascinated generations of readers and made this one of the most popular books of English literature. However, the creative exuberance of Gulliver’s Travels can be reconciled with the perceived satiric intentions by interpreting it as a semanticization of form in the mode of ironic inversion: Swift’s exuberant inflating of the satiric narrative to create a fantastic ‘monster’ of heterogeneous genre elements and generic echoes is meant to be ironic in that it is to deflate the proud exuberance of modern writers who create ever new textual ‘monsters’ in their vain, absurd faith in humanity’s progress (instead of venerating and emulating ancient models of perfection). Like the elaborate parody of epistemic discourses in A Tale of a Tub, Swift’s wondrous machinery of pygmies, giants, flying islands, sorcerers, immortals, rational horses and human apes is ultimately insincere as its subversive purpose is to show the madness of the modern monsters of the mind.¹⁸⁰ This insincerity in the service of sincerity

 See chapter V.1 below for my discussion of the common sense aspects of the realist paradigm of Robinson Crusoe.  Cf. Guilhamet (1987: 141), who maintains that there is a similar purpose to the Travels’ use of genres as in A Tale of a Tub, that is, to function as a satire of modern writing: “The way to read the Travels and other satires of this period is not by treating them as though they are realistic fiction. Rather they are mixtures of genres. Only by reading each work from several generic

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finds a symptomatic expression in the character of the ‘reformed’ Gulliver at the end of his travels, who professes in his later letter to Sympson how he for himself “was able in the Compass of two Years […] to remove that infernal Habit of Lying, Shuffling, Deceiving, and Equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very Souls of all my Species” (GT: 14). The metafictional irony in this becomes clear as Gulliver just before defended the authenticity of his travel account against detractors: “I should have great Reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my Book of Travels a meer Fiction out of mine own Brain; and have gone so far as to drop Hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more Existence than the Inhabitants of Utopia” (GT: 13). While the very letter itself, which was not part of the first anonymous edition of Gulliver’s Travels from 1726 (see Lock 1980: 71),¹⁸¹ is already a playful case of an illusion-breaking metalepsis between fictional and real world – the fictional Gulliver comments on the realworld reception of Swift’s book –, Gulliver’s professed sincerity within the fictional universe of Gulliver’s Travels is ironically undermined by the fact that every reader knew by then about the ‘insincerity’ of the whole book in that it was fictional and written by Swift. While the author pokes fun at the conventional charade of editorial fictions in novels of that time (already to be found in More’s Utopia), that is, at the convention to veil the fictional nature of a text and pass it off as authentic, Gulliver’s metaleptic comment exposes him as a deceit: Even if he is a deceit that is constitutive of narrative fiction, Swift shatters here the illusion of Gulliver’s (narratorial/moral) authority and, by extension, effectively devalues the strict Houyhnhnm ideal never to ‘say the thing which is not.’ Insincere fiction can be employed for sincere goals of satiric criticism. Yet, Swift’s method of generic subversion, just as that of discursive subversion in A Tale of a Tub, is never without risk. One danger is that it can become self-defeating when the satiric irony is missed, as happened in the case of Gulliver’s Travels when it was defused as a popular children’s book devoid of any political or philosophical provocation. Another danger, perhaps more serious, is the collateral damage caused by overshooting the mark through excessive involvement with the object of criticism. As Brian Connery and Kirk Combe have pointed out, “satire tells of the descent of humanity below itself” (Connery and Combe 1995: 2) and, in the process, steeps itself deeply in the mire. The characteristic satiric “doublethink” shows itself in the fact that most satirists “claim

viewpoints can we grasp the discordant message: there is no orderly life to be lived among modem innovations. The modern world is merely a series of fragments. It is a perversion of ancient generic orders, no longer complete or able to sustain a full range of human behavior.”  It was added by Swift to the 1735 version of Gulliver’s Travels, which was published by George Faulkner as Volume III of the four-volume Works of Swift (Dublin, 1735).

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one purpose for satire, that of high-minded and usually socially oriented moral and intellectual reform; however, they engage in something quite different, namely, mercilessly savage attack on some person or thing that, frequently for private reasons, displeases them” (Connery and Combe 1995: 2). Quite apart from any possible personal axes to grind, the clash in Swift’s satires between the (professed) high-minded purpose and the savagery of attack is a particularly acute problem. A Modest Proposal is perhaps the most extreme example of Swiftian savagery, and perhaps quite logically so since both object and vehicle of the satire are concerned with human savagery, albeit rendered in perfectly rational tone, which makes the brutality only more chilling. With the English gentleman’s specious proposal to slaughter infants from poor Irish families and sell them as culinary delicacies to English aristocratic households in order to alleviate Irish poverty, Swift simply literalizes the metaphor of England eating up Ireland (economically). While the calculated savagery in the English exploitation of the Irish is paid back in same coin by a calculated savagery in the ‘modest’ proposal, the collateral damage is a violation of common sense and good taste that also exposes a savage mind in the satirist who has created this unsavoury vision. In A Tale of a Tub, the attack on the violations of common sense in the mad chaos of modern learning and theology is seriously undermined by the gross violations of aesthetic decorum that the text commits in the mode of ironic satire – the ‘mad’ parody reveals an obsessive energy and jouissance in an author who revels in tasting the forbidden fruit. In Gulliver’s Travels, finally, a similar double bind can be made out in the representation of the gross human body and things emanating from it, mainly excrement and body odour. The Travels is teeming with gross or deformed corporeal features, bad smells and scatological instances,¹⁸² all of which can be justified by Swift’s apparent intention to squash the pride of humans by reminding them of their animal (‘Yahoo’) nature, which he achieves by a kind of optical ultra-realism, as in the shifting perspectives of size in books I and II. Furthermore, such a ‘naked’ realism can also be viewed as another generic subversion of the emerging realist paradigm in the novel – a paradigm that is exploded by taking it to its logical naturalistic extreme. With regard to the lack of beauty in Swift’s optical realism, Carol Houlihan Flynn maintains that “Swift indeed employs his optical ‘deception’ not to regularize and harmonize nature, but to deform it, and he does so not out of perversity but out of necessity. […] For when you stare as hard as Swift, ghastliness becomes predictably regu As for the latter, a non-exhaustive list of examples: Gulliver urinates on a fire in Lilliput (I.3); in the Academy of Lagado, “an Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food” (GT: 260) is attempted (III.5) as well as an analysis of the character and intentions of a politicians by way of their stool (III.6); the Yahoos defecate on Gulliver’s head (IV.1).

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larized” (Flynn 1990: 177). While it is true that human ugliness and gross physicality in Gulliver’s Travels are a satiric means to an end, Gulliver’s obsessive fixation with human excrement, deformity, and repulsive smell reflects back on an author who seems to reveal a tasteless preoccupation with deformed and repugnant corporeality. The “very offensive Smell” (GT: 167) of the giant maids of honour in Brobdingnag or the “most offensive Smell” (GT: 397) of a lascivious Yahoo female express not only the offensive part of human nature that is related to the body with its sinful desires and unclean operations, but also the offensive part of the author Swift, who, out of a desire to “vex the world rather then divert it” (Swift 2001: 606) or for whatever personal reason, proves yet again a lack of aesthetic common sense in his excessive falling back on immodest or unseemly aspects of the body. Despite the fact that Swift’s political and epistemic satire in the book implies common sense as a principle of ex negativo judgment, Gulliver’s Travels is ultimately at odds with the aesthetic and ethical norms of early eighteenth-century common sense discourse. *** If Jonathan Swift is at the forefront of satire that transgresses the common-sense union of taste and morals, Alexander Pope tries everything in An Essay on Man to cement this union, by way of both argument and poetic style. I want to take a brief final look at how Pope’s didactic long poem from 1733 – 34 gives answers to the critical questions raised by the tradition of satires on humankind and how these answers effectively reconcile this critical satiric tradition with common sense discourse. That An Essay on Man can be placed in the tradition of ‘satires on mankind,’ Douglas H. White and Thomas P. Tierney have convincingly argued, and as such the poem can be seen as an implicit commentary on the tradition comprising Boileau, Rochester, Oldham, Swift and others. Pope’s philosophical essay in verse has been subject to a wide range of controversial responses by contemporaries and later commentators. While most critics seem to concur that “Pope himself was not an original thinker” (Varney 1999: 149), the poem has been viewed either as a comprehensive summary and poetic apotheosis of the Augustan view of ‘man’ in the form of elaborate didactic epigrams, or as a rather superficial and ultimately pointless accumulation of unoriginal philosophical commonplaces in a mode of presentation lacking coherence, depth, and penetration – very rarely has it been regarded as anything between those extremes.¹⁸³ This is slightly ironic insofar as the central governing idea in the

 For an overview of the range of critical responses see Grabes (1966: 353 – 387, esp. 353 – 355) and, a little more recently, Cutting-Gray and Swearingen (1992: 479), who claim that the “famous

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Essay on Man is in fact that of a balance of extremes. Pope’s aim is to mediate between conflicting worldviews – mainly the clash between a Christian moral tradition with modern rationalism, which is enacted in the stand-off between passion and reason in the human mind – and synthesize them into a harmoniously ordered system of moral truth: “If I could flatter myself that this Essay has any merit, it is in steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite, […] and in forming a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of Ethics” (EM: 7). I argue that in this persistent idea of balancing out extremes in contemporary views of human nature, Pope’s Essay on Man is as much a result of common sense discourse as it is an influential discursive event in the shaping of common sense thought in the Essay’s aftermath. Irrespective of the (especially later) charge of a lack of originality and systematic coherence, Pope’s Essay did appeal to contemporaries and was even greeted enthusiastically by many because it signalled good sense, clarity of expression, and moderation of thought, and thus aligned itself handsomely with rather indistinct notions of commonsensical wisdom. An Essay on Man is wholly governed by the idea of a middle state between hierarchical extremes or, where there is no neat middle position available, of a perfect balance between opposing poles. Interestingly, this often goes along with a revaluation of the idea of perfection. In fact, perfection when it is based on purity, orthodoxy, and extremity becomes a very questionable ideal that is only accepted in rare contexts (e. g. God as perfect wisdom and intelligence), whereas earthly perfection is redefined as the right measure or mixture, the Aristotelian golden mean, a perfect balance. Early on in the first epistle of the Essay, Pope’s central idea of “Man” occupying a perfectly measured state is introduced: Then say not Man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault; Say rather, Man’s as perfect as he ought: His knowledge measur’d to his state and place, His time a moment, and a point his space. (EM: ep.1, ll. 69 – 72)

The difference to Swift’s angry insistence on human imperfection in Gulliver’s Travels could hardly be more marked. As if in a direct response to his friend, Pope’s verdict on man being “perfect as he ought” is calm and collected here, but not without a tinge of the complacency that annoyed Swift so much. At

contrasting responses […] demonstrate both the enthusiasm and controversy which the poem stirred and point to a duality that lay at the heart of the age itself.”

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the beginning of epistle II, Pope elaborates on the idea of man’s middle state, but makes it clear now that the apparent perfection of humankind is no cause for self-conceited triumph, but one of perfect ambivalence, as humankind’s worth is only relative to its position in the Great Chain of Being,¹⁸⁴ where it is suspended between upward-pulling and downward-pulling extremes: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such. (EM: ep. 2, ll. 1– 11)

Man “hangs between” everything as his qualities are not perfections in themselves, but merely partial measures of qualities that are to be found in purer form, as it were, in the ranks above him (“God”) as well as below him (“Beast”). In an argument that superficially seems to be informed by Pope’s cherished idea of a concordia discors, Pope shows there is much discors but very little concordia in humankind. “Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; / Alike in ignorance, his reason such” – such a yoking together of opposites has a hint of tragic existential futility that is much closer to Swift’s pessimism. But Pope knows too well he cannot leave it at such a melancholy diagnosis of the paradoxical nature of human existence. In epistle I, he already declares, as if it could really comfort us, that our experience of a disharmonious world is merely owed to our limited understanding: “All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / […] All Discord, Harmony, not understood” (EM: ep. 1, l. 289, 291). In order to deal with the apparent discord between reason and passion in our human constitution, Pope goes on to prescribe a “balance of the mind” as a commonsensical solution to our divided nature: Passions, like Elements, tho’ born to fight, Yet, mix’d and soften’d, in his work unite:

 Pope conjugates this old cosmological paradigm in section VIII of epistle I: “Vast chain of being, which from God began, / Natures æthereal, human, angel, man, / Beast, bird, fish, insect! […]” (EM: ep. 1, ll. 237– 239).

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These ’tis enough to temper and employ; But what composes Man, can Man destroy? Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road, Subject, compound them, follow her and God. Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain; These mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d, Make and maintain the balance of the mind: The lights and shades, whose well accorded strife Gives all the strength and colour of our life. (EM: ep. 2, ll. 111– 122)

If man is but able to temper and employ his passions under the guidance of reason, which is to be kept “to Nature’s road,” then everything will fall into place in a “balance of the mind” by which man is able to cope with the conflicting passions. The “well accorded strife” of emotional “lights and shades,” moderated by reason, makes life colourful and constitutes – in anachronistic terms – its élan vital. It is because of such empty and clichéd prescriptions of common sense that Pope’s poem has been taken to task for doling out a light-weight kind of tea-table philosophy in an unoriginal schoolmasterly poem. However, if we read this as addressed to Swift’s Gulliver, this affirmation of the passions as the colour of life – or “the elements of Life,” as Pope says earlier in epistle I – underlines that a balance between reason and passion is all what man can strive for to lead a happy life. Hunting after an unattainable ideal of reason is a folly and a violation of common sense, as it is inimical to the balance of mind in the middle state of creation. That it makes sense indeed to place Pope’s Essay on Man in the Augustan ‘satire on mankind’ tradition and view it as an attempt at providing answers to the philosophical and moral quandaries thrown up by the genre can also be seen in epistle I where Pope identifies pride, specifically pride in the faculty of human reason, as the single most serious error that bars humankind from true knowledge about its condition: In Pride, in reas’ning Pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods. Aspiring to be Gods, if Angels fell, Aspiring to be Angels, Men rebel; And who but wishes to invert the laws Of Order, sins against th’ Eternal Cause. (EM: ep. 1, ll. 123 – 130)

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To quit one’s appropriate sphere and “presume […] God to scan” throws humankind into error. Like a Miltonic rebellion of Satan’s army of angels, man’s self-important ambition to master nature by his reason is his fall from grace and his sin against the order of things. Pope knows, however, that in a postlapsarian universe self-conscious pride is an irreducible part of the human condition and thus cannot be wholly effaced. In fact, Pope identifies pride as the spring behind all human reasoning, not just the false and aberrant kind: “From pride, from pride, our very reas’ning springs” (EM: ep. 1, l. 161). It is clearly false reasoning, however, that makes the world an anthropocentric one – “My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies” (EM: ep. 1, l. 140) – and makes human beings foolishly aim for moral perfection in their pocket-sized anthropocentric universe. Gulliver, it seems, is again strongly reprimanded for his foolish pride to strive for perfect Houyhnhnm reason in this world: “Account for moral, as for nat’ral things: / Why charge we Heav’n in those, in these acquit? / In both, to reason right is to submit” (EM: ep. 1, ll. 162– 164). Right reason is the standard that Pope claims against such false reasoning out of proud and presumptuous overreaching, and it is not the ‘right reason’ of the Cambridge Platonists,¹⁸⁵ which Rochester already scorned in his Satyr against Reason and Mankind, but the ‘right reason’ defined by Steele as synonymous with the ennobling human faculty of common sense. There certainly lurks a self-contradiction in Pope’s protestation of the limits of human reason and understanding that could potentially defeat the entire project of An Essay of Man: how can he venture to know and explain the universe as a systematic order given the fact that he is subject to the same “due degree / Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee” (EM: ep. 1, ll. 283 – 284) as any other man in the middle state of creation? Is he not himself as presumptuous as those proud adherents to the grandeur of human reason whom he is trying to put in their place? Pope’s response to this is modesty, at least in principle. Many propositions in An Essay on Man, due to the didactic nature of the poem, sound presumptuously apodictic rather than humbly probing, but modesty is perhaps to be seen in the limited range of statements about the “mighty maze” (EM: ep. 1, l. 6) of the universe: Pope firmly believes there is a plan behind it all, but acknowledges that it is not for us to discern and understand it; his observations, then, are to be understood like those of the Platonic cave dwellers, but at least Pope wants them to be stated with conviction. This epistemological caveat affects the poem’s philosophical project as well as its form. Joanne Cut Cf. Pope’s slur of the latitudinarian Platonists: “Go, soar with Plato to th’empyreal sphere, / To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; / Or tread the mazy round his follow’rs trod, / And quitting sense call imitating God; / […] Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule – / Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!” (EM: ep. 2, ll. 23 – 26, 29 – 30)

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ting-Gray and James Swearingen have remarked that in offering a philosophical system while being suspicious of such systems at the same time, Pope is balancing extremes again: “Pope offers a testament of a new faith in system that casts a fleeting shadow of doubt, in Heidegger’s phrase, a ‘saving power’ of questionableness, over systemic thinking” (Cutting-Gray and Swearingen 1992: 491). This is also reflected in Andrew Varney’s cautioning remarks that the essay genre at Pope’s time signalled to readers yet another middle state: that between the systematic rigour of a treatise and the loose argumentative style of an epistle¹⁸⁶ – so even in formal terms Pope’s Essay on Man is a text born, as it were, from the moderating spirit of common sense. As we have seen, Pope’s notion of right reason is tantamount to common sense: it accepts a middle ground between divine reason and animal instinct as its proper station, it is reason curbed by moderation and modesty. Hence it is supposed to be immune to vain overreaching and, conversely, it operates as a reductive principle that detects and cuts the superfluous and distorting embellishments of science and learning and in this way reduces the latter to the plain, naked truth: Trace Science then, with Modesty thy guide; First strip off all her equipage of Pride, Deduct what is but Vanity, or Dress, Or Learning’s Luxury, or Idleness; Or tricks to shew the stretch of human brain, Mere curious pleasure, or ingenious pain: Expunge the whole, or lop th’excrescent parts Of all, our Vices have created Arts: Then see how little the remaining sum, Which serv’d the past, and must the times to come! (EM: ep. 2, ll. 43 – 52)

Even though Pope does not mention the term common sense yet, this passage archetypically describes the operation of common sense as an ex negativo principle of sound judgment. It contains orthodox elements of common sense discourse as we have analysed it so far: modesty, restraint, antidote to vanity

 See Varney (1999: 154). – See also Shapin and Schaffer (1985: 65), who describe the Augustan form of the ‘essay’ as a form signalling modest common sense – here with regard to Robert Boyle, but equally applicable to Pope: “The essay […] was explicitly contrasted to the natural philosophical system. Those who wrote entire systems were identified as ‘confident’ individuals, whose ambition extended beyond what was proper or possible. By contrast, those who wrote experimental essays were ‘sober and modest men,’ ‘diligent and judicious’ philosophers, who did not ‘assert more than they can prove’.”

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and pride, a cutting back of excrescent parts, the reduction to the essential and plain truth, and a conservative reflex against innovation, which is always suspected to be just fashion (“the remaining sum, / Which serv’d the past, and must the times to come!”). Common sense is constructed here as a sanitizing and sobering infusion of sparseness and clarity, which might seem mediocre and plodding from the perspective of all those rationalist system-builders like Hobbes, Spinoza, or Descartes, who “nobly take the high Priori Road, / And reason downward, till we doubt of God” (Pope 1963: 386 – 387, ll. 471– 472), as a “gloomy Clerk” of Dulness in Pope’s Dunciad remarks. But for Pope it is the only safe way of arriving at reliable and empirically verifiable knowledge about the world, which he makes clear by having the same “gloomy Clerk” foolishly deride modest common sense and experience: Let others creep by timid steps, and slow, On plain Experience lay foundations low, By common sense to common knowledge bred, And last, to Nature’s Cause thro’ Nature led. (Pope 1963: 386, ll. 465 – 468)

The way to knowledge by experience and common sense may be slow and timeconsuming, but it is presented as the only way to truth. Common sense discourse and the empiricist paradigm of factual knowledge by experience go hand in hand here to accumulate what could be called medium-range knowledge (in analogy to humanity’s medium state in the whole of creation), as opposed to the wide-ranging systems of knowledge created by the “high priori road” of rationalism. However, the vital implication is of course that the former is certain and reliable knowledge, whereas the latter is an overreaching “Ignis fatuus of the Mind,” to use Rochester’s polemic against lofty reason. In The Dunciad, Pope’s great acerbic satire of modern learning and writing, the emphasis lies on the sanitizing function of common sense discourse to debunk absurdities and follies in knowledge and literature in order to expose the kingdom of dunces for what it is. Outwardly, common sense discourse in The Dunciad has a corrective or compensatory function vis-à-vis the growing wave of epistemic and cultural innovations in eighteenth-century Britain; however, Pope often abuses it for purposes of personal reckoning and slandering rivals. Pope’s correction of “Presumptuous Man” (EM: ep. 1, l. 35) in An Essay on Man is markedly different, though, from Swift’s pessimism in Gulliver’s Travels or Pope’s own bleak vision of English culture under the sway of Dulness in The Dunciad. Common sense discourse in An Essay on Man infiltrates the philosophical discourse about the nature of humankind, but it operates there not only as a negative principle to curb the proud pretensions to human reason – the

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common target of all satires on humankind –, but also as a positive life-embracing principle. An Essay on Man seems to give this genre its corrective apotheosis: the one satire to end them all and rectify the overwhelmingly negative image of humankind painted by them with a positive affirmation of commonsensical midrange wisdom. In his approach to the perennial problem of human happiness – a quandary that was also to occupy Samuel Johnson in The Vanity of Human Wishes and in Rasselas ¹⁸⁷ –, Pope ennobles common sense as a principle of mental sanity that is available to every human being and, if consistently pursued, will ease the burden of existence and reconcile humankind with its nature: Take Nature’s path, and mad Opinion’s leave, All states can reach it, and all heads conceive; Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell, There needs but thinking right, and meaning well; And mourn our various portions as we please, Equal is Common Sense, and Common Ease. (EM: ep. 4, ll. 29 – 34)

Nature itself is boldly accredited with avoiding extremes, so the avoidance of extremes of thought and behaviour suggested by common sense is elevated to a natural principle of appreciating life. And yet the solution to the problem of human happiness remains vague and empty. “There needs but thinking right, and meaning well” (as if it were that easy!) – this is another one of those nice epigrammatic phrases that seem to offer a simple solution to a difficult problem but are rather trite and devoid of substantial meaning. The optimistic conclusion to the Essay betrays the same argumentative complacency as it recycles wellknown Christian moral precepts without adding any significant new insight: […] whatever is, is right; That Reason, Passion, answer one great aim; That true Self-love and Social are the same; That Virtue only makes our Bliss below; And all our Knowledge is, ourselves to know. (EM: ep. 4, ll. 394– 398)

“Whatever is, is right” – this smug apology of the status quo is an injunction against change; it finally takes the sting out of any impulse to reform society and human ways. An Essay on Man thus ends the satire on humankind by clipping its critical, transgressive potential for reform; it puts an end to a literary dis-

 See my discussion above in chapter II, sections 2 and 3.

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course by arguing the problem away and treating the incurable (satirists as well as philosophers) with a healthy dose of common sense for them to bear life by keeping away from extremes. Pope’s implicit canonization of common sense in An Essay on Man must be viewed as a major factor in the shaping of common sense discourse in the 1730s, not because the poem provided it with original or ingenuously new concepts and images, but because it consistently fused the neoclassical ethics of virtue as the golden mean with the reductive function of common-sense judgment into a loose and non-dogmatic system and gave it an elegant, but unpretentious aesthetic shape in the seamless flow of wittily polished couplets. How much it became associated with representing the common sense mainstream of its time can be gauged from an exemplary voice of radical dissent, which shall conclude my discussion of the complex relationship of early eighteenth-century satire with common sense discourse. Being a heretical pamphlet that attacks Pope’s Essay on Man from the (possibly) feigned perspective of a “believing Heathen,” Common Sense a Common Delusion (from 1751) sets out to prove that “Christian common Sense” is the source of all evil and moral corruption in England. The author, who mysteriously calls himself “Almonides” on the title page, force-reads the Essay against the grain and purports to show the logical inconsistencies of Pope’s philosophy. To Almonides, “Mr. Pope, a celebrated Poet among the Christians,” is one “of the most notorious Dealers in common Sense” (Almonides 1751: 3); so ‘proving’ any inconsistencies or absurdities in Pope’s particular worldview is put forward as proof of the weakness and despicability of ‘modest’ common sense in general. Even though Pope’s Essay had not been spared from criticism before this pamphlet appeared,¹⁸⁸ the author’s alarmist tone and the force of his criticism are indeed surprising as he argues for common sense itself being the source of all present evils: But it is my Opinion, and, I believe, I can prove it, that it is neither common Gin, nor common Whores, but the common Sense of Christian Societies which is the true and only Cause of all Vice and Immorality among all Ranks of them. By common Sense I mean the most generally received Notions of Things in any Community, and the common Way of judging

 Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s Examen de l’essai de M. Pope sur l’homme (1737), which was first translated into English in 1738 (A Commentary upon Mr. Pope’s Four Ethic Epistles, Intituled Essay on Man), is probably the most influential contemporary critique. The Swiss theologian takes Pope to task for what he identifies as a dangerous infusion of Leibnizian philosophy into ethics. William Warburton, defending Pope’s Essay on Man in his elaborate A Critical and Philosophical Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man (London, 1742; first published serially as four epistles in 1738 – 39), is a refutation of Crousaz. As Warburton argues, Crousaz’s criticism partly stems from misunderstandings attributable to the faulty French translation of Pope’s didactic poem.

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and reasoning concerning them; and not only these but also all private Opinions of Men which are not inconsistent with common Sense. In short, the common Sense of Christians may be said to include every thing but the religious Opinions of us Heathens, and the Doctrines of the Lawgivers, Prophets, Apostles, and Teachers of the Jews. In the former there is a Piety of its Kind, and good Sense; and in the latter a Wisdom sublime and truly divine […]. (Almonides 1751: 2)

Almonides’s criticism of common sense is evidently not owed to an anti-rational stance, but one that arises from a rather condescending mistrust of the ‘common’ as vulgar: it attacks “the most generally received Notions of Things” and “the common Way of judging and reasoning” as the cause of immorality. Common sense, thus, is treated as an inferior faculty that contrasts starkly with the superior “good Sense” of pious “Heathens” and the “Wisdom sublime and truly divine” (Almonides 1751: 2) of the Jewish tradition. This valued opposition between common sense and good sense is reinforced by describing the latter as rare: Now as there is manifestly no Wisdom, Understanding, nor good Sense in this way of thinking, I must call it common Sense. For true Wisdom, good Understanding, or good Sense, are Rarities, and not common things; and by this we know common Sense from these excellent Qualities: for there is no way of knowing Things but by their Opposites. (Almonides 1751: 5 – 6)

The clear distinction the author wants to enforce here – between good sense as noble and rare faculty and common sense as a vulgar form of judgment and understanding – had already begun to erode in the early eighteenth century, and Pope’s Essay on Man was partly responsible for putting a nail in its coffin. Hence, the author of this pamphlet is trying to swim against the rising tide of common sense discourse, but obviously has no chance of turning it: first of all, due to its peculiar discursive position as a ‘pious heathen,’ with which he manoeuvres himself into an outside of the community of British men of common sense, but also due to an argumentative strategy based on slander and spurious syllogisms. While the author occasionally has a point in criticizing some of the weaker arguments of the Essay,¹⁸⁹ for the most part he disqualifies himself

 An example would be his criticism of the notorious line “Whatever is, is right.” Almonides takes this line to its utmost logical extreme and argues that this makes the universe a “machine” in which evil is justified as right, and the morally rightful destruction of evil would conversely be wrong: “the most notorious Villains, such as Parricides and Traitors to their King and their Country, perfidious and perjured Wretches, and such as trample upon all Laws, and blaspheme every Thing that is sacred, and deny the Being of the Gods, which naturally subverts all Truth and Virtue, would be eternally as necessary Parts of this imaginary Machine, as Men of the

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through scurrilous attacks on Pope that are largely unfounded and only reveal his malicious intent.¹⁹⁰ The triumphant march of common sense discourse in eighteenth-century Britain was not to be stopped by slurring one of its proponents – by that time it had also taken a firm hold in the domain of politics and was becoming a principal element in constructions of national identity, as will be seen in the following.

greatest Talents, Virtue, and Probity could possibly be: and the Destruction of these Destroyers of the World would be the Destruction of the Universe” (Almonides 1751: 34).  Pope’s appreciation of the ignorant Indian (in the noble-savage tradition) in the Essay’s first epistle is ample proof to Almonides of the base and disgraceful humility of Pope’s common sense: “But this Humility of the Indian is like the Humility of a Hog when he wallows in the Mire, it is founded on Ignorance, or a want of nicer Taste, and better Sense, and therefore, I think, can have no great Merit in it. And as our Men of common Sense and party-coloured Virtue, approve of such Hottentot Humility, it is an indubitable Sign of their having the same hoggish Souls” (Almonides 1751: 31).

4 The Politics of Common Sense Licentiousness Freedom’s destruction may bring, Unless Prudence prepares its defence; The Goddess of Sapience bid Iris take wing And on Britons bestow’d Common-Sense. (Stevens 1772: 3)

Common sense discourse in the eighteenth century intersects with discourses of collective identity. As universally valid as common-sense appeals profess to be, notions of Englishness – and to a growing extent Britishness, in the later eighteenth century¹⁹¹ – have been shaped by invoking “the old solid English standard of Common Sense” (CS1: 5), i. e. by the conviction that common sense has been more generously granted to English people (or Britons) than to any other nation. Thus, a sense of Englishness is gained from the feeling of superior ‘good sense’: While common sense appears to be a universal concept, it is often conceived to come in varying degrees, and thus can be also claimed as a characteristic trait of a group identity in order to distance oneself from others. The intriguing question here is not whether or to what extent such a flattering self-perception is accurate or rooted in verifiable fact – which is impossible to prove empirically –, but how and under which historical circumstances a rational-pragmatic value such as common sense could become a chief constituent in the auto-images of an entire national community. When Arthur O. Lovejoy, in the 1930s, identified uniformitarianism and cosmopolitanism (next to some other ideas) as intellectual cornerstones of the European Enlightenment, he argued that from the axiom of a universal human na-

 In his essay “On Being English but Not British,” John Fowles famously claimed, from a decidedly English standpoint, that Britishness is an historically “recent façade clapped on a much older building,” that is, it is an artificial construct from imperialist times “that was most useful when we had a historical duty to be a powerful military nation, for whom patriotism was an essential emotional force” (Fowles 1964: 154). He contrasts the bullying “Red-white-and-blue Britain” (Fowles 1964: 155), iconically represented by John Bull, with the pastoral-romantic notion of a “Green England,” epitomized by Robin Hood. Only “Green England” truly sustains (stereo)typical English qualities such as reserve and withdrawal as well as “common sense and non-interference” (Fowles 1964: 159). Certainly, Fowles readily adds to the stereotypical mythopoeia of Englishness while professing to debunk it. But what seems important and true in our present context is the observation that Britain as an identity concept is a comparatively weak construct compared to Englishness (and Scottishness, Welshness, and Irishness for that matter), and plays an historically lesser role for the bulk of the eighteenth century, when jingoistic notions of ‘Empire’ were still underdeveloped.

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ture, “the condemnation of every form of nationalism or racialism obviously followed. Natura and natio were words of profoundly antithetic connotation […]” (Lovejoy 1970: 84). In theory, and when treating the spirit of Enlightenment as a Platonic idea existing beyond appearances, this makes much sense. In historical reality, however, Enlightenment culture did not stifle nationalism or racism, but its secularizing thrust, doing away with the divine authority of kings, prepared the ground for the Romantic idea of the modern nation-state. According to Benedict Anderson (1991: 6), a nation is “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” Although this concept of nation only comes to full fruition in the nineteenth-century development toward European nation-states, the element of “‘imagining’ and ‘creation’,” which Anderson emphasizes in the building of any community that is “larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these)” (Anderson 1991: 6), is not only applicable to, but in fact inseparable from the process of forming a collective identity for any larger political community, and thus can also be traced in the political discourses of English and British identity in the eighteenth century. It is in these discourses that the concept of common sense – which, in principle at least, has the same universalist reach as that which Lovejoy asserts for the Enlightenment notions of ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ – is elevated to a national virtue sustaining the imagined political community of all Britons. The important role common sense discourse comes to play in the shaping of political identity in eighteenth-century Britain can be put down to two related events occurring in the 1730s that are of little significance in ‘official’ British political history, but which cause a major shift in the relevance of common sense in political discourse: one is the allegorical depiction of common sense as a distressed queen in one part of Henry Fielding’s popular meta-theatrical satire Pasquin: A Dramatick Satire on the Times (1736), the other the appearance of the oppositional weekly magazine Common Sense: or, The Englishman’s Journal in 1737, whose very title is an allusion to the besieged Queen Common Sense in Fielding’s play.¹⁹² For reasons of argumentative economy, I will first discuss the Com-

 See also Henke (2006: 52), which already presents this assessment of a birth of “English common sense discourse from the spirit of nationalism” in 1736 – 37. Sophia Rosenfeld (2008: 28) comes to a similar conclusion, apparently without prior knowledge of my earlier article, when she calls Fielding’s Pasquin “a key moment in the history of common sense” (repeated in Rosenfeld 2011: 39) and qualifies the late 1730s as the time of “the birth of modern common sense as a political instrument” (Rosenfeld 2011: 35 – 36), ‘echoing’ the phrase I use. Though I thus claim precedence in this assessment, Rosenfeld’s excellent and astute research on the political situation in 1730s London provides a plethora of insights that go beyond the scope of

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mon Sense periodical, its impact, and the antagonism it provoked among political opponents, while I reserve my analysis of Fielding’s play for the subsequent section, which is to deal with the allegorical imagery connected to English common sense discourse during that time. As a last step, the effects of the emergent common sense discourse from the late 1730s for later constructions of English and British, but also other identities will be retraced, which will show the significant influence of a discursive link between liberty and common sense.

4.1 The Birth of Common Sense Discourse from the Spirit of Patriotism The late 1730s were politically turbulent times as the Whig politician Sir Robert Walpole, who had been ‘prime’ minister since 1721, was confronted with ever mounting opposition from his own ranks for his unpopular fiscal policy, his lenient and supposedly ill-handled foreign policy, and due to persistent allegations of corruption. It was a climate poisoned by fierce partisan disputes in parliament as well as in the public sphere where warring political magazines, vitriolic pamphlets, and sharp political satires on the theatre stage were vying for opinion leadership.¹⁹³ The heatedness and rampant partisanship of political debate was posing a threat to internal stability, and thus made appeals to common sense very attractive in order to push for agreement on common political denominators. Rosenfeld (2011: 24) rightly observes in this regard: “Common sense generally only comes out of the shadows and draws attention to itself at moments of perceived crisis or collapsing consensus. Early eighteenth-century London was no exception.” It is therefore quite apt that by the late 1730s the most prominent public voice to appeal to consensus in politics was a magazine with a programmatic and authoritative title: Common Sense: or, The Englishman’s Journal. It was not the first anti-Walpole paper of considerable political influence,¹⁹⁴ but it immediately took over as the leading oppositional voice in

my approach here. Unfortunately, her research first came to my attention when the bulk of the present chapter was already written. It is for this reason, despite both of us often drawing on the same historical sources and evidence, that there will be found many conclusions in the present chapter that overlap with Rosenfeld’s findings, without specific reference being made to parallel observations in her writings.  See Goldgar (1976) for a comprehensive study on the intellectual opposition to Walpole.  Before there were, as the most notable mentions, Nathaniel Mist’s notorious Mist’s Weekly Journal, later renamed into Fog’s Journal (after Mist went into exile), and Nicholas Amhurst’s The Craftsman, which ceased to be published regularly after Common Sense came out.

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the public press when it appeared (see Lockwood 1983: 43). Even though their identities were never officially revealed, it was an open secret at the time that the magazine was launched by Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield, the leader of the newer Whig opposition to Walpole¹⁹⁵ in the House of Lords, and George Lyttelton, a leading oppositional politician in the House of Commons, together with the Irish writer Charles Molloy, who had already collaborated with the Jacobite Nathaniel Mist on the oppositional Fog’s Journal. While Chesterfield and Lyttelton were only on board at the beginning and contributed rather irregularly to the paper (just as Henry Fielding and others did occasionally), the magazine was maintained throughout by the Jacobite-leaning Molloy (see Jones 1953), until it ceased to be published in 1743 (see Lockwood 1983: 43).¹⁹⁶ In the first year of its publication, Common Sense became popular for its wit and the variety of its bold essays and stories, with which it easily outshone other similar magazines on the market.¹⁹⁷ A model to follow for the Common Sense writers, as for many other periodical writers at the time, was the thematic diversity of the two most successful and formative magazines of the early eighteenth century, Addison and Steele’s The Tatler and The Spectator. The latter journal had popularized the idea of recurring fictional characters, for example its eponymous character, “Mr. Spectator.” While Common Sense was less literary in conception and thus had no comparable stock of characters to offer, it also followed the popular mould of personifying the magazine’s title when, in an issue from December 1737, a character called “Mr. Common Sense” was used for the first time to represent its authors. Only a month later, in an essay attributed to Lord Chesterfield, the author expressly situated the periodical in the tradition of The Spectator (no. 51, 15 January 1738) when he referred to “[m]y ingenious Predecessor, the Spectator, whom I wish to imitate […]” (CS1: 341). Its partial emulation of the Spectator model, however, was not what brought Common Sense the widespread publicity it enjoyed. Instead, it was its packaging of raucous criticism of Walpole’s policies in a witty form that hit the nerve of its patriotic readership.

 The earlier internal Whig opposition had formed around Frederick, Prince of Wales, Henry St. John (1st Viscount Bolingbroke), and William Pulteney. Bolingbroke and Pulteney financed and contributed to The Craftsman in a similar way as Chesterfield and Lyttelton to Common Sense.  See also Lockwood (1993: 87– 90) for an overview of the topics covered by Common Sense in its later years.  Cf. Lockwood (1983: 45): “What distinguished Common Sense from most other such periodicals, particularly during its first and best two years of publication, was its variety: not only of subject, as of politics one day and coxcombs the next, but also of tone and spirit.”

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With the advent of the Common Sense journal, the nexus between English political identity and common sense became firmly established. Of course, there were discursive precursors to Chesterfield and Lyttelton’s political exploits of common sense, even before Fielding’s ingenuous idea of representing common sense as a queen associated with Britannia (of which more is to be said below).¹⁹⁸ Shaftesbury (2001: I, 68), for instance, comments on common sense in British politics in his “Sensus Communis” essay, where he lavishly praises Britain for its “sense of government” acquired through tradition and “increasing knowledge” – compared to the “Eastern Countrys, and many barbarous Nations,” which suffer from tyrannical princes: As for us Britons, thank Heaven, we have a better Sense of Government deliver’d to us from our Ancestors. We have the Notion of a Publick, and a Constitution; how a Legislative, and how an Executive is model’d. We understand Weight and Measure in this kind, and can reason justly on the Balance of Power and Property. The Maxims we draw from hence, are as evident as those in Mathematicks. Our increasing Knowledg shews us every day, more and more, what Common Sense is in Politicks: And this must of necessity lead us to understand a like Sense in Morals; which is the Foundation. (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 68)

Common sense in politics, Shaftesbury argues, must have a foundation in a common moral sense, which he assumes for all humankind, as we have seen above in chapter II.1. At first it seems that Lovejoy’s verdict of the uniformitarian worldview of the Enlightenment is corroborated here. However, Shaftesbury distinguishes between a human being as animal morum and animal morum capax (to adapt Jonathan Swift’s dictum). This explains why the “barbarous” peoples have a political system that is unjust and repressive: they have not lived up to the potential of common sense of which they are capable as human beings. Britain, in turn, has been favoured with a political constitution and balance of pow-

 Rosenfeld (2011: 35) quotes a very early mention of common sense with a political meaning from Thomas Shadwell’s dedication of his 1689 play Bury-Fair (to Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex): after the Glorious Revolution, “a Liberty of speaking Common Sence [sic], which tho’ not long since forbidden, is now grown current” (Shadwell 1927: IV, 294). Another pre-1730 instance from the sphere of religion is the debate about the value of common sense in the context of the so-called Bangorian controversy around the bishop of Bangor, Benjamin Hoadly, and his 1716 treatise A Preservative Against the Principles and Practices of the Nonjurors Both in Church and State; or, An Appeal to the Consciences and Common Sense of the Christian Laity. The Anglican bishop emphasized individual conscience as the ultimate judge of spiritual matters, overruling the authority of the ordained clergy. This non-orthodox provocation caused an entire flood of divisive pamphlets and publications, which also unfolded as a controversy over the value and position of common sense in religious matters; see Rosenfeld (2011: 36 – 38) for a more detailed assessment.

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ers that is ennobled by Shaftesbury as meeting the high standard of common sense – which, by the way, is an ambiguous term in this context since it brings together two relevant discursive traditions: a sense of reasonable judgment on matters of life as well as a sense of the common good. In any case, Shaftesbury’s assessment of Britannia being blessed with more common sense than other nations is certainly more than the author’s subjective opinion; rather, it is a notion that finds broad consent among fellow Britons. Another implication of common sense offered by Shaftesbury’s description is the link to a customary tradition of accumulated experience (“deliver’d to us from our Ancestors”), a store of collective wisdom that generally has an inclusive universal dimension (as in popular phrases like the common sense of mankind), but also an exclusive and potentially discriminatory one (English common sense). Shaftesbury’s pride in Britain’s “better Sense of Government” is an effect of this exclusionary principle bearing on the idea of accumulated collective wisdom.¹⁹⁹ In the first issue of the Common Sense weekly, published on 5 February 1737, the Earl of Chesterfield also invokes this idea of Britain’s political ancestry as an emanation of common sense, but gives his assessment a clearly partisan edge to attack the present government for having strayed from this noble path and betraying the ‘old English’ common sense tradition – Chesterfield’s criticism thus becomes a political mission statement for the entire magazine: I am sensible that Common Sense has lately met with very great Discouragement in the noble Science of Politicks, our chief Professors having thought themselves much above those obvious Rules that had been follow’d by our Ancestors, and that lay open to vulgar Understandings; they have weigh’d the Interests of Europe in nicer Scales, and settled them in so delicate a Balance, that the least Blast affects it.—For my part, I shall endeavour to bring them back to the old solid English standard of Common Sense […]. (CS1: 6)

Chesterfield represents common sense as a principle “open to vulgar Understandings,” which in this context is not meant in a pejorative or derogatory way; instead, it is to imply an honest and straightforward standard that contrasts sharply with the precarious subtleties of Walpole’s foreign policy, that is, his artful “weigh[ing] the Interests of Europe in nicer Scales.” The allusion here is to Walpole’s rather unsuccessful diplomatic attempts at avoiding conflict with

 A visible manifestation of an exclusive British common sense tradition is the common law, i. e. a legal system based on a practical tradition of precedential rulings instead of statutory legislation. On the analogies between common law and customary language use, see Barrell (1983). The significance of common law for the eighteenth-century notion of English common sense has been noted by Liu (1984: 201– 211), Ackroyd (2002: 390), and Rosenfeld (2008: 33; 2011: 34).

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Spain over colonial trading (the deteriorating relationship between the two powers would finally result in the so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739). But also on the home front Walpole was facing stiff opposition. He was politically weakened after the personal fiasco of his 1733 excise bill, which he was forced to withdraw after public outrage against it (see Goldgar 1976: 87). In the piloting number of Common Sense, Chesterfield mounts a forceful attack against the government by effectively charging it with high treason for its infringing upon civil rights (the famous theatre licensing act would be passed four months later), which he condemns as meddling with Britain’s constitution: If in Domestick Affairs too I should find that Common Sense has been neglected, I shall take the Liberty to assert its Rights, and represent the Justice as well as the Expediency of restoring it to its former Credit and Dignity.—Our Constitution is founded upon Common Sense itself, and every Deviation from one is a Violation of the other.—The several Degrees and Kinds of Power, wisely allotted to the several constituent Parts of our Legislature, can only be altered by those who have no more Common Sense than Common Honesty.—Such Offenders shall be proceeded against as guilty of High-Treason, and suffer the severest Punishment. (CS1: 6 – 7)

This is strong meat, even by the standards of London’s audacious press and aggressive pamphlet culture at the time. What is interesting in our present context is Chesterfield’s equation of common sense with the English constitution. Common sense is sanctified as a noble political ideal that is presented to the reader by Chesterfield’s alarmist rhetoric as severely endangered. In short, common sense is manipulated into a powerful partisan weapon. First, it is to be made immune against critical objection by putting common sense on a par with unanimously accepted core values of English political identity (i. e. the undisputed wisdom of the constitution). This suggests that the prosperity and well-being of the country is directly linked to the appreciation of common sense in the government and at court, as is claimed in another issue of the periodical (no. 14, 7 May 1737): “If the Court has Common Sense, the Air of the Court expands itself with Ease, and is admitted with Pleasure, unless it be most notoriously tainted” (CS1: 103). Conversely, if the court is undermined by a self-serving ministry – this is obviously implied –, the common-sense foundations of the country are in danger. Hence, in a second step, by reserving common sense solely for one’s own partisan position, Chesterfield and his companion authors effectively try to coerce their readers into agreement with the political views of the oppositional ‘Patriot Whigs’, which are made to appear as the objective truth offered by commonsense judgment. Despite their clear and unmistakable political agenda, the Common Sense authors try to lend authority to their views by claiming to deliver straightforward, impartial and unbiased common sense to their readers, as Ches-

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terfield avows in another issue of the magazine (no. 24, 16 July 1737): “As I have entitled my Paper Common Sense, the Publick may depend on it, that I shall not write the Sense of a Party, because Common Sense must be free from all Prejudice, and Party Sense is observed to be rarely so” (CS1: 171). In response to this one is tempted to say that the public, if it had but an inkling of common sense, should depend on it that in the war of words between pro and anti-Walpole papers no such non-partisan view was ever to be offered. To veil this clever but somewhat bullying rhetorical strategy, Chesterfield assumes in the first Common Sense issue a pose of modesty that exploits the contemporary associations of modesty and honesty with common sense. Alluding to his noble background as a peer (although the essay was published anonymously, as was the general custom with political magazines at the time), Chesterfield calls himself “a Man of great Learning” heeding “that excellent Precept of Horace to Authors, to begin modestly, and not to promise more than they are able to perform,” which is why he has entitled the magazine “Common Sense, which is all I pretend to myself, and no more than what (I dare say) the humblest of my Readers pretends to likewise” (CS1: 3). Again, common sense is represented as a humble faculty, but again there is no derogatory or belittling intent in this. In fact, it is part of Chesterfield’s shrewd rhetoric to invite the consent of his readers on the basis of such generally accepted common-sense attributes as transparency of argument and clarity of language. However, he is but too aware of the possible negative connotations of ‘vulgar’ common sense, which is why he resorts to wit and elaborates on Juvenal’s dictum “rarus enim ferme sensus communis” (CS1: 1), quoted as a motto at the beginning of the essay,²⁰⁰ to emphasize the scarcity of common sense in humankind: But as Modesty is the best Recommendation to great Minds, on the other Side it is apt to prejudice little ones, who mistake it for Ignorance, or Guilt; therefore that I may not suffer by it with the latter, I must repeat a known Observation, that Common Sense is no such common Thing—I could give many Instances of this Truth, if I would, but decline it at present, and chuse to refer my Readers to their several Friends and Acquaintance. (CS1: 3)²⁰¹

 The Juvenal quotation is from Satire VIII (Juvenal 2010: l. 73). Chesterfield omits the prepositional phrase “in illa fortuna” at the end, apparently to make it sound more general. See also my comment on the use of the same quotation in a later issue of Old Common Sense (see footnote 250 below).  The “known Observation, that Common Sense is no such common Thing,” which Chesterfield feels the need to “repeat” here, is a paradox much referred to in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is also lamented, for instance, in an issue of The Free-Thinker (no. 16, 16 May 1718), a didactic magazine for the propagation of Enlightenment ideas among the general public, in which the author (Ambrose Philips) optimistically calls for a joined effort of “the Men

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In a witty, suave, and slightly patronizing way, Chesterfield plays with what C. S. Lewis (1967: 153) has identified as the two contrasting attitudes towards common sense at the time, the ‘minimizing’ and the ‘maximizing view,’ one a vulgar minimum of practical everyday judgment, the other a rare distinction of exceptionally good sense.²⁰² By oscillating between the two as befits his argument, Chesterfield successfully blends the two discursive strands into a powerful rhetorical amalgam of which he is certain it will appeal to his patriotic English readers. This noble standard of common sense, that is, an intuitive (and thus slightly vulgar), but still superior and unfailing ‘good sense,’ is what he will also recommend later to his son in one of his letters of polite education: Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of: abide by it, it will counsel you best. Read and hear, for your amusement, ingenious systems, nice questions subtily agitated, with all the refinements that warm imaginations suggest; but consider them only as exercitations for the mind, and return always to settle with common sense. (Chesterfield 1800: 129; letter LXII)

Prototypically, Chesterfield’s common sense encapsulates here all the standard connotations of a plain, sober, and reliable sense of judgment with which to tell right from wrong, true from false, and practical from unpractical. Since such ‘good sense’ is rather rare, there is a difficulty of defining it, as Chesterfield acknowledges already in his Common Sense essay from 1737: “Should I here be ask’d then what I mean by Common Sense, it is so uncommon a Thing, I confess I should be at Loss to know how to define it” (CS1: 3).²⁰³ Its rare occurrence in

of Genius and Learning” to wrap up “a little parcel” of “the Wisdom and Knowledge, requisite for the Welfare of Society,” for example by putting it “into Proverbs, to be scattered amongst the People, and inculcated to Children from their Infancy” (Philips 1733: I, 72). Such a measure, Philips is convinced, “would very much contribute to prevent, for the future, the great Scarcity of Common Sense in Britain” (Philips 1733: I, 72). In this passage, which precedes Chesterfield’s essay by two decades, common sense seems to be viewed as distributable contents of wisdom, rather than a faculty of judgment. Besides that, the author’s idea of remedying the British populace’s general lack of common sense reflects an Enlightenment-typical optimism that is slightly at odds with the scepticism towards pedantry and complicated learning characteristic of later common sense discourse. As can also be seen, the chauvinistic claim of Britain’s supremacy in matters of common sense has not become a fixed point in the discourse of national identity yet, since the author laments the widespread lack of British common sense.  See also chapter I.2 above  The difficulty of defining common sense in positive terms is one of the commonplaces of common sense discourse. As I have mentioned several times in the chapters above, this commonplace is echoed later by the Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid in his 1785 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, when he describes common sense as a principle of

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everyday life arises from the circumstance that “it is rather that Rule by which Men judge of other People’s Actions, than direct their own; the plain Result of right Reason admitted by all, and practiced by few” (CS1: 3 – 4). When Chesterfield ‘modestly’ claims this rare gift of ‘humble’ common sense for himself (“which is all I pretend to myself”), it is obvious that this is no more than a hedged assertion of his own superior sense of judgment, by the authority of which his readers are to take the effusions of this new political weekly as infallible common sense. *** The general impact of the Common Sense weekly on the London publication market was such that it not only became the leading oppositional press organ, but it also led to imitators and competitors who tried to capitalize on the success of the paper. Last but not least, Common Sense naturally caused some fierce pro-Walpole reactions in the press market. I will deal with them step by step in the following. That Common Sense superseded other oppositional papers as the most popular one, is indicated by a remark by Horace Walpole, Robert Walpole’s son, who states that the hitherto most visible opposition paper The Craftsman, originally the mouthpiece of the older oppositional forces around Bolingbroke and Pulteney, “went out of repute on the commencement of Common Sense” (qtd. in Lockwood 1983: 43).²⁰⁴ As for other competing periodicals, Common Sense received a competitor from its own midst after running for little more than half a year, when on 26 November 1737 the journal Old Common Sense was published for the first time. After a rift among the contributors to Common Sense over the question where the magazine should continue to be printed, Old Common Sense split off from the established Common Sense. ²⁰⁵ Apart from con-

falsification rather than verification, being “more extensive in refutation than in confirmation” (Reid 2002: 433).  The quotation is from a manuscript note in Walpole’s copy of Chesterfield’s Miscellaneous Works (1777), archived in the British Library.  According to the first issue of Old Common Sense (published as no. 43, parallel to the issue numbering of Common Sense), the original magazine changed to a publisher in Whitefriars Street (off Fleet Street), while the former publisher at Bartholomew Close, less than a mile away, now offered a magazine by the title of Old Common Sense. In a postscript to Old Common Sense no. 43, the author blames the selfish interests of one of Common Sense’s authors (perhaps Charles Molloy), who single-handedly changed printers, as the reason for the inception of Old Common Sense. One may well assume that economic interests played a role in the decision of the publisher at Bartholomew Close to continue with the publication of a successful oppositional weekly, even if he was forced to modify the original title. Who exactly wrote for Old Common Sense remains unclear. It is certain that Molloy and Chesterfield continued to write for Common

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tinual attacks on the authors of Common Sense, Old Common Sense had the same oppositional agenda as its sister magazine, but pursued this altogether in a more direct, less witty, and rather one-dimensional way. In one issue from the next year, the author of Old Common Sense solemnly vows to have “every Thing that is said, wrote, or done […], be brought to the Test of Common Sense: And, if ’tis not found both incorruptibly honest, and evidently useful, let us reject what is trifling, and expose what is hypocritical” (OCS no. 74, 1 July 1738: 1). This strict, if not obsessive, tone is to be found in many of the political tirades of the paper, and differs considerably from the elegant rhetoric of most the Common Sense essays (from the first year at least). Accordingly, the alarmist voice of the paper’s propagandist is entirely free of wit and irony when he paints a picture of revolutionary doom and catastrophe on the horizon, should the present government not be stopped in their oppressive ways: Perhaps no Nation in the Universe ever was favour’d with so many Opportunities to render themselves free and happy, as this; and, if ’tis decent to say so, the very Hottentots themselves could hardly have made a worse Use of them: Witness the long and bloody Civil War with Charles the First, the military Government that followed it, the Restoration, the Revolution, and the Establishment of the Crown in a new Family! Either of them alone sufficient to put Oppression out of the Power of any future Administration, and yet all lost: Insomuch, that we are now as effectually at the Mercy of the present, as if no such Events had ever taken Place; and if any Attempts should be made to enslave our Posterity, the whole Series of past Mischiefs must be acted over again, or they must bow their Necks to the Yoke for good and all. (OCS no. 74, 1 July 1738: 1)

Although this seems a shrill exaggeration of the state of political affairs, this historical rundown of England’s revolutionary upheavals in the former century is quite indicative of the compensatory function of eighteenth-century common sense discourse in Britain: It was a matter of political common sense to avoid the past nightmares of revolution in the present age. With the persistent danger of a Jacobite overthrow of the monarchy (which would culminate eventually in the 1745 attempt of the Young Pretender) and a ministry that seemed to be putting at risk civil rights at home and British interests abroad, the threat of history repeating itself (“the whole Series of past Mischiefs must be acted over again”) was perceived as real. Despite its doom-laden tone, the contributions of Old Common Sense to the political debate can be seen as an effect of compensatory common sense, which is to correct dangerous extremism, here in the political arena in which the authority of common sense was needed more than anywhere else.

Sense, which outlasted its new rival by four years (Old Common Sense already ceased to be published after less than two years in June 1739); for all this, see Lockwood (1983: 44– 45).

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And yet, on the whole, Old Common Sense is an example of what Thomas Lockwood (1983: 45) has described as the tedium of oppositional propaganda that repeats itself in “drearily familiar weekly political argument.”²⁰⁶ Another case of a short-lived imitation of the Common Sense weekly is the magazine Country Common Sense, published in Gloucester, of which only the first two numbers were printed in the periodical form, while five more essays were published together with the first two as a collection volume in 1739.²⁰⁷ An immediate, particular concern for the author seems to have been the state of the “Woollen Trade” (1739: iv) in England and Ireland, on which many of the essays focus; the author laments the structural disadvantages of British wool manufacture compared to other European countries, and strongly warns his readers against Britain putting at risk one of the nation’s important economic foundations of wealth and prosperity. In this the author professes to be guided by the true common sense of liberty-loving patriotic Britons, which should be based on loyalty to King and country, but which will also oblige him to raise concerns where necessary: An Englishman, whose Mind is governed by Principles of Virtue, will always pursue what he sincerely thinks is most for his Country’s Good; devoid of the servile Impressions of Complaisance for the Great, Fear of Men in Power, or Indulgence towards publick Vices, when they plainly tend to publick Ruin.—To speak the Truth freely, when Occasion requires it, I am sure, it is a Duty which the Author of Man’s Being expects from him: And it is my humble Opinion likewise, that the same is the only sure Way, in which a Person can discharge those other great Duties, which he owes to his King and Country; however the Principles or Practice of some pretended Loyal People may teach the contrary. (Country Common-Sense 1739: iv)

Such licence to speak out freely the author explicitly draws from the London Common Sense, whose model of setting up a tribunal of common sense (as Chesterfield announces in the first issue) he seeks to emulate for matters in the country: It is from this great Desire which I have, that we would follow the Example of Those of the City, in all that’s Virtuous and Publick-Spirited, that we have entitled these Essays, Country Common-Sense. The most Part of your Readers, no doubt, have read or heard of, a Weekly Paper published under that Title, in London. […] On reading, I find it to be, what its Title speaks for it, viz. An Essay towards persuading Mankind to judge of all Things, by that

 An exception to this was an allegorical piece called “The Vision of Common Sense,” which, despite being derivative in many ways, enjoyed some public success, as it was reprinted in later issues of the magazine. I will return to this below when discussing Fielding’s Pasquin and several other allegorical representations of common sense.  This can be gathered from the preface (“To the Reader”) to the volume.

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Rule of Right Reason, which is common to every one; in whose Light, all Things appear the same, undisguised, and as they really are in themselves, to every Spectator. (Country Common-Sense 1739: 8)

The country author is so fascinated by Chesterfield’s idea of a common-sense tribunal that he is convinced it “will prove more Infallible, than even his Holiness and all his Conclave” (1739: 8). Thus, “we shou’d have a Court of Common-Sense among us in the Country too” since “it is the antient and undoubted Right of us Englishmen, to have Justice administred at our own Doors in the Country” (1739: 8). Compared to the urbane way, in which Chesterfield in the London Common Sense toys with the image of erecting “a Kind of Tribunal, for the Crimina Læsi Sensus Communis, or the Pleas of Common Sense” (CS1: 5), the author of Country Common-Sense betrays an enthusiasm that comes from undaunted faith in the unbiased neutrality and infallibility of common sense: “Common Sense will never forget its Station, or the Duties of its Office, or abuse its Power; it will never oppress its Enemies, nor favour its Friends, by departing from Equity and Justice” (1739: 9). What makes the engendering concept of the original Common Sense magazine so successful is its ability to capitalize on the strong public desire for a firm ground of truth and virtue. It is such a fixed point that the concept of common sense seemed to offer amidst turbulent political times. *** The appropriation of common sense for political interests of the opposition did not remain unchallenged by pro-government voices, even though – and this is significant for our evaluation of the impact of common sense discourse in the political sphere – common sense itself as a valuable and authoritative norm remained unquestioned. The envy on the side of the Court Whigs for the opposition’s public claim to common sense is palpable when the pro-Walpole author of a comment in The Gentleman’s Magazine attacked “the redoubted Author of Common Sense” and identified the damage of the magazine stemming not so much from its contents, but from the Title of his Paper, behind which he has the Art of sheltering himself in perfect Security. He defeats his Enemies by calling them Enemies of Common Sense, and silences the strongest Objections and the clearest Reasonings, by assuring his Readers that they are contrary to Common Sense. (Gentleman’s Magazine 1739: IX, 112)

However, the commentator cannot help but “confess, to the immortal Honour of this great Writer, that I can remember but two Instances of a Genius able to use a few Syllables to such great and so various Purposes” (Gentleman’s Magazine 1739: IX, 112).

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The earliest public rebuttal to Common Sense came from Lord Hervey, a courtier and ministerial colleague of Walpole, whose pamphlet A Letter to the Author of Common-Sense; or The Englishman’s Journal, of Saturday, April 16 (1737) was prompted by an essay in Common Sense of the said date about liberty in ancient Rome, in which the author of the piece took the resistance of the Roman senate against out-of-hand taxation as an argument to deplore Walpole’s tax policies. Hervey, with a haughty and condescending attitude, charged the Common Sense author with gross mistranslations of Latin text passages and other historical distortions. Apart from the actual article with which Hervey found fault due to its historical misrepresentations as well as its unfair critical thrust (in Hervey’s eyes), his pamphlet also contains a general attack mounted against the presumptuous title of the Common Sense weekly and its exclusive claim to truth: “But unless you thought, by taking the Title of Common Sense, you had monopolized the Thing it self, how could you ever imagine what you usher into the World under that Title, would ever pass for such, or be acknowledged to deserve that Name […]?” (Hervey 1737: 2) However strongly Hervey objects to what to him is an abuse of the term common sense by the oppositional weekly, he quite obviously acknowledges the noble standard itself; in other words, common sense may be appropriated as a concept and twisted for political interests, the authority of common sense as a faculty of clear discernment and prudent judgment is not disputed by him. In fact, he is even willing to acknowledge, perhaps also in reverence to the aristocratic background of Lord Chesterfield, his adversary in the House of Lords, that the initial public success of the Common Sense weekly is well deserved: The Fraternity who are engaged in this Paper, I own, set out with so much Wit, Humour, and Vivacity, in some of their earliest Essays, that I promised my self great Pleasure in the revival of a sort of Writing, that for many Years last past, I had been mortified with thinking was quite lost to our Island: but the Undertakers of your Journal, have done like some Tradesmen, who, in order to get People’s Custom, use them astonishingly well in the two or three first Bargains, and then never after give them any thing worth a farthing: or, like some Vintners, who think they can cheat you into taking a Hogshead of thick, flat, spoil’d or brew’d Wine, by sending you a Pint of good and pure Wine for Taste. (Hervey 1737: 3 – 4)

Hervey thus establishes an air of imperious authority about himself, a superiority of taste, to be precise, by virtue of which he can pass authoritative judgment on the pettiness of the paper’s exploits – after all, it is for good reason that at the end of the quoted passage he compares the paper’s quality with that of wine, that is, with an area of perception concerned with the sense of taste. The discursive as well as conceptual proximity of common sense and taste in the early

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eighteenth century has already been shown above (see chapter II.1), and so it may suffice to say here that by suggesting his superior taste, Lord Hervey in fact establishes his superior faculty of common sense and sets it above that of those insignificant Common Sense hacks. From this superior vantage point, he goes on to affect boredom and mock the tedious anti-ministerial paper for its low quality and cheap predictability: However, I confess to you the dull Impudence of what I suppose you call Satire in these dormitive Papers, or the insipid Flatness of what I conclude you honour with the Name of Panegyrick in some others, are not the things that provoke me most; the usual Strain of anti-ministry Papers, and the common Run of Dedications, have so inured my Patience to Writings of this kind, that I can take up a Paper in this Stile, read a Paragraph or two, till I know, by what I have found, what I am to expect, and can then lay it aside as calmly as I took it up, and never think of it again. (Hervey 1737: 7– 8)

The affected ennui of the aristocrat might have hurt the pride of the author of the piece in question, a successful effort at regaining the upper hand in the battle for opinion leadership it was not, and an appropriate strategy to silence the opposition it was even less. What Hervey did manage to expose, however, was the self-immunizing, authoritarian aura of impartial truth-telling that the Common Sense writers had tried to create around themselves by their alluring appeals to common sense – this was after all what made these appeal so attractive. This strategy was further exposed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her riposte to the Common Sense magazine and its attacks on Walpole, whose second wife happened to be one of Lady Mary’s best friends (see Halsband 1970: xviii). In her own biweekly periodical with the programmatic title The Nonsense of Common-Sense, which had a brief run of nine issues in the winter of 1737– 38, she denounced the magazine’s authors as a “Club of People who think they have monopolized Common-Sense” (Wortley Montagu 1970a: 70). That even her choice of words resembles Lord Hervey’s is not surprising since they were close friends, and Hervey had probably collaborated with her on a number of texts, most notably Lady Mary’s attack on Alexander Pope after he had slandered her and Hervey in his satiric epistles.²⁰⁸ Yet, the argumentative strategy with which she took Common Sense to task for its impertinent and corrosive criticism of the government differed slightly from Hervey’s. In the opening paragraph of the first number of The Nonsense of Common-Sense from 16 December 1737, she complains about

 For a brief discussion of Lady Mary’s “Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace” (Wortley Montagu 1970b), see chapter III.2 above.

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the apparent shift of meaning in the term common sense, which was brought about by the publication of the oppositional paper by that name: The Title of this Paper would appear very absurd, if these Words, Common-Sense, were to be now understood in the same Manner they were last Christmas, when they were supposed to mean that low Degree of Understanding, which directed a reasonable Man in the Course of his ordinary Affairs; for as to all Projectors and Refiners in Politicks, under whatever Shape they appeared, they were never believed to be under the Guidance of Common-Sense. But these poor Words have since been applied very differently; they now mean a certain Paper with many Flights and small Reason, that is handed about at Coffee-Houses and Tea Tables, for the Amusement of the Idle, the Entertainment of the Malicious, and the Astonishment of the Ignorant, who are very numerous in this Part of the World. (Wortley Montagu 1970a: 1)

Significantly, Lady Mary is quite dismissive of the value of common sense in politics, arguing that political leadership takes more than just “that low Degree of Understanding, which directed a reasonable Man in the Course of his ordinary Affairs.” Evidently, her argumentative strategy is to reduce common sense to what even Chesterfield called a principle “open to vulgar Understandings.” By thus using common sense in the ‘minimizing view’ and declaring this form of common sense unfit for refined statesmanship, Lady Mary tries to undermine the aura of authority the Common Sense authors have given their paper and attack the very premises from which they receive their argumentative weight. However, one important attribute on which the Common Sense authors insist to be indivisible from common sense – impartiality – even Lady Mary cannot do without: “I will positively praise whatever I think right; tho’ I foresee I shall be supported in this Design by no Party whatever” (Wortley Montagu 1970a: 2). Obviously, she feels obliged to feign an unbiased ‘common-sense’ position for her biased political commentary “since she was aware that to affect a non-partisan attitude would lend weight and persuasiveness to her periodical,” as Robert Halsband (1970: xvii) remarks.²⁰⁹ Another reaction to the Common Sense periodical, in which the author also tried to undermine the authority of the opposition’s claims to common sense, came from the poet Thomas Newcomb, one of the few literary figures on Walpole’s side,²¹⁰ although of a much lesser public standing than Gay, Pope, Field-

 For another comment on Lady Mary’s journal in the view of gender aspects see below, chapter V.2.  Newcomb, who lived a long life from 1675 to 1766 and was, by his mother’s side, a great grandson of Edmund Spenser, wrote several odes dedicated to Walpole, one of them on his

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ing or others. Even though Walpole was the main reference point of political writing for some two decades – which led David Hume to exclaim in 1742 that the prime minister “is the subject of above half the paper that has been blotted in the nation within these twenty years” (qtd. in Goldgar 1976: 3) –, support for Walpole in literary circles was virtually non-existent. Bertrand Goldgar has argued that the resentment was mutual because “for perhaps the first time in England, the most talented writers of a generation faced a government which made no bones about its hostility to men of letters and its contempt for their role in society” (Goldgar 1976: 6). Although Walpole, between 1732 and 1741 alone, reportedly spent over fifty thousand pounds on hired hack writers and pamphleteers to fight the opposition press in the battle for public opinion (see Halsband 1970: xiv), Lord Chesterfield gleefully pointed out Walpole’s total lack of support from the literary world in an issue of Common Sense from 8 October 1737 (no. 37): This certainly never happen’d in any Reign, or under any Administration before; for […] I challenge the Ministerial Advocates to produce one Line of Sense, or English, written on their side of the Question for these last Seven Years.—Has any one Person or distinguish’d eminency, in any one Art of Science, shown the least Tendency to support or defend ’em?— Has there been an Essay, in Verse or Prose, has there been even a Distich, or an Advertisement, fit to be read, on the Side of the Administration?—But on the other side, what Numbers of Dissertations, Essays, Treatises, Compositions of all Kinds, in Verse and Prose, have been written, with all that Strength of Reasoning, Quickness of Wit, and Elegance of Expression, which no former Period of Time can equal?—Has not every body got by heart, Satires, Lampoons, Ballads, and Sarcasms against the Administration? And can any body recollect, or repeat one Line for it? —What can be the Cause of this? It cannot be, that those who are able to serve the honourable Person, despair of being rewarded by him, since the known Instances of his Liberality, to the worst Writers, are sure Pledges of his Profusion to the best. (CS1: 248)

With Chesterfield hinting at Walpole’s “Liberality” of paying hirelings to write on his “side of the Question,” it is very likely that the Reverend Thomas Newcomb was paid by the government to defend its policies. In one poem from an entire collection of pro-government poems and essays published in 1740, he also lambasts the Common Sense journal. In the satirical “Verses Address’d to One of the Suppos’d Authors of Common Sense,” Newcomb chooses a line of attack similar to Lady Mary’s, but his rhetoric is blunter and more violent in tone, as can be seen in the opening stanzas of the poem:

retirement as prime minister in 1742, another on Walpole’s death in 1747 (see Chalmers 1815: 111– 112).

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If vulgar sense is common sense, As all learn’d criticks have agreed, Thine to its title has pretence, For thine is common sense indeed. Common and prostitute agree, Whoe’er bids most, when put to sale, Is sure to buy both her and thee, The patriot’s tongue, and strumpet’s tail. Whate’er is common we despise, Our wives, and wine, if common, slight; Change then thy style, if thou art wise, And proper sense, not common write. (Newcomb 1740: 34; ll. 1– 12)

Newcomb tries to insult the Common Sense author (he most probably meant Charles Molloy) by likening him and all the other “patriot” writers to prostitutes, which seems rather silly given the fact that Walpole lavishly rolled out money, e. g. in the form of pensions, for his own writers. As regards his argumentative approach, Newcomb takes great pains to undermine the high moral ground of the periodical by redefining common as base and thus denigrating the concept of common sense as well. In the following stanzas, he affronts Molloy, who also worked as a playwright, for his “wicked rhiming” (Newcomb 1740: 34; l. 14) and attacks the opposition figureheads “St. J––n” (St. John = Bolingbroke), “P–––––y” (Pulteney), “S–––––p” (Stanhop[e] = Chesterfield), and “L–tt–––n” (Lyttelton) directly by name (1740: 35; ll. 31– 32, 36 – 37). In the end, Newcomb calls for the retirement of the “pigmy patriots” (1740: 36; l. 53) and lashes out at the ‘pilferer’ Edward Cave, the editor of the popular Gentleman’s Magazine, who would select the best essays from Common Sense and other oppositional papers for his magazine:²¹¹ Their lying Journals let ’em fill With trade quite lost, and tradesmen broken; Enriching each learn’d Magazine With speeches never heard, nor spoken. While pilf’ring C–ve selects from thence Something each fruitful month divine, And shews his want of common sense In praising, and in printing thine. (Newcomb 1740: 36; ll. 57– 64)

 Samuel Johnson contributed his first essays to Cave’s magazine in 1738, later also his famous ‘parliamentary reports’ – verbatim reporting was banned at the time – under the title of “Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia” in 1741.

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In the end, due to his utter helplessness of piling insult upon insult, Newcomb cannot help but contradict his own argument and acknowledge the standard of common sense, otherwise his criticism of Cave – as someone lacking common sense – would miss its target. Why then was the attraction to common sense discourse so great in the political area, despite the fact that many commentators (naturally those that are attacked by it more than others) saw through the design to use it as a rhetorical weapon? The pressure for subjects to accept it as a rational norm in order to enter public discourse and speak with authority was simply irresistible at the time. Due to this pressure and startled by the success of the Common Sense weekly, some pro-Walpole writers felt compelled to deal with the concept of common sense itself in order to pull the carpet from under the opposition’s feet, and use it themselves as a strategy of persuasion for their own arguments. One anonymous pamphleteer who did this on a more serious note than, for instance, Newcomb or even Lord Hervey, was the anonymous author of the long-winded tract Common Sense: Its Nature and Use from 1738, which shall be my last example of the dispute between government and opposition press about common sense. This proministerial pamphlet was a reaction to an article in Common Sense ²¹² which was harshly critical of the government’s diplomatic handling of the “Spanish Affair” (in which British merchant ships en route from India were searched and seized by Spanish battleships – an affair that would erupt in the War of Jenkins’ Ear one year later). The author sets out with an attack typical of all pro-Walpole retorts to the oppositional journal: I have once before said, that the Authors of the Journals, call’d Common Sense, whatever Share of it they might have themselves, were not in earnest in refering [sic] their Readers to it, but artfully evaded it, and dress’d Things up with Glosses to common Passions, common Weaknesses and vulgar Sense. (Common Sense: Its Nature and Use 1738: 3)

To overcome the partisan abuse of the authoritative name of common sense “by two Journals being read every Week with this Title” (1738: 7), the author endeavours in a philosophical manner to define the ‘true’ meaning of the word, that is, a non-partisan ‘general’ common sense. He asserts that common sense is not just that lowly intuitive faculty “by which we keep ourselves from falling into Fire and Water, and chuse a Piece of Bread to eat, rather than a Piece of Wood,” but “that general Perception or Sensation of Things which is common to all Men” (1738: 8). In the following argumentation, the author develops the idea

 The pamphlet was a follow-up to an earlier article published in the ministerial press organ The Daily Gazetteer from 21 November 1737, which is reprinted as an appendix to the pamphlet.

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of a disinterested epistemological principle universal to all humankind that is distinct from matters of taste – in judgments of the latter, “Particular Men may be biass’d or blinded by Interest, Passions, Appetites, or Humours, which often are opposite, and contradictory, and may be as various as there are Men, or Sets of Men” (1738: 8). Instead – and with the obvious intention of debunking as politically biased the views sold as judgments of common sense by the Common Sense authors – the author argues that the correct understanding of the term in question should be a “general Common Sense, this involuntary and passive Perception, which shews Things as they really are, and therefore it is, That all Men on the same Proportion of Evidence, see Things in the same Manner, tho’ they may act and speak differently” (1738: 8 – 9). He gives the following example to highlight the difference between taste and common sense: Some love the bitter of Gentian in Wine, others hate it; but there is as wide a Difference in the Taste and Colour of that, and of Salt and Sugar, to the Perception of the Man who loves it, as to his that hates it, the Distinction remains and is the same, notwithstanding that their Appetites lead them to chuse differently, as to the Use and Application of it; they do not confound one Thing for another, their Common Sense sees and determines in respect to the Difference between Sugar and Salt in the same Manner. (Common Sense: Its Nature and Use 1738: 9)

In order to make this distinction fruitful for the political ends of the pamphlet, the author proceeds to charge the writers of the opposition with rhetorical trickery to suspend their readers’ common sense and thus blind the “Eye of the Understanding”: Therefore it is that these artful Writers, whose Business is to impose on Men, and who themselves see the Force of it, are obliged to find out Evasions and Amusements to take Mens Common Sense off, (which is the Eye of the Understanding) from seeing Things, and, like Legerdemain Juglers, divert the Eyes of the Spectators from the Thing itself, till they have convey’d a very different Object in the room of it, and then, like expert Craftsmen, tell them it is the same, tho’ no more so in Reality, than a Six-pence is a flying Bird, or that the King of Great Britain’s calling the Spaniards to Account, with Spirit and Force on every justifiable Occasion, is tamely submitting to their Impositions […]. (Common Sense: Its Nature and Use 1738: 9 – 10)²¹³

Even if the argument occasionally slips into a redundant and confusing rant about ‘true’ common sense, the author’s strategy is significant since it goes in

 The swipe at the “expert Craftsmen” who deal with words like sleight-of-hand jugglers is a pun on The Craftsman, a famous older oppositional periodical founded by Nicholas Amhurst (alias Caleb d’Anvers) in 1726.

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the opposite direction of what Hervey, Wortley Montagu, or Newcomb attempt: instead of downplaying the value of common sense, this author confirms its worth and elevates it further, just to bring home to his readers that the Common Sense authors fall short of this high standard. Accordingly, Chesterfield’s image of the “Tribunal of Common Sense” is here turned against the opposition writers: When the Journal with this Title first appear’d, they talk’d so much of bringing Things to the Tribunal of Common Sense, that I own I expected something extraordinary from it: I soon found, indeed, that they could not be in earnest somewhere, that is, I knew they must either drop the Topicks they propos’d to proceed on, or drop the Criterion they propos’d to try them by. I presently saw they had chosen the latter, for nothing can look this Tribunal in the Face, that is not consistent with Truth and right Reason, and every of those Actions they had a Mind to censure, being so consistent, as to be justified by such Trial, they therefore had no farther Business with Common Sense […]. (Common Sense: Its Nature and Use 1738: 15 – 16)

While the opposition writers either wilfully distort or are incapable of using that sense principally available to them, it is the ministers of the present government “who have their Common Sense clear” and are able to act accordingly “when the giddy Multitudes are to be govern’d, and Laws to be made for the Good of a Nation, when Peace and War are upon the Carpet, and the subtle Designs of the great Ministers of foreign Princes are to be penetrated into, and guarded against” (1738: 18). By having a pro-government writer arguing in favour of “undisturb’d and unsophisticated Common Sense” (1738: 19) in politics – with the implication that this capability lies with the ministry rather than the opposition –, the victory march of common sense discourse in the political arena is complete. The conviction that there must be such a thing as “Common Sense, or that passive Sensation or Perception, by which Things, and their Relation to one another appear to the Mind in their uncloath’d Simplicity” (1738: 19) – in other words, the unbiased, unbarred view of truth and ‘things as they are’ – is an unquestionable consensus among all parties involved; it is so much stronger than any sceptical suspicion of an ultimately unknowable objective reality behind a multitude of subjective views. What is therefore striking about all participants in the heated political debates, irrespective of whether they belong to the pro-government or opposition camp, is the urge to give oneself the appearance of being as neutral, objective, impartial, and unbiased as possible. The new populist fashion²¹⁴ of invoking

 See also Rosenfeld (2011: 46), who attributes the popularity of the Common Sense magazine to their successful appropriation of the vox populi: “Here was an old theme in the literature celebrating common sense – the defense of the common people, based on their natural instinct

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some standard of common sense for one’s own partisan position – in order to veil this very partisanship – is instrumental in achieving such an appearance; at the same time it obviously devalues the very standard invoked and betrays it as a mere rhetorical ploy.

4.2 English Common Sense Personified – Pasquin and the Many Lives of Common Sense An important factor promoting common sense discourse in the heated political debates of the mid-eighteenth century is allegorical personification, by which representations of common sense are able to gain a place in the English cultural imaginary of the age. Contrary to other core values in the construction of Englishness and Britishness, such as liberty and virtue, which are represented in the iconic tradition of personifying Britannia as a mythical nymph,²¹⁵ common sense could not draw on any such iconic tradition. If anything, common sense as a faculty of judgment could be remotely associated with the scales of Iustitia, but there is no iconography of common sense itself up to the mid-eighteenth century. This changes almost overnight with Henry Fielding’s play Pasquin: A Dramatick Satire of the Times from 1736, which features the allegorical character of Queen Common-Sense in the mock-tragic part of the play. Fielding’s popular piece, at the time the biggest stage success since John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera from 1728,²¹⁶ provides common sense discourse with a clearly defined image with strong nationalist overtones, as it is reminiscent of both the mythical goddess Britannia and the historical Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth (and perhaps, even less remotely, Queen Anne). Less than a year after Pasquin’s premiere at the Haymarket, Lord Chesterfield intimates in the first number of Common Sense that Fielding’s character of Queen Common-Sense has served as an inspiration for

for knowing and saying what’s what – turned toward newly political and, indeed, populist ends.”  A typical example from the early modern period would be Anthony Munday’s The Triumphes of Re-United Britania (1605), a pageant performed in honour of the coronation of the Scottish king James VI as James I, King of England, in which Britannia is represented as a nymph: “On a Mount triangular, as the Island of Britayne it selfe is described to bee, we seate in the Supreame place, under the shape of a fayre and beautifull Nymph, Britania […]” (n. pag.).  See Cleary (1984: 87), who reports that Pasquin had “the greatest first season since The Beggar’s Opera.”

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the title of the periodical.²¹⁷ The Common Sense journal itself then adds the metaphor of a common sense tribunal to pass infallible judgment on all follies, foibles, and (political) extremes.²¹⁸ Another year later, in an issue of Old Common Sense, common sense is represented as a glorious goddess with emblems of liberty, justice, and truth, now clearly evoking the iconography of the national goddess Britannia.²¹⁹ Further allegories and visions of common sense appear in magazine essays in the following decades, even a full-length ‘historical novel’ in two volumes, The Life and Adventures of Common Sense: An Historical Allegory (1769) by Herbert Lawrence. All these examples, which shall be examined now, prove how Fielding’s Queen Common-Sense from Pasquin became the starting point for imaginative manifestations of a common sense discourse charged with political and nationalist meaning. *** It is a well-known fact, but still rather undervalued critically, that before Henry Fielding became the famous novelist for which he is mostly remembered nowadays, he was a prolific writer of plays, penning twenty-six of them between 1728 and 1737, and was securely established as London’s most celebrated playwright, until the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 ended his stage career. Many of his notorious political plays were satires in the genre of so-called ‘rehearsal play,’ that is, meta-theatrical satires about the production of stage-plays, a genre with old roots that was flourishing at the time,²²⁰ especially since Gay’s enormous success with his meta-theatrical and equally political Beggar’s Opera in 1728. Pasquin, which takes its name from the Pasquino statue in Rome, a place for posting anonymous lampoons (‘pasquinades’) since the sixteenth century,²²¹ is quite a special rehearsal play as it shows the rehearsing of not just one but two separate plays, a comedy entitled “The Election” and a tragedy called “The Life and Death

 “An ingenious Dramatick Author has consider’d Common Sense as so extraordinary a Thing, that he has lately, with great Wit and Humour, not only personified it, but dignified it too with the Title of a Queen […]” (CS1: 4).  “As to the Design of my Paper, it is to take in all Subjects whatsoever, and try them by the Standard of Common Sense.—I shall erect a Kind of Tribunal, for the Crimina Læsi Sensus Communis, or the Pleas of Common Sense […]” (CS1: 5).  “The Goddess was seated on an Ivory Throne of curious Workmanship (on which were emblematically represented Justice, Truth, and Liberty) under a Canopy of Gold […]” (OCS no. 53, 4 February 1738: 1).  See Bevis (1990) for information on the historical background of the genre, also in view of Fielding’s later development into a novelist.  See Spaeth (1939) for the ancient classical background of Renaissance pasquinades in Martial’s epigrams.

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of Common Sense.” The two plays within the play are being rehearsed successively by a group of actors under the direction of Trapwit, the comic poet, and Fustian, the tragic poet, who both frequently interrupt the rehearsals either with self-praise for the wit and ingenuity of their own play or with disparaging sneers about the play of the other, while there are even more interruptions coming from prompters, quarrelling actors, and a theatre critic called Sneer-well. Initially, the comedy within the comedy – Fielding’s entire play is a burlesque comedy after all – was of greater appeal to the audience during Pasquin’s first season (see Cleary 1984: 86), which was probably due to the fact that “The Election” is a raucous and straightforward satire about bribery and corruption in elections. It shows how a country mayor is bribed for his vote first by the Whig candidates Lord Place and Colonel Promise, then by the local Tories Sir Henry Fox-Chace and Squire Tankard. While the mayor resolves to vote for the Tories, who are at least locals, his wife and his daughter, lured by the flattery and splendour of the Whig courtiers, force him to vote for the Whigs against his “conscience,” or rather his “interest” (which, as the director-playwright Trapwit shrewdly remarks, “are Words of the same Meaning”; PD: 280). However, when it turns out that Lord Place and Colonel Promise have lost the election to Fox-Chase and Tankard, all bribes promised to the mayor seem lost, until his wife suggests to him the ultimate solution to their quagmire, which is to report the Whigs as victors contrary to the actual result, which he gladly accepts to do. This biting satire of corruption affects both parties, even though the added twist of fraudulent election results seems to hurt Walpole’s Whigs most (they had won all elections since 1721). Besides political satire, “The Election,” just like the overall frame play, also contains meta-theatrical satire. In the forced conventional ending of “The Election” – the mayor’s daughter is married to Colonel Promise in the fifth act without having even spoken a word to each other onstage before – Fielding attacks the predictability and unimaginativeness of comedy authors, while it is also a nationalist swipe at implausible dramatic conventions adopted from France. This is made clear by Trapwit’s justification that the comedy-typical lovers’ bout has been happening offstage all this while: “What, would you have every Thing brought upon the Stage? I intend to bring ours to the Dignity of the French Stage […]” (PD: 282). Throughout all of Pasquin, Fielding’s wit and irony is a two-pronged weapon that attacks both political evils and literary follies. The meta-dramatic frame has an important function here, just as in Fielding’s later plays The Historical Register for the Year 1736 and Eurydice Hissed: the frequent interruptions of the staged rehearsals, which constantly break the audience’s illusion of witnessing ‘real’ action, are forerunners of the Brechtian alienation effect in that they lay bare the stagecraft and machinery in both theatre and politics. Especially the latter area is disenchanted in “The Election” as

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being corrupted by vice, foibles, and personal interests. Being an Augustan satire, the play implies common sense as a norm of moral and rational sanity that, although not displayed in “The Election” by any character or action in positive terms, is endorsed ex negativo. Fielding’s concern for common sense is much more conspicuous in “The Life and Death of Common Sense,” not only because of its title, but also due to the fact that the eponymous allegorical character is in fact the only positive, non-satiric character in all of Pasquin. Even if the play is essentially a mock-tragedy in a literally “Fustian” bathetic mode, the character of Queen Common-Sense is in line with the political norms that Pasquin propagates. This can be seen immediately on the level of plot where Queen Common-Sense is not only pitted against a foreign Queen Ignorance, who invades England with armies of “Singers, Fidlers, Tumblers, and Rope-dancers” (PD: 295) from Italy and France, but she also falls victim to the treacherous intrigues of her own corrupt courtiers Physick, Law, and Firebrand. Respectively, these stand for the ills of quack medicine, an impenetrable and corrupt jurisprudence, and a power-hungry (papist) clergy, while the chief-priest Firebrand is also in many respects a caricature of Walpole. All three courtiers feel they suffer from “the Lethargick Sway of Common-Sense” and hate “that drowsy Queen” (PD: 292). Physick complains that Common Sense “stops my proud Ambition! Keeps me down / When I would soar upon an Eagle’s Wing, / And thence look down and dose the World below” (PD: 292) – a criticism not only of selfish ambition, but also of an aloofness out of intellectual pride. Law bears a grudge to Common Sense for reducing his power as she demands the law to be “understood by all” (PD: 292). Firebrand, finally, is an enemy to Common Sense because he strives for “enlarg[ing] the Worship of the Sun: / To give his Priests a just Degree of Power, / And more than half the Profits of the Land” (PD: 293). The three conspire to overthrow their queen with the help of the imported Queen Ignorance, who arrives at Covent Garden with her motley crew of Italian and French entertainers – these are anathema to Fielding’s concept of a patriotic theatre with strong moral and political concerns, which is a form of aesthetic common sense vis-à-vis the silly amusements of foreign cultural origin. Three ghosts, a conventional tragic device of which Fustian, Pasquin’s ‘tragic’ poet, is exceedingly proud, try to warn the English queen (“Awake, great Common Sense, and sleep no more”; PD: 298) against the frauds of lawyers and physicians, the hypocrisy of courtiers, and all the new-fangled “nonsense” on the London stage (e. g. ballet, rope-dancing, and Italian opera) – but it is all in vain. Queen Common-Sense is stabbed to death by Firebrand himself and can only prophesy chaos in her dying speech (“all things shall topsy turvy turn”; PD: 310). The triumph of Queen Ignorance and the conspirators seems complete until Common-Sense returns as a ghost herself to haunt the leaders

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of misrule with her awe-inspiring spectral presence. Despite this allegorical plot being continually undercut by illusion-breaking intrusions from the frame-play level (Fustian’s tedious speeches on neoclassical dramatic theory as well as numerous ironies and in-jokes about the theatre world coming from actors, the critic, and other theatre staff),²²² there is still seriousness in all the bathos. The mock-tragedy does not devalue common sense – there is never any room for doubt that common sense is the satiric antithesis, that is, the aesthetic and political focal point of the play. What makes Pasquin such a multi-faceted and at times complex satirical play, is a technique reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, which Robert D. Hume (1988: 237) has called the “superimposition of targets.”²²³ While political and theatrical topicality are constantly blended into each other as the butt of Fielding’s ridicule, the superimposition of several satiric targets within one element can best be perceived in the character of Firebrand. As the priest of some heathen religion worshipping the sun as its highest deity, he is most immediately reminiscent of the Pope as the “chief-priest” of the Roman Catholic Church, which was as “heathen” to staunch Anglican Protestants as anything, and whose ‘magic beliefs defying all common sense’ (such as transubstantiation) were already the target of Swift’s representation of Peter in the Tale of the Three Brothers in A Tale of a Tub. Such standard criticism of Catholicism is reinforced in Pasquin by the priest Firebrand. Not only is his religion opposed to common sense, but the chief-priest’s presumptuous claim to infallibility is even more so, as Firebrand expressly states: “They [the gods] know their Interest better [than to side with Common-Sense; C.H.]; or at least / Their Priests do for ’em, and themselves. […] I’d be infallible! And that, I know, / Will ne’er be granted me by Common-Sense” (PD: 295). As Queen Common-Sense is indeed not willing to accept his infallibility, he pronounces her a heretical enemy to religion. Queen Common-Sense’s retort to this charge reproduces the conventional protestant common-sense argument against overbearing claims of religion: “I honour and adore the Sun! […] But know, I never will adore a Priest, / Who wears Pride’s Face beneath Religion’s Mask, / And makes a Pick-Lock of his Piety / To steal away the Liberty of Mankind” (PD: 300). This

 Laura McGrane (2005) stresses the political function of the illusion-breaking rehearsal frame, at which I have already hinted above, with specific reference to “The Life and Death of Common Sense”: “When Firebrand invokes Omens, Fustian as director demands more spectacular special effects, roaring thunder and blinding lightning. Because Fielding foregrounds the fictional nature of Fustian’s characters and the stagecraft that creates the illusion of Firebrand’s power, the audience understands that this sun priest is only a character. No mystical agent informs or pronounces his words” (McGrane 2005: 190).  In a footnote, Hume attributes this thought to J. Paul Hunter (see Hume 1988: 210).

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rather commonplace attack against Catholicism, on account of its hypocritical dogmas and sacraments veiling an earthly lust for power and domination, acquires a completely new meaning once Firebrand is identified as a parody of Walpole, which the audience was wont to do in the politically charged atmosphere of 1730s London. Then, all the attributes of greed, embezzlement, ambition for power, hypocrisy and public dissimulation could be transferred from the chiefpriest to a prime minister who seeks to “enlarge the Worship of the Sun [read George II; C.H.]: / To give his Priests [read ministers; C.H.] a just Degree of Power, / And more than half the Profits of the Land [from heavy taxation; C.H.]” (PD: 293). Queen Common-Sense, however much she is unaware at first of Firebrand’s stratagems, is duly opposed to such selfish and unpatriotic behaviour and thus serves as the allegorical figurehead of patriotic opposition.

Image : “The Judgment of the Queen of Common Sense”²²⁴

 A contemporary print depicting Queen Common-Sense handing over gold to the author Fielding for his play Pasquin, while holding a halter towards what appear to be the characters Firebrand, Law, and Physick from the play. (Reproduced from Henry Fielding, Plays and Poems in Five Volumes, volume 4, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967, 165.)

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The historical circumstances of Pasquin’s staging in the spring of 1736 provide further substance for this party-political reading of “The Life and Death of Common Sense,” which had largely escaped its contemporary audience at first, but soon after became the main reason for Fielding’s celebrated success (see also the caricature in Image 1, which portrays the author receiving a purse of gold from Queen Common-Sense for his play). Thomas R. Cleary has succinctly pointed out how the audience’s reception of the rather dull fustian tragedy changed during the first season after an advertisement in the playbill of a benefit performance (for the actor who played Fustian) hinted at the intended political message of the tragedy: Mr. Fustian desires the Audience […] to take particular Notice of the Tragedy, there being several New and very deep Things to be spoke by the Ghost of Tragedy, if the Cock does not crow him away too soon. N.B. As Mr. Fustian is the first Poet that ever cared to own, that he brought Ignorance upon the Stage, he hopes all her Friends will excuse his calling in particular upon them, and favour him with their Company along with the Friends of Common Sense, which he hopes will be the Foundation of a Coalition of Parties. (Qtd. in Cleary 1984: 88)

In his witty call for “a Coalition of Parties,” Fielding actually hints at his political allegiance to the so-called ‘Patriot Boys’ or ‘Cobham Cubs,’ which was a group of young Whig politicians that had formed under the patronage of the anti-Walpole Whig Lord Cobham, and included, among others, George Grenville, George Lyttelton, and William Pitt the Elder. As a Whig faction in opposition to Walpole, their political conviction resembled in fact that of the Tory ideologue and Jacobite Lord Bolingbroke, who condemned Walpole’s government as corrupted by partisan interests, and envisioned a true “Patriot” rule independent of party and faction – something that would in fact come true to an extent with the so-called ‘Broad-Bottom’ government two years after Walpole’s retirement in 1742. Hence, when Fielding in the playbill note expresses his support for “the Foundation of a Coalition of Parties,” he “could not advertise Broad-Bottom bias more clearly,” as Cleary (1984: 88) concludes. This cross-party appeal for opposition to the present state of government is underlined by Fielding’s canny remark about the “author” Fustian excusing himself for having brought Ignorance upon the stage: In literary terms, this mocks Fustian’s inadequacy as a tragedy author; in political terms, however, it is conciliatory gesture to invite the ignorant (i. e. the politically ignorant, but also those who had not fully understood the tragedy’s agenda)²²⁵ to join the ‘Broad-Bottom’ opposition.²²⁶ If we take this on

 In the play, the critic Sneer-well voices these concerns by wondering whether the allegory

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board for an evaluation of Pasquin’s role in the shaping of a ‘patriotic’ common sense discourse in British politics, it becomes clear that Fielding in his play promotes common sense not only as a faculty of shrewd and sober judgment with which the true enemies of the country are to be discerned (all the Firebrands and partisan corrupters in politics), but also as a consensual spirit that is to be strengthened among all who love their country and care about its future – in other words, Fielding’s Pasquin calls for common sense in judgment and common sense in patriotic feeling. This call to arms for joined political opposition has a strong nationalist tinge, which is the true ‘patriotic’ agenda of the “The Life and Death of Common Sense.” Given its popular success as a highly entertaining satiric burlesque, Pasquin perhaps falls short of amounting to a veritable rupture in common sense discourse, but it is definitely a momentous discursive event facilitating the connection between common sense discourse and a political discourse of British national identity. Before, the English discussion of common sense had been part of what Lovejoy defines as the uniformitarian impulse of Enlightenment: it was understood to be either a vulgar minimum of reason in the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition of a sixth sense evaluating the sensory data of the five external senses, or a superior form of understanding in the direction of what Descartes already called bon sens,²²⁷ but all in all not directly, let alone exclusively, related to the national self-concept of Britons. Now, common sense, meaning both astute rational judgment and a consensual collective perspective, is called upon as an integral part of a patriotic notion of what it means to be British. This connection between common sense and patriotism is already established in the prologue to “The Life and Death of Common Sense”: Britons, attend; and decent Reverence shew To her [i. e. Common-Sense; C.H.], who made th’ Athenian Bosoms glow; Whom the undaunted Romans could revere, And who in Shakespear’s time was worship’d here […]. (PD: 288)

of the tragedy will be understood by the audience: “This tragedy of yours, Mr. Fustian, I observe to be Emblematical; do you think it will be understood by the Audience?” (PD: 296)  Whoever is meant precisely by the friends of Ignorance, it might perhaps even be Jacobite Tories, as Queen Ignorance in the play commands the armies of France, the preferred place of refuge for English Jacobites (Bolingbroke had been exiled to France in 1735).  René Descartes in the Discours de la méthode (1637) explicitly appeals to the bon sens of humankind as a sufficient requirement for anybody to arrive at metaphysical truths: “[…] je pensai que les sciences des livres […] ne sont point si approchantes de la vérité, que les simples raisonnements que peut faire naturellement un homme de bon sens touchant les choses qui se présentent” (Descartes 1960: 50, sect. IV.i.).

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Common sense as an element of British national identity needs a tradition, as the idea of who one is is inseparably bound to the idea of who one was, i. e. the memory of one’s past,²²⁸ irrespective of how invented this tradition might be, to use Eric Hobsbawm’s term freely²²⁹ – and this is provided by Fielding in the form of Fustian’s reference to the ancestry of common sense spanning from Greek and Roman antiquity to Shakespearean England. But since Fustian is not a reliable voice in the play – his comments are potentially invalidated by his role as the target of meta-theatrical satire –, Fielding in the mock-tragedy’s epilogue, which is also the epilogue to the entire play of Pasquin, has to make sure that the call for common sense in politics and the theatre is understood as being in dead earnest and coming straight from the author himself: Our Author then in Jest thro’out the Play, Now begs a serious Word or two to say. Banish all Childish Entertainments hence; Let all that boast your Favour have pretence, If not to sparkling Wit, at least to Sense. (PD: 314)

Again, the moral imperative is double-edged: the banishing of “Childish Entertainments” and the resorting to “Sense” can be attributed to both the theatrical and the political stage. Restoring them both to common sense, however, is implied to be a matter of national urgency, out of an obligation to the grandeur of the British nation: Can the whole World in Science match our Soil? Have they a Locke, a Newton, or a Boyle? Or dare the greatest Genius of their Stage, With Shakespear, or immortal Ben engage? (PD: 314)

However, “Nature’s Bounty” (PD: 314), as British cultural heritage is called in the following line, is shown to be endangered by both political and theatrical corruption. Thus, the mock-tragedy’s outcome, the murder of Queen Common-

 Cf. Gillis (1994: 3): “The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity.”  Cf. Hobsbawm (1983: 1): “’Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices […], which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.” In the context of the English common-sense tradition, such “practices” I interpret liberally to be discursive ones, as in the quotation from Pasquin’s prologue above.

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Sense, is a seemingly bleak message about Britain’s future: it seems, as Laura McGrane (2005: 191) argues in her interpretation of the play, that CommonSense ultimately “fails to rise above the corruption”²³⁰ and leaves behind universal darkness reminiscent of the reign of Dulness in Pope’s Dunciad. Yet, Queen Ignorance and the traitors flee in horror at the sight of Queen Common-Sense’s ghost, who issues a grave warning to her enemies: “And all henceforth, who murder Common-Sense, / Learn from these Scenes that tho’ Success you boast, / You shall at last be haunted with her Ghost” (PD: 313). In other words, even though Queen Common-Sense falls – as she must, according to the rules of tragedy, which Fustian is so keen on observing strictly –, even though common sense has been abandoned on stages theatrical and political, her ghost remains and is haunting those who killed her in the form of plays like Pasquin and, one might add, oppositional magazines like The Craftsman, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Common Sense (less than a year after the plays premiere). In a last twist of irony, Fielding has Sneer-well, the theatre critic, point out this moral of the play: “I am glad you make Common-Sense get the better at last; I was under terrible Apprehensions for your Moral”; to which Fustian replies: “Faith, sir, this is almost the only Play where she has got the better lately” (PD: 313). This clearly underlines the sense of alarm beneath all the mockery in Pasquin: let’s not be fooled, English common sense is currently in dire straits. The satiric message was understood by Fielding’s contemporaries, as was the rallying cry in the epilogue, which is to provoke the audience into action to help British common sense get the better of its enemies. *** Now that Fielding’s Pasquin had sown the seeds of a patriotic common sense discourse to define British identity, its plants were shooting up soon after. Allegorical personifications of English common sense as a queen, goddess, or ancient hero became quite popular in the following years and underline how notions of Englishness and Britishness were strongly affected by common sense discourse.

 She goes on to claim: “Acting within the bounds of Fielding’s satire, she takes advice from ghosts and priests, falls under Firebrand’s knife, and returns to the play as a ghost herself. […] her very appearance betrays her tenuous victory. She has metamorphosed from a queen who speaks rationally into a shade who rises to music and frightens her audience. In other words, she has become the very thing that she (and Fielding) have denounced” (McGrane 2005: 191). This interpretation fails to do justice to the character of a warning this obviously has. Fielding does play the role of a modern Cassandra, but contrary to the mythological figure, his intention is to close the ranks behind him and mount a common-sense attack on Walpole’s government (as well as “nonsensical” entertainment on the stage).

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Interestingly, many allegories of common sense take a generic form that is perhaps most suitably described as vision or dream narrative. The reason for that is to be found in two early numbers of the Common Sense periodical, which in itself, as we have seen, was the most important disseminator of political common sense discourse. Part of the notoriety the magazine enjoyed was due to an outrageous satire published over two issues on 19 and 26 March 1737 (nos. 7 and 8), entitled “The Vision of the Golden Rump” (CS1: 46 – 63). One suspect for the piece’s authorship was indeed Fielding, who had made quite a name for himself with his series of anti-Walpole plays; but according to another rumour the piece was penned by a Jacobite, one Dr William King of Oxford, which, with hindsight, seems more likely indeed (see Battestin and Battestin 1989: 225 – 227).²³¹ “The Vision of the Golden Rump” is the bizarre narrative of a dream in which the dreamer visits a ritual ceremony in an exotic place (resembling Greenwich Park, as it occurs to the dreamer). During the ceremony, a high priestess inserts liquid gold into the golden posterior of the “Pagod,” an idol of worship that lets out oracular speeches through his enormous behind, while the big-bellied chief magician has his magic rod swallow all the precious offerings of the worshippers and add them to the golden rump of the pagod. It was not all too difficult for contemporary readers to discern in the pagod an insulting caricature of King George II, in the high priestess one of his wife, Queen Caroline, and in the chief magician a slanderous portrayal of Sir Robert Walpole. Two months later, this text supposedly became the basis of a farcical theatre play, The Golden Rump, but the only piece of circumstantial evidence of this play ever having existed (apart from a shorter passage of dialogue printed in The Gentleman’s Magazine) was a cartoon called “The Festival of the Golden Rump” (see Image 2).²³² The planned staging of the dramatic lampoon was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back on the road to the ministerial licensing of the stage – or at least it was the pretext that Walpole needed to push it through in the House of Lords. The author of The Craftsman of 28 May (who was probably Fielding) suggests that the news of the mysterious play, of which not a single manuscript survives, was just a stratagem devised by Walpole himself in order to rush things toward a tightening of the Theatre Licensing Act, which was then finally passed in June 1737 (cf. Battestin and Battestin 1989: 225, and Thomson 1993: 100 – 136). Whatever the exact histor-

 Horace Walpole even claimed he had seen the manuscript in Fielding’s handwriting among his father’s papers, but this is highly unlikely due to the piece’s Jacobite overtones, which were alien to Fielding’s political outlook, as far as we know.  The publishing of the cartoon was mentioned in The Craftsman of 7 May 1737; cf. Battestin and Battestin 1989: 649 (n. 388). A reproduction of the print appeared in The Craftsman of 28 May (reproduced below as Image 2 courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University).

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ical truth behind the Golden Rump play may be, “The Vision of the Golden Rump” was influential enough on its own by inaugurating a series of imitations and adaptations in the genre of visionary allegory, which, based on the example set by Fielding with his Queen Common-Sense and through its first occurrence in the Common Sense periodical, became quickly associated with common sense discourse itself.

Image : “The Festival of the Golden Rump” ()

The joined political impact of Fielding’s political rehearsal plays and the impertinent “The Vision of the Golden Rump” can be gauged from Lord Hervey’s exasperated reaction to it in his riposte to the Common Sense weekly from which I have quoted before. With an arrogant air of feigned boredom the Walpole confidant writes: As to your Dreams and Visions, the sort of Writing has been so hackney’d, by such Multitudes of See-ers of Visions, and Dreamers of Dreams, that that Plan for Essays, is as much worn out, in the Press, as that of a Rehearsal, and a Play within a Play, is on the Stage: And for my own part, when any Author sets such Titles to his Papers, I conclude immediately, he is a damn’d dull Dog; and embark in them with just the same Expectation of being pleased, as I should listen to an old Nurse, who began her Story with, Last Night I was a-dreamt. (Hervey 1737: 5–6)

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This angry broadside did not prevent opposition authors to rehash the pattern of the dream narrative and combine it with Fielding’s effectual strategy of personifying common sense for their political purposes. In a text called “The Vision of Common Sense,” published over two issues of Old Common Sense (nos. 53 – 54, 4– 11 February 1738), the elevation of common sense is even taken one step further, as common sense is represented as a sublime goddess with emblems of liberty, justice, and truth, thus clearly evoking the iconography of the mythical Britannia. Overall, the text brims with nationalist attributes and stereotypical imagery, such as the idyllic English-countryside setting of the “beautiful Vale” where the Goddess Common Sense resides in her stately temple, which does not seem “be wholly the Work either of Art of Nature, but the Master-piece of both blended together” (OCS no. 53, 4 February 1738: 1). Furthermore, the lush valley is described as “water’d by a large and limpid Stream, which served as a Mirrour to all the other Beauties of the Place, and shew’d them double” (OCS no. 53, 4 February 1738: 1) – a depiction that echoes Alexander Pope’s glorification of bucolic England in Windsor-Forest, where in the mirroring surface of the “soft, silver Stream” of the Loddon (a tributary of the River Thames, transformed from the nymph Lodona in Pope’s poem) “the musing Shepherd spies / The headlong Mountains and the downward Skies, / The watry Landskip of the pendant Woods, / And absent Trees that tremble in the Floods” (Pope 1961a: ll. 204, 211– 214). The Goddess Common Sense, to whose temple petitioners are flocking from everywhere, is characterized as a rigorous defender of truth and liberty. An old man (acting as a utopian-style Cicerone character) explains to the dreaming I-narrator: “None are refused Admittance into the Temple; or denied the Privilege of making their Application: But such only as have shew’d themselves the Friends of Mankind, by zealously espousing and defending the Cause of Truth and Liberty, are entitled to her Favour” (OCS no. 53, 4 February 1738: 1). When the dreamer eventually gets a glimpse of the Goddess in her temple, the emblematic description of Common Sense and her throne is charged with patriotic propaganda, from which ‘liberty,’ even more than justice and truth, emerges as the core value of British political identity: The Goddess was seated on an Ivory Throne of curious Workmanship (on which were emblematically represented Justice, Truth, and Liberty) under a Canopy of Gold, on which was this inscription: Pro Libertate, Vita periculo decernendum est; Non enim in Spiritu Vita est, Nam ea nulla est serviendi.

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i. e. Men ought to contend for Liberty even at the Hazard of their Lives; for Life does not consist in Breathing, but in being free. She was habited in a plain loose white Robe, and though in her Eyes there appeared the Firmness and Resolution of Age, her Looks spoke her in the Prime of Life. In her Right Hand she held a Sword, with this Motto on it, Pro Patria; and in her Left a Wreath of Laurel, which, my Conductor told me, was the Reward of those, who, by their Arms or Counsel, had defended or preserved the Liberties of their Country. (OCS no. 53, 4 February 1738: 1)

While justice and truth are values that can be extrapolated from common sense discourse without difficulty since they are inherent in a conception of common sense as a faculty of sensible judgment, liberty is a political imperative that is rather arbitrarily attached to the image of Common Sense here, in an attempt to tie common sense discourse firmly to a nationalist discourse of English liberty.²³³ The Latin inscription, which is from Cicero’s 10th Philippic, has the obvious function of legitimization through recourse to ancient Roman authority – a strategy that is further signalled by the Latin motto “Pro Patria” on the Goddess’s sword, which is to establish the ‘natural’ connection of common sense to the nationalist cause. Besides, Common Sense’s plain white clothes signify sobriety and stylistic plainness, which not only betrays an anchoring in English Protestant culture, but also illustrates the metaphor of ‘plain common sense.’ Finally, the “Firmness and Resolution of Age” in Common Sense’s eyes are supposed to express her reliability and wisdom – while they are rather proof of the relentless rigour with which the author of Old Common Sense interpreted his patriotic mission against political enemies in the Walpole camp. “The Vision of Common Sense” adopts Chesterfield’s engendering metaphor of a common-sense tribunal from the first issue of Common Sense, and turns Goddess Common Sense into a judge. In a setting reminiscent of the Last Judgment, she judges the merit of each petitioner’s request for her laurels. Significantly, at this point, the author of the “Vision” somewhat detaches common sense from the discursive tradition of denoting a general epistemological faculty; common sense is redefined, instead, as a patriotic sense of the common good of a country. What remains of the epistemological dimension is the Goddess’s ability to see through false designs and mere pretences to patriotism:

 This is not to say that the author of Old Common Sense was the first to bring common sense and liberty together as related concepts. Rather I would argue that “The Vision of Common Sense” picked up floating elements of the two discursive traditions – common sense and patriotism – that had been associated before (e. g. in the first numbers of the original Common Sense weekly), and strengthened their loose ties by combining them into an iconic image. – I will return to the firm link between common sense and liberty in nationalist discourse in the subsequent section below.

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The Goddess […] judges of Actions only by the Intent, and is not to be imposed upon by the plausible Pretexts and specious Appearances with which the Wicked and Ambitious commonly cover their Designs. Conquest and Success, however they may dazle the Eyes of the World, cannot here sanctify a Villany, or excuse a Transgression of the Duties Men owe their Parents, their Friends, and their Country. (OCS no. 53, 4 February 1738: 1)

Despite this redefinition as a synonym of sincere and virtuous patriotism, common sense discourse continues to function as a powerful principle of exclusion. This is illustrated in the “Vision” by every petitioner that is brought before the strict Goddess, first in the collective case of “a promiscuous Crowd” rushing towards Common Sense’s throne to claim their reward, only to be attracted by showy “Baubles” hanging behind her throne, which betrays their vanity and thus separates the common-sense wheat from the chaff: I ask’d my Guide the Reason of it. ‘These, said he, are a set of Creatures, who, from no other View than that of gratifying their Vanity, or their Avarice, pretend to list themselves in the Service of Common Sense, but are easily drawn aside by those Baubles which you see hanging behind the Throne.’ I advanced a few Steps, and observed two or three Persons distributing Patents, Ribbons, Commissions, &c. which the others greedily catch’d at. (OCS no. 53, 4 February 1738: 1)

Apart from these anonymous crowds of common-sense pretenders, the Goddess also deals with some specific cases of notable personages and comes to rather predictable verdicts, given the political tendency of the text: Oliver Cromwell cannot pass as a true and patriotic lover of liberty, whereas Jonathan Swift, who is identified by “several Books, on one of which I saw plainly inscribed these Words, The Drapier’s Letters,” duly receives from Common Sense “those Honours to which thy steady Adherence to the Interest of thy Country justly entitle thee” (OCS no. 54, 11 February 1738: 1).²³⁴ In the climax of the entire piece, Robert Walpole, identified as “The Grand Projector” (OCS no. 54, 11 February 1738: 1), is taken to task by Common Sense for his absurd laws (controversial excise tax, exploitation of Ireland, general misuse of funds, licensing of the stage, unjust taxation of small farmers and husbandmen, expensive standing army etc.) and given a sneering reply to his request for the Goddess’s reward: The Goddess here interrupting the Herald [reading out Walpole’s achievements; C.H.]; thus address’d herself to her Blue-embellished Petitioner.—‘I have heard enough to convince me that your Merit entitles you to the highest Elevation, such, indeed, as I can’t contribute to;

 The author of the piece either wilfully glosses over the Dean’s misanthropic bend when he credits him with “general Benevolence for Mankind” (OCS no. 54, 11 February 1738: 1).

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but continue to pursue the same Measures, and your Country will, no doubt, soon take care to give you the Reward due to your singular Services.’ (OCS no. 54, 11 February 1738: 1)

The satiric tirade culminates in this ill-concealed threat against Walpole that Britons will soon present him with the bill for his ‘service’ to the country and send him packing.²³⁵ In the end, “The Vision of Common Sense” reiterates the all-too-well-known oppositional denigration of Walpole and his ministry, which is the predictable purpose of the prolonged imaginative effort. Nevertheless, “The Vision of Common Sense” is significant as a prototypical illustration of the strong attraction common sense discourse exerted within the political arena, and in particular on the “Patriot” opposition to Walpole, where its political function emerged. The historical appearance of a certain imagery to illustrate political concepts of common sense (as the high judge in a tribunal, as a an allegorical figure, as a visionary or dream character) was quite influential and is therefore relevant, even beyond its specific topical use at the time of its emerging, to a genealogy of British common sense discourse in the eighteenth century. *** In later years, the imagery of common sense emancipated itself from the immediate political purpose it had in the dying years of Sir Robert Walpole’s office as British prime minister. Long after he had become just another chapter in the long political history of Great Britain, visions and allegories of common sense, not unlike the ghost of Queen Common-Sense in Fielding’s Pasquin, would still haunt the British press. The later occurrences of common-sense imagery clearly testify to the interconnection between nationalist discourses of Englishness/Britishness and common sense discourse. Three examples from the latter half of the eighteenth century to be discussed here show the continuance as well as some modifications of the formative imagery of the late 1730s. The scene of a tribunal over which common sense presides as a deity is the topic of a didactic narrative with  The very last case brought before Goddess Common Sense is in fact that of the editor of the rival paper Common Sense, which is one of the many examples of the constant bickering between Old Common Sense and Common Sense (which was actually rather one-sided, since the Common Sense authors appear to have wisely ignored the attacks of their smaller and less successful rival). Predictably, the indignant Goddess turns down the Common Sense editor’s request for her favour: “But the Goddess, refusing to receive his Papers, told him, That a Man who had basely deserted an old Friend for sordid Self-Interest, cou’d never be a Friend to Liberty. That […] he had since undeceived both her and the World, by the wretched low Stuff, the Ribaldry and Obscenity which he had blasphemously publish’d under the Sacred Name of Common Sense. Shock’d with this unexpected Answer, he withdrew in the utmost Confusion” (OCS no. 54, 11 February 1738: 1).

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the title “The Judgment of Common Sense,” first published in the third edition of The Pleasing Instructor (1760), an anthology of literary essays and fictional narratives designed “for the Instruction of the Youth of both Sexes” with a “connected Plan of Morality” (Preface; 1760: n. pag.).²³⁶ The court proceedings are once more presented by an I-narrator who ‘witnesses’ them in a dream, but unlike in Pasquin or Old Common Sense’s “The Vision of Common Sense,” the character of Common Sense in is no longer female; instead it comes in the form of a wise “old Gentleman” (“The Judgment” 1760: 137) – perhaps a modification resulting from patriarchal pressure within common sense discourse, which tended to push for an exclusion of women from its self-concept (see “The Judgment” 1760: 132– 133).²³⁷ Much as the inspiration for this dream vision seems to have sprung from Old Common Sense’s “Vision,” the focus in “The Judgment” is no longer directly political, but rather morally didactic. The core idea of the piece is to have Common Sense preside over an infernal court that judges the dead according to their deeds, which refers to Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy, where a fiendish Minos with a deadly long tail is the judge of the sins of the dead. In the allegorical “Judgment of Common Sense,” the I-narrator dreams that Common Sense temporarily takes over from Minos, who is relieved from his usual duties for a while (see “The Judgment” 1760: 132– 133). Within this fictional-mythological framework, Common Sense is depicted as a strict judge (similar to Goddess Common Sense in Old Common Sense’s “Vision”) who is able to see through all the boasts and pretensions of the sinners appearing in front of him and accordingly commits most of them to hell. Only the honest and just, few and far between, and especially those who had a mind for public benefit in their lifetime, are saved and sent to “Elysium.” Again, Common Sense’s verdicts are utterly predictable since they are informed by conventional morality based on Christian virtues, and overall the short narrative piece is rather unoriginal and tedious for the taste of a modern reader. Yet it is interesting to note that common sense, just as in the older “Vision of Common Sense,” is represented less as an intuitive rational-pragmatic faculty (even though the personification as a judge still reveals this discursive tradition), but as a moral sense for the common ‘weal’ of

 The first edition of The Pleasing Instructor appeared in 1757 and already featured a selection of didactic magazine articles from the first half of the eighteenth century (Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, Adventurer, Rambler etc.) as well as shorter texts or excerpts of texts by Swift, Pope, Thomson, and others. Starting with the enlarged third edition, the editor included several original essays, published anonymously (one of which being “The Judgment of Common Sense”), “for which he stands indebted to a Friend” (Preface; 1760: n. pag.).  I will touch upon gender aspects of common sense discourse in the next chapter.

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society. Accordingly, Common Sense is easily irritated by sinners who acted selfishly and against the interests of the general public: In short, he [i.e. the first sinner; C.H.] was looked upon, while on Earth, as a humane, generous Man, beloved by his Neighbours, and esteemed by his Acquaintance;—but on a further Examination it was proved, that this very Person was mean enough to become Slave to a Party for a Pension; that though seemingly humane to Individuals, he was a Betrayer and Ruiner of his Country’s Interest, and that his seeming Virtues proceeded not from any Goodness of Heart, but an Ostentation to keep up the empty Shew of consequential Grandeur; on which Common Sense, with a Look of Severity, telling him that of all Cruelty that towards the Public was the most unpardonable, nodded towards a black Officer on the Left to take him into Custody […]. (“The Judgment” 1760: 133)

The political roots of the allegorical common-sense tribunal in the oppositional rhetoric of the 1730s are still noticeable in the man’s sin of becoming “Slave to a Party for a Pension,” but the context here has changed into a less topical one of general morality. By the same token, another sinner who claims to have been an ingenious scientific inventor in his earthly life is condemned to go to hell for having failed to share his potential blessings with humankind while he was still alive: “Wise Men are designed to be Vehicles of Blessings from above: Nor are Misers of any Sort so detestable as those, who through mean selfish Views bury in Oblivion what might prove a public and a lasting Benefit to their Fellow-Creatures […]” (“The Judgment” 1760: 138). The understanding of common sense propagated here is a patriotic sense of the common good; it betrays the vestiges of political common sense discourse, but is rather concerned with a more general task of moral didacticism. Just as in “The Judgment of Common Sense,” common sense is also personified as a male character in Herbert Lawrence’s historical allegory The Life and Adventures of Common Sense from 1769. While Common Sense is not a deity here, he is apparently immortal, and so are the other members of his family in the book (Wisdom, Truth, Prudence, Wit, Genius, Humour, and Vanity). While the title betrays an inspiration from Fielding’s “The Life and Death of Common Sense,” Lawrence’s ‘novel’ is the only full-length effort to allegorize common sense in fiction. The long-winded narrative, which spans an epic story time of some two thousand years from Grecian antiquity to 1760s England, is a rather forced affair with the purpose of commenting on the twists and turns of British history since early modern times from the personified viewpoint of Common Sense, who is the homodiegetic narrator of the book. Quite tellingly, Common Sense is born in ancient Athens to his mother Truth and his father Wit, a playwright of loose morals, who has tricked Truth into marriage by disguising himself as her fiancé Wisdom. When Wit abandons his young family

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for his concubine Vanity soon after the wedding, Wisdom joins his partner Truth again and they raise her boy Common Sense with the help of the governess Prudence. In later years, Common Sense decides to become a doctor specialising in the cure of lunacy and madness, and conducts a grand tour of the world for his training which lasts about a hundred years. After his return to Greece, he notices that “the Grecian Empire was become the Shadow of what it was when I left it” (Lawrence 1974: I, 90 – 91), whereupon the whole family moves to Rome. With the birth of Jesus Christ, Common Sense and his family become Christian and praise the Son of God as a champion of Truth and Wisdom. During the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, Common Sense continues to work as a ‘psychiatrist’ among Kings, rulers, and church leaders throughout Europe (in a Eurocentric affirmation of cultural superiority, Common Sense’s attitude to the rest of the known world is such that “I found the People so bigoted, ignorant and superstitious, that I could do nothing with them”; Lawrence 1974: I, 112), but struggles hard to be allowed to perform his cures during this time. After becoming Protestant and having a brief spell in Renaissance Florence, where arts and sciences flourish under the guidance of his father Wit and Wit’s friend Genius, Common Sense, together with Prudence, follows the call of Truth and Wisdom for a reunion in Elizabethan England, “in a Country and at a Time the most suitable to our respective Inclinations” (Lawrence 1974: I, 145). Here they continue to stay for the remainder of the novel – the book closes with the departure of Wisdom, Truth, Prudence, and Common Sense “for a very distant Country” around the time of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 (see Lawrence 1974: II, 256). Effectively, two thirds of the novel are concerned with English history between 1600 and 1760, with glances at France and Spain where Vanity takes up her residence, and mainly serve the author to pass judgment on major events of English politics from the authoritative vantage point of Common Sense. Several public figures such as Shakespeare, Lord Chesterfield, Henry Fielding, David Garrick, or Samuel Johnson are mentioned and described as champions of either Wit and Genius or Common Sense (or both), while others are condemned as their enemies (Tobias Smollett for example; see Lawrence 1974: II, 188). All in all, the novel’s allegorical strategy quite exhausts itself over vast stretches of the second volume, which is mitigated only slightly by the introduction of a humorous character called Jack Smatter, a mixture of naive fool, John Bull, and My Uncle Toby,²³⁸ who is obviously designed for comic relief from the tedium of historical commentary.  Allusions to Sterne’s popular character from Tristram Shandy and his amours with Widow Wadman are unmistakable in the prolonged episode of how the clumsy Jack Smatter woos the bookish and rather unfeminine Miss Bluecot, and manages to win her in the end (Lawrence 1974: II, 117– 173).

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As a literary achievement, The Life and Adventures of Common Sense is of little merit and would have probably been forgotten, had not its author Lawrence, a physician and friend of David Garrick, London’s star actor of the mideighteenth century (see Anderson 2005: xxvi), represented Shakespeare as a plagiarist through the mouth of his narrator Common Sense. Lawrence’s book is frequently cited as the first publication to deny Shakespeare’s authorship openly, but this is clearly down to a misunderstanding of the book’s allegorical strategy to attribute great works of literature to the inspiration or penmanship of Wit, Genius, or Humour.²³⁹ This misunderstanding is somewhat revealing as it hints at an obvious weakness of Lawrence’s book, which is its attempt at combining what is genuinely incompatible: mediaeval allegory and novelistic realism. That Lawrence is influenced by the early realist paradigm established by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding becomes apparent, for example, in Common Sense’s justification for giving detailed information about incidents involving his parents from the time when he is still a baby infant. Here the author takes recourse to the popular epistolary tradition by having Common Sense explain, in a reply to an imaginary reader’s question about his narrative reliability, that he is “only the faithful Transcriber” (Lawrence 1974: I, 28) of the memoirs of his governess Prudence (his mother’s maid), since she “was remarkable for being the first Female who ever kept a regular Diary of her own Actions, and of those with whom she was connected” (Lawrence 1974: I, 27). Much as these struggles for realism seem odd from today’s perspective, given the dated allegorical mode of the whole book, they only point to a more fundamental oddity at the heart of the entire novel. The very concept of representing common sense as an allegorical personification marks the book as a strange kind of fiction: Not

 As Ruthven (2001: 6) points out, Lawrence adopts the view first publicized in Nicholas Rowe’s Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) that the young Shakespeare was a “Deer-stealer” and “certainly […] a Thief from the Time he was first capable of distinguishing any Thing” (Lawrence 1974: I, 146). While this indeed undermines the Bard’s authority and insinuates the possibility of plagiarism, the actual ‘stealing’ of manuscripts and material from Wit, Genius, and Humour in the novel reads more like a homage to Shakespeare if one translates the allegorical code into attributes of Shakespeare’s art: “Amongst my Father’s [i. e. Wit’s; C.H.] Baggage, he [i. e. Shakespeare; C.H.] presently cast his Eye upon a common place Book, in which was contained, an infinite variety of Modes and Forms, to express all the different Sentiments of the human Mind, together with Rules for their Combinations and Connections upon every Subject or Occasion that might Occur in Dramatic Writing” (Lawrence 1974: I, 147). In the same fashion, Shakespeare gets hold of Genius’s magic glass for perfect verisimilitude in representing the human soul as well as Humour’s magic mask with “the Power of making every Sentence that came out of the Mouth of the Wearer, appear extremely pleasant and entertaining” (Lawrence 1974: I, 148).

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only is it “ridiculous—absurd to the greatest Degree” (Lawrence 1974: I, 27), as the imaginary reader cries out, for Common Sense to give the reader minute details of conversations between people that he cannot have witnessed himself, but it is perhaps even more ridiculous and absurd, an even severer violation of common sense, to personify common sense as a fictional character and worry about verisimilitude at the same time. This inherent paradox has haunted imaginative representations of common sense since Fielding’s Queen Common Sense (where it is less of a problem due to the play’s multiple ironies), but in Lawrence’s novel it becomes utterly ludicrous due to the author’s strains to strengthen his readers’ suspension of disbelief. Despite its obvious flaws, it is worth taking a closer look at The Life and Adventures of Common Sense with regard to the representation of common sense and the imagery used in it. Due to the allegorical mode of the book, the actions and self-characterizations of the homodiegetic narrator Common Sense illustrate Lawrence’s concept – and indeed show his overwhelming esteem – of the human faculty of common sense. At the same time, this character sketch of common sense exemplifies once more the pervasive influence of common sense discourse in popular concepts of Englishness at the time. In other words, Lawrence’s idea of common sense is neither idiosyncratic nor original (while the idea of writing an entire novel in the mode of historical allegory might be), but an expression of a shared view of how important common sense is for the well-being of a country and how English history has prospered from it whenever it prevailed. That said, the author draws on familiar notions and images of common sense, for example the typical ‘minimizing view’ of a very basic rational faculty that is nevertheless far from being base, but an ennobling feature of human nature that is often suppressed or underdeveloped in individuals. Accordingly, in his early youth, young Common Sense is described as developing more slowly than other children of the same age (see Lawrence 1974: I, 58) – a matter of serious concern for his mother Truth, which his stepfather Wisdom seeks to alleviate by predicting wisely that “your Son’s Parts are not yet budded forth […]—he will become a Comfort and Companion to his Mother, and the candid Tribunal to which all good Men will make their Appeal” (Lawrence 1974: I, 60 – 61). The widely established metaphor of unfailing rational judgment as a tribunal over which common sense presides reinforces the idea of the important value of this seemingly lower faculty. Another integral figure of common sense discourse occurring in The Life and Adventures of Common Sense is the precept of the golden mean when being faced with extreme positions. As a practical piece of advice, the golden mean is common sense in all situations of life, even in matters of dress. Irrespective of cultural differences in fashion, Common Sense commands Prudence not to wear what would be considered extreme according to the national fashion in order

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to avoid being exposed to ridicule: “But, laying aside all Prejudice in Favour of this or that Country, there is no Security against Ridicule, but the strict Observance of the golden Mean: for the Man or Woman, wherever it be, that runs into either Extreme, must certainly provoke your Laughter or excite your Contempt” (Lawrence 1974: II, 192– 191).²⁴⁰ While common sense, not just in clothing, is essentially about conforming to pre-existing norms, the character of Common Sense also happens to give here an insight into the relativity of common sense judgments. Their actual content depends on historically and culturally variable norms, just as “every Woman as well as every Man should conform both to the Custom of Countries and to the Manners of the Times in which they live, provided they are neither immoral nor indecent” (Lawrence 1974: II, 191– 192).²⁴¹ This last moral stipulation, however, is crucial and quite in line with eighteenth-century common sense discourse altogether: the potentially dangerous cultural arbitrariness of customs, fashions and social norms needs to be limited by an understanding of universally binding morals. For Lawrence as well as his contemporaries, common sense is not just common opinion, which might vary, but an invariable norm for sound behaviour which is characterized by shunning immodest or inappropriate extremes. Whatever is judged to fall outside of this seemingly universal norm, is branded as folly, frenzy, or madness in eighteenth-century terms. Accordingly, Common Sense in The Life and Adventures of Common Sense is a physician specializing in the cure of madness. In this capacity, he tries to cure great rulers from falling into extremes of folly and frenzy, which might spread dangerously like a contagious disease among those subjected to such leaders. In the critique of the selfish abuse of power in kings and rulers, Lawrence’s satire betrays an almost subversive note: A Man is siezed with a Phrenzy—draws his Sword—declares he will put all the People to Death, of a distant Country (which he never saw or has had the least Intercourse with) unless they will acknowledge him for their Lord and Master—this is communicated to those about him—they give it to others, and so in the space of a few Hours, the Contagion catches like the Electrical Fire, & the whole Nation are stark staring Mad. […] I must confess that I have never known this Species of Madness attack any but great Personages; such as Rulers of Kingdoms and Commanders of Armies; if they escape, the Nation over which they preside, remain perfectly free from Infection. (Lawrence 1974: I, 102– 103)

 The 1974 facsimile reprint adopts an error in the original page numbering of vol. II: after page 192, pagination continues at 191, so the page numbers 191 and 192 appear twice.  I.e. the pages before faulty page no. 191.

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Mental sanity is an aspect of bodily sanity; only when they come together in a leader, a nation’s well-being is guaranteed: “Happy, singularly Happy is that Nation which experiences in it’s Sovereign, the Mens [sic] sana in Corpore sano, that is, a King found both in Body and Mind” (Lawrence 1974: I, 103 – 104). The mania of arbitrary power, in turn, is described by Common Sense as a “Distemper” that “is radical and hereditary; and that it is the very same Disease which has baffled the utmost Efforts of the wisest Physicians, vulgarly called the King’s Evil” (Lawrence 1974: I, 103). As the lines of succession in European monarchies are hereditary, the frequent abuse of royal power is surmised to be hereditary too, but the syllogistic explanation offered here might very well be ironic and thus a satirical attack on the endemic corruption of power by those who have been granted it by their people. This ‘madness’ often affects the whole state apparatus as well, as Common Sense concludes from the hostility with which he is treated by courtiers and advisors to kings at the courts of Europe he visits during his travels. His attempt at curing madness in Catholic popes proves altogether futile because it would always fail whenever “they began to mutter certain Words to themselves, which had no Relation to any Thing on Earth or to the Waters under the Earth— such as Infallibility, Transubstantiation, &c. &c.” (Lawrence 1974: I, 119). Here Lawrence adopts the all too familiar Protestant slur of ‘nonsensical’ Catholic dogma running like a thread through English culture and, just as Swift in A Tale of a Tub and many others before, ridicules it as blatantly violating common sense. When the character of Common Sense eventually comes to reside in England, the place most suitable to his own person as well as his mother Truth and stepfather Wisdom, Lawrence’s book at last becomes the self-serving advertisement of English cultural superiority which it is apparently intended to be. While Lawrence briefly dwells on the Golden Age of Elizabeth, he fast-forwards through the dark and quarrelsome decades of revolution and restoration to halt at the fruitful reign of George II, who “had a better Title to the glorious Name of Pater Patriæ” (Lawrence 1974: II, 254) than any other English monarch. As almost all of the book’s second volume is devoted to the historical events under the reign of George II, Lawrence’s main point seems to be to prove, in Common Sense’s words at the end, “the perfect Harmony and Happiness that have subsisted in every Part of his present Majesty’s Dominions, even unto this Day” (Lawrence 1974: II, 255). Published in 1769, that is, nine years into the reign of British-born George III, The Life and Adventures of Common Sense is a thoroughly Augustan testimony of national faith in the glory, prosperity, and happiness of Britain “in this enlightened Age, when Nothing is credited but self-evident Principles” (Lawrence 1974: II, 254). That Britain is able to enjoy such peaceful harmony in uncertain times, is described in Lawrence’s book as owing to the untir-

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ing care of Common Sense, Prudence, Truth, and Wisdom (while some of Britain’s cultural fruitfulness is also attributed to the frequent involvement of Wit, Genius, and Humour). Most important, Common Sense continues his work as a physician for “the Cure of maniacal Cases” (Lawrence 1974: II, 65) on English soil and thus helps to prevent the spreading of lunacy in England: For my own Part, as I had all along directed my physical Studies chiefly to the Cure of maniacal Cases, I gave the greatest Attention to that melancholly Mansion in Moor-Fields, destined to the Reception of the most lamentable of God’s Creatures. But to prevent as much as possible, this Receptacle from being crouded with Patients, I kept a very watchful Eye over the good People of England, and administered speedy Relief before the Disease had got intire Possession […]. (Lawrence 1974: II, 65)

It is Common Sense’s “watchful Eye over the good People of England” that lays the foundation for England’s overall happiness in Augustan times. Lawrence’s character of Common Sense further proves to be a direct expression of English common sense discourse in the eighteenth century in that he embraces the ‘middling’ nature of common sense, which is again informed by the idea of the golden mean that avoids extremes. Accordingly, Common Sense appeals most to the middle ranks of the English people: For I never found that any Thing I could say to those in the highest or lowest Rank of Life, had ever any Sort of Effect. The Former were too exhalted [sic] to listen to me; and the Latter did not understand me[.] I have therefore, for this and some other Reasons, generally taken up my Residence amongst the middling People in England, and in all other Countries where there are any such People. (Lawrence 1974: II, 113).

In this sense at least, The Life and Adventures of Common Sense is best understood as a novel: not only does it openly address the middle class in this passage, but it also affirms the “middling People in England” as the pillars of English common sense. A third and last instance of common sense imagery at the end of the century shows how the allegorical representation of common sense is finally stripped of all political import. In a piece called “Wisdom and Folly” from The Scientific Magazine (May 1797), the genre of the dream narrative is reused once more, even with a direct reference to Fielding’s Pasquin, which is mentioned as an inspiration for this moral allegory,²⁴² but the genre is cleansed, as it were, from its

 “I lately happened to be reading a performance of Fielding, in which he represents Signor Opera, Miss Novel, Monsieur Pantomime, and other personages, as in high favour at the court of Queen Nonsense, and avowed enemies of Queen Common Sense” (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797:

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historical topicality and political virulence. Wishing that Fielding had “pursued the votaries of Nonsense through a greater variety of situations” (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 301), the homodiegetic narrator falls asleep and finds himself transported in his dream to a strange land. Henceforth, the entire narrative becomes a direct inversion of Old Common Sense’s “The Vision of Common Sense” in that it is an allegorical satire of all things contrary to common sense. The dreamer meets a man to show him “the Mountains of Wisdom,” behind which lies “the Vale of Folly, a country very extensive, and at present still more populous,” with its principal provinces “Frivolity, Silliness, and Stupidity” and the adjacent dynasties of Vanity and Obscenity (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 301). Unfolding an entire topography of nonsense, the dreamer reports that the Vale of Folly, also called “Fool-Land,” lies close to other dominions, such as “Dull-Land” (frequently in political alliance with Fool-Land), which borders on “the lowest district of Wise-Land, called Plain-Sense” (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 301). Fool-Land, as the dreamer learns, is peopled by “many emigrants from the neighbouring country of Wisdom, allured by the accessibility of her sacred Majesty Queen Folly” (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 301), who will refuse nobody at her court. The description of “Mount Fancy,” a landmark of Fool-Land, boils down to a common-sense attack on the lures of fancy, which underlines the preference for plainness and usefulness, typical of common sense discourse, over flashy flights into romantic enthusiasm. All this is identifiable as a reactionary argument against the aesthetic and intellectual climate change toward Romanticism at the time: “I see,” said I, “another mountain almost as high, and more steep, than Wise-Land. Heavens, what a grand and beautiful prospect! what woods and lawns, and streams! what delightful verdure! The top appears to be sublime, the middle exquisitely beautiful; but the lower part is grotesque, and seems to lose itself in the confines of Frivolity.” “That,” said my guide, “is Mount Fancy. […]” (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 302)

This common-sense aversion to the follies of romantic fancy is highlighted further by the contrast between Mount Fancy and “the Hills of Knowledge, less picturesque and romantic than the Mountains of Fancy, but more useful” (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 303). In essence this is the same criticism of romantic fancy that Jane Austen advances in the conversation between the helplessly romantic Marianne and the commonsensical Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility (1811), when Edward slights the romantic fascination with the sublime or gothic “picturesque” and instead commends his “idea of a fine country [that] unites beauty

301). Here, the author is taking liberties with Fielding’s actual play, which does not contain any of the characters mentioned by him, except for Common-Sense and Ignorance, of course.

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with utility” (Austen 2006: 112). This concern with aesthetic common sense, i. e., the lack thereof, is also visible in the narrator’s account of proceedings at the court of Queen Folly – in general, the author seems to be eager to remain true to the spirit of Fielding’s Pasquin by including satire about the lack of common sense in the literature and art of his time. Therefore, at Queen Folly’s court, the visitor is treated to the overture to an Italian opera, before he learns that her majesty’s subjects, the “fools,” merely pretend their love of music (see “Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 304). Overall, fashion is “so prevalent, that to it beauty and grace [are] sacrificed” (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 304) and along with it all sense of taste, which is signalled by Queen Folly’s courtiers: Her prime minister is Signor Opera and her poet laureate Mr. Lacksense, who in his latest work, as the Queen proudly boasts, has “as completely excluded common-sense in these few lines as any of the Della Crusca school, (so deservedly dear to Queen Folly) after labouring through hundreds of verses” (“Wisdom and Folly” 1797: 306). The sentimental poetry of the ‘Della Cruscans,’ founded in the 1780s by Robert Merry as an collaborative effort of English and Italian poets,²⁴³ was scorned by contemporaries as excessive and nonsensical due to its flowery and pretentious language and had become the butt of much satire in the 1790s.²⁴⁴ As they were considered the epitome of bad taste, the Della Cruscans are an apt choice to become the benchmark of nonsensical, tasteless poetry here. In a nutshell, “Wisdom and Folly” is a derivative piece of satire inspired by common-sense imagery and the allegorical pattern of common-sense personification in the eighteenth century that was inaugurated by Henry Fielding’s satiric burlesque Pasquin and its play-within-a-play “The Life and Death of Common Sense.” As can be seen not just in this last piece, but throughout the years after 1736, the life and death of oppositional common sense discourse was a short-lived history, limited to its specific historical circumstances, while the imagery emerging from it survived its immediate political-historical context and continued to haunt discourses of Englishness and Britishness in the fashion of Queen CommonSense at the end of Fielding’s play. This fanciful allegorical embellishment is however no more than a spectral presence, an exotic oddity, because the imaginative effort of personifying common sense as a queen, deity, or superhuman character ultimately clashes with principal precepts of common sense discourse: its aversion to flights of fancy and its emphasis on practical utility.

 Among them were Hester Thrale Piozzi, Samuel Johnson’s good friend of later years, as well as Hannah Cowley and Mary Robinson.  Most noteworthy here are William Gifford’s verse satires The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795), which more or less finished the Della Cruscans publicly; see Adams (1964: 259).

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4.3 Nationalist Common Sense: Liberty and Revolution As we have seen, common sense discourse becomes a powerful rhetorical weapon in the political sphere of the eighteenth century since its epistemological and ethical worth is almost universally acknowledged.²⁴⁵ It also produces its own short-lived tradition of allegorical imagery that gives evidence to its virulence even outside the political arena. I have already hinted at the importance of common sense discourse with regard to concepts of English political and cultural identity – this shall now be pursued in more detail in a view ahead to the end of the eighteenth century. Throughout the century, common sense becomes a key rhetorical element in notions of Englishness and Britishness, especially in conjunction with the mythical notion of English liberty, the most cherished and famed of all political values sustaining Englishness, and it is later also associated with the jingoistic icon John Bull. As a complementary term to and nearsynonym of liberty, common sense becomes such a popular political term in the second half of the eighteenth century that is also progressively used by ethnic minorities within Britain that struggle for their political rights or even strive to gain political independence from the British crown – a development that culminates in Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense from 1776, which set the wheels in motion for American independence. Even though this later instrumentalizing of common sense in contentious political contexts seems to bear no direct connection to the birth of political common sense discourse arising from

 Examples of the spread of common sense discourse in other areas of British intellectual culture from the mid-eighteenth century onwards are numerous. Probably also due to the growing influence of Scottish common sense philosophy, the popularity of the term can be gauged from the sheer number of tracts in moral philosophy and theology carrying it in their titles. A few examples shall be mentioned just in passing: The use of the term in the title Common Sense: In Some Free Remarks on the Efficiency of the Moral Change (New York, 1772), signals an authoritative truth-claim irrespective of the subject matter (in the same way as Thomas Paine’s pamphlet four years later); in the treatise itself, common sense is merely used as an rhetorical buoy in the flow of logical reasoning. William Cokin’s The Freedom of Human Action Explained and Vindicated: In Which the Opinions of Dr. Priestley on the Subject Are Particularly Considered (London, 1791) does not mention common sense in its title, but is nonetheless a good example of the spread of common sense discourse. The author seeks to refute philosophical scepticism towards free will (particularly as advanced by Joseph Priestley), and states at the end of his essay “that the Freedom of men’s Actions is not only the opinion of Common Sense, and the doctrine of Scripture, but also the conclusion of Philosophy” (146). Finally, in an ecclesiastical context, the short anonymous pamphlet An Address to the Common Sense and Understanding of the People; Shewing, That the Repeal of the Test Act Must Be Necessarily Attended with the Greatest Dangers Both to the Church and State (Ipswich, 1790) uses the familiar appeal to common sense as a rhetorical strategy.

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the anti-Walpole opposition in the 1730s (especially Paine’s republican agenda could not be any further from the interests of the Country Whigs),²⁴⁶ the structural similarities are obvious: common sense maintains its rhetorical potency as a shibboleth of the opposition while its political range changes from within to without, i. e. from an internal opposition to ministerial power towards a more or less external one directed against English domination within Britain and, eventually, against British colonial rule. In the following, I shall delineate the discursive overlap of common sense and liberty as well as its flexible adaptation to changing political environments, in which it becomes a battle cry for several nationalisms of the late eighteenth century. Of all elements in historical constructions of English political identity, liberty is arguably the most fetishized. It owes its almost sacred character in the English cultural imaginary to the epochal constitutional events of Magna Carta in 1215 and the Bill of Rights in 1689, which curtailed the power of the monarch and granted rights to the monarchy’s subjects as well as the parliament. In Alexander Pope’s influential early patriotic poem Windsor-Forest from 1713, the glory of England arises poetically from a fine balance of opposing cosmic attributes²⁴⁷ in a glorious Arcadian vision of mythologized landscape. The bucolic scenery of the royal forest, very much alive with mythical gods chasing nymphs, is overseen by Liberty personified as Britain’s patron goddess in the poem, who comes to life to hold sway in the golden age of Stuart kings and queens: “Fair Liberty, Britannia’s Goddess, rears / Her chearful Head, and leads the golden Years” (Pope 1961a: ll. 91– 92). Such is the beneficial guardianship of Liberty that the idyllic Windsor Forest, a synecdoche of Queen Anne’s Britain, can measure up to the ancient Arcadia.²⁴⁸ The pulsating stream of “Un-

 Rosenfeld (2008, 2011), who traces the development of the earlier eighteenth-century notion of common sense into the democratic and republican one used by Paine, concedes this difference: “Combing through Common Sense [i. e. the 1730s London weekly; C.H.], one is struck by occasionally radical claims as to the authority of the public, and its sense, in the political arena. Significantly, the question of expanding the franchise or democratization does not emerge” (Rosenfeld 2008: 38). It is precisely at this point that a conceptualization of common sense as a regulated historical discourse seems to me to offer an advantage over the standard approach of intellectual history: the genealogy of common sense in the eighteenth century can be accounted for by identifying its shared discursive operations, while also noting its differences, additions, modifications, and ruptures as significant discursive events.  Wasserman (1959: 142) has called the poem’s description of Windsor Forest a “cosmic Forest […] of concordia discors.”  “Let old Arcadia boast her ample Plain, / Th’ immortal Huntress, and her Virgin-Train; / Nor envy, Windsor! since thy Shades have seen / As bright a Goddess, and as chaste a Queen; /

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bounded Thames [that] shall flow for all Mankind” (Pope 1961a: l. 398) serves Pope as a dynamic metaphor of the universal progress of liberty in future times, which nevertheless has unmistakable colonial overtones and is thus an expression of profound nationalist pride.²⁴⁹ This glorification of English liberty, as praised in Pope’s poem and frequently used as a nationalist commonplace in many other writings of that period, also had a major influence on the shaping of common sense discourse in the political snake pit of the late 1730s. In a number of Old Common Sense from January 1738, common sense is expressly defined as a sense of liberty – a remarkable redefinition of the term that so far had been mainly understood by contemporaries to be a faculty of judgment. Accordingly, the author of Old Common Sense is eager to explain his particular understanding of the term. Like Lord Chesterfield in the first number of the Common Sense weekly, he starts out with Juvenal’s line “rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa fortuna,” which is generally understood to be a criticism of the selfishness of Rome’s ruling class.²⁵⁰ However, the author rejects all common denotations of common sense, such as prudence or discretion to do “what is most proper” in “the ordinary Occurrences of Life,” an innate talent to keep one’s sanity in the acquisition of knowledge and learning, or simply “the social Affection, or Fellow-feeling” (OCS no. 51, 21 January 1738: 1). Instead of all these, common sense is equated by him with a devotion to the cause of liberty – an argumentative move that appropriates common sense discourse in order to lend weight to the political aims of the patriotic opposition: For these, and some other Reasons, I am of Opinion, that Juvenal’s, or Old, Common Sense, was a Sense fairly worth the Five, I mean, the Sense of Liberty, which under a corrupt Government, such as under which this Author lived, dies first among the Great. To this I know it may be objected, that this Sense cannot properly be called common; because we find in Fact, that a great Part of Mankind have little or no Notion of it. […] there is no Man but from Nature receives a Desire for, and a Sense of Freedom, however the Exertion of this Divine Passion may, in time, be stifled, or rendered languid, by Education, Custom, Self-Interest, or the other grosser Passions. The most effectual Means made use of by the Friends of Mankind, to keep this Sense alive and vigorous, has been freely to communicate to the People such Observations on the Conduct of their Governors, as might put them on their Guard

Whose care, like hers, protects the sylvan Reign, / The Earth’s fair Light, and Empress of the Main” (Pope 1961a: ll. 159 – 164).  Even though “Conquest [shall] cease, and Slav’ry be no more: / […] the freed Indians in their native Groves” (Pope 1961a: ll. 408 – 409) are to thrive on an idea of political and economic freedom that underscores the cultural supremacy of Britain as the importer of such an idea of liberty.  From Juvenal’s Satire VIII, which in Christopher Kelk’s translation is rendered as: “that rank rarely gives a cuss / For others” (Juvenal 2010: ll. 73 – 74; trans. ll. 97– 98).

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against any Part of it that had a dangerous, or even a doubtful Tendency. (OCS no. 51, 21 January 1738: 1)

This rhetorical strategy of explaining the scarcity of common sense (i. e. love of liberty) in these ‘dark’ political times is clearly derived from Chesterfield’s aphorism that “Common Sense is no such common Thing” (CS1: 3),²⁵¹ but the focus has become more direct and the political propaganda blunter. The claim of liberty as the common political aim of all people in their right mind enables the author of Old Common Sense to present himself as a sane guard of liberty in the face of all the political insanity and violations of common sense coming from the Walpole government. Beyond this particular act of self-legitimization, this passage gives evidence to a discursive event – the equation of common sense with the love of liberty – that is not without consequence. From around this time onwards, liberty and common sense are linked together in British discourses of nationalism – especially as an integral part of English identity, but more and more also in political calls to arms issued by minority groups within the growing political construct of what will soon become the British Empire. The firm connection between liberty and common sense as complementary self-concepts of Englishness is vividly illustrated in the Songs, Comic, and Satyrical (1772) of actor-playwright-poet-songster George Alexander Stevens.²⁵² His pseudo-philosophical song “Common Sense” (Stevens 1772: 94– 96)²⁵³ is about the difficulty of finding and identifying common sense in the different spheres of life: the commonplace of common sense being a rare gift appears here yet again. In a complex world full of “Such frauds and such fractions, such follies, such fictions, / Such out-of-door clamours, and in contradictions” (Stevens 1772: 94), the speaker seeks for a fixed point of orientation: “What is it we want?—why, we want Common Sense” (Stevens 1772: 94). Unfortunately, he has no idea where to look for it. All the speaker knows is that “She’s natively neat, like a lovely young Quaker. / Pure Beauty, despising false Drapery’s aid, / And Common Sense scorns all pedantic parade” (Stevens 1772: 95). Stevens’ humorous personification of common sense reveals some of its typical attributes, such as plain-

 See above for my discussion of this commonplace (n. 201).  Stevens became well-known in the London theatre scene with his satirical puppet performance Lecture on Heads (1764), with which he later even toured the British colonies; see Kahan (1984) and Shershow (2010: 6).  The beginning of the song sets the tone of light-hearted mockery for the rest of it: “One night having nothing to do—nor to drink, / I began a new practice, and that was to think; / What my subject shou’d be, kept me some time in doubt, / I consider’d, at last—what we all were about” (Stevens 1772: 94).

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ness, sobriety, and an antidote to pedantry and false pretension. In the following stanzas, the speaker searches for common sense at court, at church, and in trade – he finds traces of common sense in many places, but also gross violations against it (or “her” in the song’s mode of personification). The song’s inconclusive ending with “a Toast” (Stevens 1772: 96) to Common Sense, however, asserts the relevance of common sense despite the light-hearted comical mode. In a similar way, common sense is valued highly in the allegorical “Song I: Origin of English Liberty” (Stevens 1772: 1– 4), which stresses its significance for the maintaining of English liberty. In the song, freedom is hailed as the exclusive hallmark of Britain (compared to the endowments of other countries), but common sense is needed as well to restrain freedom and prevent it from turning into licentiousness: With silver, gold, jewels, she [i. e. Minerva; C.H.] India endow’d, France and Spain she taught vineyards to rear, What was fit for each clime on each clime she bestow’d, And Freedom she found flourish’d here. […] Licentiousness Freedom’s destruction may bring, Unless Prudence prepares its defence; The Goddess of Sapience bid Iris take wing And on Britons bestow’d Common-Sense. (Stevens 1772: 3)

The mythological frame of reference seems already rather humorous, but it borders on mockery when, at the end of the song, the “blossoms of Liberty” (Stevens 1772: 4) are described as the pure fruit on which Englishmen are fed: Thus fed, and thus bred, by a bounty so rare, Oh preserve it as pure as ’twas giv’n; We will while we’ve breath, nay we’ll grasp it in death, And return it untainted to Heav’n. (Stevens 1772: 4)

While the pathos of English liberty remains outwardly unbroken, the overblown phrasing of freedom as pure and untainted, to be returned to Heaven, seems to subvert England’s pride in liberty in that it is made to appear as the nation’s obsession. However, in his “Song XCI: Freedom” (Stevens 1772: 169 – 170), a thematic follow-up to the “Origin of English Liberty,” Stevens looks at the present with an almost apocalyptic attitude and laments the widespread corruption of English liberty. What once was an English trademark (“You’re England’s Genius, it is said, / And Englishmen possess thee”; Stevens 1772: 170), is now apparently lost (“Like

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Hamlet’s Ghost, ’Twas here! ’tis gone!”; Stevens 1772: 170). As a last resort, common sense is called upon once more to restore England to its senses: Oh, Common Sense! once more descend To save this Isle from sinking; Be once again Britannia’s friend, And set her Sons to thinking! No more by Knaves let us be school’d, But teach us how to read ’em, Nor let well-meaning Men be fool’d, By Privilege and Freedom. (Stevens 1772: 169)

The “Freedom” quoted here in the last line is but a shadow of Britannia’s ennobling spirit of liberty; it is echoed in a later stanza as “Licentiousness [that] has Harlot’s charms, / Which tempt to our undoing” (Stevens 1772: 170). The bitter conclusion of this ‘freedom song’ is that the former English glory of liberty has decayed into a slippage of moral restraint, which in fact has made Britannia’s citizen “Slaves, […] / Each fetter’d to some Folly; / And all the Liberty we know, / Is – drink! and let’s be jolly” (Stevens 1772: 170). The fierce criticism poking through the veneer of light-hearted humour in this and other songs of Stevens’ collection shows that the discursive connection between common sense and liberty in constructions of Englishness can be used as a versatile weapon of criticism and satirical attack as it adapts easily to varying political contents and contexts. While common sense and liberty were the catchwords of the patriotic opposition to Robert Walpole’s government in the late 1730s, they are now in Stevens’ case a general vehicle of cultural criticism in the patriotic vein. *** From the use of common sense discourse as rhetorical weaponry in internal political conflicts it is but a small step to its gaining currency in external affairs. As of the middle of the century, jingoistic concepts of Englishness or Britishness are bolstered by the conviction of a national ‘us’ that has a monopoly of liberty and common sense. In an anonymous collection of patriotic songs from the late eighteenth century, revealingly entitled The Antigallican Songster, many songs mention John Bull, the allegorical character once invented by John Arbuthnot for extended satire,²⁵⁴ who would then become the iconic personification of Brit-

 In Law Is a Bottomless Pit (1712), the first in a series of allegories featuring John Bull, Arbuthnot allegorizes the War of the Spanish Succession by having John Bull (Britain) conduct a

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ain as a simple but good-natured everyman. In one song filled with nationalist propaganda and anti-French slander, John Bull is represented as an honest man of common sense who knows that true liberty is to be found nowhere else but in Britain: Tis the voice of John Bull, (Tho’ he’s honest and dull, Yet he never did want common sense) That, tho’ masters from France May have taught him to dance, He will not copy Freedom from thence. To a distance from home ’Tis madness to roam, In search of fair Liberty’s Tree: No exotics we want, For Freedom’s a plant, Which flourishes, Britain, in thee! (The Antigallican Songster 1793: 11)

Perpetuating well-known anti-French prejudices in the politically turbulent and fear-ridden time of post-1789, the song positively affirms the crude nationalist picture of a staunchly patriotic and utterly conservative Tory-Englishman who has always abhorred all things French for their flair of vain extravagance and befuddling exoticism. As in Stevens’ songs, freedom is again separated into two contrastive meanings, but this time under more pressing historical conditions due to the lurking danger of revolution and anarchy: On the one hand, there is English liberty as the proper sort of freedom, which suggests civil rights and a common-sense, golden-mean approach to the rationally restrained use of freedom. This is opposed to French licentiousness, on the other hand, as the kind of freedom not to be copied, as it implies unrestrained violent passion and an anarchic surrender to impulses and desires (see also Images 3 and 4). By the end of the eighteenth century, the diffuse discursive link between liberty and common sense has been cemented into a fixed stereotype of English national character,²⁵⁵ which is rather sweepingly assumed, in the iconic figure of John Bull, to serve as a general standard of Britishness.

lawsuit against Louis Baboon (France’s Louis XIV) in order to contest the latter’s claims to the estate of the deceased Lord Strutt (Spain’s Charles II).  See Nünning (2006) for an overview of the rhetoric and stereotypical elements of English national character in the eighteenth-century across a wide range of texts and genres.

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Images  and : Caricature by Thomas Rowlandson (above; first printed in )²⁵⁶ and an anonymous copy (below) on the frontispiece of The Antigallican Songster no.  ()²⁵⁷

Such totalizing constructions of Britishness on the basis of English hegemony do however have their fault lines, at which colonized cultural groups within the emerging empire gnaw in a refusal to accept a superimposed British identity, especially when it is based on political domination and economic or fiscal exploitation of marginalized groups, as in the case of British policies in the Irish and

 Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.  Interestingly, the copy replaces “British Liberty” with “English Liberty,” perhaps in order to stress that liberty on the basis of Magna Carta (which Britannia is holding in her right hand in both prints) originated from English soil. – For a detailed reading of Rowlandson’s caricature see Neumann (2003: 42).

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American colonies. Ironically, the movements for independence towards the end of the eighteenth century – successful in the case of the American colonies, unsuccessful as regards the Irish Rebellion of 1798 – are discursively underpinned by the same talismanic values that represent Englishness and Britishness at the time: liberty, interpreted as liberation from foreign rule, and common sense, fully exploiting the latter term’s ambiguity in that it can mean ‘the sensible thing to do’ as well as ‘communal spirit,’ i. e. what is in the best interest of the collective. That these values are adopted is not really surprising since the argumentative strategy of appealing to common sense is convenient and extremely popular in political discourse at that time, where it is applied to almost any political cause whatsoever.²⁵⁸ However, the appropriation of liberty and common sense in the rally for independence is an obvious example of the victory of the hegemonic value system; in other words, the oppressed have no other discursive means but to define themselves by the language and symbolic values of the oppressor. This especially applies to Ireland with its own indigenous cultural tradition being marginalized by the imperial power. It is an altogether different story in the New World where the independence movement has a primarily English cultural background in the first place and, what is more, is itself implicated in the colonial oppression, displacement, and killing of indigenous people. Thomas Paine’s history-making pamphlet Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (1776) is certainly the most effective case of political common-sense rhetoric. It signals with its very title a claim to a plausible rational truth that should be commonly accepted – by no means a new or original strat-

 Political publications throughout the second half of the eighteenth century abound with common sense rhetoric, also those from the (geographical) margins of political power. A few random examples may illustrate this: An Appeal to the Common Sense of Scotsmen, Especially Those of the Landed Interest, and More Especially Freeholders (1747) is a verbose and often rhetorically redundant treatise to promote wool manufacturing in Scotland in order to overcome the poverty and ‘ruin’ of the Scottish landed gentry – apart from the title itself, appeals to common sense in it are frequent. Another instance, even more regionally marginal, is a pamphlet called Common Sense: A Letter to the Fourteen Incorporations of Edinburgh (1777), in which an anonymous “Citizen” uses the rhetorical appeal to common sense to invite agreement with his criticism of Edinburgh municipal politics in the face of upcoming elections. A more elaborate use of common sense discourse can be found in a political treatise entitled Reflections on the Present State of the British Nation, by British Common Sense (London, 1791). In this argument for a parliamentary reform, the author assumes the role and name of ‘Common Sense’ personified: “To obtain for reason this candid and attentive hearing from you, my fellow citizens, is the present purpose of an individual but little known; stiling himself Common Sense; that constant and faithful attendant to Human Reason” (Reflections 1791: 5). This is also another example of the ongoing popularity of allegorical personifications of common sense, which I have discussed in the previous section.

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egy, as there were many other pamphlets and tracts of far lesser political impact before Paine’s text with the same title, but one that was especially effective in combination with Paine’s emotive rhetorical style.²⁵⁹ The third section of Paine’s sermonic treatise, in which he explicitly argues for America’s independence from Britain, is prefaced by the following much quoted sentence: In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves; that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day. (Paine 1995: 20)

Paine skilfully employs here well-established elements of common sense discourse (“simple facts, plain arguments” as well as being free “of prejudice and prepossession”) and mixes them with an appeal to his readers’ feelings and their openness to a broader view of things (to “generously enlarge his views beyond the present day”). In this clever rhetorical approach, the usual commonsense appeal becomes Paine’s Trojan horse in order to reveal a proposition going far beyond common consensus, i. e. the independence of the American colonies. While Paine himself, the born and bred “Englishman” (which is the anonymous description of the author on the title page of the first edition), is of course part of English common-sense culture, he subversively uses its rhetoric here in order to declare war on the self-proclaimed homeland of common sense. Again, but in a way that is even more radical than with the 1730s Whig Patriots, common sense is claimed for an oppositional cause, but is turned even more militantly into a “call to arms” (Rosenfeld 2011: 136).²⁶⁰ In the first re-

 See Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005), who, comparing Paine’s style with that of James Chalmers’ rebuttal to Paine in Plain Truth (1776), maintains that the latter “fails to counter the sentimental power of Common Sense. Candidus [Chalmers’ persona] appeals to the reader’s reason, where Common Sense owed much of its success to Paine’s appeal to his readers’ passion and imagination, as well as their reason” (55).  Paine’s rhetorical strategies in the light of common sense discourse deserve a more detailed examination – one which I cannot offer here as it would go beyond the scope of the present study. See instead Rosenfeld (2011: 136 – 180) for excellent analysis and commentary in the light of her history of eighteenth-century political common sense. In the sphere of politics, Paine’s pamphlet clearly outshines all other appropriations of common sense from the age due to its association with modern democracy: “Then, in Philadelphia in 1776, common sense buttressed the first modern experiments in generating widespread popular participation in governance. It remains a central element of the democratic creed” (Rosenfeld 2011: 7).

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actions from English commentators, the annoyance with Paine’s monopolization of the term is palpable. In the pamphlet Plain Truth Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, Containing Remarks on a Late Pamphlet, Entitled Common Sense (1776), written by the Scottish loyalist James Chalmers, the irritation with Paine’s presumptuous rhetoric is already signalled in the parallelism of the title. The Philadelphia edition of Chalmers’ pamphlet contains an additional section, signed by “Rationalis,” in which the author attacks the bold claim of Paine’s title and criticizes its manipulative rhetoric: The town has been lately amused with a new political pamphlet, entitled Common Sense. This piece, though it has taken a popular name, and implies that the contents are obvious, and adapted to the understandings of the bulk of the people is so far from meriting the title it has assumed, that in my opinion it holds principles equally inconsistent with learned and common Sense. (Chalmers 1776: 75)

The cool and belittling tone is quite reminiscent of Lord Hervey’s arrogant reaction to the Common Sense weekly from forty years before – this is an all too familiar rhetorical pattern in political argument. But just as in Hervey’s rebuttal, the value of common sense itself remains undisputed, even if it has been compromised by Paine’s ‘abuse’ of it in an argument which to Chalmers was clearly against patriotic British interests.²⁶¹ For the Irish nationalist cause of the later eighteenth century, the American case was certainly an inspiration and a model to emulate. Calls for Irish liberty are frequently paired with appeals to common sense, which are always a conspicuous allusion to Common Sense as well. However, in the time before Paine’s pamphlet becomes the blueprint and standard for revolutionary propaganda, liberty and common sense are still clearly on the side of the British rulers. In 1759 – 1760, the Irish writer Henry Brooke publishes four letters to his countrymen, published under the title Liberty and Common-Sense to the People of Ireland, in which he assumes the personified roles of Common Sense and Liberty: “We two Personages, called Liberty and Common-Sense, have a Right to address you, and to be heared and regarded by you, as we have been, for some Ages, your best Friends and truest Patriots” (Brooke 1759: I, 7). The letters clearly

 This opinion was not shared by every homeland commentator. In an obvious allusion to Paine’s pamphlet, John Cartwright, an early advocate of American independence, wrote The Memorial of Common-Sense, Upon the Present Crisis Between Great-Britain and America (1778), in which he assumes the role of Common Sense personified to address the House of Lords. He calls sharply for their pleading with the King and bringing about the dismissal of the ministry responsible for the maltreatment and subsequent secession of the American colonies, in the hope of a future reconciliation between Britain and the United States.

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argue in favour of Ireland being a part of Great Britain: the author sets out in his first letter to appease the Irish populace after some rioting over rumoured plans of a union of England and Ireland, in the process of which Ireland would lose its own parliament. Brooke is a loyalist, but argues against such a union, stressing that it would be in nobody’s interest and, above all, an infringement upon Irish liberty which would never happen (it did in 1801).²⁶² Brooke’s pamphlets are a clear case of an adoption of hegemonic ideology by the colonized, which becomes even clearer from his peculiar act of falsifying some famous patriotic lines from Joseph Addison’s Letter from Italy (1703) – original and copy are quoted side by side here: Oh Liberty, thou goddess heavenly bright! Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight! Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign, And smiling Plenty leads thy wanton train; Eas’d of her load Subjection grows more light, And Poverty looks cheerful in thy sight; Thou maks’t the gloomy face of nature gay, Giv’st beauty to the sun, and pleasure to the day. […] ’Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia’s isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. (Addison 1811: 222– 223)

O Liberty, thou Goddess heav’nly bright, Profuse of Bliss, and pregnant with Delight! Eternal Pleasures in thy Presence reign, Ev’n Poverty grows Plenty in thy Train; Eas’d of her Load Affliction treads more light, Sickness and Pain look chearful in thy Sight! Thou maks’t the gloomy Face of nature gay, Giv’st Beauty to the Sun and to the day. ’Tis Liberty that crowns Hibernia’s isle, And makes her barren Heaths and her bleak Mountains smile. Addison. (Brooke 1759: II, 2)²⁶³

It must be assumed that Brooke expected at least some of his Irish readers to know Addison’s poem, that is, his ‘forgery’ must be taken as either a literary joke or a serious adaptation with a sincere avowal of the original source (thus signed with “Addison”). While the latter is likelier, the question of whether his intention is serious or humorous is in fact rather immaterial here. In either case, Brooke must have felt the desire to forge a mythic tradition of Irish liberty that could compare to Britannia’s liberty as famed in so many Augustan poems. This is an indication of a hybrid mid-eighteenth-century Irish identity which combines the desire to be respected as a separate nation on the British Isles,

 That the author is a staunch supporter of Ireland’s Britishness, he leaves no doubt in Letter III: “Had all the Minos’, Solons, Lycurgus’, Numas, that ever blessed separate Nations with Systems of Policy or Institutions of Law, been united together; all their Study and Wisdom, their Depth of Genius and Extent of Experience could not have comprehended a Constitution so freely informed, so strongly connected, so equally balanced, and so prosperously disposed, as That of Great-Britain” (Brooke 1759: III, 8).  The passages in bold print are to highlight the substantial changes made by Brooke to transpose the context from Britain to Ireland (italics are in Brooke’s original).

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while being interpellated by a value system imposed upon by the imperial power. This situation changes, however, after the American and French Revolutions, when the reductive definition of Irish liberty as parliamentary privileges within Great Britain is no longer accepted by the majority, and the desire for independence is stirred. Again, song collections play a role in the spread of liberty discourses. One such is Paddy’s Resource: Being a Collection of Original and Modern Patriotic Songs, Toasts and Sentiments (1795, printed in Belfast), with which the author wants “To fan the Patriotic flame, / […] For Virtue and for Liberty” (Porter 1795: iii). While the title itself does not make any mention of common sense, the ambiguous reference to it as both a general concept and Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense occurs in several songs. One is entitled “Common Sense,” easily identifiable as a call for rebellion and an end to maltreatment (“Why should he tamely bow to those / Who class him with the swine, sir?”; Porter 1795: 83). Another song, called “The Dictates of Reason,” is even more direct in its reference to revolution in that it contains an obvious allusion to Thomas Paine as well as many standard elements of common sense discourse: Brave Irish no longer inactive remain, Attend to the dictates of Reason and Paine; ’Tis to Freedom they call you, no longer delay, Your Rights are at stake—and are lost if you stay. Shall men as the heads of the nation preside, Who cannot the test of inquiry abide? […] They flatter and fawn, and their friendship express, To blind, while they plunder, and roll in excess; And a pension bestow, for the praise of those Who would, if not brib’d, their corruptions expose: While apostates and tyrants so boldly agree, Let the powers of our Reason enlighten’d and free, Unappall’d at their frowns—with the object in view, Thro’ all its dark turnings, oppression pursue. (Porter 1795: 75)

The “dictates of Reason and Paine” in the second line is a nice pun alluding to Paine’s manifesto as well as expressing the Irish pain of oppression. At the same time, the “dictates of Reason” are a synonym of the ‘dictates of common sense,’ a much belaboured formula of rhetorical coercion in the eighteenth century, but yet again also a hidden reference to Paine’s Common Sense and the inevitable revolutionary model it has set for the Irish context. A few lines below, the accusation of the “corruptions” of those in charge of running the country (associated with bribery here as well) is identifiable as a staple of political common sense

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discourse since its beginnings with the Patriot Whigs of the 1730s. While remaining true to the oppositional spirit, the accusation has been turned here against the English themselves, aiming at British rule in Ireland. The inverted light metaphor in the “dark turnings” of oppression in the last line is shared by Enlightenment discourse (“Let the powers of our Reason enlighten’d and free”) and common sense discourse alike – Thomas Reid (2002: 27), for instance, claims “the old light of common sense” as a guide for the right kind of philosophical enquiry. Finally, the British oppressors are defamed as thieves and plunderers that “roll in excess,” which is a particularly mischievous use of common sense discourse. On the one hand, excess is anathema to common sense, that is, a behaviour or attitude diametrically opposed to a sane person in their right mind, and thus it nicely promotes the idea here that every sensible Irishman should see the necessity of taking action against such immoral excess and exploitation. On the other hand, excess is the dark spectre of anarchy and revolutionary chaos that is conjured up in the anti-revolutionary writings of the conservative British ruling class after the events of the French Revolution.²⁶⁴ Edmund Burke, Irish-born himself, severely castigates in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) the violent excesses of the Revolution and warns against an unrestrained and unbounded “spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess,” unless it be “tempered with an awful gravity” (Burke 2001: 185) instilled by a dignified English tradition of rights and privileges that is quite distinct from the insolent licentiousness of excessive French freedom. As can be seen, liberty and excess are markers of a discursive battlefield of competing political viewpoints and interests, which traverses common sense discourse in the highly charged political arena of the late eighteenth century. It indeed becomes an opportune strategy for oppositional political or ethnic groups to make use of the rhetorical appeal of common sense discourse, even in cases where the association of common sense with English or British national identities seems to betray the cause of the opposed or colonized group as it means falling victim to the hegemonic ideology of the colonizer or dominant nation. To put it more positively, English common sense can be subverted and turned against those who cling to it as a national quality – a strategy of beating the opponent

 See also Pelzer (1998: 269), who remarks on the predominantly conservative climate in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century in reaction to the political turmoil in France: “das nationale englische Bewußtsein wurde an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert von einer überwältigenden konservativen Kraft gespeist. Die Verteidiger der bestehenden politischen und sozialen Ordnung erhielten zusätzliche Unterstützung dadurch, daß die einflußreiche profranzösische Grundströmung im eigenen Land mit Anti-Gallikanismus bekämpft und schließlich niedergerungen werden konnte.”

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at their own game, which we will also encounter in other cases of the ‘commonsense Other’ in eighteenth-century Britain in the following chapter. All in all, the rhetoric of common sense is able to persist in the political discourses of the eighteenth century due to its flexibility and adaptability within changing political contexts. Together with the talismanic concept of liberty, common sense becomes an important element in political constructions of English and British identities in the eighteenth century, but due to its historic association with oppositional patriotism it also lends itself perfectly to be employed against British hegemony by dominated or oppressed groups within a growing British colonial empire.

5 The Other of Common Sense As has been demonstrated for the area of politics in the previous chapter, common sense always implies a distinction between ‘us’ and the ‘them,’ between a common ‘self’ and an uncommon ‘Other.’²⁶⁵ Even at its most universal scope, the sense that is supposed to be common to all humankind defines a human self against a nonhuman or subhuman Other – those who do not even measure up to a basic standard of rational understanding, a minimum of sense manifesting itself in the evidence of such principles as the logical tertium non datur. ²⁶⁶ However, due to the discursive shift occurring in the 1730s that ennobled common sense as an ideal of impartial, infallible judgment and made it one of the cornerstones in constructing a superior collective identity, English or British ‘men of common sense’ embrace a hegemonic collective identity in opposition to an Other that is more or less openly valuated as inferior, but still implicitly felt to be a potential threat to the superior status of the self. ‘Othering’ in eighteenth-century common sense discourse in Britain not only effects discrimination  I use the philosophical term ‘Other’ in the sense established across a broad range of disciplines, such as Emmanuel Lévinas’ postmodern ethics, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Even though the precise meaning of the Other is accentuated quite differently in different disciplines and different authors (e. g. the radical Other in Levinas’ ethics, whose face places undeniable ethical demands on the self; or the symbolic Other in Lacan’s concept of the psyche, onto which the subject’s desire is directed), the Other is always that which is perceived as being other than the ‘self’ (i. e. the self-concept of an individual or a group), but without which the self could not constitute itself either. The capitalization of the term has become a convention to mark the profound impact the Other has on the self, regardless of whether it is perceived as superior or inferior to the self, as sublime or lowly, or is ignored or negated by the self. I intend to circumvent the serious philosophical problem of determining the degree to which, or whether at all, the Other can be comprehended by the self. In an early postcolonial essay, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory,” Abdul R. JanMohamed (1985: 64– 65) has expressed this sensitive issue in respect of the colonial encounter quite well: “If he [i. e., the European; C.H.] assumes that he and the Other are essentially identical, then he would tend to ignore the significant divergences and to judge the Other according to his own cultural values. If, on the other hand, he assumes that the Other is irremediably different, then he would have little incentive to adopt the viewpoint of that alterity: he would again tend to turn to the security of his own cultural perspective. Genuine and thorough comprehension of Otherness is possible only if the self can somehow negate or at least severely bracket the values, assumptions, and ideology of his culture.”  “’Tis impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be,” as John Locke (1975: 49) calls it. According to Locke’s empiricist philosophy, tertium non datur is a speculative principle that is not innate (it is “not known to Children, Ideots, and a great part of Mankind”; Locke 1975: 63), but as close to an innate idea as can be, since anybody denying this principle or attempting to justify it “would be thought void of common Sense” (Locke 1975: 68).

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against political opponents, but also against foreign cultures as well as the ‘weak sex’ in a patriarchal, heteronormative society. Common sense discourse thus stabilizes hegemonic cultural and gendered identities by externalizing the repressed fears of the male English self – emotionality and effeminacy, resulting in a loss of control and, ultimately, power – into the foreign and the female Other. In the following two sections, I shall look at discursive manifestations of Otherness in British writing of the first half of the eighteenth century. Viewed against the backdrop of an English self-affirmation of cultural superiority, representations of ‘exotic’ otherness in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World will reveal the role of common sense discourse in these fears of the Other – an aversion to otherness that is at the same time undercut, at least in Goldsmith’s text, by glimpses of the arbitrary nature of identity concepts prompting racial and ethnic stereotypes. Regarding the role of gender, male-dominated common sense discourse clearly operates as a principle of exclusion in order to ex-territorialize femininity: stereotypically feminine attributes are represented as alien to common sense not only in the public discussion of common sense at the time, but also in popular literary texts such as Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

5.1 The Foreign Other – Robinson Crusoe and The Citizen of the World The past is not the only foreign country where people do things differently. That which is not accepted as common sense is very foreign to those who are within the borders of the discursive territory that demarcates accepted reasonable speech, sensible judgment, or pragmatic behaviour – whatever is excluded from these borders, marks a foreign country that is as unknown as it is potentially intimidating. This metaphorical affinity between non-common sense (or even nonsense) and foreign territory is an important point of pursuit here. Cultural otherness in eighteenth-century Britain is often discursively constructed as being in some way alien to common sense – a sense, it is to be repeated, that despite suggesting universality (in a Lovejoyian notion of pan-European Enlightenment culture)²⁶⁷ can be compartmentalized into a maximizing and a minimizing view of it, that is, into higher amounts or a more exquisite quality, on the one hand, and lower amounts and a less acute form, on the other. Whenever com-

 See above, chapter IV.1.

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mon sense is claimed to be an integral element of the English national character, it is of course meant in the maximizing view of a quality in which the English excel and that sets them above other nations or cultures. This does not mean that the perceived foreignness of other cultures, for which there is generally a great interest in eighteenth-century Britain given the popularity of travel writing at the time, could not be embraced as positively exotic. As a matter of fact, Orientalism in the eighteenth century can exude a fascinating aura of ancient wisdom (as exploited superficially in the market appeal of Samuel Johnson’s oriental tale Rasselas as well as in the stereotype of Far-Eastern sagacity in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World). However, the case has been made that travel writing up to Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) indulges either in dry descriptions of superficial appearances or in outrageous romanticized lies about foreign wonders, both marvellous and abhorrent (Batten 1978: 5) – in any case, these travel reports are confined to the travellers’ stereotype-ridden worldviews and are altogether barred from capturing the radical otherness of the foreign experience. Moreover, in both fictional and non-fictional writing about foreigners or foreign countries, the foreign often becomes an object of scorn and derision (e. g. as experienced by the Chinese Altangi in Goldsmith’s Citizen), if not of downright anxiety and existential fear (e. g. in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe). While this inability to address radical otherness (in the modern postcolonial sense) is by no means confined to the context of English eighteenth-century literature – it is rather a phenomenon endemic to Western literature up to the twentieth century –, my point here is to show how representations of the foreign in eighteenth-century English writing intersect specifically with common sense discourse in that both construct an alien Other through a process of discursive ex-territorialization. In other words, the foreign Other is barred from the English self in that the accounts of foreign cultures or their practices often operate on the foreign cultures’ violations of common sense. This discursive operation results in the exclusion of otherness from the cultural self-concept; a true encounter with it thus becomes impossible. The discursive operation of constructing cultural otherness as an exclusion from the English common-sense self begins with the construction of an outside territory of what common sense is not. In a number of the Common Sense periodical (no. 66, 6 May 1738), a whole essay in the popular form of a feigned letter to the author is devoted to the question of what is to be excluded from English common sense and how to judge what falls within or without its bounds. This discussion of the manifestations of non-common sense is quite revealing in that it gives an insight into the operations of common sense discourse as a principle of exclusion in the Foucauldian sense. The author of the ‘letter’ asserts that explaining “what is not Common Sense [is] a Talk much more extensive” compared to defin-

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ing what common sense be in positive terms, and also “more useful to Society” (CS2: 81). The deviation from common sense as a “plain Rule of Action” can have many reasons as “Men are misled by Prejudice, misguided by Pride, and enticed by Foibles” as well as by “the Excrescences of Affectation, Fashion, Party, and Passion,” which are all well known stumbling blocks to a moral ideal of common sense (CS2: 81).²⁶⁸ The imagery is interesting insofar as common sense is understood as a “Condition of Mind which more People stand in Need of being reduced to” (CS2: 82) rather than being supplied with. Hence common sense seems to be envisaged here in the Shaftesburian tradition of an innate sense, which is plain in its natural state and should be put to use economically and pragmatically. This very Protestant, if not Puritan, notion of plainness is reinforced by the image of mankind’s “strange Inclination to branch out into Extreams, […] dilating themselves into the Ridiculous, unless some judicious Hand takes the Trouble to prune their Luxuriances, and by that Means make them bear the Fruits of Common Sense” (CS2: 82). The aggressive botanical image is reminiscent of Jack and Martin’s removal of the embellishments that their Catholic brother Peter had added to their father’s coat (the Bible) in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. ²⁶⁹ This pruning purification of the human mind through the asceticism of common sense performs a discursive exclusion of unrestrained passion, imagination, fancy, speculation, and any mental operation that is beyond immediate practical use towards a morally justifiable end. All these violent extravagances of the mind are pushed into an outside of common sense discourse, an unchartered territory that is simply labelled madness. The author follows here John Locke’s famous definition in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding where the philosopher construes madness as a faulty application of reason in “join[ing] together some Ideas very wrongly, [so that] they mistake them for Truths, and err as Men who argue right from wrong Principles. For, by the Violence of their Imaginations, having taken their Fancies for Realities, they make right Deductions from them” (CS2: 82). As Allan Ingram has pointed out, Locke grants madmen the power of reasoning (as opposed to ‘idiots’ who are totally bereft of reason; see Locke 1975: 160), only to hold them “responsible for their own error” (Ingram 2001: 11). The language or behaviour resulting from misapplied reason is unreason, though, which has been described by Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization as Neoclassicism’s discursive operation to silence the discourse of madmen (Foucault 2001: 248 – 249). This discursive operation of silencing is also at

 See also above, chapter II.1, about Shaftesbury’s concept of an innate moral common sense of right and wrong.  See above, chapter III.2.

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work in the ‘letter’ from the Common Sense journal when, with reference to Locke, non-commonsensical behaviour is ultimately put on the same level as the unreason of madmen and thus pushed off into a disempowered outside of common sense discourse. In this specific case, the author seems to have an axe to grind with cases of ‘mad’ behaviour by “Person[s] of Distinction” (CS2: 84)²⁷⁰ who act below their social rank and indulge in speaking and behaving like low-class people. However ludicrous the warning against such behaviour may seem – the author views it as a symptom of “Epidemical Frenzies” (CS2: 85) taking hold of English society –, the underlying discursive operation is a normative one that pushes away unwanted behaviour into an outside of common sense, into the wilderness of an unchartered foreign territory. *** The wilderness that metaphorically characterizes the outside of common sense discourse has a precursor, I would argue, in the wilderness of Crusoe’s island in Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The novel presents the castaway Crusoe as the iconic myth of the common-sense Englishman who survives in the wilderness by relying on physical, spiritual, and rational fortifications and by domesticating as well marking off otherness around and within himself. Even though the term common sense is rarely mentioned in the novel, th text can be read as an allegory of the principle of exclusion at work in common sense discourse, not least because the isolated Crusoe procures his survival by practical common-sense decisions that are based on a vital distinction between the rational self and an Other that is beyond rational comprehension and thus perceived as a threat to the self. In order to persevere on an unknown island that appears to the castaway as a vast, amorphous, and life-threatening terra incognita, Crusoe uses a form of instrumental reason that is easily associated with the faculty of practical common sense in matters of everyday life, in order to domesticate and cultivate the wilderness as far as this can be done. He salvages many spoils from the shipwreck for his provisions and building material; he domesticates wild animals as livestock and cultivates plants and grain for his nourishment; he even teaches himself mechanical crafts so that he is able to make simple tools, build furniture and construct other apparatuses: “as Reason is the Substance and Original of the

 The strange incident the author reports is that of nobleman who dresses up as a coachman and drives a stage-coach filled with his servants (acting as imaginary respectable people) in the most furious manner, swearing and acting generally like a real coachman in the event. This ‘class-confusion’ is a gross violation of common sense to the author of the letter and to be put on the same level as the acts of unreason by madmen (cf. CS2: 84– 85).

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Mathematicks, so by stating and squaring every thing by Reason, and by making the most rational Judgment of things, every Man may be in time Master of every mechanick Art” (RC: 59). Just like in his previous life as a seafaring fortune hunter and plantation owner, Crusoe proves himself to be not just a self-reliant individualist, but a homo oeconomicus through and through²⁷¹ – as Ian Watt states in his seminal analysis of the novel as a literary myth of Western capitalist individualism: “profit is Crusoe’s only vocation, and the whole world is his territory” (Watt 1995: 67). Crusoe is guided by principles of utility and expediency that allow him a plain, but comfortable life amidst dire circumstances. As we have already seen above, the appreciation of plainness and utility are recurring motifs in common sense discourse and are prefigured in the example that Defoe sets here with Crusoe. Utility is also the governing principle in Crusoe’s pedantic establishing of order, not only in his small household space on the island,²⁷² but also in his keeping of social time with the help of a calendar and a diary (his writing cure against depression), as well as in his frequent list-making to sort out his thoughts and overcome self-doubt and emotional uncertainty²⁷³ – such sticking to order, logic, and reason is an effective means for Crusoe to establish meaning and keep his common sense, i. e. his mental sanity under adverse conditions. The same motivation is discernable behind Crusoe’s religious awakening on the island, although he (and probably Defoe as well) seems wholly oblivious to this: his spirituality is functionally subordinated to the expediency of survival, however tightly (or rather loosely) Robinson Crusoe still appears to adhere to the genre pattern of the spiritual autobiography.²⁷⁴ Even if the stages towards fully embracing his faith in God’s Providence still conform to the Puritan scheme of

 See also Laurenz Volkmann’s (2003: 550 – 572) extensive analysis of Robinson Crusoe as an iconic homo oeconomicus of English eighteenth-century literature.  He builds shelves for the small cave he excavated in the rock (the back wall to his ‘house’) and uses it as a cellar, so that “it look’d like a general Magazine of all Necessary things, and I had every thing so ready at my Hand, that it was a great Pleasure to me to see all my Goods in such Order […].” (RC: 60).  The most significant example is Crusoe’s list of pros and cons, headed “Evil” versus “Good,” about his situation on the island at the beginning (see RC: 57– 58).  Watt’s conclusion about the struggle between the Puritan template and the secular novelistic pattern has not lost any of its validity after more than fifty years: “It would seem, then, that Defoe’s importance in the history of the novel is directly connected with the way his narrative structure embodied the struggle between Puritanism and the tendency to secularisation which was rooted in material progress. At the same time it is also apparent that the secular and economic viewpoint is the dominant partner, and that it is this which explains why it is Defoe, rather than Bunyan, who is usually considered to be the first key figure in the rise of the novel” (Watt 1995: 83).

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conversion, Crusoe’s religious awakening is facilitated by mounting existential fears in the face of an earthquake, a hurricane, and finally a violent fever (combined with the haunting conscience-ridden thought that his father’s prediction of his perishing due to disobedience might actually come true).²⁷⁵ Like calendar time and orderly housekeeping, faith in God’s Providence after surviving the forces of nature becomes a useful psychological tool for Crusoe to compensate for the deprivations of his island life and accept his fate. Much as he seems to downplay “the Dictates of common Sense” (RC: 76)²⁷⁶ that primarily determined his life before his religious conversion, his strategy for survival never truly deviates from them. Ultimately, Crusoe is presented by Defoe as a model image of employing instrumental reason and practical common sense in a state of complete (but rather splendid) isolation,²⁷⁷ in which he strongly relies on the distinction between what is useful for his survival and for alleviating his everyday life, on the one hand, and what is useless and a potential threat from outside, on the other. Shunning the intimidating otherness that surrounds him is a necessary strategy to strengthen the self. This principle of exclusion is most vividly symbolized in the novel by the various forms of walls, fortifications, and enclosures that Robinson Crusoe erects between himself and the wilderness. In minute detail, Crusoe describes how he selects the place for setting up his tent on the island – under a steep precipice – and how he fortifies his abode by enclosing it with a half-circular fence, laboriously built with stakes and cable, which does not even have a door:

 “Now, said I aloud, My dear Father’s Words are come to pass. God’s Justice has overtaken me, and I have none to help or hear me: I rejected the Voice of Providence, which had mercifully put me in a Posture or Station of Life wherein I might have been happy and easy; but I would neither see it my self, or learn to know the Blessing of it from my Parents […]” (RC: 78).  The passage where Crusoe mentions this is no downright dismissal of common sense anyway; on closer inspection, he characterizes his former life as not even guided by common sense: “But I was meerly thoughtless of a God, or a Providence; acted like a mere Brute from the Principles of Nature, and by the Dictates of common Sense only, and indeed hardly that” (RC: 76; my italics).  His isolation on the island is anticipated by his individualistic egoism in all of his ventures before he shipwrecks, which had already put him into a state of self-willed isolation from society. This is an aspect of Crusoe’s character that does not quite go along with standard concepts of the ‘man of common sense,’ who is characterized not alone by his superior faculty of judgment, but also by his orientation toward the common good. Ian Watt even goes so far as to call Crusoe’s egocentricity an “excess” (1995: 86). Samuel Johnson considered solitude and isolation, which are basically positives in Robinson Crusoe, as impositions on man to make him go mad (cf. Watt 1995: 88, who quotes from Hester Piozzi’s Thraliana). This predicament is demonstrated in the character of the Astronomer in Rasselas, whose delusion is caused by isolation (see above, chapter II.2).

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The Entrance into this Place I made to be not by a Door, but by a short Ladder to go over the Top, which Ladder, when I was in, I lifted over after me, and so I was completely fenc’d in, and fortify’d, as I thought, from all the World, and consequently slept secure in the Night, which otherwise I could not have done, tho’, as it appear’d afterward, there was no need of all this Caution from the Enemies that I apprehended Danger from. (RC: 52)

Inside this fortress, as Crusoe calls it himself, he further sets up a system of several tents-within-a-tent, three layers altogether, consisting of “[o]ne smaller Tent within, and one larger Tent above it, and cover’d the uppermost with a large Tarpaulin which I had sav’d among the Sails” (RC: 52) to protect himself from violent rains. Even though Crusoe realizes in the first year of his stay that building a fortress was not exactly necessary as the island is apparently uninhabited by other men or dangerous animals, it gives him a soothing feeling of protection. However, when he is shaken from his everyday routine by the discovery of a footprint on the beach in his fifteenth year on the island, Crusoe hastens to build a second line of outer fortification around his original fortress, for which he fills the gaps between rows of young trees that he had planted a decade before: Thus in two Years Time I had a thick Grove and in five or six Years Time I had a Wood before my Dwelling, growing so monstrous thick and strong, that it was indeed perfectly impassable; and no Men of what kind soever, would ever imagine that there was any Thing beyond it, much less a Habitation. (RC: 137)

This obsession with wall-building and land-enclosure, plausible in itself given Crusoe’s existential fears and his instinct for self-preservation, has been read as symbolic of a divided or displaced self, if not an allegory of the epistemological subject-object divide caused by Enlightenment philosophy, and recently even as a colonial enclosure of a small part of an otherwise frighteningly unassailable space that stands for the Lacanian ‘real.’²⁷⁸ Scott Nowka in a very recent article has added to these interpretations by arguing that “Crusoe’s obsession with his wall is indicative of an effort to create and maintain a stability of subjectivity – a sense of self defined against the Otherness he fears” (Nowka 2010: 44). Crusoe’s abode and its manifold fortification thus become “a locus of selfhood in which the threat or influence of the Other is negated” (Nowka 2010: 44)²⁷⁹ – and, by extension, an allegory of the principle of exclusion working

 See Brown (1971); Kavanagh (1978); Marzec (2002).  Without referring to the postmodern concept of the ‘Other,’ Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth in Realism and Consensus in the English Novel already identified ‘enclosure’ to extend one’s power against threats from outside as a central metaphor in Robinson Crusoe: “Crusoe fortifies, and when more materials wash ashore, refortifies, so that the activity of fortification becomes a sign

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within common sense discourse, which is given a powerful image in the desperate attempts by the commonsensical Crusoe to keep out otherness. Crusoe’s fears are only redoubled after perceiving in the footprint “the inescapable image of the Other” (Brantlinger 1990: 3) or, more precisely, a haunting trace of the absent Other that seems even more uncanny because of its very absence making it a projection plane for his wildest fears (De Certeau 1984: 154). When the absent presence of the Other finally turns into the physical presence of cannibals on Crusoe’s island, this confrontation with the Other outside is at the same time a confrontation with the Other inside of Crusoe. What he perceives as savage and inhuman behaviour in the cannibals – feasting on human flesh –, reverberates inside of him in the form of a savage and inhuman bloodlust – to ‘exterminate all the brutes’: “for Night and Day, I could think of nothing but how I might destroy some of the Monsters in their cruel bloody Entertainment” (RC: 142). His burning desire to kill as many as possible makes him ponder various plans of how to succeed in this most effectively, either with gunpowder or from an ambush “with my three Guns all double loaded” (RC: 143). He is so preoccupied with his “Malice” or “murthering Humour” (RC: 143, 155), as he calls it, it even haunts him in his sleep: […] I made no doubt, but that if there weas twenty I should kill them all: This Fancy pleas’d my Thoughts for some Weeks, and I was so full of it, that I often dream’d of it; and sometimes that I was just going to let fly at them in my Sleep. (RC: 143)

These passionate feelings of extreme aggression continually welling up in him represent a side of his psyche that is foreign to him – it is the Other inside of a self that is normally under the strict control of a rational common-sense super-ego, but is now besieged by a ‘savage’ passionate id, experienced by Crusoe as his hitherto unacknowledged side. However, in his “cooler and calmer thoughts,” the rational super-ego gets the better again and is able to keep the savage Other in check, e. g. when he considers: What Authority, or Call I had, to pretend to be Judge and Executioner upon these Men as Criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many Ages to suffer unpunish’d, to go on, and to be as it were, the Executioners of his Judgments one upon another. How far these People were Offenders against me, and what Right I had to engage in the Quarrel of that Blood, which they shed promiscuously one upon another. (RC: 144)

to himself of his continuance, like his other productions and records, a sign of his power to maintain himself against any external threat” (Ermarth 1983: 125).

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This rational self-questioning, on moral and religious principles, triggers off a whole series of further-reaching critical reflections on the colonial “conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people,” which brought about “the utmost Abhorrence and Detestation, by even the Spaniards themselves, at this Time; and by all other Christian Nations of Europe, as a mere Butchery, a bloody and unnatural Piece of Cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or Man” (RC: 145). While it is quite revealing that Crusoe turns a blind eye to British colonial misdemeanour²⁸⁰ here, this is perhaps his closest shot at an insight into cultural relativism. And yet, Crusoe will not keep up this disengaged attitude towards otherness both external (the cannibals) and internal (his bloodlust), as he later engages in frequent killings of other natives during and after his acquisition of Friday. The difference is, however, that his former passion for killing sprees makes way for utility and deliberate action again – and in this, I would argue, the reflex of common sense thinking can be traced again: it facilitates a compromise between the extremes of passionate involvement and moral-rational detachment. Crusoe does kill the natives, but he does so because he judges that he must, in order to protect himself and his slave Friday, and to free Friday’s father and the Spanish sailor.²⁸¹ Not  That is, the African slave raids and the cruel treatment of slaves in South American colonies such as British Surinam, which are described in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. The passage about Spanish colonial crimes is just one among many others that imply a rigid cultural hierarchy in Robinson Crusoe, a “hierarchy [that] develops as soon as other people turn up on the island” (Ermarth 1983: 137): From Crusoe’s patriotic point of view, the English have cultural and moral superiority over other European nations (e. g. the Spanish and the Portuguese). The Europeans, in turn, claim a right as colonizers to rule over African and South American slaves (e. g. on Crusoe’s plantation in Brazil), while the Caribbean cannibals appear as the least civilized ethnic group and most pernicious in the novel. Crusoe himself becomes the colonial master per se and feels on top of the cultural ladder: “My Island was now peopled, and I thought my self very rich in Subjects; and it was a merry Reflection which I frequently made, How like a King I look’d. First of all, the whole Country was my own meer Property; so that I had an undoubted Right of Dominion. 2dly, My People were perfectly subjected: I was absolute Lord and Law-giver […]” (RC: 203). His social vision, as a Puritan, is progressive and based on ideals of religious freedom. While in reality this is to be implemented much later with the independence of the United States of America, it is no more than a utopian dream at the time of Defoe’s writing of Robinson Crusoe – and a stab at the persecution of dissenters in Britain: “My Man Friday was a Protestant, his Father was a Pagan and a Cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist. However, I allow’d Liberty of Conscience throughout my Dominions” (RC: 203).  It might be taken as a visible, if somewhat peculiar, result of this ‘compromise’ between passion and reason that Crusoe resorts to making lists again in his report about the dead in his raid on the cannibals: “3 Kill’d at our first Shot from the Tree. / 2 Kill’d at the next Shot. / 2 Kill’d by Friday in the Boat. / 2 Kill’d by Ditto, of those at first wounded. / 1 Kill’d by Ditto, in the wood. / 3 Kill’d by the Spaniard. / 4 Kill’d, being found dropp’d here and there of their Wounds, or kill’d

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only is the threatening Other destroyed in the form of the cannibals, but it is also the Other within his psyche, threatening to take over his ego, that is successfully repressed and excluded from the common-sense self. If Friday is “a benign other who takes the place of the unknown threatening other who leaves only a trace,” as Robert Folkenflik (2009: 113) has recently argued with reference to the interpretive significance of the footprint scene, then it is only because he is designed by Defoe as a character that already bears the visible marks of the European self when Crusoe frees him from the cannibals. It begins with his outward appearance: as has often been noted, the description of Friday’s bodily and facial features strongly resembles the ‘noble savage’ pattern of the African prince Oroonoko in Aphra Behn’s late seventeenth-century slavery narrative.²⁸² On top of that, Friday, although he becomes Crusoe’s slave, brings with him such advantageous qualities that his domestication, language education, and finally religious instruction at Crusoe’s hands are a great success. In this way, Friday loses a considerable part of his otherness in that he becomes Europeanized and stripped of some of his most savage customs, such as the eating of human flesh – he becomes a hybrid being that is visibly ‘other’ than Crusoe and yet has been infused with attributes of Crusoe’s English self. Friday even becomes so English that he uses his common sense to put his finger on logical loopholes in the Christian concept of the devil which Crusoe tries to teach him – a move that leaves his instructor completely dumbfounded: But, says he again, if God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God no kill the Devil, so make him no more do wicked? I was strangely surpriz’d at his Question, and after all, tho’ I was now an old Man, yet I was but a young Doctor, and ill enough quallified for a Casuist, or a Solver of Difficulties: And at first I could not tell what to say, so I pretended not to hear him, and ask’d him what he said? But he was too earnest for an Answer to forget his Question; so that he repeated it in the very same broken Words, as above. (RC: 184)

by Friday in his Chase of them. / 4 Escap’d in the Boat, whereof one wounded if not dead. / 21 In all.” (RC: 199)  Cf. Oroonoko’s description: “His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony, or polished jet. His eyes were the most awful that could be seen and very piercing, the white of ’em being like snow, as were his teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen, far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes” (Behn 1994: 12; my italics). – Conversely, Friday is described as follows: “[…] he had all the Sweetness and Softness of an European in his Countenance too, especially when he smil’d. His Hair was long and black, not curl’d like Wool; his Forehead very high, and large, and a great Vivacity and sparkling Sharpness in his Eyes. The Colour of his Skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet not an ugly yellow nauseous tawny […]. His Face was round, and plump; his Nose small, not flat, like the Negroes, a very good Mouth, thin Lips, and his fine Teeth well set, and white as Ivory” (RC: 173; my italics).

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While Crusoe has taught Friday “to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my Name” (RC: 174), he is no master of theology, “ill enough quallified for a Casuist,” as he says himself. As a man of practical common sense, Crusoe is no pedant of theological learning; so in order to quell the insistent questions of his religious disciple he can only resort to diversionary tactics (“I therefore diverted the present Discourse between me and my Man, rising up hastily […]; then sending him for something a good way off”; RC: 185) and some subsequent general lecturing about God’s wisdom. Ironically, it is the innocent common sense of the savage Friday – for it is certainly common sense in the Lockean usage of simple logic what Friday employs here – that catches the commonsensical Englishman off his guard. Yet, this ambivalence of common sense thinking in Robinson Crusoe is rather a deconstructive fault line of which the author Defoe appears to have been largely unaware himself. Overall, Crusoe’s Puritan faith is not to be seriously challenged on the basis of theological quibbles and seeming inconsistencies – the novel suggests that Puritanism is to trump any rationalistic latitudinarian dilution of the true faith. Only temporarily defeated in his role as a missionary, Crusoe therefore comforts himself with the idea that “nothing but divine Revelation can form the Knowledge of Jesus Christ” (RC: 184). Rather than to challenge Christian doctrine, the purpose of this passage is to reinforce the boundary between the European self and the colonized Other. Even though Crusoe confirms later that under his tutelage Friday has become as good a Protestant as any, the scene of religious interrogation shows that the kernel of Friday’s otherness is irreducible. This impression is redoubled in a later incident at the end of novel, after Crusoe and Friday have managed to leave the island, reached the European continent, and are now on their way to England, travelling by land route through the Pyrenees with guides and further servants. When the company is first attacked by wolves and then by a bear during their mountain passage, Friday not only proves to be utterly fearless of the wild animals, but also betrays a savage bend of mind as he cruelly teases the bear for Crusoe’s entertainment for a prolonged time, before he eventually kills him (see RC: 246 – 249). This ‘sport’ (Friday claims it is a native custom in his country – “so we kill Bear in my Country”; RC: 249) might seem like a variant of bear-baiting, so by no means a form of entertainment foreign to British citizens. Nevertheless, Friday’s direct confrontation with the bear makes him appear as a wild exotic creature himself. The fact that Crusoe and his European company stand back, uninvolved and at some distance, to watch the spectacle of Friday’s killing game with the bear, is symbolic of the insurmountable distance between European civilization and Caribbean savagery. In the end, the benign Other can only be civilized and transformed into a Westerner up to some point; the divide in the novel between

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the common-sense self and the foreign Other is warranted by a discursive principle of exclusion which ultimately remains intact. A final comment shall be made with regard to common sense discourse and the novelistic form of Robinson Crusoe, that is, its profound contribution (together with Richardson’s and Fielding’s novels) to the development of a realist tradition at the outset of the much debated ‘rise of the novel.’ Ever since Ian Watt argued in The Rise of the Novel from 1957 that the emergence of the modern novel in the eighteenth century was based on the two pillars of ‘formal realism’ (inspired by Lockean empiricism) and the growing socioeconomic influence of a bourgeois middle-class readership (with individualism as its core value), the controversial debates about this grand récit have not abated, specifically as to the almost mythical status of Robinson Crusoe as the founding text of the modern novelistic tradition.²⁸³ This is certainly a debate I neither need nor wish to enter here. However, I would like to take my cue from Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s concept of realism as an aesthetic consensus that establishes itself in the eighteenth century novel,²⁸⁴ and reflect on a possible aesthetic consensus stipulated by common sense discourse. Paradoxically perhaps, Robinson Crusoe is considered, not just by Ian Watt, the first major English prose narrative to promote bourgeois individualism – a circumstance that seems to contradict the commonality of perspective presupposed by common sense as a faculty of judgment. It is certainly true that Crusoe embodies self-reliance and an individualistic pursuit of happiness. Although this seems to be thwarted by his isolated existence on the island for decades, Crusoe is rewarded with social reintegration, marriage, and a large fortune at the end of the novel. But this is only one side of the story. In practical  Critical beacons in the debate since the 1980s have been: Davis (1983), a Foucauldian analysis of the broader discursive underpinnings of the novel, such as the older news/novels discourse; Spencer (1986), a feminist counter-history to the male ‘rise of the novel’ and an important resource for the study of eighteenth-century women writers; McKeon (1987), a Marxist analysis of the dialectical struggle in the prehistory of the novel up to 1740 between romance and antiromance; Hunter (1990), a broad historical study of the late seventeenth/early eighteenthcentury contexts of the emerging genre; and finally: Gallagher (1995), a New-Historicist study on female authorship and its different historical stages in the marketplace, from early novelists (Behn and Manley) to mid and late eighteenth-century writers (Lennox, Burney, Edgeworth).  Ermarth (1983: ix–x) argues that “fictional realism is an aesthetic form of consensus, its touchstone being the agreement between the various viewpoints made available by a text.” Her idea is that the realistic conventions developed in Renaissance pictorial art find their expression in the novel through its innovations in converging perspectives: “The consensus of realism […] produces in literature a rationalization of consciousness analogous to the rationalization of sight evident in realistic painting” (Ermarth 1983: 4). While the intermedial historical aspect of Renaissance art and its conventions is of no relevance to my argument, the general idea of an aesthetic consensus is.

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matters as well as in his thinking (in his many reflections about his situation), Crusoe is the rational everyman that can be identified as the overall focal point of eighteenth-century common sense discourse. He is a plain man, he is not eccentric, and he has no particular or extreme qualities in which he excels. This matter-of-fact plainness is reflected in his minutely descriptive style as a homodiegetic narrator, which is generally viewed as the prototype of realist verisimilitude.²⁸⁵ While Defoe’s journalistic faith to physical detail is unprecedented in fictional narrative,²⁸⁶ it is at the same time an exorcism of the fanciful and the fantastic of the romance tradition, despite the colourful exotic setting of the Caribbean island, to which it correlates inversely. In other words, not only does the Anglocentric common-sense view of reality in Robinson Crusoe give no voice to the cultural Other (Friday’s broken English is certainly not its authentic voice), it also excludes otherness with respect to stylistic extravagances. Due to its commonsensical protagonist, its emphasis on factual description, its plainness of style, and its rejection of fanciful embellishment, Robinson Crusoe is an instance of literary common sense. The rewarding of the hero with a happy ending of bourgeois prosperity both in family and money matters is also significant here: While it is certainly a manifest earthly sign of God’s grace toward Crusoe according to the Puritan doctrine of predestination, it is at the same time an act of poetic justice and thus an expression of the aesthetic-cum-moral common sense of the Augustan Age. In all these ways Robinson Crusoe embodies the aesthetic and moral values implied by common sense discourse in the early eighteenth century. Since the new genre of novel is “a discourse for reinforcing particular ideologies” (Davis 1983: 9), the early realist mode developed in Robinson Crusoe lends itself perfectly to the ideology of a transparently discern-

 Cf. Ian Watt’s influential verdict: “Defoe would seem to be the first of our writers who visualised the whole of his narrative as though it occurred in an actual physical environment” (Watt 1995: 26). – However, Elizabeth Ermarth has stressed how many of Defoe’s detailed descriptions of physical environment “defy visualization” and “do not yield scenes with primarily dramatic value” (Ermarth 1983: 118).  According to Lennard J. Davis, this is exactly what makes Robinson Crusoe such an oddity as the founding text of the novel tradition. He views the first novel of the journalist and magazine writer Defoe as still being part of an older news/novels discourse hinging on an appearance of fact, while only in retrospect it turns out to be the beginning of the ‘novel’ as a genre of narrative fiction: “When Robinson Crusoe was written in 1719, there was no clear distinction between news and fiction, and Defoe’s work rests uneasily in that world of a discourse which is more and more inclining to separate into two subdiscourses but which still has not broken apart. Defoe strikes us as necessary to, yet subversive of, the history of the novel, and perhaps this quiddity has installed his work in the position of primum mobile of the novelistic tradition” (Davis 1983: 155).

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able and still essentially moralistic reality as implied by common sense discourse. Defoe’s realism thus initiates an aesthetic consensus that is not just based on the technical treatment of perspective (as Ermarth suggests), but also on the ideology of a common sense of reality. This is not to say that common sense discourse would lead to only one particular aesthetic mode or narrative style in fiction – the vast stylistic differences between Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless certainly contradict aesthetic uniformity. But up to the advent of sentimental fiction, Gothic romance, and later Romantic novels, the representation of the common sense self in the form of an everyday protagonist rendered in a transparent narrative style, at the expense of otherness excluded, will go on to dominate the eighteenth-century novel. *** The encounter between the English common-sense self and the foreign Other in the eighteenth century is not limited to a foreign colonial space, but can also occur under reverse conditions and thus become food for the self’s imagination. In a widely overlooked passage from Shaftesbury’s “Sensus communis” essay, the philosopher imagines an Ethiopian to be transported to the carnival in Venice where the foreigner mistakes the masked revellers for real people who are acting genuinely. Shaftesbury muses over the question who would appear more ridiculous in the event, the Ethiopian in his ‘simplicity’ of taking the masks for real faces, or the revellers in their ridiculous masks: The Europeans, on their side, might laugh perhaps at this Simplicity. But our Ethiopian wou’d certainly laugh with better reason. ’Tis easy to see which of the two wou’d be ridiculous. For he who laughs, and is himself ridiculous, bears a double share of Ridicule. However, shou’d it so happen, that in the Transport of Ridicule, our Ethiopian, having his Head still running upon Masks, and knowing nothing of the fair Complexion and common Dress of the Europeans, shou’d upon the sight of a natural Face and Habit, laugh just as heartily as before; wou’d not he in his turn become ridiculous, by carrying the Jest too far; when by a silly Presumption he took Nature for mere Art, and mistook perhaps a Man of Sobriety and Sense for one of those ridiculous Mummers? (Shaftesbury 2001: 53)

The Ethiopian is not to blame, according to Shaftesbury, for mistaking the masks for real faces, but he would certainly expose himself to ridicule for mistaking real faces for masks, “having his Head still running upon Masks,” that is, once he has learned that Europeans wear masks. While Shaftesbury apparently has some idea of the difficulties of intercultural understanding in an encounter with the Other, his attempt at envisaging the perspective of the Ethiopian Other from inside, that is, as a self in its own right, involuntarily proves how difficult cultural

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understanding is indeed (since his assumption that the Ethiopian might not understand the concept of masks is rather ludicrous in itself). Obviously, it is Shaftesbury’s intention to show that it would violate common sense to assume, like the Ethiopian in his example, that there is no inner core of self, of true self-identity, but only ever more masks – an absurd thought as he clarifies: All is not Fucus, or mere Varnish. Nor is the Face of Truth less fair and beautiful, for all the counterfeit Vizards which have been put upon her. We must remember the Carnival, and what the Occasion has been of this wild Concourse and Medley; who were the Institutors of it; and to what purpose Men were thus set a-work and amus’d. We may laugh sufficiently at the original Cheat; and, if pity will suffer us, may make our-selves diversion enough with the Folly and Madness of those who are thus caught, and practis’d on, by these Impostures. But we must remember withal our Ethiopian, and beware, lest by taking plain Nature for a Vizard, we become more ridiculous than the People whom we ridicule. (Shaftesbury 2001: 54)

Much as characters, identities, and truth are hidden behind (social) appearances, it would be absurd – against common sense – to think there was no true being behind these appearances. Since Shaftesbury discusses this parable in the context of the uses and limitations of his ‘test of raillery’ (i. e., debunking the absurdity or falsehood of an argumentative position by ridicule),²⁸⁷ it serves him as warning against excessive jesting that overshoots the mark of common sense if it cynically denies the possibility of any truth whatsoever. What is significant in our present context, though, is Shaftesbury’s revealing use of a non-European Other to be the ultimate victim of ridicule. Even though it is only in a heuristic parable, he exploits the prejudices of his philosophical readers against cultural otherness and reinforces the Manichean hierarchy of the superior English self over the inferior non-European Other on account of the latter’s lack of common sense. While the intrusion of the non-European Other into European territory or, specifically, the English cultural sphere is an encounter that could potentially challenge the identity of the self in a fundamental way, it rather tends to be used in eighteenth-century writing to affirm the self’s superiority over the Other. Common sense discourse and concomitant notions of cultural supremacy exert a clear influence on the outcome of such an encounter from the self’s viewpoint. In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the Word; or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762), common sense discourse plays a subversive role in such an encounter, even though, in the end, Goldsmith cannot resist the high esteem of common sense and the authority with which its discourse invests the speaker  See my discussion above in chapter III.1.

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and affirms it indirectly. As English life and manners are satirized by Goldsmith’s fictional voice Lien Chi Altangi in The Citizen of the World,²⁸⁸ so is, at first glance, also the exclusive English claim to common sense: Where-ever I come, I raise either diffidence or astonishment; some fancy me no Chinese, because I am formed more like a man than a monster; and others wonder to find one born five thousand miles from England, endued with common sense. Strange, say they, that a man who has received his education at such a distance from London, should have common sense; to be born out of England, and yet have common sense! impossible! He must be some Englishman in disguise; his very visage has nothing of the true exotic barbarity. (CW: 142)

Goldsmith’s text ostensibly argues for a universal concept of common sense, divested of all “those differences which result from climate, religion, education, prejudice, and partiality” (CW: 40). The experience of cultural otherness leads to Altangi’s debunking of preconceived notions of what is right, good, appropriate, or suitable as arbitrary conventions. However, to Goldsmith’s Chinese philosopher, “who is desirous of understanding the human heart, who seeks to know the men of every country” (CW: 40), this insight into cultural difference does not result in a radical moral insight into cultural relativism, but the renewed belief in fundamental standards of ‘human nature’ beyond all “prejudice and partiality” (CW: 20). However, the satiric agenda of appealing to a truly common sense shared by all mankind is undercut by an ambiguity in the text’s narrative strategy, a subversive double irony,²⁸⁹ which ultimately – and I would argue against Goldsmith’s apparent intentions – leads to an instability of meaning and thus an erosion of a firm basis for defining universal standards of human nature and morality. The fictional homodiegetic narrator Altangi (the author of the over-

 Goldsmith’s letters from a Chinese philosopher had many precursors, one of them being George Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian in England, to His Friend at Ispahan (1735), in which the Persian letter-writer Selim is in a similar position as Lien Chi Altangi. Just as in Goldsmith’s text, Lyttelton’s empathy with cultural otherness does not go very far; the wise ‘outside’ perspective is used as a convenient mask for critical commentary on social life and manners, such as in the following example: “His Wit [i. e. that of a certain gentleman Selim meets; C.H.] was all founded on good Sense; it was Wit which a Persian cou’d comprehend as easily as an Englishman; whereas most that I have met with from other Men, who are ambitious of being admir’d for that Accomplishment, is confin’d not only to the Taste of their own Countrymen, but to that of their own peculiar Set of Friends” (Lyttelton 1735: 129).  See Ghose (1997: 48): “In The Citizen of the World, the irony often cuts both ways, with the reader smiling at both the naivety and ignorance of the stranger and at the social absurdities he exposes.”

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whelming majority of ‘letters’ in Goldsmith’s convolution of texts) often shows characteristics of what Wayne C. Booth has called ‘unreliable narration,’ based on the fact that the Chinese Altangi tends to deviate from the norms and worldviews that the implied author and the implied reader appear to share in mid-eighteenth century England (see Booth 1987). Such is quite evidently the case in Altangi’s privileging of a supposedly Chinese ideal of beauty, which sets him at odds with the corresponding norms of the text’s historical English readers: [T]o speak my secret sentiments, […] the ladies here are horridly ugly; I can hardly endure the sight of them; they no way resemble the beauties of China; the Europeans have a quite different idea of beauty from us; when I reflect on the small footed perfections of an Eastern beauty, how is it possible I should have eyes for a woman whose feet are ten inches long. I shall never forget the beauties of my native city of Nangfew. How very broad their faces; how very short their noses; how very little their eyes; how very thin their lips; how very black their teeth; the snow on the tops of Bao is not fairer than their cheeks; and their eye-brows are as small as the line by the pencil of Quamsi. Here a lady with such perfections would be frightful; Dutch and Chinese beauties indeed have some resemblance, but English women are entirely different; red cheeks, big eyes, and teeth of a most odious whiteness are not only seen here, but wished for, and then they have such masculine feet, as actually serve some for walking! (CW: 24– 25)

While the implied author and implied reader obviously enjoy an ironic joke here at the unreliable narrator’s expense (e. g. the ‘absurdity’ of the “small footed perfections” impractical for walking or the implied ugliness of Dutch women), this passage also exemplifies Goldsmith’s strategy of shifting perspective, which in this case implies a general questioning of beauty ideals as cultural conventions. This shift of perspective – through the fictive foreign view on the self – often has an estranging or defamiliarizing effect on the customary and the everyday: the self is seen by the Other in a different light.²⁹⁰ The effect on the reader can range from light amusement and mild satire to more serious insights into the arbitrariness of cultural conventions, i. e. a form of cultural self-awareness that leads to self-distancing and thus, potentially, to self-criticism. However, in many letters Altangi voices critical opinions that seem entirely free of any tinge of exoticism or Asian otherness – his ‘Chineseness’ wears thin, the fictional mask is lowered, if not dropped altogether, and to the fore comes what must be considered Goldsmith’s unmasked criticism of the follies of London social life in the late 1750s (such as the craze for freak shows and human monstrosities in Let-

 Another random example of this can be found in Letter XXI, where Altangi attends a theatre performance and ridicules the dramatic and theatrical conventions of the time.

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ter XLV, or the general China fad in Letter XIV). Equally, Altangi’s profound knowledge of English literary history as well as European philosophy from a suspiciously English point of view²⁹¹ could be accounted for by deficiencies in Goldsmith’s execution of his fictional persona Altangi.²⁹² The oscillation between these two narrative voices (i. e. Altangi’s as an unreliable narrator and Goldsmith’s through Altangi as his mere mouthpiece), partly in accordance, partly at variance with each other, is important for an assessment of the ambivalent status of common sense in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. In Altangi’s narrative discourse, common sense has an important double function: First of all it is a discursive element that operates, within Altangi’s critique of English life and manners, as a strategic weapon to attack types and modes of social behaviour that violate a certain set of explicit or implicit values. Positive values surfacing in Altangi’s discourse as prerequisites, if not ingredients, of English common sense are honesty,²⁹³ moderation,²⁹⁴ pragmatism and experience,²⁹⁵ equality and impartiality,²⁹⁶ to name but a few. Even though Altan-

 Cf. Altangi’s focus, rather implausible for a Chinese, on Voltaire’s view of the English: “Every country that at once united liberty and science, were his peculiar favourites. The being an Englishman was to him a character that claimed admiration and respect” (CW: 184).  As early as 1762, in a review in the Monthly Review immediately after the first book publication of the hitherto serialized letters, the anonymous reviewer complained that “this Chinese Philosopher has nothing Asiatic about him, and is as errant an European as the Philosopher of Malmesbury; yet he has some excellent remarks upon men, manners, and things – as the phrase goes” (qtd. in Arthur Friedman, Introduction, CW: xiii).  “For you and I, my friend, […] at least let us strive to be honest men, and to have common sense” (CW: 310).  “In learning the useful part of every profession, very moderate abilities will suffice; great abilities are generally obnoxious to the possessors. Life has been compar’d to a race, but the allusion still improves, by observing that the most swift are ever the most apt to stray from the course” (CW: 252).  Cf. the parable of European pragmatism outclassing Asian learning: “When Father Matthew, the first European Missioner, entered China, the Court was informed, that he possessed great skill in astronomy; he was therefore sent for, and examined. The established Astronomers of State undertook this task, and made their report to the Emperor, that his skill was but very superficial, and no way comparable to their own. The Missioner, however, appealed from their judgment to experience, and challenged them to calculate an eclipse of the moon that was to happen a few nights following. […] They accepted the challenge confident of success. The eclipse began, the Chinese produced a most splendid apparatus, and were fifteen minutes wrong; the Missioner, with a single instrument, was exact to a second” (CW: 406 – 407).  “Happy the country where all are equal, and where those who sit as judges have too much integrity to receive a bribe, and too much honour to pity from a similitude the prisoners [sic] title or circumstances with their own. Such is England, yet think not that it was always equally famed for this strict impartiality” (CW: 164– 165). I take this passage to be free of irony, both on

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gi seldom takes explicit recourse to the term ‘common sense’ as forming the basis of his satiric attacks, the discursive pattern of his criticism, i. e. a rhetoric based on recurrent oppositional concepts and specific structural analogies, proves it to be part of the prevailing common sense discourse of his time. For example, a logic pertinent to common sense discourse can be traced in Altangi’s theory about the rise and fall of empires in the history of the world, as in the decline of the East Asian empire of Lao, which – due to a carefree and self-complacent overindulgence in wealth and luxury, combined with insolence towards their neighbouring countries – was bound to fall and come under Chinese rule: Happy, very happy might they have been, had they known when to bound their riches and their glory. Had they known that extending empire is often diminishing power, that countries are ever strongest which are internally powerful; […] that too much commerce may injure a nation as well as too little; and that there is a wide difference between a conquering and a flourishing empire. (CW: 108)

Altangi’s argument here is founded on the oppositional logic of ‘moderate’ versus ‘extreme,’ one of the basic discursive oppositions of common sense (as the Common Sense journal has it: “For Mankind have a strange Inclination to branch out into Extreams”; CS2: 82). Since the people of Lao were not able to find a middle ground, i. e. the right measure, between external expansion and internal stability, between “too much commerce” and “to little,” they strayed from the golden mean and were not able to make their empire “bear the Fruits of Common Sense” (CS2: 82). Easily the most common argumentative strategy within the discursive formation of common sense is the exposure of follies and absurdities, of those “Excrescences of Affectation, Fashion, Party, and Passion” (CS2: 82) that show a deplorable lack of common sense. The Citizen of the World is full of passages that brand absurd and potentially dangerous behaviour as arising from excesses of some sort, as in the following criticism of learning that loses touch with empirical fact due to an excess of passion: But of all the learned, those who pretend to investigate remote antiquity, have least to plead in their own defence when they carry this passion to a faulty excess. They are generally found to supply by conjecture the want of record, and then by perseverance are wrought up into a confidence of the truth of opinions which even to themselves at first appeared founded only in imagination. (CW: 361)

Altangi’s and Goldsmith’s part (the attack, following here, on the French judicial system seems to support this interpretation). However, only a few years prior to the publication of The Citizen of World, Henry Fielding, in his novel Amelia, had painted a much grimmer picture of the state of impartiality and fairness in English law courts.

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In a similar vein, Altangi attacks, by way of satiric ridicule, human vanity (e. g. in the character of Beau Tibbs), the imposture of ordinary men as ‘great’ (Letter LXXIV), the unreasonable interest in monstrosities and the abnormal (Letter XLV) and many more. The other important function of common sense discourse in The Citizen of the World is a particular form of empowerment: the speaker’s discursive position is authorized – in spite of Altangi’s status of a culturally marginalized figure – by virtue of its very connection to Englishness. Altangi’s outspoken claim to speak from inside the discourse of common sense²⁹⁷ (in contrast to his being placed, as a Chinese, in a cultural space outside hegemonic Englishness) is to give authority to himself and his observations. According to the principles of objectivity in empirical science (as had been established by the 1750s in a line from Bacon to Locke and Newton), a prerequisite for any observation to be able to pass as impartial and objective was that the observing subject must be separate from the observed object. As Altangi’s outside view on English society resembles this analytic ideal of the subject-object dichotomy, his vantage point contributes to lending authoritative force to his observations. However, a superior vantage point can only be granted to a subject who shares the rational precepts of empiricism and thereby sustains the very dichotomy between subject and object – thus the need for Altangi to position himself inside the discourse of common sense, i. e. one of empiricism’s discursive foundations. Since this very discourse is to be understood – from an English point of view at least – to be foundational for Englishness as a cultural identity, Altangi has effectively short-circuited outside and inside perspective: subject and object are no longer categorically apart. Therefore the text’s strategy can be best described as a performative self-contradiction: to exploit the publicly appealing mask of the exotic in order to castigate the irrational appeal of the exotic, to attack the English and their follies by using the very English weapon of common-sense reasoning and satire. Significantly, despite all the differences between Goldsmith and his fictional character Altangi, the fictional Chinese outsider Altangi and the real Irish outsider Goldsmith seem to unite in their ambivalent effort to criticize the English from a perspective of otherness while trying to appropriate an English identity and be ‘one of them’. Just as Goldsmith reportedly sought the society of Johnson in his struggle for recognition in the London intellectual scene,²⁹⁸ he endowed his fic-

 Cf. the quotation at the beginning of this section where Altangi satirizes English prejudices against him as a Chinese “to be born out of England, and yet have common sense!” (CW: 142)  See Boswell’s characterization of Goldsmith in Life of Johnson: “He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged by the contemplation of such a model. To me and many others it appeared that he studiously

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tional Chinese letter-writer with discursive authority by having him seek the society of the English – both geographically, as a traveller in London, and intellectually, as being just as ‘English’ as the English. In the “Editor’s Preface” to the 1762 book publication, Goldsmith’s fictive “editor” expressly asserts the similarity of English and Chinese culture, in an attempt at rendering Altangi’s ‘English’ common-sense views more plausible while, at the same time, making Altangi appear authoritative to English readers: Yet upon his first appearance here, many were angry not to find him as ignorant as a Tripoline ambassador, or an Envoy from Mujac. They were surprized to find a man born so far from London, that school of prudence and wisdom, endued even with a moderate capacity. They expressed the same surprize at his knowlege that the Chinese do at ours. How comes it, said they, that the Europeans, so remote from China, think with so much justice and precision? They have never read our books, they scarcely know even our letters, and yet they talk and reason just as we do. The truth is, the Chinese and we are pretty much alike. (CW: 13 – 14)

Goldsmith, as has been stressed before (see Quintana 1969: 69 – 70; Hopkins 1969: 98 – 99), exploited in The Citizen of the World the popular prestige of China as a high-cultured nation, apparently for the purpose of securing himself a calculated literary success, although he had expressed himself highly critically of the so-called China fad of his time and had even gone as far as to boldly maintain about Chinese literature that there was “not a single attempt to address the imagination, or influence the passions; such therefore are very improper models for imitation” (qtd. in Smith 1996: 99). From this, as well as from the almost plagiaristic borrowing from other comparable sources with which Goldsmith filled Altangi’s letters, it can be safely deduced that Goldsmith had neither authentic knowledge nor true interest in Chinese culture. Altangi’s Chinese identity is a choice that, while not being completely arbitrary, suited Goldsmith well for a compromise between popular exoticism (of which it thus is an implicit satire) and a projection of high-culturedness easy enough to emulate since he was going to make it seem not so very different from the dominant culture of his reading audience.

copied the manner of Johnson, though, indeed, upon a smaller scale. […] He had, no doubt, a more than common share of that hurry of ideas which we often find in his countrymen, and which sometimes produces a laughable confusion in expressing them. He was very much what the French call un étourdi, and from vanity and an eager desire of being conspicuous wherever he was, he frequently talked carelessly without knowledge of the subject, or even without thought. His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar aukwardly affecting the easy gentleman” (Boswell 1980: 271; “1763: Ætat. 54”).

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Accordingly, any apparent hint in The Citizen of the World at a rather modern ideal of intercultural tolerance must be taken with a pinch of salt. Quite on the contrary, the text propagates a traditional concept of English cultural hegemony. Whereas on a surface level England and China are put on a cultural par with each other, the fictive foreign perspective crumbles away all too often, only to point to the fact that China might just as well be crossed out of the cultural equation. Furthermore, glimpses of cultural relativity, arising from Altangi’s awareness that the perception of absurdities in a foreign culture might bespeak “a standard originally founded in prejudice and partiality” (CW: 22), are overshadowed by Altangi’s frequent lapses into the very kind of racial and cultural prejudice of which he was seemingly aware. Altangi for example explains to his ignorant English friends that “you must not expect from an inhabitant of China the same ignorance, the same unlettered simplicity, that you find in a Turk, Persian, or native of Peru” (CW: 146). Besides ethnic discrimination, The Citizen of the World also displays gender stereotypes in keeping with the view voiced in Charles Molloy’s Common Sense journal that women generally lack common sense and should therefore stay out of all social domains where that faculty is needed.²⁹⁹ If common sense is indeed to be taken as Altangi’s point of departure for his critical observations on English culture, if his criticism of an English arrogance to view common sense as an exclusively English character trait (Letter XXXIII) is to be understood as a plea for a universal concept of common sense – if this is the text’s professed agenda, it deconstructs itself in the contradictory tension between an impartial standard of common sense and Altangi’s frequent violations against it, i. e. his voicing cultural prejudices and thus implying the superiority of English (and/or Chinese) male common sense over that of women and other nations.

 See Letters XLVI (only the deaf-mute imbecile woman in Altangi’s dream has a clean, unspoiled mind) and LXII (women should stick to the domestic), the latter of which borrows material from Lord Chesterfield’s essay in Common Sense no. 32 (10september 1737); see the editorial notes in CW: 255. – The pervasive sexism of Goldsmith’s source in Chesterfield’s Common Sense essay may be illustrated by “Eudosia,” one of several women types given character names in that article, who is, to Chesterfield, a striking example of an absurd and completely unfeminine pretension to common sense in a woman: “Eudosia, the most frivolous Woman in the World, condemns her own Sex for being too trifling. She despises the agreeable Levity and Chearfulness of a mix’d Company; she will be serious, that she will; and emphatically intimates, that she thinks Reason and good Sense very valuable Things. […] If Eudosia would content herself with her natural Talents, play at Cards, make Tea, and Visits, talk to her Dog often, and to her Company but sometimes, she would not be ridiculous, but bear a very tolerable Part in the polite World” (CS1: 226). – See also below, section 2 of this chapter, for my discussion of the exclusion of women from common sense discourse.

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All in all, The Citizen of the World presents itself as a mild satire of English life and manners from the fictive perspective of a foreigner, whose name Altangi with its components alt(er) and ang(l)i is not to be parsed as ‘other than English,’ but rather as ‘another English(man),’ as he most often comes across as “some Englishman in disguise” (CW: 142).³⁰⁰ English common sense is the main discursive principle of Goldsmith’s satiric observations; thus common sense discourse is turned upon itself, or rather: against a concept of Englishness whose sense of cultural supremacy feeds on the notion of having the lion’s share of common sense. Whereas this could be a subversive textual strategy with a strong critical potential for questioning English common-sense concepts as arbitrary and conventional,³⁰¹ such critical thrust is considerably weakened in The Citizen of the World by several counteracting factors. First, Altangi’s persona is implausible as he oscillates between, on the one hand, value judgments that seem authoritative to a mid-eighteenth century audience and, on the other hand, outrageously exotic opinions that make him an unreliable narrator who is at odds with the shared worldviews of implied author and implied reader. It seems that the immutable norm Altangi happens to either coincide with (which he mostly does) or deviate from is “the old solid English standard of Common Sense” (CS1: 6) – a norm with which the Irish-born Goldsmith, in his struggle for acceptance in Johnson’s literary London, was only too ready to comply. Second, Altangi’s rhetoric relies heavily on common sense discourse – either overtly, by linking his value judgments expressly to common sense, or covertly in the form of arguments based on the conceptual oppositions of common sense discourse (moderate/extreme, reasonable/absurd, pragmatic/theoretical etc.). Even if it can be conceded that using the enemy’s weapon against himself is a successful tactic, there are limits to this strategy, which are overstepped when the overall goal reveals itself as becoming the enemy rather than overcoming him. Third, Englishness as a prestigious identity concept is never questioned or truly criticized in The Citizen of the World. On the contrary, fundamental aspects of English social life and political culture are praised – e. g. English fairplay and charity based on justice and reason,³⁰² superior English liberty arising

 It is tempting to interpret Altangi’s first names, Lien Chi, as a phonetic allusion to ‘lying and cheating,’ but this would probably go too far.  See Lucas (1990: 5), who claims, primarily with reference to Goldsmith’s poetry, that “he is a good deal more cunning, and cunningly subversive, than has been habitually recognised.”  “In other countries the giver is generally influenced by the immediate impulse of pity; his generosity is exerted as much to relieve his own uneasy sensations, as to comfort the object in distress: in England benefactions are of a more general nature; some men of fortune and universal benevolence propose the proper objects; the wants and the merits of the petitioners

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from a common-sense compromise between monarchy and parliamentary democracy³⁰³ – while pardonable faults and harmless foibles are gently ridiculed – such as English spleen (in Letter XC) or inconstancy and irresolution (in Letter CXXI).³⁰⁴ Seen in this light, the overall picture of Goldsmith’s balanced view of Englishness in The Citizen of the World is modelled on one of the main structural elements of common sense discourse: the idea of balance as the middle position between two extreme poles. Judicious Queen Common Sense, it seems, has balanced out criticism and praise of the English to just the right measure – at least to such a degree as to make The Citizen of the World a very fitting medium of English common sense discourse which is ultimately myopic to cultural otherness.

5.2 The Female Other – The Rape of the Lock Common sense in the eighteenth century is an unmistakably gendered concept and its discourse often an open invitation for misogynist sexism. Eighteenth-century men patronizingly view ‘sense’ as their own exclusive domain: feminine foibles such as vanity, affectation, and unbridled feelings exclude women from participating in the discursive field and reduce them to the Other of common sense discourse. When Henry Fielding personified common sense as a queen in his play Pasquin,³⁰⁵ Lord Chesterfield, while evidently approving of the play and its claim to the authority of common sense on behalf of the political opposition, showed himself bemused by the choice of the character’s gender: “Tho’ I am not sure that had I been to personify Common Sense, I should have borrow’d my Figure from that Sex” (CS1: 4). Once on the subject, he continues to scoff at women with haughty condescension. Common sense being an affair of the mind, it can-

are canvassed by the people; neither passion nor pity find a place in the cool discussion; and charity is then only exerted when it has received the approbation of reason” (CW: 97– 98).  “How then are the English more free (for more free they certainly are) than the people of any other country, or under any other form of government whatever? Their freedom consists in their enjoying all the advantages of democracy with this superior prerogative borrowed from monarchy, that the severity of their laws may be relaxed without endangering the constitution” (CW: 210).  This is another instance where Altangi out-reasons a stereotypical weakness to turn it eventually into a strength: “Yet upon examination, this very inconstancy, so remarkable here, flows from no other source than their love of reasoning” (CW: 468). This love of reasoning leads to a form of “government acting from the immediate influence of reason” (CW: 469), which Altangi deems clearly superior to despotic forms of government.  See above (ch. IV.2) for my detailed analysis of Fielding’s play in the context of political common sense.

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not appeal to vain, superficial, fashion-keen women – the only way for the “Fair Sex” to have common sense “about” their heads is to use the weekly paper for their hairstyle: The Fair Sex in general (Queens excepted) are infinitely above plain downright Common Sense; sprightly Fancy, and shining Irregularities are their Favourites, in which despairing to satisfy, tho’ desirous to please them, I have, in order to be of some Use to them, stipulated with my Stationer, that my Paper shall be of the properest Sort for pinning up of their Hair; as the new French Fashion is very favourable to me in this Particular, I flatter myself, they will not disdain to have some Common Sense about their Heads at so easy a Rate. (CS1: 4)³⁰⁶

Chesterfield’s derision of women suggests that he either does not expect them to be among his readers or has no qualms about affronting them: just as women are effectively excluded from the addressees of the Common Sense journal, they are generally excluded from participation in common sense discourse. These patronizing remarks mirror the pervasive sexism of an eighteenth-century patriarchal society founded on a repressive gender hierarchy, due to which the ‘weaker sex’ had neither equal legal rights nor the same social privileges as men.³⁰⁷ Common sense discourse in the first half of the eighteenth century, as virtually all public discourses at that time, either completely ignores the question of gender (at the expense of women, that is) or is shot through with stereotypes about women that betray a male attitude ranging from condescension to hatred. As a result, women are denied to have any (or any greater) capacity for common sense. In the rare cases in eighteenth-century writing where women are represented as having ‘common sense’ or ‘good sense,’ they are either weak and in need of male protection,³⁰⁸ or are described as defeminized ‘masculine’ women, not worthy of men’s (sexual) attention.³⁰⁹ On the whole, women who fall victim

 For an extended comment on the sexist mockery in this passage see Scholz (2004: 205).  This has been well documented by social historians, gender theorists, and literary critics alike. See, for example, Charles and Duffin (1985), Hill (1989), Jones (1990). See also Turner (1992) for an interesting study on the growing market share of women writers towards the end of the century.  Pamela and Clarissa in Richardson’s novels are characters that are occasionally attributed with ‘good sense,’ but obviously belong to the weak type of ‘damsels in distress.’ Fielding’s Amelia is another interesting example as she is credited on several occasions in the novel with showing “great good Sense” (Fielding 1983: 256); yet her most prominent qualities are still her passive virtuousness and sensibility (i. e. emotional responsiveness).  A relevant example for the latter type is Clarissa in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, which I will analyse below. Another suitable example coming to mind, though appearing historically later, is the governess Mrs. Selwyn in Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1777). She is a defeminized common-sense female of the older tradition that I am sketching here. As to the newer

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to the principle of exclusion operating in a predominantly male common sense discourse are displaced into an Other that is to be repressed by the male self, but also from the male self, as shown in the vociferous aversion to effeminacy at the time. Hence, as with the foreign Other, the female Other poses a potential threat to the common-sense self and is a cause of male anxiety. However, due to the growing competition among print publications on the market throughout the early decades of the eighteenth century, women could not be lightly skipped over as consumers of newspapers, magazines, and didactic pamphlets. The Enlightenment agenda of moral and rational education that is central to The Tatler and The Spectator, the early flagships of English magazine entertainment, does not stop short of women as possible addressees that stand in need of education and reform, albeit in a markedly condescending tone. While Richard Steele announces in the first number of The Tatler (12 April 1709) that the paper is “principally intended for the Use of Politick Persons […], whereby such worthy and well-affected Members of the Commonwealth may be instructed, after their Reading, what to think” (The Tatler 1987: 15), he makes sure to add: “I resolve to have something which may be of Entertainment to the Fair Sex, in Honour of whom I have invented the Title of this Paper” (The Tatler 1987: 15). The difference between instructing worthy men “what to think” and condescendingly providing some entertainment to ever ‘tattling’ women is quite conspicuous: the hierarchical gender difference in common sense discourse is prefigured here. Male condescension towards the rational limitations of women readers runs like a thread through eighteenth-century magazine culture, which contributed to constructing a stable hierarchical polarity between men and women with regard to self-concepts of gender difference and a related separation of social and cultural spheres (e. g. an active male world of business versus a passive female world of domesticity).³¹⁰ How much this hierarchical gender polarity was internalized by women themselves can be gauged from a remark in The Female Tatler, a magazine running only from 1709 to 1710, which addressed itself exclusively to a female authorship (the title indicates the obvious strategy to capitalize on the initial success of Steele’s Tatler). The magazine’s writer, the mysterious “Mrs Crackenthorpe, a Lady that Knows Every Thing,”³¹¹ though

type of ‘sensible’ heroines (both in the old and modern usage of that adjective), such as Evelina or Jane Austen’s heroines, I will give a brief outlook on the shift from common sense discourse to the discourse of sensibility in the final chapter below.  This patriarchal gender polarity, as constructed and cemented in English magazine culture, is traced by Maurer (1998).  Such is the byline for every number of The Female Tatler. Its authorship is a strongly contested issue: Delarivier Manley, notorious for her satire New Atalantis (1709), which led to her

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being quite an outspoken and witty woman, self-deprecatingly calls her own writerly efforts “all my Scribling” and claims she “wou’d chuse a Man that is fit to support the Weakness and Correct the Frailties of my Sex, superior in Sense, and equal in Disposition” (The Female Tatler 1709: 1; no. 47, 24 October). Man’s rational superiority over women’s mental weaknesses was a mutually accepted gender norm in eighteenth-century culture. Nevertheless, Augustan men of letters continued to lower themselves, as it seems, in order to spread some sense among the frail sex, which can be seen in another didactic magazine from the early eighteenth century, The Free-Thinker. Emulating the format of The Tatler and its successor, The Spectator, Ambrose Philips, a Whig poet and friend of Addison and Steele, ran his own magazine in 1718. The collected edition of the Free-Thinker papers, with its cascade of programmatic subtitles (Essays on Ignorance, Superstition, Bigotry, Enthusiasm, Craft, &c.: Intermix’d with Several Pieces of Wit and Humour: Design’d to Restore the Deluded Part of Mankind to the Use of Reason and Common Sense) is specifically dedicated to “the Ladies of Great Britain” in order to reform their ignorance and superstition: You’ll forgive us, Ladies, when we say that Your tender Sex, for want of those Inquiries which you had been long difus’d to, were the greatest Slaves in Your Notions, and consequently not the most impartial Readers of a Paper, with this Title: To think therefore of bringing even You, not only to favour but patronize his [i. e. Philips’s; C.H.] Work, was a Noble Design. (Philips 1733: I, v)

In a generous, yet no less condescending gesture, the progressive Whiggish notion of education is propagated here to include also women. Drawing on the ideal of impartiality, a key term of common sense discourse, the “Editors”³¹² in the volume’s dedication (probably written by Philips himself) praise the author of The Free-Thinker for his “Noble Design” to bring the light of common sense to the dark recesses of womanhood. From a modern perspective the comparison drawn between slaves and women is significant as it points again to the arrest and court trial in the same year, has been assumed as the author of the first fifty-one numbers, after which the authorship was announced to have taken over by a ‘society of ladies’ (the circumstantial evidence is that Manley’s arrest coincides with the publication of no. 52 under the new authorship). However, recent research suggests that some (if not all) of the first numbers of The Female Tatler might have been penned by a lawyer called Thomas Baker, which obviously would invalidate the evidence for my point above, albeit not the point itself, I would argue. For a summary of the authorship issue, in which apparently even Bernard Mandeville plays a significant role as a frequent contributor to the later ‘society of ladies’ numbers, see Goldsmith (1999: 41– 48).  The dedication is signed by “The Editors” (Philips 1733: I, viii).

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discursive similarities between the colonial and the female Other. The obvious function of the dedication being to advertise the book, the “Editors” go on to claim happily: “Honest Free-Thinking now prevails in theses Nations, and the Word is no longer a Term of Reproach even among the Ladies” (Philips 1733: I, v). This statement of blatant self-propaganda is followed up with lavish praise for the qualities of British women, especially – thanks to the educational work of The Free-Thinker, of course – for their superior capacity for judgment: ’Tis in Great-Britain alone, that the charming Sex maintain the Dignity of Human Nature; the Ladies here have ever been Subjects of Envy to the whole World, and the most shining Parts of our Annals present us with a Woman at the Head of Affairs. Freedom has been Your peculiar Prerogative, Time out of Mind; ’tis now so in the noblest Sense of the Word. The Liberty of judging for One’s self, tho’ it be but a common Right of the whole Human Species; You, Ladies, are the only Females that have put in Your Claim for the Privilege. (Philips 1733: I, vii)

How seriously this is to be taken is questionable, as chivalrous gallantry mixes with national pride here. What is interesting to note, though, is how the nationalist discourse of Britishness mitigates the usual misogynist slant against women in common sense discourse: In keeping with the glorious regal past of Elizabeth and Anne, the ‘Ladies of Great Britain’ are the only women privileged to enjoy the “Liberty for judging for One’s self.” In other words, British women are lucky enough to profit from the national culture into which they were born; otherwise they would fail to “maintain the Dignity of Human Nature,” as women do by default. Viewed in this light, the praise of free-born British women sounds rather hollow. Any such optimistic attempts at educating the female mind to raise it to a male standard of reason are abandoned for the repressive guidelines for female conduct laid down in an issue of the Common Sense weekly from 1738 (no. 71, 10 June). In the name of common sense, the author attacks various foibles, extravagances, vanities, and affectations of married women and counters these with an ideal type of a submissive ‘common-sense’ wife who is to behave very much like the later Victorian ‘angel in the house,’ eternalized in Coventry Patmore’s eponymous poem from the 1850s. The author of the essay, who is apparently identical with that of an earlier piece about “what is not Common Sense” (CS2: 81),³¹³ sets out by reminding his readers of his preferred “Way of bringing the World to Common Sense, by the Rule of Reduction; by paring away the Redundancies of the

 See my discussion above in section 1 of this chapter about the earlier essay in Common Sense no. 66 of 6 May 1738.

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Mind, till it is left in the becoming Simplicity of Common Sense” (CS2: 109) – a strategy that is now to be applied to “the Other Sex” (CS2: 109) and specifically to married women. Generally, as suggested by common sense discourse, proper female conduct rests on the exclusion of unwanted behaviour (unwanted by men, that is) and the avoidance of extremes. Accordingly, his general advice for a good wife is to strive for “the Absense of Aukwardness and Affectation” and to abstain from an “immoderate Zeal for distinguishing herself” (CS2: 109, 110). Following a common didactic strategy since the days of Addison and Steele’s Spectator, the author assigns character names to different types of female violations of common sense and good marital manners:³¹⁴ Florinda is reprimanded for her elegance in public while being casual and neglectful about her appearance at home; Cleora is criticized for being over-meticulous as to keeping the marital home pristinely clean; Lady Fadler’s fault is her annoying obsession with card-playing; Honoria is a nuisance to her husband due to her domineering way with him in public; Phillis is a spoiled merchant’s wife who poses for a lady of fashion, thereby making him and herself a public laughing stock (see CS2: 110 – 112). All these transgressions of married women, the author explains, are not serious vices; rather they are to be considered “Indiscretions which flow from false Notions of themselves” (CS2: 112), which make such women appear ridiculous and inconsistent in public, as much as they can render domestic life unbearable to their husbands. Generally, the author would banish every violent Attachment, whatever be the Object of it; Lap-Dogs or Children, Female Friends, or, what is often the Disguise of bad Purposes, the innocent Desire of Publick Approbation: for every Attachment, when indulg’d, will ingross too much of a Female Mind, and leave too little Room for Domestick Cares […]. (CS2: 113)

 Precisely the same strategy of assigning names to types of female ways was already adopted by Lord Chesterfield in Common Sense no. 32 (10september 1737), with the difference that the earlier piece was about women in general, not married women in particular. The didactic strategy of putting women in their place and disciplining them into servility to men is identical in both articles. In the first paragraph in Common Sense no. 32, Chesterfield explains the ‘natural’ superiority of men over women: “Man’s Province is universal, and comprehends every Thing, from the Culture of the Earth, to the Government of it; Men only become Coxcombs, by assuming particular Characters, for which they are particularly unfit, though others may shine in those very Characters. But the Case of the Fair Sex is quite different; for there are many Characters which are not of the Feminine Gender [i. e. not feminine in kind; C.H.], and, consequently, there may be two Kinds of Women Coxcombs; those who affect what does not fall within their Deportment, and those who go out of their own natural Characters, tho’ they keep within the Female Province” (CS1: 224). – See also above, note 299, for an example of an ‘unfeminine’ woman who pretends to good sense (from the same article).

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In other words, in order to make a wife submissive, dutiful, and controllable by her husband, she must be kept in a state of what the author claims to be a detached balance of mind, but what actually appears to be emotional deprivation. Furthermore, wives should be restrained by their husbands from extreme follies such as political “Party-Rage,” because “all Female Conjectures about Foreign Transactions, and all Propositions to settle the Ballance of Power in Europe, are absolutely inconsistent with Common Sense” (CS2: 113), as well as “all Attempts at Wit and Poetry, which always carry them beyond the Bounds of Common Sense, and are too often productive of Flights and Ecstacies unbecoming the Character of a Matron” (CS2: 114). Finally, the good wife had better not voice any opinion of her own and “should not be exorbitantly copious upon any Subject whatever” (CS2: 114). After issuing all these “many Embargo’s [sic]” (CS2: 114) on female conduct, the author is well aware of possible objections – not against the madness of his proposal for such a rigid and cruel disciplining of women, but as to the chances of realizing it: “I am apprehensive they [i. e., his male readers; C.H.] will begin already to cry out, Where is the Woman to be found?” (CS2: 114). Not in the least concerned with empirical quibbles, he presents to the reader his ideal of a wife in the form of Eudocia, the ‘well-trained’ woman: Eudocia is happy in having a Man of Sense for her Husband; but still more so in prefering his Affection to the fashionable Follies which her Sex adore.—Her Life is a just Mixture of Domestick Cares and Innocent Diversions. In the former, She is indefatigably busied in embellishing Private Life, and bringing him, whose Felicity is her chief Aim, to look upon her Company, and his own Home, as a sure Asylum from the Noise, Fatigues and Crosses of the World. There he is certain of meeting his Eudocia ever chearful and serene, and every Thing about him suited to his Taste and to his Fortune. No strain’d Magnificence in one Part of his Oeconomy, supported by a penurious Meanness in another, but the Whole one consistent Scheme of elegant Frugality. (CS2: 114– 115)

The perfect wife is a tame and obedient angel in the house, whose sole raison d’être is subservience: “To her Husband, She improves every Felicity by partaking it, and is a Relief in every misfortune” (CS2: 115). From a modern-day perspective, after more than two hundred years of female emancipation since the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, this repressive system of female training seems blatantly misogynist. Eighteenth-century common sense discourse rears its ugly head, as it were, in that it enables texts such as this one to emerge and position itself strategically within existing power relations. In this case, common sense discourse empowers the male speaker to occupy a space from which those excluded from this discourse can be further disenfranchised. The female position is repressed as the Other that

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is not allowed to have a voice, and when it appears to make itself heard, as in the case of The Female Tatler discussed above, it is not its own. *** If common sense discourse can be employed to discipline married women into submission and subservience to their husbands, its equal pertinence to the instruction and preparation of young women for their role as future wives will come as no surprise. To the eighteenth century it as an affair of common sense that young women must enter marriage to come under male protection, especially when they are beautiful and attractive, so to save them from the social pitfalls of either turning into prudish spinsters or losing their honour and good reputation. This is what Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is about, or at least that is what it is also about. In recent decades, Pope’s text has been exposed to a startling range of different critical responses, especially within the last thirty years with the advent of new political-historicist, poststructuralist, and feminist readings that have augmented and partly superseded the traditionally strong biographical and formalist approaches in Pope criticism.³¹⁵ The most significant reassessment of Pope’s poem in the present context has come from feminist and gender studies, especially in the form of two groundbreaking feminist studies on eighteenth-century literature from the 1980s by Felicity A. Nussbaum and Ellen Pollak, who both read Pope’s Rape (next to its later companion text “Epistle to a Lady”) against the grain of the traditional critical opinion which identified the ridicule of general social manners to be at the heart of Pope’s mocking verse, and focus on the poem’s covert misogynist ideology instead. While Nussbaum (1984: 137– 158) convincingly traces in Pope’s text the literary tradition of Restoration satires against women, Pollak (1985: 77– 107), in a sophisticated argument, reads The Rape as a reification of the early eighteenthcentury myth of passive womanhood. My own discussion of the poem takes many cues from Pollak’s analysis specifically, but will accentuate the gender issues inscribed in the text slightly differently. Rather than identifying in the characters of Belinda and Clarissa two opposite extremes of female deviance, I will argue that Clarissa is hijacked by male common sense discourse in her moralistic speech in Canto V. Much has been made of the vagaries of Clarissa’s role as the

 See Baines (2000) for an overview of the development of critical approaches to The Rape of the Lock. For an interesting interpretation of The Rape against the backdrop of the Jacobite movement and the rebellion of 1715, in which the lock figures as an ambivalent symbol of the ‘stolen’ Jacobite crown, see Erskine-Hill (1996). As for some fruitful postmodern readings of The Rape, see Wheeler (1995) and Wood (1995). For feminist criticisms see my following statements above.

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declared mouthpiece of the author, while ambiguities are bound to remain in the assessment of her character. In any case, Clarissa’s voice is not her own: it is appropriated by a discourse that pushes the female Other to an unrepresentable outside. While Pope’s popular mock-heroic poem might seem at first like a trivial literary joke about how a young coquette loses a lock of her hair to an aristocratic suitor, Geoffrey Tillotson, editor of the Twickenham edition of the poem, made the case for its complexity many years ago: “But the social mockery of the Rape of the Lock is not simple […]. Its world is vast and complicated” (RL 119; qtd. in Trimble 1974: 674). To see that there is more to Pope’s poem than just an extended literary joke requires no deep analysis. Even though the text arose out of a specific request by Pope’s friend John Caryll for a poem about an actual feud between two English Catholic families,³¹⁶ it is more than just an occasional poem. Perhaps there is a hint of that in the early two-canto version of 1712, but with the witty inclusion of an elaborate epic machinery of spirits, goddesses, and underworld beings running parallel to the very mundane plot of Belinda and the Baron in the expanded five-canto form of 1714, the poem became a full-blown mock epic and too elaborate for a mere poetic exercise. When in 1717 Clarissa’s moralizing speech to Belinda was added to the final version, the poem seemed to have eventually acquired a serious note and a straightforward moral. Nevertheless, the oscillation between humour and gravity is doubly inscribed in The Rape of the Lock, which is signalled in the parallelism of the two opening lines of the poem: “What dire Offence from am’rous Causes springs, / What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things” (RL: Canto 1, ll. 1– 2) – a “dire Offence” is contrasted with “am’rous Causes,” and so are “mighty Contests” and “trivial Things.” Structurally, this doubling already hints at a double ambiguity in the poem: one arises out of the clash between form and content – epic grandeur versus trivial matter –; the other concerns the effect and intended purpose: is it humorous mockery or serious censure? John Trimble has called this the “double perspective” (Trimble 1974: 678 – 679) of the poem, which allows the reader to view Belinda as both an epic goddess of beauty and a vain coquette. Neither perspective fully cancels out the other,³¹⁷ but each calls forth its own interpretive stance towards the decision whether the poem is to be read as an amusing joke or a didactic satire (the difference would lie in the force of its ap-

 The family quarrel between the Fermors and the Petres began with the trivial incident of the young Lord Petre cutting off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair against her will.  See Trimble (1974: 678): “Augustan high society is felt to be both an accomplishment and a trifle; Belinda is both a goddess and a silly flirt, and so on. We are plainly not in an either/or world here.”

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peal for reform). While the poem remains wilfully ambiguous in this respect and offers both possibilities of reception, it is rather clear-cut in perpetuating an established gender hierarchy and its accompanying norms, according to which women bear the brunt of the blame for the ‘gender troubles’ depicted in The Rape. If anybody it is they who stand in need of disciplining and reform. It might be argued that The Rape of the Lock mocks both Belinda’s and the Baron’s behaviour – after all, the Baron is introduced to the reader as a romantic fool when he facetiously builds “to Love an Altar […] / Of twelve vast French Romances” and “all the Trophies of his former Loves,” which he lights with “tender Billet-doux” and then falls prostrate before it, breathing “three am’rous Sighs” (RL: Canto 2, ll. 37– 38, 40, 41, 42). However, compared to the mild satire of male upper-class skirt-chasing, the Baron’s object of prey, Belinda, comes off much worse. The difference in the gravity of the offences is indicated at the very beginning of the poem: Say what strange Motive, Goddess! cou’d compel A well-bred Lord t’assault a gentle Belle? Oh say what stranger Cause, yet unexplor’d, Cou’d make a gentle Belle reject a Lord? (RL: Canto 1, ll. 7– 10)

In the following lines of the first canto, this “stranger cause” is explored through mockery of Belinda’s exceedingly vain demeanour, which is given far more room in the poem than the satire of anything else. Belinda’s shortcomings are coded in the poem as a lack of good sense; her vanity is literally ‘bad sense’ since her sensory apparatus is exclusively in tune with the material world and the mere surface appearance of things. This is amply demonstrated in the dressing scene: And now, unveil’d, the Toilet stands display’d, Each Silver Vase in mystic Order laid. First, rob’d in White, the Nymph intent adores With Head uncover’d, the Cosmetic Pow’rs. A heav’nly Image in the Glass appears, To that she bends, to that her Eyes she rears; Th’ inferior Priestess, at her Altar’s side, Trembling, begins the sacred Rites of Pride. (RL: Canto 1, ll. 121– 128)

Narcissistic vanity and self-pride are aroused again and again in Belinda by seeing her “heav’nly Image” appear in the mirror. Aided by the “inferior Priestess,” her chambermaid, she performs the “sacred rites of Pride” by using a vast array of exotic toiletries and cosmetics: “This Casket India’s glowing Gems unlocks, /

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And all Arabia breathes from yonder Box” (RL: Canto 1, ll. 133 – 134) – a hint at what sustains the empty world of fashion and luxury in imperial Britain, which exploits its colonies for commercial goods that, in this case, have no other purpose than serving female vanity.³¹⁸ Belinda’s lack of good sense is symbolized by the striking asyndeton of “Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux” (RL: Canto 1, ll. 138), which insinuates female untidiness and lack of organization, as well as a neglect of deeper matters of mind and soul (the “Bibles” are scattered in the mess of her dressing-table). When Belinda shines in the full splendour of her female armour and weaponry on the mock-heroic level of the poem (“Now awful Beauty puts on all its Arms”; RL: Canto 1, ll. 139), she is ready for a battle in which virtue and valour in a selfless struggle for the good of the country are replaced by vice and vanity in a selfish struggle for looks of adoration. Evidently, Belinda represents vain young women in general, which applies to their perceived faults and the precariousness of their unmarried state. Pope’s poem is swamped with mockery of female behaviour, which has been acknowledged as condescending even by traditional critics, while feminist critics have read it as more or less openly misogynous and objectifying.³¹⁹ Even seemingly well-meaning flattery of Belinda’s breathtaking beauty is tinged with mocking condescension for female deficiencies: “If to her share some Female Errors fall, / Look on her Face, and you’ll forget ’em all” (RL: Canto 2, ll. 17– 18; see also Rumbold 1989: 71). The mock-epic device of the parallel spirit world of sylphs constantly fluttering around Belinda’s head in a “giddy Circle” (RL: Canto 1, ll. 93) is a device to ridicule “Female Errors” in general, not just Belinda’s. Pope furnishes his exuberant system of spirits – who are quite tellingly the distilled qualities of dead women – with a pseudo-mythical authority: In an obvious parody of the ancient four-humour doctrine, the four types of female spirits of salamanders, nymphs, gnomes, and sylphs are associated with the four elements of fire, water, earth, and air, to represent respectively “fiery Termagants,” “Soft yielding Minds,” “graver Prude[s],” and “Coquettes” (RL: Canto 1, ll. 59, 61, 63, 65). While the spirits of salamanders and nymphs remain unrepresented in

 For a critical reading of the dressing scene as illustrating the logic of commercial exchange in colonial Britain see Scholz (2004: 54– 59).  Trimble (1974: 674) states that “women are consistently treated here with easy condescension”; Pollak (1985: 77) remarks that “Pope’s satire on a culture that objectifies individuals is itself a pretext for his own objectification of the female”; and Rumbold (1989: 79) contradicts the extenuating claim that Pope’s criticism is harmless compared to more openly misogynist satires of women: “Yet, compared with a misogyny that offends by its very excess, gallantry can be a subtle and effective method of keeping women in their place.”

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the poem,³²⁰ Belinda and Clarissa stand for the opposing qualities of the coquettish, empty-headed sylphs and the grave, prudish gnomes. In the case of Belinda, who is accompanied by sylphs at all times, the airy beings can also be construed as external projections of her own psychological states. When Ariel, her guardian sylph and leader of the whole train, pleads with her – “Hear and believe! thy own Importance know” (RL:Canto 1, l. 35) –, it seems like a narcissistic message of her own consciousness.³²¹ Besides this, the fact that the spirits from the epic world constantly try to influence Belinda in her actions, but are ultimately unable to protect her from the ominous theft of the lock, is a strong metaphor of female feebleness.³²² The criticism seems to be that because women are so susceptible to external influences, they stand in constant need for protection; ultimately, they are powerless on their own, especially in a world of rapacious men that lust after possessing them.³²³ While in the end Belinda’s predicament is to be powerless indeed after she has become a prey to the Baron’s designs, the poem is very clear about the fact that she only has herself to blame. The charms of her hair as well as other bodily attributes of female beauty are described as an active force to ensnare the male world: This Nymph, to the Destruction of Mankind, Nourish’d two Locks, which graceful hung behind In equal Curls, and well conspir’d to deck With shining Ringlets her smooth Iv’ry Neck.

 Female characters in The Rape are occasionally called nymphs as a synonym for young women – e. g. the ‘Sylphic’ Belinda is called “the Nymph” who “adores / With Head uncover’d, the Cosmetic Pow’rs” (RL: Canto 1, ll. 123 – 124) –, but obviously this usage is set apart from the female spirits by that name, who represent the phlegmatic type.  I adopt this observation from Ellen Pollak (1985: 78): “In fact, however, sylph embraces (which are the reward Ariel promises Belinda for her rejection of mankind) are self-embraces, and the function of the erotic dream that Ariel conjures over the sleeping Belinda’s head is finally to stoke the maiden’s sense of self-importance (1, 35).”  While this effect might have been intended by Pope, there are also reasons for the lack of interaction between the two worlds that are rooted in the publication history of Pope’s revisions of the poem. When the epic machinery of Sylphs and other mythical beings was added in the second published version of 1714, Pope kept the core of the 1712 version intact. As a consequence, the spirits can witness the events of the earthly world and try to interfere with them, but their actions remain largely unperceived by the earthlings. (An exception is to be found in Belinda’s lament after the loss of the lock when she says: “A Sylph too warn’d me of the Threats of Fate”; RL: Canto 4, l. 165.)  See Pollak’s (1985: 88 – 89) similar take on this matter: “As the ultimately impotent embodiments of the female’s need for protection, the sylphs symbolize woman’s inherent vulnerability to influences beyond her control.”

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Love in these Labyrinths his Slaves detains, And mighty Hearts are held in slender Chains. With hairy Sprindges we the Birds betray, Slight Lines of Hair surprize the Finny Prey, Fair Tresses Man’s Imperial Race insnare, And Beauty draws us with a single Hair. (RL: Canto 2, ll. 19 – 28)

Drawing on the age-old myth of female seduction, Pope turns Belinda into a modern-day Circe who actively nourishes two locks that conspire against, detain, hold in chains, betray, surprise, and ensnare “Man’s Imperial Race” (an interesting pleonasm). It is no wonder therefore, according to the exculpatory logic of the poem, that the Baron, bewitched by all these charms, meditates whether By Force to ravish, or by Fraud betray; For when Success a Lover’s Toil attends, Few ask, if Fraud or Force attain’d his Ends. (RL: Canto 2, ll. 32– 34)

At this point, the connotations of the rape finally veer toward the narrow modern meaning of word, which has led Valerie Rumbold (1989: 71) to point out “the description’s affinities with the classic rapist’s defence that women ask for it.” The lock, in itself a trifling matter, is sexually connoted throughout the poem and works flexibly as either a relatively harmless synecdoche of female beauty or, more pointedly, as a frivolous metonymy of the hymen as well as female genitals altogether. The ‘rape’ of the lock thus signifies the forceful loss of virginity and, by extension, a loss of honour and social reputation. The trifling matter thus becomes a serious one through the sexual ambiguities with which the poem abounds.³²⁴ The gravity of Belinda’s lament over the ‘rape’ in Canto IV is a good example for this ambiguous ‘double perspective’ (yet another one, which is added to the double perspective of epic and earthly world). When she bemoans her loss – “For ever curs’d be this detested Day, / Which snatch’d my

 Other examples of sexual innuendo are contained in the musings of the Sylphs over the black omens they can sense before Belinda’s arrival at court, when they wonder “[w]hether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law [the goddess was revered for her chastity; C.H.], / Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw [an allusion to the notorious “china scene” in William Wycherley’s The Country-Wife, due to which china became a dirty word for genitals; C.H.]; / Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade” (RL: Canto 2, ll. ,105 – 107). Another less obvious example would be the role of Shock, Belinda’s lapdog, which is an element of male fantasies about women’s sexual gratification with the help of their lapdogs in Restoration satires against women; see Nussbaum (1984: 140 – 141).

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best, my fav’rite Curl away!” (RL: Canto 4, ll. 147– 148) –, this outcry confirms the impression of her empty-headedness on the literal level, since she is making such a fuss about a mere trifle; on the symbolic level, however, it reinforces the sexual connotation of the lock. Belinda’s ensnaring coquettishness is portrayed as a form a female deviance (it is also connoted as a violation of common sense, as we will see below), but so is active female sexuality altogether in The Rape of the Lock. Two elements from the text shall suffice to demonstrate this, one being the lock as an ambivalent sexual symbol, the other the description of female madness in the Cave of Spleen in Canto IV. As shown above, the lock becomes a symbol of female genitals throughout the poem, which makes the theft of the actual lock a symbolic rape in which Belinda loses her innocence. However, the poem also portrays Belinda as an agent who actively sends out sexual signals, only to keep her distance from men and build an aura of untouchability around her: “Favours to none, to all she Smiles extends, / Oft she rejects, but never once offends” (RL: Canto 2, ll. 11– 12). So instead of being a passive ‘nymph’ that leaves the active part to men, she violates the established gender hierarchy and the accepted forms of female behaviour by displaying power (over men). The symbolic culmination of Belinda’s subversive claim to power is her “curs’d” victory over the Baron in the card game shortly before the scene of the ‘rape’ (see RL: Canto 3, ll. 97– 104).³²⁵ This grasp of power, though, is precarious as it poses a threat to sexually dominant men, which provokes them, here the Baron, into countering it with renewed force (“By Force to ravish, or by Fraud betray”). The prize that is out is the lock as a symbol of Belinda’s virginity, but since Belinda transgresses female gender norms with her active sexual aura, the lock also has a phallic dimension as a symbol of power.³²⁶ Evidently, such symbolic phallic power in a female is unacceptable in a patriarchal gender dichotomy of ‘active male’ versus ‘passive female,’ which is why Belinda needs to be ‘castrated’ with the shears that Clarissa, her prudish rival, provides for the Baron (see RL: Canto 3, ll. 127– 128), who “extends / The little Engine on his Finger’s Ends, / This just behind Belinda’s Neck he spread” (RL: Canto 3, ll. 131– 133). In a richly allusive

 Cf. also Pollak (1985: 100): “Thus, although Belinda’s victory at cards is a transient fulfillment of her subversively ‘masculine’ power, it also manages to foreshadow the maiden’s final defeat […].”  Cf. Pollak (1985: 96), who mentions “the notion of the lock as phallus is relevant,” but views it rather “at least transiently as the common property of Belinda and the Baron.” In effect, her reading leads her to a similar conclusion: “Belinda’s deviance and persecution, in short, like the erotic-pathetic victimization of women in the popular fictions of the age, are needed to demonstrate the failure of subversive possibilities” (Pollak 1985: 105).

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scene, sexual roles are peculiarly reversed in this castration scene: Belinda’s phallic lock is severed in forced coitus with the blades of the scissors that are spread like women’s legs, which are, then again, held by phallic fingers. That the trophy of the lock is mythically elevated to a star in the firmament is but an open triumphant display of how female deviance stands corrected. All that remains for Belinda in this repressive gender hierarchy is the small comfort of having exchanged her frail subversive power with dubious fame – a fame of passive beauty whose former power is defused into a harmless artefact. The passage of the Cave of Spleen, finally, augments this lesson because it offers a disturbing repertoire of images of splenetic women whose pathological sexuality³²⁷ has been repressed and displaced into hysterical diseases and aberrant behaviour. Besides the personified Spleen, Pain, Megrim, Ill-Nature, and Affectation, female “Bodies [are] chang’d to various Forms by Spleen” (RL: Canto 4, l. 48) and are objectified as “living Teapots,” a walking “Pipkin,” a sighing “Jar,” a talking “Goose-pye,” and “Maids turn’d Bottles, call[ing] aloud for Corks” (RL: Canto 4, ll. 49 – 54). Especially the latter image is revealing: ‘old maids,’ who have prudishly rejected men due to an extreme, unhealthy obsession with chastity have ‘bottled up’ their sexual drives so much that they are now condemned to cry in vain for being ‘uncorked.’ The surreal infernal imagery in this underworld of the female psyche is obviously intended as a warning to all young women in the world of what may happen to coquettes and prudes as a result of their deviant sexuality, because deviant they are both: Coquettes, who subversively employ their sexual charms to gain power over men by teasing, and prudes, who conceal their charms and try to stifle desire in this way, seem like flipsides of the same coin of female deviance.³²⁸ But the passage serves Pope also for a scathing general attack on all women whose inexcusable fault it is to play an active part and meddle in male affairs and domains – all these are mocked by the gnome Umbriel (himself the spirit of a ‘prude’) in his address to the underworld goddess Spleen: […] Hail wayward Queen! Who rule the Sex to Fifty from Fifteen: Parents of Vapours and of Female Wit, Who give th’ Hysteric, or Poetic Fit, On various Tempers act by various ways,

 See also Pollak (1985: 97), who argues that Belinda’s “sexual pathology is reflected in the ‘hysterick’ Cave of Spleen.”  Cf. Pollak (1985: 88): “If the sylphs and gnomes symbolize different and inevitably conflicting aspects of Everywoman, coquettes and prudes are simply individuations of a common female paradigm.”

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Make some take Physick, others scribble Plays; Who cause the Proud their Visits to delay, And send the Godly in a Pett, to pray. (RL: Canto 4, ll. 57– 64)

It seems that just as Umbriel receives from Spleen a bag of chagrin with which to supply Belinda, Pope has filled a bag of misogyny here with which he has supplied his poem. The disparaging swipe at female wit and women authors is derogatory and simply sexist. But so is the whole scenery of the Cave of Spleen in its imaginative presentation of the grotesque female Other. Aesthetically, these images present disconcerting and utterly hideous violations of the principles of common sense due to their display of tasteless, unbridled fancy.³²⁹ However, in the mode of ironic satire, the Bruegelian imagery of the Cave of Spleen is all the more fitting as a metaphor of female unreason and aberrant otherness. Nevertheless common sense certainly prevails: not only in the polished couplets and the witty rhetorical elegance of The Rape of the Lock, but also in the character of Clarissa and her controversial speech in Canto V. Even though she makes only two appearances in the poem, and has a speech in only one of them, John Trimble has wittily remarked that “we remember her chiefly because she is the poem’s only character with a brain” (Trimble 1974: 673). Ellen Pollak offers a less favourable character description when she maintains that Clarissa is one of “the twin freaks of coquette and prude” (Pollak 1985: 80), the other being Belinda of course. Regardless of how differently Clarissa has been assessed by critics especially in recent years, there is universal agreement about Clarissa’s importance despite her rare appearances in the poem. This obviously has to do with an authoritative note that was added to the 1751 edition of the poem, written either by the editor William Warburton or by Pope himself before his death, which describes Clarissa as a “new character introduced in the subsequent Editions, to open more clearly the Moral of the poem, a in parody of the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus in Homer” (qtd. in Trimble 673).³³⁰ This has made her, in most critics’ eyes, the mouthpiece of the author, an authorial voice of common sense to judge Belinda’s antics. Clarissa certainly puts Belinda in her place when she questions why beauty is mistaken for merit when good sense is the true basis of virtue:

 See above, chapter II.1, for my discussion of Pope’s censure of violations against aesthetic common sense in his Epistle to Burlington.  As Tillotson observes in the Twickenham edition, the note is slightly inaccurate because Clarissa already appears in the 1712 and 1714 versions as the Baron’s (speechless) assistant in the cutting of Belinda’s lock.

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Say, why are Beauties prais’d and honour’d most, The wise Man’s Passion, and the vain Man’s Toast? Why deck’d with all that Land and Sea afford, Why Angels call’d, and Angel-like ador’d? Why round our Coaches crowd the white-glov’d Beaus, Why bows the Side-box from its inmost Rows? How vain are all these Glories, all our Pains, Unless good Sense preserve what Beauty gains: That Men may say, when we the Front-box grace, Behold the first in Virtue, as in Face! (RL: Canto 5, ll. 9 – 18)

That her argument is informed by common sense discourse becomes apparent in her strategy not to exchange one extreme (beauty) for another (good sense), but to aim for a compromise between them in which good sense merely has moral priority over beauty (“Behold the first in Virtue as in Face!”). Her next instalment of common sense concerns the short-sightedness of Belinda’s vain self-love and her obsession with the pleasure principle in the face of life’s transitoriness and the responsibilities of the future: Oh! if to dance all Night, and dress all Day, Charm’d the Small-pox, or chas’d old Age away; Who would not scorn what Huswife’s Cares produce, Or who would learn one earthly Thing of Use? […] But since, alas! frail Beauty must decay, Curl’d or uncurl’d, since Locks will turn to grey, Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade, And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid. (RL: Canto 5, ll. 19 – 22; 25 – 28)

Pleasure and vanity are played off against practical care and usefulness, and so is the folly of youth against the prudence of mature age. However, Clarissa’s clinching argument against vain coquettishness is the danger of ending up as a spinster. This blunt warning is a direct appeal to Belinda’s practical common sense: for a woman in patriarchal society, the only chance of long-term fulfilment is marriage, even if this requires self-negation and a relinquishing of subjective desire: What then remains, but well our Pow’r to use, And keep good Humour still whate’er we lose? And trust me, Dear! good Humour can prevail, When Airs, and Flights, and Screams, and Scolding fail. Beauties in vain their pretty Eyes may roll;

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Charms strike the Sight, but Merit wins the Soul. (RL: Canto 5, ll. 29 – 34)

This argument for female good humour is presented as the sensible thing to do in view of the inevitable decay of beauty, but it also has a tinge of calmly accepting an inevitable loss of female autonomy in marriage (“What then remains, but well our Pow’r to use, / And keep good Humour still whate’er we lose?”). What Clarissa means precisely by “our Pow’r” remains vague, especially since it is counterbalanced by a tone of resignation in “What then remains”; instead the end-of-line focus of “whate’er we lose” has much more weight. In the verse of Clarissa’s speech, common sense advice is presented as a regulatory discourse in that Clarissa argues for the practically sensible and censures impractical, foolish, and unrestrained behaviour (airs, flights, screams, scolding, rolling one’s pretty eyes) as a form of outcast female otherness. The critical consensus that Clarissa’s speech represents the authoritative moral of Pope’s poem was first challenged by Trimble, who argued that “grave Clarissa” – the Amazon queen Thalestris even calls her a “Prude” (RL: Canto 5, ll. 7, 36) – is not an altogether reliable voice since her moralizing speech in the poem’s last canto reveals her “hypocrisy and hauteur” (Trimble 1974: 691). It might be that she has her own interests in destroying Belinda as a rival for the attention of the Baron – after all, Clarissa is described in her brief appearance before as acting like one of the “Ladies in Romance assist[ing] their Knight” (RL: Canto 3, l. 129) when she becomes an accomplice in the actual ‘rape’ of the lock by producing the scissors and handing them to the Baron.³³¹ However, the obvious problem with such speculative psychologizing of Clarissa’s ulterior motives is that her appearances in the poem are so rare and so sparse that very little can be said about her for certain. In fact, the danger is to overestimate her as a flesh-and-blood character and downplay her function as a moralizing Cassandra

 Cf. Trimble (1974: 684): “It would seem that her own good sense has been subtly corrupted by the prideful cravings ‘that early taint the Female soul’ (I.87).” I have two minor reservations about Trimble’s reading: First, the fact that Clarissa assists the Baron in the deed is not inconsistent with the purpose of her speech, as the ‘blow’ of the lost lock could be seen as a necessary precondition – a punishing eye-opener, as it were – to prepare Belinda for the moral lesson of the speech. In other words, the cutting of the lock symbolically anticipates the moral message that Belinda’s vain obsession with physical beauty needs to be cut. Secondly, would Clarissa’s purported self-interest in the matter really invalidate the message of her speech? Could it not be that the common-sense truths stand regardless of the fact that she may utter them not without expediency? Trimble himself admits this as a plausible possibility: “Judging from his [i. e. Pope’s; C.H.] own scattered comments on the value of good sense and good humour, he quite clearly wished us to attend seriously to Clarissa’s moralizing” (Trimble 1974: 690).

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figure who foretells doom (and just like in the myth of Cassandra, her advice remains unheard – “So spoke the Dame, but no Applause ensu’d; / Belinda frown’d, Thalestris call’d her Prude”; RL: Canto 5, ll. 35 – 36 –, and Clarissa is symbolically killed off by disappearing from the text hereafter). It is also a misconception to think that the poem’s ending would contradict Clarissa’s moral because Belinda seems to be rewarded with a star in her name. While the mockheroic tone of the poem calls for an ironic happy ending with the aesthetic glorification of the lock (which is, as we have seen before, actually a sign of Belinda’s utter defeat as a coquette), Clarissa’s reminder of the vanity and transitoriness of human life is echoed in the last lines of the poem, and thus also the serious tone of her speech: For, after all the Murders of your Eye, When, after Millions slain, your self shall die; When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must, And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust; This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame, And mid’st the Stars inscribe Belinda’s Name! (RL: Canto 5, ll. 145 – 150)

Ultimately, Clarissa in The Rape of the Lock is more of a functional device than a character. She is, after all, the voice of common sense in the poem, but the fact that this voice is female is intriguing – yet ultimately misleading. If we take her for what Thalestris makes her out to be in the poem, that is, a prude whose professed asexuality and open enmity to social joyousness are considered an aberration of proper female behaviour, it is certainly valid to say of her, as Pollak (1985: 86) has done, that “she perhaps constitutes the most concrete instance in this poem of Pope’s exploitation of female deviance in the service of the norm it would subvert.” The norm that both coquettish and prudish behaviour would subvert is commonsensical female conduct, constructed and imposed upon by patriarchy and internalized by women of virtue. But the question whether Clarissa is really a prude or not is rather irrelevant in this case. Either way, the character of Clarissa is indeed exploited in the poem in that she becomes the medium of male common sense, i. e., a norm of conduct determined by men. Viewed in this way, Clarissa throughout the entire poem has no voice of her own: even when she speaks in Canto V, hers is not an authentic voice of the female self, but rather that of the male self of common sense (to which women will forever remain an Other). There is no need here to determine any further whether Clarissa is truly Pope’s ventriloquist voice or not, but the fact that her speech is modelled on the speech of the male Trojan king Sarpedon in Homer’s Iliad is telling. While Sarpedon’s speech is parodied in the mock-heroic mode of

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The Rape, which debases the original by transplanting it into the lesser context of appropriate female conduct, the functional similarity is nonetheless striking: Sarpedon’s morale-boosting speech to Glaucus is a reminder of their responsibility as proper men of honour and valour – Clarissa’s speech to Belinda is a reminder of their responsibility as proper women of virtue. The ironic inversions, though, are also conspicuous: While Sarpedon and Glaucus are to attack the Greek camp, Clarissa and Belinda are to submit to men in marriage. But the mocking does not stop here: while Sarpedon succeeds in his attempt to convince Glaucus, Clarissa’s speech falls on deaf ears.³³² Clarissa’s defeat in spreading male ‘good sense’ thus amounts to an utterly misogynist comment on the inferiority of women, who lack common sense on all fronts: they either fail to accept the good sense of patriarchy (Belinda), or they merely parrot this common sense (Clarissa). The voice of the female Other in The Rape of the Lock remains ultimately mute. *** The exclusion of the female Other from eighteenth-century common sense discourse requires two postscripts that are somewhat complementary. The first postscript shall be about the attempt by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to open up common sense discourse for women – a hopeless foray in her time, but still relevant here, as she makes it under the guise of a male speaker. The second postscript concerns the exclusion of the effeminate Other from a masculine identity concept in the first half of the eighteenth century, which also touches upon the formation of common sense discourse. If Alexander Pope ventriloquizes the female role of Clarissa, it is only fair for his personal enemy Mary Wortley Montagu to ventriloquize the male role of a magazine writer in her short-lived periodical The Nonsense of Common-Sense, which had a brief run from 16 December 1737 to at least 14 March 1738.³³³ Of this pro-government paper, commenced by Robert Walpole’s friend Lady Mary to counter the continual political attacks on the ministry from the authors of the oppositional Common Sense magazine, nine numbers survive, which were

 Trimble also discusses the purpose of Sarpedon’s speech in The Rape of the Lock and mentions further possible functions: 1) it is in keeping with the mock-heroic mode and adds necessary colour and pomp; 2) it shows a witty parallel between Sarpedon and Clarissa being in battle (thus pointing to Clarissa’s self-interest in her speech); 3) it might be a mutual ironic shrinkage of the Augustan world of beaus and the Hellenic world of pompous heroic ideals (see Trimble 1974: 686 – 689).  See also my brief discussion of the rivalry between Pope and Lady Mary (chapter III.2) as well as Lady Mary’s paper in the context of political common sense discourse (chapter IV.1).

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all published anonymously.³³⁴ Since the authorship of the new paper was initially unknown, Lady Mary did nothing to prevent her readers from believing that they were reading the essays of a man: “And as this Author takes the Liberty of blaming whatever he dislikes, I will positively praise whatever I think right […]” (Wortley Montagu 1970a: 2). Obviously, she hoped to gain argumentative weight from referring to herself (“this Author”) in the third-person singular with masculine gender (“whatever he dislikes”). While anonymous publishing in London’s abrasive press and pamphlet culture was the norm (one reason being the risk of seditious libel lawsuits which limited the culture of free speech; see Black 1987: 20 – 21), Lady Mary certainly felt the need to also veil her own gender in order to lend her writing the authority that readers at the time would have denied her had she revealed herself to be a woman. In her guise as a male author, however, she continually turns towards ‘women topics’ (which she excuses with catering to her “Lady Readers”; Wortley Montagu 1970a: 1) and shows herself rather sensitive to their concerns: I have always been an humble Admirer of the Fair Sex. Nay, I believe, I think of them with more Tenderness, than any Man in the World.—I do not look upon them as Objects of Pleasure, but I compassionate the many Hardships both Nature and Custom has subjected them to.—I never expose the Foibles to which Education has inclined them; but, contrary to all other Authors, I see, with a favourable Eye, the little Vanities with which they amuse themselves; and am glad they can find, in the imaginary Empire of Beauty, a Consolation for being excluded every Part of Government in the State. (Wortley Montague 1970a: 4)

It is striking how well Lady Mary emulates here the condescending tone of male authors towards the subject of women (e. g. “the little Vanities with which they amuse themselves”), but avoids the misogyny that often goes along with this tone (“I never expose the Foibles” / “I see, with a favourable Eye”). The fact that she even suggests that women need “Consolation for being excluded every Part of Government in the State” is like a crack in her male-authored mask. In issue no. 6 of her journal (24 January 1738), this mask is finally crumbling when she censures sexism against women in strong terms and speaks out for the social recognition of female achievements, despite their state of submission to men: Men that have not Sense enough to shew any Superiority in their Arguments, hope to be yielded to by a Faith, that, as they are Men, all the Reason that has been allotted to human Kind, has fallen to their Share.—I am seriously of another Opinion.—As much Great-

 Her authorship of the papers has been established beyond doubt; see Halsband (1970: ix–xii).

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ness of Mind may be shewn in Submission as in Command; and some Women have suffered a Life of Hardships with as much Philosophy as Cato traversed the Desarts of Africa, and without that Support the View of Glory offered him, which is enough for the human Mind that is touched with it, to go through any Toil or Danger. […] A Lady who has performed her Duty as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother, raises in me as much Veneration as Socrates or Xenophon […]. (Wortley Montagu 1970a: 27)

This proto-feminist protest against male chauvinism is followed up by an attempt to claim common sense for women and gain discursive acceptance for ‘women of sense.’ Significantly, her strategy for achieving this is to redefine ‘virtue’ as a core value of female identity in post-Restoration Britain: A Woman really virtuous, in the utmost Extent of this Expression, has Virtue of a purer Kind than any Philosopher has ever shewn; since she knows, if she has Sense, and without it there can be no Virtue, that Mankind is too much prejudiced against her Sex, to give her any Degree of that Fame which is so sharp a Spur to their greatest Actions.—I have some Thoughts of exhibiting a Set of Pictures of such meritorious Ladies, where I shall say nothing of the Fire of their Eyes, or the Pureness of their Complexions; but give them such Praises as befits a rational sensible Being: Virtues of Choice, and not Beauties of Accident. I beg they would not so far mistake me, as to think I am undervaluing their Charms: A beautiful Mind in a beautiful Body, is one of the finest Objects shewn us by Nature. (Wortley Montagu 1970a: 27– 28)

True human virtue, Lady Mary argues, is to have sense. And women of such virtue, i. e. women of common sense, are treated unfairly in a society that lets men get away with reducing women to objects of physical beauty. Instead women should be eligible to the same “Praises as befits a rational sensible Being,” indeed the same “Fame” as men “which is so sharp a Spur to their greatest Actions.” When Lady Mary nevertheless acknowledges physical beauty as a worthy female value besides others (at the end of the quotation above), this shows yet again the mediating effect of the very common sense discourse to which she demands access for women. Her argument ends with a rallying cry: “Begin then Ladies, by paying those Authors with Scorn and Contempt, who, with a Sneer of affected Admiration, would throw you below the Dignity of the human Species” (Wortley Montagu 1970a: 28). As if this were a direct attack on Alexander Pope, Lady Mary castigates the exclusion of women from ‘male’ common sense with a strategy that inverts Pope’s in The Rape of the Lock: While a male voice of common sense dominates Clarissa’s speech to objectify women as marriageable objects, it is a female voice of common sense disguised as a man’s to argue against such objectification. However, as powerful discourses cannot be governed by singular voices, female common sense remains a contradiction in terms in the early eighteenth century.

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While common sense discourse is still kept in safe seclusion from the female Other, the male common-sense self is fighting what, with the later advent of the sentimental man, will turn out to be a losing battle against an enemy within, yet which is believed to be encroaching from outside. This enemy to masculinity is identified in the effeminization of male manners and a spread of un-masculine ‘foppish’ behaviour. In an aggressive verse satire titled The Modern Englishman from 1739, the anonymous author (the frontispiece only states the initials “A. P.”) condemns a general decay of social mores, which he links to a public decline of common sense due the rivalry of fashionable taste as the “reigning Foible of the Times” (The Modern Englishman 1739: 8).³³⁵ Taste is exteriorized by the satirist as un-English, because it has been imported “from Naples, France and Rome” (The Modern Englishman 1739: 9) – a xenophobic complaint which draws on common late-Restoration concerns about a general Frenchification of manners³³⁶ as well as popular diatribes against the domination of English culture by Italian opera. This outlandish foreign taste has suffused English manners with attributes of foppery and effeminacy, which have superseded the former veneration of “manly Deeds” (The Modern Englishman 1739: 6): This gaudy Silkworm has enrich’d his Mind With softer Passion, Notions more refin’d; Has Powder, Engines, and the D—l know what, Scents, Paints, Complexions, Washes, Bergamot; ’Midst these soft Delicacies, Chat, and Tea, Tenderly melts his gentle Age away; Who Gaily shines thro’ Life’s abortive Span, By Art an Insect, and by Nature Man. If Transmigration of the Soul were true, There’s Transmigration sure of Bodies too; […] No more Sir Fopling fears to be disgrac’d, Baboons and Asses first were Men of Taste; Exactly each the same Endowments fit, Alike in Fiz, in Action, and in Wit. (The Modern Englishman 1739: 10)

 For the link to common sense, see the motto on the title page of The Modern Englishman: “Power is Right, and Knavery Common Sense; / Honour a Sound, and Principle Pretence: / Virtue’s abandon’d, Honesty’s disgrac’d; / Good Sense is scorn’d—what Rivals all is Taste.” (The Modern Englishman 1739: n. pag.)  “So gull’d of Treasure, Honesty, and Sense, / He [i. e. the fop; C.H.] rules our Reason as he rules our Pence. / Such Madness reigns thro’ each revolving Moon, / And Britons emulate the French Buffoon.” (The Modern Englishman 1739: 12)

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Referring to the popular character of Sir Fopling from George Etheredge’s restoration comedy The Man of Mode,³³⁷ the author deplores an unnatural softening of manliness in that “gaudy Silkworm” of the fop, who with his use of “Powders, Engines, […] / Scents, Paints, Complexions, Washes, Bergamot” is reminiscent of young Belinda in front of her dressing table in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. Another satiric parallel between The Rape and The Modern Englishman can be seen in the daily routines of Belinda and the fop, as both represent the contemptible lifestyle of the beau monde. Belinda is woken up by her lapdog at noon: “Now Lapdogs give themselves the rowzing Shake, / And sleepless Lovers, just at Twelve, awake” (RL: Canto 1, ll. 15 – 16). This is echoed by the daily schedule of the fop: “At Twelve to Supper, and at Four to Sleep, / […] They ring at Ten, and rise again at Noon” (The Modern Englishman 1739: 16). The parallels are characteristic of another exclusion from the male discourse of common sense that occurs in the early eighteenth century. As gender concepts drift further apart and congeal into rigid divergent norms of acceptable behaviour, a man’s lively interest in fashion and physical appearance as well as male gallantry towards other men, perfectly in line with a traditional code of aristocratic chivalry, become more and more suspicious of ‘effeminacy,’ in other words, they are perceived as transgressions of the emerging binary opposition between masculine and feminine identities. Behind this intensifying aversion to foppery, though, there is also a growing male anxiety over homosexuality, which also comes to fore in the text of The Modern Englishman: Yet this is all mere venal low Offence, To some Degrees of Mens Concupiscence: Sodom’s curs’d Crew far worse than Beasts obscene, Devils incarnate to the Damn’d unclean; A vile detested Heterogeneal Race, Monsters! unfit to wear a human Face. (The Modern Englishman 1739: 16)

That the concupiscent ‘sodomites,’ berated here as “Monsters! unfit to wear a human Face,” were associated with effeminate men is a relatively new development starting around 1720, as Randolph Trumbach has argued in several of his gender-historical works.³³⁸ In fact, the overlapping associations of effeminate

 See Scholz (2004: 180 – 203) on the figure of the fop in Restoration comedy and the early eighteenth-century comedy of manners.  See for instance Trumbach (1989: 134): “In the three generations between 1660 and 1750, public attitudes toward the fop changed dramatically by generation. […]. After 1720 the fop’s effeminacy, in real life and on the stage, came to be identified with the effeminacy of the then

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foppery with both homosexuality and French culture (Britain’s foremost national enemy in the eighteenth century) contribute to a concept of common sense that intersects with discourses about masculine identity as well as nationalism. Forms of female and effeminate otherness are thus banished from the discourse of British common sense, but continue to exert a haunting influence by functioning as its negatives.

emerging role of the exclusive adult male sodomite—known in the ordinary language of his day as a molly, and later as a queen.” – The validity of Trumbach’s historical equation of post-1720s ‘effeminate men’ with homosexuals has been disputed by Carter (2001: 144– 147) and by Clery (2004: 8 – 10), who differentiates between the historical usage of ‘feminized’ as a descriptive epithet for heterosexual men and ‘effeminate’ as derogatory for men that might be homosexual.

6 The Afterlife of Common Sense O England! England! thou land of liberty, and climate of good sense, thou tenderest of mothers—and gentlest of nurses […]. (TS: II, 635) Defend me therefore common sense, say I, From reveries so airy, from the toil Of dropping buckets into empty wells, And growing old in drawing nothing up! (Cowper 1994: 117; bk. III, ll. 187– 190)

Common sense is here to stay. William Cowper, author of the pre-Romantic long poem The Task, was to lose his own common sense, suffering from reoccurring bouts of mental illness and severe depression up to his death in 1800. Still the orientation towards a supposedly infallible and self-evident standard of common sense has remained a lasting discursive feature of British cultural life, from its emergence in the early eighteenth century until today, arguably, when even football managers are assessed in respect of their tactical common sense or the lack thereof.³³⁹ Nonetheless, the discourse of common sense has undergone considerable changes since its beginnings. These discursive shifts started already in the second half of the eighteenth century with the advent of the cult of sensibility and continued with a decline in the esteem of common sense during the Romantic period, even though Scottish common sense philosophy became exceedingly popular in academic circles during that time, as Gavin Budge (2007: 12) has reminded us. Before I sketch some final aspects of common sense discourse in English literature on the road to Romanticism, it is time to take stock. To recapitulate: I started out in chapter I by differentiating the discourse of common sense in the early eighteenth-century into two complementary modes. One mode affirms positive moral values that can be flexibly incorporated in the interdiscourse of common sense. As we have seen here throughout this study, these range from classical ancient virtues such as the Golden Mean and classic Christian ones such as modesty, diligence, honesty, to political values such as liberty, patriotism, the right Anglican faith, or a hierarchical concept of gender. Yet the more frequent mode of common sense discourse is a negative or corrective one where common sense is mostly conceptualized as a faculty of practical

 Many examples of the persistent popularity of the phrase common sense can be found in Körver (1967: 150 – 198) for the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as in Wierzbicka (2010: 328 – 337) for its present-day usage, also as a mainstay in law.

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rational judgment that borders on intuition and instinct. With the help of this faculty, violations of an implied norm of ‘sane’ rational behaviour can be identified and criticized – typically: absurdity, folly, impracticality, speculation, systematic rigour, also thoughtless, excessive, or vicious action, especially action harming the common good; in general: all forms of abnormality or deformity deviating from an implied communal standard –; but again this procedure has a wide and flexible range as the implied critical norm is rarely stated and therefore remains fuzzy and unclear in most cases. This is what makes common sense particularly amenable to Augustan satire, in which it finds a congenial literary mode, for the most part at least. But also other texts and genres of early eighteenth-century literature abound with expressions of common sense, either on the level of subject matter, e. g. in didactic essays and poems, or in the semanticization of an emerging novel form whose realism carries the ideological marks of a common-sense worldview, as I have tried to show with respect to Robinson Crusoe in chapter V.1. Regarding common sense as a discourse in the sense of Michel Foucault has enabled us to conceive of it as a historically emergent phenomenon in speech and writing that is not to be misunderstood as a fixed system of values or even a doctrine that can be distorted or purified, but rather as a constantly shifting formation of recurrent statements with endemic rules. In other words, principles of inclusion and exclusion regulate what can be reasonably said with reference to common sense (or ‘good sense,’ ‘plain sense,’ or any other of its derivatives) and what not. This theoretical approach was then augmented with Link and Link-Heer’s concept of an interdiscourse that incorporates other specialized discourses to make common sense discourse adaptable to differing ends and needs. This interdiscursive adaptation is most clearly visible in the area of politics where common sense discourse became an important factor in eighteenth-century constructions of national character, i. e. in the forging of English and British identities. However, common sense in political speech often deteriorated into a mere buzzword and rhetorical formula. My overall thesis as to the reasons for the emergence and cultural significance of common sense discourse in early eighteenth-century Britain has been that it performed a historically contingent function of compensation and moderation with regard to several cultural clashes in post-Restoration England to which it offered itself as a corrective. These broader cultural clashes occurred in the mingled areas of religion and politics (Anglicanism vs. Puritan dissent, Protestant monarchy vs. Catholic rebellion, High-Church vs. Low-Church etc.) as well as in the domain of knowledge and learning (rationalism vs. empiricism, Ancients vs. Moderns debate). In this latter epistemic area, common sense had the crucial function of serving as a conservative corrective to the Enlightenment dynamic of progress and social

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change by expelling radical innovations from the inside of its discourse on grounds of violating self-evident truths. The inside and outside of this significant discourse of British social and cultural life in the early eighteenth century has been charted in the ensuing chapters of this study that have turned to different functional effects of common sense discourse. In chapter II, the ethical dimension of common sense discourse was determined in its hybrid fusion of moral, aesthetic and epistemological judgments. As there was yet no discrete philosophical discipline of aesthetics at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy established a concept of common (as shared) sense for moral righteousness that entails a concept of taste springing from the recognition of beauty in moral truth. In this sense, beauty and truth are just related aspects of the same ‘natural affection,’ as Shaftesbury called it. This played out in the pronouncement of orthodox Neoclassicist poetics in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, which elevates a common-sense aesthetic to the norm of ‘good sense’ by the carefully weighted and balanced refinement of both argument and versification in his didactic poem. Bernard Mandeville’s ‘gross’ Fable of the Bees, in turn, is a text that is ugly insofar as it perverts the moral common sense of his time – the doggerel poem at the heart of Mandeville’s treatise ironically underlines this violation of acceptable common-sense norms. This hints at a profound misunderstanding on Mandeville’s part, who, in trying to reach a broad audience for his innovative ideas, targeted the ‘common sense of mankind’ in the minimizing view (a basic rational understanding to recognize what is ‘plain to see’) with a simple and crude form of versification, whereas the acceptable aesthetic standard of common sense in the maximizing view was prototypically realized in Pope’s polished verse that combines elegance of diction with the plain and efficacious form of rhyming couplets. However, the limitations of a balanced common-sense ethic/aesthetic became visible in Samuel Johnson’s ‘oriental tale’ Rasselas, where common sense, typically considered the author’s domain, is of no help in breaking the circle of life’s desires since it fails to achieve a compromise between the irresolvable opposites the text offers as possible ‘choices of life.’ The void in the middle of common sense, experienced by Rasselas and his companions, was my cue for the calculated transgressions of good sense and good taste in Augustan satire, which were discussed in chapter III. While satire to the Augustans obviously was an efficacious means to criticize deviations from collective norms of behaviour, the harshness and venom of many satires and lampoons were subject to a controversial public debate in the early eighteenth century. Writers like Joseph Addison, considered a beacon of common sense and good taste, issued statements of concern about the viciousness of satire. Even though satire seems the mode for common-sense criticism of society

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and manners, which has been suggested is its moral basis in the Augustan Age, the transgression of good taste in A Tale of a Tub, Swift’s ferocious satire of modern learning, taints the perceived purpose of preserving the good sense and good taste of the Ancients. In a way, then, Swift’s ingenious early satire is an extreme illustration of how negative common sense discourse can become in its corrective function: the fiercer the irony of critical attack, the harder the positive moral centre gets to be identified. In terms of satiric theory, satire becomes all thesis and offers no longer any antithesis for moral reform. Like Swift’s Tale, Pope’s Peri Bathous exploits similar ex negativo strategies of common-sense criticism in the mode of persistent irony, to make its case against the threatening masses of bad modern poets. This, however, causes considerable friction with established common sense precepts of modesty and moderation due to Pope’s instrumentalizing of common sense for self-promotion. Finally, Augustan satires on humankind have an inherent generic structure that sets them at odds with dominant moral norms and a community-oriented discourse of common sense. Nevertheless, all three examples of such satires discussed here showed the marks of common sense discourse to differing extents. While Rochester’s ‘common sense’ in A Satyr against Reason and Mankind was an immoral concept tantamount to personal gain, common sense discourse in Gulliver’s Travels served Swift for his well-known attacks on political evils and the presumptuous follies of the modern scholars. However, as a potential moral norm in the ambiguous fourth book of the Travels, common sense fails on two accounts: it neither seems to be the solution the predicament of man’s vicious condition, nor does Swift uphold it in the satire’s aesthetic, whose misanthropic crassness violates common sense standards of good taste. The last two chapters of the present study formed a complementary unit insofar as one addressed the inclusions of suitable political values (e. g. liberty) in constructions of a nationalist common-sense self, while the other chapter engaged with the principles of exclusion by which the Other is repressed from the ‘inside’ of common sense and barred from participating in its discourse. Chapter IV charted the historical development of a political discourse of common sense from its actual birth in 1736 – 37 by way of the combined impact of Henry Fielding’s satiric play Pasquin (and the mock-tragedy The Life and Death of Common Sense contained therein) and the oppositional Common Sense weekly, led by Chesterfield, Lyttelton, Molloy and others. Despite the fierce reaction of the pro-Government press to stifle the opposition’s public attention, common sense became an undisputed standard of political rationale and continued to be an imaginary projection plane in political life due to similar allegories as Fielding’s Queen Common-Sense. Towards the end of the century, common sense discourse gained ground in colonial political contexts where it was ironi-

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cally turned against its self-professed homeland and claimed for various nationalist movements, most notably for American independence through Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense. The flipside of nationalist inclusions of common sense discourse is that they are necessarily made at the expense of some excluded Other. In chapter V therefore, we first looked at how the foreign Other was represented under the influence of common sense discourse in two rather different texts, Defoe’s realist adventure novel Robinson Crusoe and Goldsmith’s epistolary essay-novel The Citizen of the World. Both texts show fleeting instances of critique of the common-sense self and its smug feeling of superiority over the Other (Friday’s inquisitiveness in Robinson Crusoe, and Lien Chi Altangi’s encounter of smug Little Englanders in London), but ultimately retract into a position that in fact stabilizes the ideology of hegemonic superiority on the basis of common sense – in neither text, the Other can find its own voice. This is also the case in the representation of the female Other in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, where the prude Clarissa becomes a male mouthpiece not only because she is assumed to represent her author’s intentions in a more or less direct way, but also because it is in fact male common sense that speaks out of her. The coquette Belinda, in turn, transgressively assumes symbolic attributes of power to which she is not entitled as a woman in a strictly patriarchal world. Under the guise of the light-hearted mock-heroic mode, hierarchical gender roles that secure male superiority were reinforced through the poem. As in the case of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s attempts at speaking up for women, the female voice of the Other remained unheard even when it tried to give itself the guise of authority by employing elements of male common sense discourse. *** This study needs a companion study that would chart the afterlife of British common sense discourse in the late eighteenth century and beyond. Sophia Rosenfeld (2011) has presented us with an impressive account of the fate of political common sense up to the present time in the Atlantic world, while Anna Wierzbicka (2010) has stressed the loaded cultural significance of common sense as a keyword of Anglo-English culture. Nonetheless, the persistence of British common sense discourse specifically in literature and the arts, in intellectual and everyday culture since the middle of the eighteenth century deserves further research in order to retrace its ruptures, revisions and recombinations with the advent of Romanticism, but also throughout Victorian times and beyond. I shall conclude the present study with giving a few hints as to what I think should be included in a study about the Long Eighteenth Century that I would have wished to write but could not do so for its vast scope. An analysis of common sense discourse in the literature and culture between 1760 and 1820 could

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offer another angle on the historical paradigm shift in the late eighteenth century from ‘sense’ (as a primarily rational faculty) to ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentimentalism.’ Before the long-standing appreciation of common-sense ideals comes under attack from Romantic poets and critics (especially Coleridge) and is devalued in favour of the individual creative genius, elements of common sense discourse in novels such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility already testify to a slippage in the discursive formation of common sense. This slippage facilitates an emphasis of aspects of con-sensuality and sensibility. In other words, ‘common feeling’ tends to be given priority over ‘common reason.’ An exemplary look at Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy may illustrate this. Sterne’s experimental novel could well be read as a belated Augustan satire. In fact, to conceive of Tristram Shandy as a comic novel or anti-novel, and not a satire, is of course not ‘naturally’ given, but largely owing to an influential interpretative tradition.³⁴⁰ What is however important here to me is how common sense notions themselves are satirized in Sterne’s book. This I would like to demonstrate by a short reading of a passage concerning Tristram’s father Walter (from chapter 19 of book I). Tristram tells the reader about his father’s theory of “a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impress’d upon our characters and conduct” (TS: I, 57– 58). Setting the tone for common-sense satire, he starts this episode with an apology: “I Would sooner undertake to explain the hardest problem in Geometry, than pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father’s great good sense, […] could be capable of entertaining a notion in his head, so out of the common track […]” (TS: I, 57). Walter, though ostensibly endowed with “great good sense,” violates common sense with a notion “so out of the common track” that he resembles

 See New (1991: 50): “the inclusion of Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth-century novels course, immediately following Fielding and Richardson […], is in fact an interpretative act, one that preconceives the genre – and hence our expectations – of the work.” Excellent overviews of the divisive state of Tristram Shandy scholarship in the novel and the satire camps are given in Gurr (1999) and especially Keymer (2002: 1– 26). – The case for satire, most comprehensively presented in New (1969), is easy to make: Similar to A Tale of a Tub, Tristram Shandy advances a sheer multitude of general and personal satiric targets: e. g. John Locke’s theory of duration (just as important as his theory of association for the overall organization of the seemingly ‘chaotic’ Tristram Shandy); or the Tristrapaedia compiled by Walter Shandy (on the whole a satiric character as the pedantic scholar and Quixotean master-builder), which ridicules absurd pedagogic concepts of Sterne’s time; but also the inadequate Dr. Slop, modelled on the Roman Catholic physician John Burton of York, to whose political and religious views Sterne was deeply inimical; on this last point see New (1969: 107).

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Don Quixote in graveness and fervour: “The Hero of Cervantes argued not the point with more seriousness,—nor had he more faith […]” (TS: I, 58). Tristram further recounts how Walter would confront anybody frowning on his theory of names by appealing to that person’s “own good sense” and being “free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men” (TS: I, 58). This is rather ironic: Walter’s argumentum sensus communis (or sensus boni) – as we may dub it – comes from a man who seems to have very little common sense himself; therefore his argument invalidates itself by exposing the mere rhetorical nature of such common-sense appeals. However, as it turns out, it is the very authority of common sense that is brought into question in this passage. Walter has been building up his argument to the point of presenting the clinching example to prove his theory: that nobody would want to call their son Judas, since the burden of such a name would certainly exert a negative influence on the poor child’s development. Tristram shows himself deeply impressed by his father’s rhetorical powers (“he was certainly irresistible”; TS: I, 59). The ambiguity of the whole passage is subtle but significant: it both affirms and subverts the authority of common sense. It affirms it as a basis for attack on claims contrary to common sense (Walter’s theory), but it also subverts it by making Walter’s theory appear plausible to a degree. Even though Tristram has too strong a footing in common sense to give his father’s theory full credit, the whole episode is designed to manipulate the reader and lead him to question common-sense certainties. This becomes apparent in Tristram’s eventual comment on the matter: Whether this [forming of whimsical notions into theories; C.H.] was the case of the singularity of my father’s notions,—or that his judgment, at length, became the dupe of his wit;— or how far, in many of his notions, he might, tho’ odd, be absolutely right;—the reader, as he comes at them, shall decide. (TS: I, 61)

What starts out as a satire on absurd reasoning turns into a self-reflexive crisis of common sense. On the whole, Tristram Shandy lacks a constitutive element of eighteenth-century common sense, namely, the aversion to extremes. In contrast, Sterne’s novel is an excrescence, an excess of self-reflexivity, a triumph of eccentricity and exuberance over normality and restraint. If anything, Tristram Shandy aims at a redefinition of common sense, away from a rational faculty of understanding and sound judgment, towards a subjective capacity for common sentiment. In the Shandean universe, as has often been stressed,³⁴¹ there is no true

 See Byrd (1985: 47– 68), who summarizes most of what has been written on Sterne and sensibility/sentimentality up to the 1980s and holds that the only clinically mad person, the imbecile French girl Maria in chapter 24 of book 9, is treated by Tristram with “a warm and

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(rational) understanding among its characters; at times they seem like unique monads in a Leibnizian universe of pre-established harmony. What prevents them from drifting into solipsism, though, is a capacity for common feeling and sympathy: Walter and My Uncle Toby, those isolated subjects riding, or rather ridden by, their individual hobby-horses, have no shared level of understanding, but at least they are (sometimes painfully) aware of each other’s hobby-horses and are able to acknowledge and respect them as a structural necessity in human character. In this redefined way, it is perhaps commonsensical after all that Tristram’s hobby-horse, his ‘life writing,’ is all about subjective individuality – his own, but just as much that of all the others for which he shows a common sentiment. As signalled by the very ambiguity of the word sense itself, the discursive shifts and modifications towards the end of the century resulted in a broadening of meaning to include (and, in certain texts, to stress) the capacity for common/ communal sentiment. R. F. Brissenden, in his classic study of the pre-Romantic novel of sentiment, describes this historical shift from sense to sensibility in revealing terms: Disproportionate weight eventually came to be placed on the feelings – on sensibility at the expense of sense. But this is not so significant as the fact that the process of moral judgment was held to be essentially private and subjective. Ideally the man or woman of sentiment as presented in the fiction of the age was seen as someone in whom the claims of reason and feeling were properly balanced. (Brissenden 1974: 24)

Such a proper balance of reason and feeling is something that Pope was already striving for in An Essay on Man, as we have seen before. Nevertheless, Brissenden has it quite right when he, seemingly paradoxically, describes the primacy of feeling vis-à-vis a continued ideal of balance of the mind. A fitting example of this paradox is Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, which exploits the easily impressionable sensibility of her heroine Emily for titillating fireworks of gothic effects. The novel’s balancing act informed by common sense discourse is in fact a broken dialectic of extremes: one pole is excessive/destructive passion (represented by the gothic villain Montoni and Signora Laurentini), the other pole would be unemotional reason (which is not represented in the novel). The golden mean are St. Aubert and the Count De Villefort, the male father figures of the novel, who balance the extremes of reason and passion well: While the latter stands for aristocratic ideals of good sense and benevo-

sentimental affection” (Byrd 1985: 63). The contrast to previous representations of madness in Augustan literature, especially also in Swift, is sharp.

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lence, Emily’s father is the epitome of the common sense norm the novel seems to want to advocate: he is benevolent, educated, rational, empathetic, but strict in his principles and conviction, as he tries to fortify Emily against disappointments and the adversary forces of life.³⁴² Emily herself, due to her strong sensibility, is dangerously close to the pole of passion and has to learn to overcome her excessive responsiveness to feeling. The novel’s technique of rationally ‘explaining away’ all ‘supernatural’ terrors suggests again common sense as the epistemological guard against the “dangers of sensibility,” but the great lengths to which Radcliffe goes in her novel to keep the reader entertained with scenes of terror and the gothic sublime make the common sense norm appear threadbare and ultimately insincere. Common sense discourse seems to operate seamlessly just as decades before, but is in fact subverted and betrayed to the calculated arousal of emotional effects. Characters like Emily St. Aubert, Evelina Anville, and Elinor Dashwood also stand for a re-gendering, a ‘feminization,’ of common sense discourse,³⁴³ which, at the same time, opens up new discursive positions for ‘effeminate’ men (as in the characters of Tristram Shandy and Uncle Toby, or in Harley from Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling), such as were not available just decades before, as I have indicated at the end of the previous chapter. At the same time, however, novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho or Sense and Sensibility prove that earlier forms of common sense discourse, stressing sanity of mind, pragmatism, prudence, balanced judgment, resistance to enthusiasm and extremes, have not be-

 See for example his important deathbed lecture to the young Emily, in which he strongly warns her “against the dangers of sensibility” (Radcliffe 1998: 80; the whole speech is at 79 – 81 in chapter VII).  An interesting critical attempt at linking common sense discourse to the feminization of fiction through women authors by the end of the eighteenth century has been made by Julie Choi (1996). She argues that eighteenth-century female authors emulated male authority in their fictions by assuming a disembodied, neutral, and non-gendered voice of ‘common sense’ (which however could be easily associated with male authors at that time) in order to establish authority for themselves. In her interesting argument, Choi tries to combine historical narratology (the development of ‘disembodied’ omniscient narration, e. g. in Jane Austen’s novels, which anticipates and prepares modern forms of figural narration) with a rather vague notion of eighteenth-century common sense: “Common sense is an especially fortuitous terrain, because it covers both the empathy as well as the ironic distance that are simultaneously held by the thirdperson narrator vis-à-vis her literary heroine” (658). Irrespective of evidence, her thesis that it was specifically women authors writing third-person novels who contributed majorly to the development of a covert objective narrative perspective in fiction is very intriguing: “Women who engineer this [narratological; C.H.] possibility have a stake in creating a view that presents itself as if from nowhere; in the spirit of a common enlightenment, a common reason, they take their share in construing that fiction of ultimate authority—objectivity” (Choi 1996: 659).

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come obsolete by that time. A final illustration of this shall come from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, whose very title signals the dialectic of reason and feeling that is sustained in the novel through the opposition between Elinor and Marianne. Elinor, the representative of a very emotionally restrained form of Augustan common sense, is made the focalizer of Austen’s novel so that she is a little closer to the reader, and arguably to appear more appealing, than her rashly passionate sister Marianne. However, it has been the centre of critical debate for a long time to wonder whether it is not just Marianne who is restored to some middle ground by the end of the novel, but Elinor as well, who has lost some of her former emotional frigidity at that point. Hence in both characters there is a move away from their former extreme, towards a commonsensical compromise between reason and feelings, even though this is certainly much more marked in Marianne, as Elinor seems to be very close to the novel’s common-sense ideology from the start. For now, these final points have to remain what they are: rather general observations that cannot be substantiated here any further by detailed analysis. But it is safe to say that by the beginning of the nineteenth century common sense discourse became rather ambivalent in itself.³⁴⁴ The criticism of common sense by Romantic thinkers was at times disparaging, at other times mildly condescending as to the limitations of that ‘low’ rational faculty: common sense had fallen into intellectual disrepute. In a way, the formerly maximizing view of the wonderful benefits of a common-sense mind and a corresponding attitude to life, visibly predominant in the early eighteenth century, gave way again to a minimizing view in Romantic culture. Common sense now had an air of mediocrity, of a second-class intellect. Coleridge’s epigrammatic verdict about the English national character in a private letter illustrates this new minimizing view: “The English possess Genius occasionally […]—but good sense diffusedly. The former is the national honor; but the latter is the national Character” (Coleridge 2002: 667; letter no. 1024, to Thomas Boosey, 4 September 1816). However, even such a critical reassessment of common sense implicitly acknowledged its worth as part of the national ‘character.’ In a similar vein, William Hazlitt (1821: 78 – 79) stated what could be taken for the received view of British common sense at the end of the Long Eighteenth Century: “Hasty, dogmatical, self-satisfied reason is worse than idle fancy or bigoted prejudice. […] Common sense thus acts as a check-weight on sophistry, and suspends our rash and superficial judg-

 Körver’s introductory statement to the development of common sense usage in the Romantic era is vague, but reflects the value shift that has taken place: “In der Zeit der Romantik bietet die Entwicklung unseres Wortes ein uneinheitliches Bild” (Körver 1967: 150).

286

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ments.” Statements like Coleridge’s and Hazlitt’s show that common sense discourse was by now operating even in the utterances of its detractors since it had left an indelible mark in the nationalist discourse of identity. Many elements of common-sense discourse – positives such as practical prudence and a balanced intuitive judgment, but also corrective qualities such as resistance to unbridled passions, extreme behaviour or thought – continue to lead a discursive afterlife in clichéd self-concepts of cultural and national identity.

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Author and Title Index Ackroyd, Peter vi Addison, Joseph 23, 49 n., 95 f., 117, 137 n., 168, 223, 254, 256, 278 Amhurst, Nicholas 74, 167 n., 184 Anderson, Benedict 166 Anne, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland 37 n., 186, 213, 255 Antigallican Songster, The 217 – 219 Arbuthnot, John 118, 217 Aristotle 9 – 11, 45 f., 55, 47, 59, 142 n., 155, 193 Austen, Jane 253, 284 n., 285 – Mansfield Park 25 – Sense and Sensibility 25, 210 f., 281, 285 Austin, J. L. 17 n. Averroes 10 Avicenna 10 Bacon, Francis, Baron Verulam, 1st Viscount St. Alban v, 5, 12, 112, 113 n., 247 Baker, Thomas 254 n. Bakhtin, Mikhail 100 Beattie, James 15, 52 n. Beckford, William 24 Behn, Aphra 236 n., 237, 239 n. Bentham, Jeremy 44 Bentley, Richard 109 n., 117 n. Berkeley, George 2 f., 14, 15 n., 23, 25, 29, 31, 38 n., 63 Blackmore, Richard 96 n., 118 Bock, Hellmut 19 f., 22 Boerhaave, Hermann 6 Boileau, Nicholas 54, 128 – 130, 137 n., 154 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st Viscount of 168 n., 174, 182, 192, 193 n. Bonaventura 10 Booth, Wayne C. 110 n., 244 Boswell, James 2 f., 70, 74 f., 89, 247 f. n. Bourdieu, Pierre 65 Boyle, Robert 5, 128, 159 n., 194 Breuer, Rolf vii Brissenden, R. F. 283 Brooke, Henry 222 f. Brown, Laura 24, 40

Budge, Gavin 29, 276 Buffier, Claude 25 Burke, Edmund 63 n., 225 Burney, Frances 239 n., 252 n., 281 Burton, John 281 n. Burton, Robert 45 f., 106 n. Butler, Joseph 29 Cartwright, John 222 n. Caryll, John 259 Cave, Edward 182 f. Chalmers, James 221 n., 222 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland 175 Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland 129 Charles II, King of Spain 218 n. Charles XII, King of Sweden 71 Chatman, Seymour 110 n. Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of 1 f., 19, 30, 36, 43, 168 – 174, 176 – 178, 180 – 182, 185 f., 199, 204, 214 f., 249 n., 251 f., 256 n., 279 Choi, Julie 284 n. Cibber, Colley 126 Cicero (Tully) 10, 199 Cleveland, John 118 Clifford, James 141 n. Cobham, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount 192 Cokin, William 212 n. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 40, 281, 285 f. Combe, Kirk 98 f., 128, 152 Common Sense: or, The Englishman’s Journal 1 f., 30, 35 f., 47, 110, 166 – 187, 195 – 197, 199 n., 201 n., 213 n., 214, 222, 229 – 231, 246, 249, 251 f., 255 – 257, 270, 279 Connery, Brian A. 98 f., 128, 152 Cowley, Abraham 8 n. Cowley, Hannah 211 n. Cowper, William 276 Craftsman, The 1, 74, 167 f. n., 174, 184 n., 195 f. Cromwell, Oliver 200

Author and Title Index

Culverwell, Nathaniel Cutting-Gray, Joanne

130 n. 158 f.

Dampier, William 140 Davis, Lennard J. 240 n. De Crousaz, Jean-Pierre 162 n. Defoe, Daniel 43, 105, 205, 241 – The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner 41, 89, 228 f., 231 – 241, 280 – The Shortest Way with the Dissenters 99, 105 DePorte, Michael 149 Derrida, Jacques 42 Descartes, René 6, 13, 160, 193 Dryden, John – Absalom and Achitophel 97 – Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire 98, 99 n., 117 f – MacFlecknoe 100 Duns Scotus 10 Eagleton, Terry 54 n. Easthope, Antony v f., 11 f., 30 f., 38 Edgeworth, Maria 239 n. Edward VI, King of England and Ireland 4 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland 4, 37, 186, 208, 255 Elliott, Robert C. 95 f., 98 n. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds 234 – 236 n., 239, 240 n., 241 Etheredge, George 274 Female Tatler, The 253 f., 258 Fermor, Arabella 259 n. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 16 n., 38 n. Fielding, Henry 30 f., 41, 43, 76, 168 f., 187 n., 196 – 198, 203 – 206, 239, 281 – Amelia 246 n., 252 n. – Eurydice Hissed 1, 188 – The Historical Register for the Year 1736 1, 188 – The History of Tom Jones 30, 89, 113 n., 241 – Pasquin: A Dramatick Satire on the Times 1, 28 n., 37, 166, 176 n., 186 – 195, 201 f., 209 – 211, 251, 279

305

Flaubert, Gustave 90 Fludernik, Monika vii, 7 f. n., 63 Flynn, Carol Houlihan 153 f. Fog’s Journal 167 n., 168 Foucault, Michel v, 7, 11, 24 f., 32 f., 39, 41 f., 49, 78, 121, 229 f., 239, 277 Frederick, Prince of Wales 168 n. Free-Thinker, The 6, 172 n., 254 f. Freud, Sigmund 134 Frye, Northrop 100 Fussell, Paul 93 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 50 n., 53, 57 f. Gallaway, Francis 18 – 20, 22, 100 f. Garrick, David 204 f. Gay, John 31, 118, 180, 186 f. Geertz, Clifford 38 Gentleman’s Magazine, The 177, 182, 195 f. George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland 30, 191, 196, 208 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland 208 Gifford, William 211 n. Gildon, Charles 58 f. Goldgar, Bertrand 1, 167, 171, 181 Goldsmith, Oliver 30 f., 43, 247, 250 – The Citizen of the World 37, 228 f., 242 – 251, 280 Greenblatt, Stephen 43 Grenville, George 192 Guthrie, Patrick 96, 127 n. Habermas, Jürgen 6 n., 27 n., 108 Hall, Joseph 96 n., 112 Halley, Edmond 5 Harley, Robert, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer 109 n. Harth, Phillip 110 n. Haywood, Eliza 241 Hazlitt, William 285 f. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 16 n. Heidegger, Martin 159 Henry VIII, King of England and Ireland 4, 111 Hervey, John Hervey, 2nd Baron 43, 126, 178 f., 183, 185, 197, 222 Hoadly, Benjamin 169 n.

306

Author and Title Index

Hobbes, Thomas v, 12, 16, 19, 63, 103, 112, 113 n., 130, 135, 137, 160 Homer 60 f., 266, 269 Hooker, Richard 5, 20 Horace 54, 61 n., 99 – 101, 117, 124, 126, 172, 179 Hume, David 14 f., 17, 20 n., 25, 31, 34 n., 52, 63, 181 Hume, Robert D. 190 Hutcheson, Frances 17, 20 n., 51 f., 134 Innes, Alexander

63 – 65, 69, 73

James I, King of England and Irland (James VI, King of Scotland) 186 JanMohamed, Abdul R. 227 n. Johnson, Ronald W. 133 n., 136, 138 Johnson, Samuel vii, 2 f., 8 f., 14, 43 f., 61 n., 65 f., 70 – 75, 77, 79 – 94, 118 n., 124, 161, 182 n., 204, 211 n., 233 n., 247, 248 n., 250 – A Dictionary of the English Language 124 – The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia 24, 41 f., 44, 78 – 94, 146 n., 161, 229, 233 n., 278 – London 70 f. – “Preface to Shakespeare” 8 – “Sermon 5” 70, 72 f. – The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated 65, 70 – 72, 89 n., 161 “Judgment of Common Sense, The” 202 f. Juvenal 61 n., 70, 99 f., 130, 172, 214 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 51 f. n. Kant, Immanuel 4 n., 16 n., 25, 50 f. n., 54 n. Keats, John 54 Kernan, Alvin 98 n. King, William 196 Knowles, Robert 139 f. n. Körver, Helga 19 n., 20 f., 276 n., 285 n. Kümmel-Schnur, Albert vii La Rochefoucauld, François de 130 n. Lacan, Jacques 24, 42, 92, 227 n., 234

Latour, Bruno 42 n. Lawrence, Herbert 43, 187, 203 – 209 Leavis, F. R. 84 f. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 162 n., 283 Lennox, Charlotte 239 n. Lévinas, Emmanuel 227 n. Lewis, C. S. 19 f., 22, 34, 81, 137, 173 Link, Jürgen 39, 277 Link-Heer, Ursula 39, 277 Linnaeus, Carl 6 Liu, Alan 22, 24 f., 93 n., 170 n. Lock, F. P. 139 n., 149 f., 152 Locke, John v, 12 – 15, 25, 47, 105, 112, 113 n., 194, 227 n., 230 f., 238 f., 247, 281 n. Lockwood, Thomas 176 Louis XIV, King of France 218 n. Lovejoy, Arthur O. v, 17 f., 48 n., 58 n., 165 f., 169, 193, 228 Lucretius 10 Lyons, J. 35 f. Lyttelton, George, 1st Baron Lyttelton 1, 2 n., 168 f., 182, 192, 243 n., 279 Mack, Maynard 98 n. Mackenzie, Henry 284 Malthus, Thomas 63 Mandeville, Bernard 41, 44, 63 – 78, 130, 254 n., 278 Manley, Delarivier[e] 239 n., 253 f. n. Martial 187 n. Marx, Karl 63 Mary I, Queen of England and Ireland 4 McGrane, Laura 190 n., 195 Merry, Robert 211 Middeke, Martin vii Mill, John Stuart v Miller, J. Hillis 24, 88 n. Milton, John 88 f., 158 Mist, Nathaniel 167 n., 168 Modern Englishman, The 273 f. Molloy, Charles 1, 2 n., 168, 174 n., 182, 249, 279 Montaigne, Michel de 130 n. Montrose, Louis 43 Moore, G. E. 15 n., 17 n., 19 n. More, Henry 106 n.

Author and Title Index

More, Thomas 140, 142, 152 Munday, Anthony 186 n. New, Melvyn vii, 281 n. New, Peter 81 – 83, 84 n., 90 n. Newcomb, Thomas 180 – 183, 185 Newman, Steve 40 f. Newton, Isaac 5, 128, 142 n., 194, 247 Nietzsche, Friedrich 32, 92 Nowka, Scott 234 Nussbaum, Felicity 24, 40, 258, 263 n. Old Common Sense 1, 172 n., 174 – 176, 187, 198 f., 201 n., 202, 210, 214 f. Oldham, John 128, 154 Orwell, George vi Oswald, James 15 Ozell, John 126 Paine, Thomas 26, 212 f., 220 – 222, 224, 280 Parker, Fred 90 Partridge, John 64, 65 n., 95 Patmore, Coventry 255 Paulson, Ronald 98 n., 110 n., 116 Paxman, Jeremy vi Peirce, Charles Sanders 15 n. Philips, Ambrose 6, 118, 172 f. n., 254 f. Piper, William Bowman 22 – 24, 27, 96, 114, 123 n. Pitt, William (the Elder), 1st Earl of Chatham 2 n., 192 Plato 45, 88 n., 122, 158 Pleasing Instructor, The 202 Plutarch 62 Pollak, Ellen 258, 261 f. n., 264 f. n., 266, 269 Pope, Alexander 7 f., 31, 43 f., 55 n., 62, 67, 76, 97, 101, 126 f., 132, 137, 141, 148, 162 – 164, 179 f., 202, 270 n., 272, 278, 283 – The Dunciad 37 n., 96, 125 – 127, 160, 195 – Epistle to Burlington 16 n., 49 n., 61 f., 266 n. – An Essay on Criticism 57 n., 58 – 61, 121, 132, 278

307

– An Essay on Man 7, 74, 79 f., 97, 128, 148, 154 – 163, 283 – Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry 59, 96, 118 – 125, 279 – The Rape of the Lock 42, 100, 119, 228, 252 n., 258 – 270, 272, 274, 280 – Windsor-Forest 198, 213 f. Priestley, Joseph 212 n. Pseudo-Longinus 118 f. Pulteney, William, 1st Earl of Bath 168 n., 174, 182 Radcliffe, Ann 281, 283 f. Rapin, René 55 Rawson, Claude J. 140 n., 141, 147 Reid, Thomas 14 – 17, 19, 22, 25, 29, 35 f., 52 n., 57, 74, 85, 173 n., 225 – Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man 15 f., 173 f. n. – An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense 15 f. Reynolds, Joshua 25 Richardson, Samuel 205, 239, 281 n. – Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady 25, 252 n. – Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded 89, 241, 252 n. Robinson, Mary 211 n. Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of 42, 96 f., 128 – 138, 154, 158, 160, 279 Rosen, David 150 Rosenfeld, Sophia 2 n., 26 – 28, 166 n., 167, 169 n., 185 n., 213 n., 221, 280 Rowe, Nicholas 205 n. Rowlandson, Thomas 219 Rymer, Thomas 55 – 57, 60 Sackville, Charles, 6th Earl of Dorset and Middlesex 169 n. Santesso, Aaron 150 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 16 n. Schmidt-Haberkamp, Barbara 47 n. Searle, John 17 n. Shadwell, Thomas 169 n. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of 16 f., 19, 20 n., 25 f., 30 f., 44, 47 – 54, 57 – 60, 62, 73, 75 f., 95 f., 101 –

308

Author and Title Index

107, 108 n., 115 n., 117 f., 169 f., 230 n., 241 f., 278 Shakespeare, William 8, 56, 126, 194, 204 f. Smith, Adam 17, 25, 44, 52, 63, 66 Smollett, Tobias 204 Socrates 45, 81, 142, 272 Somers, John, 1st Baron Somers 105, 107 n. Spectator, The 6, 19, 23, 34, 47, 49 n., 95, 117, 130, 133, 137 n., 168, 202 n., 253 f., 256 Spence, Joseph 118 n. Spinoza, Baruch 160 Steele, Richard 47, 130, 133, 137, 158, 168, 253 f., 256 Sterne, Laurence – The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gent. 113, 204, 281 f., 283 n. – A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 229 Stevens, George Alexander 215 – 218 Stewart, Dugald 14 f. Swearingen, James 159 Swift, Jonathan 31, 43, 61 n., 64 f., 67, 76, 95, 97, 101, 109 n., 118, 124, 151, 154, 156, 169, 200, 202 n., 279, 283 n. – The Battle of the Books 99, 109 n. – Gulliver’s Travels 23, 97, 100, 121, 128, 138 – 155, 157, 160, 279 – A Modest Proposal 99, 153 – A Tale of a Tub 24 n., 37 f. n., 96, 100, 107 – 117, 119 – 122, 142, 145, 147, 151 – 153, 190, 208, 230, 279, 281 n. Tatler, The 6, 19, 168, 202 n., 253 f. Temple, William 109 n.

Theobald, Lewis 118, 126 Thomas Aquinas 10 Thomson, James 202 n. Thrale Piozzi, Hester 211 n. Tierney, Thomas P. 128, 154 Tillotson, Geoffrey 259, 266 n. Tilmouth, Christopher 133 n., 134 Toland, John 46, 106 f. Trimble, John 259, 261 n., 266, 268 n., 270 n. Valihora, Karen 22, 25 f., 50 f. n., 52, 54 Varney, Andrew 7 n., 159 Vico, Giambattista 30 Voltaire 63, 90, 245 n. Walpole, Horace 174, 196 n. Walpole, Robert 1 f., 5, 96, 126, 167 f., 170 – 172, 174, 177 – 183, 188 f., 191 f., 195 n., 196 f., 199 – 201, 213, 215, 217, 270 Warburton, William 29, 162 n., 266 Wasserman, Earl R. 81 f., 86, 89 f., 91 n., 94, 213 n. Watt, Ian 232, 233 n., 239, 240 n. Weinbrot, Howard D. 8 n., 40 n., 108 n. White, Douglas H. 128, 154 Wierzbicka, Anna 21 f., 280 William III, King of England and Ireland 111 Williams, Kathleen 148 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 17 n. Wollstonecraft, Mary 257 Wolsey, Thomas 71 Wortley Montagu, Mary 43, 126 f., 179 – 181, 185, 270 – 272, 280 Wotton, William 109 n., 117 n. Wycherley, William 263

Subject Index Aesthetic – philosophy 49 – judgment 3, 4 n., 9, 16 f., 26, 45, 50 – 52, 57, 59, 62, 73, 102 – sense 17, 49, 50, 51 n. Allegory 1, 37 n., 43, 88, 109 f., 112, 119, 139 n., 150, 166 f., 176 n., 186 f., 190 – 192, 195 – 197, 201 – 206, 209 – 212, 216 f., 220 n., 227 n., 231, 234, 279 Amateurism 48 Analytic philosophy 15 n., 17 n., 38 n. Anglicanism v, 3 – 5, 37, 105, 109 – 112, 116, 130 n., 140 n., 169 n., 190, 276 f. Anti-intellectualism 18, 48, 129 Aporia 80, 90, 92 f. Arcadia 198, 213 Asceticism 75, 81, 151, 230 Beauty 35 n., 44 f., 49 – 51, 54, 57, 59, 61, 70, 153, 210 f., 215, 223, 244, 259, 261 – 263, 265 – 268, 271 f., 278 Benevolence 16, 24, 52 n., 72, 107, 149, 151, 200 n., 250 n., 284 Bill of Rights 213 Bourgeoisie, middle class 46, 54, 209, 239 f. Britannia 8 n., 40 n., 169 f., 186 f., 198, 213, 217, 219, 223 Britishness vi, 3, 30, 36, 165, 186, 195, 201, 211 f., 217 – 220, 223 n., 255 Broad-Bottom opposition 192 Calvinism 5, 108 Cambridge Platonists 130 f., 133, 137, 158 Capitalism 232 Chain of Being 18, 120, 156 Circularity, cycle 44, 79 f., 85 – 88, 90 – 93, 102 – 104 Classicism v, 8, 17 f., 48 Colonialism 41, 171, 213 f., 220, 226, 227 n., 234, 236, 241, 255, 261 n., 279 Commerce 5, 7, 27, 33 f., 74, 246, 261

Common sense – appeal 4 f., 10, 13 – 15, 17, 20, 26, 29, 33 n., 38, 54, 73, 76 f., 103, 155, 165, 167, 169 n., 173, 179, 193 n., 206, 209, 212 n., 220 – 222, 225, 243, 245 n., 267, 282, 285 – aversion to abstract speculation v f., 12 – 14, 15 n., 17 – 19, 47 f., 121, 133, 146, 230, 277 – avoidance of extremes vi, 5 f., 7, 9, 11, 27, 35, 37, 38 n., 46, 56, 58, 76 f., 80 – 84, 97, 99, 104, 106, 108, 110 – 112, 122 – 124, 141 n., 147 f., 151, 154 – 156, 159, 161 f., 175, 187, 206 f., 209, 236, 240, 246, 250 f., 256 – 258, 265, 267, 282 – 286 – balance 5, 7 f., 11, 31, 42, 44, 49, 51, 53, 58, 61, 65, 67, 77, 83 f., 94, 98 f., 104, 119, 122 f., 136 n., 148, 155 – 157, 159, 169 f., 213, 223 n., 251, 257, 278, 283 f., 286 – compensation 4, 7 – 9, 23, 27, 29, 33, 39, 58, 61, 77, 105, 109, 125, 160, 175, 233, 277 – compromise vi, 4 f., 7, 37, 42 f., 58, 77, 80 f., 83, 98, 108, 111, 123, 136 n., 147 f., 236, 251, 267, 278, 285 – consensus 2, 4 f., 8, 10, 17 f., 27, 44, 46, 50 f. n., 53, 54 n., 66, 74, 77 f., 81, 167, 185, 193, 221, 234 n., 239, 241, 281 – dictates 4, 35 f., 47, 113 n., 224, 233 – free of bias, partiality, prejudice 12, 18, 31, 35 – 37, 52, 78, 103 f., 107, 110, 171 f., 177, 179 f., 184 f., 207, 221, 227, 230, 243, 245, 246 n., 247, 249, 254, 272, 281 f., 285 – Golden Mean 10 f., 123 f., 155, 162, 206 f., 209, 218, 246, 276, 283 – good sense vii, 13, 16 n., 20 n., 22, 24, 34, 45, 49 n., 53, 77 f., 82, 104, 121, 126 f., 132, 147, 155, 163, 165, 173, 243 n., 249 n., 252, 256 n., 260 f., 266 f., 268 n., 270, 273 n., 276 – 279, 281 – 283, 285 – instinct 10, 18, 34, 159, 185 n., 277 – intuition vi, 9, 13, 15, 18, 29, 30, 34, 36, 39, 54, 73, 102 f., 173, 183, 202, 277, 286 – judgment (faculty of) 4, 9 – 12, 15, 19 f., 25 f., 30 f., 33 – 36, 39, 44 – 63, 65, 73, 77 f., 80, 82 f., 101 – 103, 106 f., 116, 121 f., 125,

310

Subject Index

129 f., 133, 137, 154, 159, 162 f., 170 – 174, 178, 184, 186 f., 191 – 193, 199, 202 – 204, 206 f., 214, 227 f., 232, 233 n., 239, 250, 255, 277 f., 282 – 284, 286 – maximizing/minimizing view 19 f., 22, 34, 77, 81 – 83, 99, 137, 173, 180, 206, 228 f., 278, 285 – middle ground, middle way, via media vi, 5, 7, 11, 37, 61, 75 – 7, 81 – 83, 110, 116, 123, 136 n., 147 f., 155, 159, 246, 251, 285 – moderation vi, 6 f., 8, 27, 37, 38 n., 45 f., 56, 61, 72, 75 – 77, 80, 83, 102 n., 105, 109 – 111, 114, 116, 123 f., 134, 137, 155, 157, 159, 245 f., 248, 250, 256, 277, 279 – principle of exclusion 28, 32 f., 35 – 37, 39, 44, 55 f., 58, 78, 98, 100, 170, 200, 202, 228 – 231, 233 f., 239, 249 n., 253, 256, 270, 272, 274, 277, 279 – prudence 6, 9 f., 34, 82, 133 n., 135 f., 150, 165, 178, 189, 203 – 206, 209, 214, 216, 248, 267, 284, 286 – restraint 29, 56, 60, 75, 78, 83 f., 101, 105, 128, 134, 159, 216 – 218, 225, 230, 257, 268, 282, 285 – right reason 34, 47, 130, 132 – 138, 158 f., 174, 177, 185 – Scottish School 12, 15 – 17, 29, 34 n., 35, 38, 52 n., 173 n., 212 n., 276 – self-evidence 9, 14 – 16, 31, 34 – 36, 40, 54 n., 77, 82, 208, 276, 278 – violation, deviation 3 f., 12, 14, 18, 24 f., 33, 35, 45, 51 n., 56 f., 62, 65, 73 – 75, 96, 98, 103 f., 112 f., 116 f., 119, 143, 150, 153, 157, 206, 208, 215 f., 229 f., 231 n., 233, 242, 249 f., 256, 264, 266, 277 – 279, 281 Community 4, 11, 23, 31, 33 n., 44, 46, 53, 72, 133 n., 143, 146, 162 f., 165 f., 279 Deism v, 16 f., 46 – 48, 52, 105 – 107, 147 Della Cruscans 211 Desire 32, 34, 64 n., 69 n., 70 – 72, 78 – 80, 87, 90 – 94, 133 – 136, 154, 177, 192, 214, 218, 223 f., 227 n., 235, 265, 267, 278 Digression (narrative style) 107 n., 109, 113 – 117 Discourse analysis 20 n., 27, 39, 41, 49, 105

Disinterestedness 51 n., 52, 75, 184 Dogma 7, 8, 11 f., 37 – 39, 56 f., 112, 144, 162, 191, 208, 285 Economics 63, 66 – 68, 71, 81, 153, 174 n., 176, 214 n., 219, 230, 232, 239 Effeminacy 228, 253, 270, 273 – 275, 284 Empiricism v f., 5, 11 – 17, 22 f., 25, 29 – 31, 34, 38, 48 f., 112, 113 n., 116, 122, 133, 151, 160, 227 n., 239, 247, 277 Englishness v f., 2 f., 11, 19, 28, 30, 36 f., 165, 186, 195, 201, 206, 211 f., 215, 217 n., 220, 247, 250 f. Enlightenment v, 5 f., 17 f., 27 – 29, 33, 41, 46, 48 n., 52 f., 66, 78, 80, 97, 105, 128, 129 n., 138, 150, 165 f., 169, 172 f. n., 193, 225, 228, 234, 253, 277, 284 n. Enthusiasm 6, 18, 84 n., 104 – 109, 115, 177, 210, 254, 284 Episteme 5 f., 12, 29, 33, 45 f., 97, 151, 154, 160, 277 Epistemology 6, 9, 14 – 18, 22, 26 f., 30 f., 46, 133 n., 158, 184, 199, 212, 234, 278, 284 Ethics 11 f., 17, 30, 34, 41 f., 44 – 47, 49, 51 n., 52, 54, 63, 65 f., 69 f., 73, 75, 78, 81 f., 89, 94, 103, 127, 133, 154 f., 162, 212, 227 n., 278 Ethnic stereotypes 143, 228, 236 n., 249 Excess 11 f., 16, 28, 31, 35, 38 n., 53, 95, 97, 104 f., 106 n., 114 – 117, 134, 137, 151 f., 154, 211, 224 f., 233 n., 242, 246, 261 n., 277, 282, 283 n., 284 Experience 12 f., 15, 17, 21, 23, 31, 37 n., 46, 50 – 52, 77, 81, 88 f. 90 n., 102, 112, 125 n., 135, 149, 156, 160, 170, 223 n., 229, 243, 245 Exuberance 24, 116, 151, 261, 282 Faith

13, 16, 71 f., 107, 112, 116, 130 n., 131, 151, 159, 177, 208, 232 f., 238, 240, 271, 276, 282 Fancy 19, 24, 30, 45, 55 f., 58, 71, 83 f., 93 n., 119, 145 f., 210 f., 230, 235, 240, 243, 252, 266, 285 Feminism, gender studies 40 f., 227 n., 239 n., 258, 261, 272

Subject Index

Folly

30 f., 35 f., 47, 68 f., 78, 83 f., 96 f., 99, 108, 115 f., 127 f., 140, 157, 160, 187 f., 207, 209 – 211, 215, 217, 242, 244, 246 f., 257, 267, 277, 279 Fop 273 – 275 Fortunate Fall 89 France 8 – 10, 12, 15 f. n., 21, 29, 54 f., 60, 108, 126, 128, 162 n., 188 f., 193 n., 204, 216, 218, 224 f., 229, 246 n., 248 n., 252, 260, 273, 275, 282 n. Genius 119, 126, 173 n., 177, 194, 203 – 205, 209, 216, 223 n., 281, 285 Gentleman ideal 19, 47 n., 63, 76, 101 f., 103, 153, 202, 248 n., 281 Glorious Revolution 105, 169 n. Gothic 24, 210, 241, 283 f. Happiness 44, 52 n., 66, 68, 70 – 73, 75, 79 – 94, 114, 134, 137, 150, 161, 208 f., 239 Hedonism 81, 93, 131, 133 f., 136 Homosexuality 274 f. Humanism 10, 42 n. Humankind, mankind 7, 13 f., 15 n., 16 – 18, 23, 30, 32 – 36, 42, 44, 46 f., 53 f., 71, 97, 103, 114, 122, 127 – 129, 135 – 138, 140 f., 143, 147, 149, 151, 154, 156 – 158, 160 f., 169 f., 172, 176, 184, 190, 193 n., 198, 200 n., 203, 214, 227, 230, 243, 246, 254, 262, 272, 278 f. Humour 1 n., 56, 95, 101 f., 104, 106 f., 178, 184, 187 n., 203 – 205, 209, 215 – 217, 223, 235, 254, 259, 261, 267 f. Idealism 14, 16 n., 23, 29, 144, 147 Identity vi, 2 f., 8 n., 17, 31, 36 f., 45, 51 n., 53, 78, 103, 125, 129 n., 138, 164 – 166, 169, 171, 173 n., 193 – 195, 198, 212 f., 215, 219, 223, 227 f., 242, 247 f., 250, 270, 272, 275, 286 Imperialism 165 n., 204, 215, 219 f., 224, 226, 246, 261 Individualism 17, 232, 233 n., 239 Interdiscourse 34, 38 – 41, 43, 276 f. Italian opera 189, 209 n., 211, 273

311

Jacobitism 2, 5, 37 n., 108, 168, 175, 192, 193 n., 196, 258 n. John Bull 165 n., 204, 212, 217 f. Judgment see Common sense/judgment (faculty of) Koinè aisthesis

9, 45

Laissez-faire 66 Lampoon 95, 101, 110, 117 f., 181, 187, 196, 278 Latitudinarianism 105, 130 n., 131, 133, 134 n., 158 n., 238 Libertarianism 105 Libertine 129, 131, 134, 136 Liberty, freedom 3, 27 f., 30, 32, 53, 60, 64, 87 f., 101, 106, 116, 143, 165, 167, 169 n., 176, 178, 186 f., 190, 198 – 200, 201 n., 212 – 226, 236 n., 245 n., 250, 251 n., 255, 276, 279 Madness 8 n., 30 – 33, 35 f., 38 n., 47, 78, 80, 83, 87, 106, 107 f. n., 114 – 117, 128, 130, 139, 143 f., 145 – 147, 151, 153, 161, 204, 207 f., 218, 230 f., 233 n., 242, 257, 264, 273 n., 282 n., 283 n. Magazine culture 95, 253 Magna Carta 213, 219 n. Mankind see Humankind Manners 16, 19, 47, 53, 56 n., 63, 73 n., 115, 142, 207, 243, 245, 250, 256, 258, 273, 274 n., 279 Marxism 40, 239 n. Masculinity, male identity 37, 244, 252 f., 264 n., 269 – 271, 273 – 275 Memory 45, 126, 194 Menippean satire 41 n., 100, 108, 130, 140, 151 Metafiction 110, 113, 116 f., 152, 166, 187 f., 194 Metaphysics 12 f., 14 n., 16 n., 133, 193 n. Mimesis 9, 31, 58 f., 119 Misanthropy 126 f., 141, 143 – 146, 149, 200 n., 279 Mock-epic 125, 261 Modern learning, false learning 18 f., 48, 55, 71, 97, 105, 108 – 110, 112, 115, 116

312

Subject Index

n., 117, 119, 121 f., 124, 126, 138, 142, 145, 150, 153, 159 f., 238, 245 n., 246, 277, 279 Modernity 78 n., 113 Modernization 7 Moral sense 16 f., 26, 44, 47 – 49, 50, 51 f. n., 59 f., 76, 107 n., 169, 202 National character vi, 37, 218, 229, 277, 285 Nation, nationalism vi, 2, 18 f., 30, 34, 37, 42, 71 f., 165 f., 175, 181, 185 – 188, 193 f., 198 f., 201, 207 f., 213 – 215, 218, 220 n., 221 – 225, 237 n., 246, 248, 255, 275, 279 f., 286 Nature 8 f., 14, 17 f., 22, 30, 32, 35 n., 36, 37 n., 44, 48, 51 f. n., 55 – 62, 66, 69, 71, 74, 80 f., 83, 85 – 87, 97 f., 114 f., 119, 121 – 124, 127 – 133, 140 – 144, 148, 152 – 158, 160 f., 166, 183 – 185, 194, 198, 206, 214, 223, 233, 241 – 243, 255, 265, 271 – 273 Neoclassicism 7 – 9, 17, 54 – 58., 60, 162, 190, 230, 278 New Eighteenth Century 8 n., 24, 40 f. Nonsense 58, 106, 122, 179, 189, 195 n., 208, 209 n., 210 f., 228, 270 Orientalism 44, 81, 87, 229, 278 Orthodoxy 29, 36 f., 105, 108, 115, 147, 155, 159, 169 n., 278 Otherness, the Other 42, 78, 92, 226 – 229, 231, 233 – 244, 247, 251, 253, 255 – 257, 259, 266, 268 – 270, 273, 275, 279 f. Passion 7, 11, 31, 36, 71, 75, 84 n., 96 n., 107, 119, 129, 133 n., 135, 148, 155 – 157, 161, 183 f., 214, 218, 221, 230, 235 f., 246, 248, 251 n., 267, 271, 273, 283 – 286 Pastoral, bucolic 85, 165 n., 198, 213 Patriotism 2 f., 42 f., 143, 165 n., 167 f., 173, 176, 189, 191, 193, 195, 198 – 200, 203, 213 f., 217 f., 222 – 224, 226, 236 n., 276 Pedantry 21, 117 n., 121, 126, 150, 173 n., 215 f., 232, 238, 281 n. Politeness 19, 23, 53, 101 f., 173, 249 n. Postcolonialism 41, 227 n., 229

Pragmatism 3, 9, 15 n., 38, 42 f., 70, 73, 77, 133 n., 134 f., 137 f., 165, 202, 228, 230, 245, 250, 284 Public sphere 6 n., 27, 29, 95, 108, 167 Puritanism 5, 38 n., 75, 105, 110, 131, 133, 140 n., 230, 232, 236 n., 238, 240, 277 Quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes 8, 55, 56 n., 60 f., 97, 109, 112, 118, 142, 146, 277 Raillery 76, 96, 101 – 104, 106, 117 f., 132, 242 Rationalism v, 5 – 7, 9, 12 f., 15, 17 f., 20, 34, 48 n., 54, 105 – 107, 110 n., 128 f., 132, 136 n., 155, 160, 238, 277 Realism 16, 31, 59, 69, 74, 76, 110, 135, 136 n., 140, 151, 153, 205, 234 n., 239 – 241, 277, 280 Reason 4 – 7, 10, 15, 17 f., 20, 30, 32 – 36, 41 f., 46 – 48, 53, 55 f., 67, 71 f., 77, 83 f., 90, 96, 99, 101, 105 – 107, 111, 115, 120, 128 – 138, 140 f., 143 – 148, 151 – 161, 166, 169, 174, 177, 180, 185, 193, 214, 220 n., 221, 224 f., 230 – 233, 236 n., 248 – 251, 254 f., 262, 271, 273 n., 277, 279, 281, 283, 284 n., 285 Reformation 4, 10, 105, 111 Regulatory principle 6, 24, 28, 31, 268 Renaissance 4, 9 f., 20, 45, 96 n., 98, 105, 150, 187 n., 204, 239 n. Repetition 79 f., 85, 88, 111, 143, 194 n. Restoration 5, 8, 55, 101, 112, 129, 175, 208, 258, 263 n., 272 – 274, 277 Revolution 5 f., 27 f., 42, 46, 105, 108, 128, 142 n., 143, 145, 169 n., 175, 208, 218, 221 n., 222, 224 f. Robin Hood 165 Roman Catholicism 4 f., 37, 38 n., 108 – 112, 125, 190 f., 208, 230, 259, 277, 281 n. Romanticism 3, 8, 17, 20 f., 24, 29, 38 n., 48, 63, 80, 165 n., 166, 210, 229, 241, 276, 280 f., 283, 285 Royal Society 5, 121, 128, 142

Subject Index

Sanity 7, 36, 78, 80, 83 f., 130, 137, 161, 189, 208, 214 f., 225, 232, 277, 284 Satire 19, 23 f., 31, 41 f., 48 n., 65, 67, 70, 76, 95 – 154, 157, 160 – 162, 166 f., 172 n., 179, 181, 186 – 190, 193 – 196, 201, 207 f., 210 f., 214 f. n., 217, 243 f., 246 – 248, 250, 253 n., 258 – 260, 261 n., 263 n., 266, 273 f., 277 – 279, 281 f. Scholasticism 9 f., 13, 21, 45 f., 130, 133 n., 193 Scriblerus Club 120, 124 Secular, secularization 5, 73, 78, 87 f., 89 – 91, 166, 232 n. Self-interest, selfishness 4, 16, 51, 66, 69, 75 f., 130, 133 f., 135 f., 138, 140 n., 149, 161, 174 n., 189, 191, 201 n., 203, 207, 214, 261, 267, 268 n., 270 n., 279 Self-reflection, self-reflexivity 13, 50, 110, 112 – 114, 116 f., 137, 144, 282 Self, selfhood 19, 28, 36 f., 51 n., 118, 125, 128, 134, 165, 193, 202, 206, 215, 227 – 229, 231 – 239, 241 f., 244, 253, 255, 260, 269, 273, 279 f., 286 Sensation, sensory perception 9 f., 14 f., 17, 31, 44 – 46, 49, 134, 183, 185, 193, 250, 260 Sensibility 25, 50, 52 n., 58, 84 n., 101 n., 210, 252, 253 n., 276, 281 – 285 Sensualism 49, 129, 131 f., 134, 281 Sentiment, sentimentalism 15 n., 17, 49 f., 52, 62, 84 n., 90, 96 n., 205 n., 211, 221 n., 224, 229, 241, 244, 273, 281 – 283 Speculation 12 – 14, 17 – 19, 47 f., 102, 121, 133, 146, 227 n., 230, 268, 277 Subject-object divide 234, 247 Sublime 50, 63, 115, 118 f., 122 f., 163, 198, 210, 227 n., 284

313

Taste 4, 16 – 18, 20 n., 24 – 26, 30, 34, 44 – 46, 49 – 62, 68, 75, 77, 82, 115 f., 119, 121, 123, 126, 130, 133, 153 f., 164 n., 178 f., 184, 202, 211, 243 n., 257, 266, 273, 278 f. Tory 109, 118, 140 n., 188, 192 f., 218 Transubstantiation 38 n., 112, 190, 208 Universal 5, 8, 14, 17 f., 20, 31 f., 33 n., 34 – 37, 39, 44, 50, 56, 59, 77 f., 81, 84, 97 f., 100, 125 n., 127 f., 143, 165 f., 170, 184, 195, 207, 212, 214, 227 f., 243, 249, 250 n., 256 n., 266 Utilitarianism vi, 52 n., 69 f., 75 Utopia 53, 69, 72 f., 140, 143 f., 148, 151 f., 198, 236 n. Vice

11, 36, 44, 62 – 71, 73 – 75, 78, 97 f., 103, 118, 127, 129, 137 n., 140 f., 143 f., 159, 162, 176, 189, 256, 261 Virtue 11, 16, 23, 32, 44, 48, 50, 64 f., 67 – 77, 84 n., 89, 98, 103, 107 f. n., 110, 124, 127, 130 f., 136, 142 n., 143, 147, 161 f., 163 f. n., 166, 176 f. 186, 200, 202 f., 224, 252, 261, 266 f., 269 f., 272, 273 n., 276 War of Jenkins’ Ear 171, 183 War of the Spanish Succession 217 n. Whig 2 n., 28 n., 96, 109 n., 126, 140 n., 167 f., 171, 177, 188, 192, 213, 221, 225, 254 Wit 1, 10, 56, 57 n., 61, 95, 96 n., 99, 101 f., 106, 111, 118, 121, 123, 127 n., 137 n., 138, 162, 168, 172 f., 175, 178, 181, 187 n., 188, 192, 194, 203 – 205, 209, 243 n., 254, 257, 259, 265 f., 270 n., 273, 282