The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Walter B. Houghton, Jr.
The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century
Part II
67a
|
Content
Part I
Part II
§ 1.
Definitions § 4. The Sensibility: Antiquities and
Science
§ 2. Origins
and Sources in
§ 3. The Growth
of the Movement: 1590-1640 § 6. The Decline of the Movement: 1680-1710 |
Journal of the History of
Ideas, 3 (2
Apr. 1942,
190-219
§4. The Sensibility: Antiquities and
Science
In The Revival of Learning, Symonds has described
“the admiration, curiosity, and awe” excited in men like Petrarch and Poggio “by
the very stones of ancient
Unless the Charity or Ambition of writing be extraordinary, it is otherwise an Affliction for those Minds which have been conversant in the Marvels and Delights of Hebrew, Greek and Roman Antiquities, to turn over so many musty Rolls,… so many dull and heavy paced Histories, as they must who will obtain the Crown and triumphal Ensign of having compos’d CORPUS RERUM ANGLICARUM. 69
67a. Part I, which contained three sections on
“Definitions,” “Sources and Origins in
68. J.A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, part
II: The Revival of Learning (1888 ed.), pp. 143,
155-157.
69. Hypercritica (1618?), in Spingarn, Critical
Essays, I, 97.
190
In this dichotomy there is no question where Peacham
belongs. The final paragraph of his
chapter on antiquities manages at once to explain his respect for
I will let passe the content a man has to see, and
handle the very same individuall things which were in use so many ages agoe… But
would you see a patterne of the Rogus or funerall pile burnt at the
canonization of the Romane Emperors? would you see how the Augurs Hat,
and Lituus were made? Would
you see the true and undoubted modells of their
Besides, it is no small satisfaction to an ingenuous eye
to contemplate the faces and heads, and in them the Characters of all these
famous Emperours, Captaines and illustrious men whose actions will bee ever
admired, both for themselves, and the learning of the pennes that writ them.
71
While the historical value of numismatics is recognized,
the learned pleasure is scarcely that of hard-won knowledge; it is the thrill of
immediate touch with an ancient and heroic civilization.
The same kind of delight, subjective and romantic, is characteristic of Evelyn. In the important letter to Pepys on how to be a virtuoso, the roll call of a hundred worthies beats out an incantation, as if the very sound of their names would charm them to life. On ancient coins, “who is not delighted to behold the true effigies of the famous Augustus, cruel Nero, and his master Seneca? Vepasian, Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Antoninus, Severus, the great Constantine, and his devout mother Helena? For we have in medals the beautiful Cleopatra and her paramour; Drusilla, Livia, Julia, Agrippina…” 72
70. op. cit., p. 51.
71. op. cit., pp. 123-124.
72. Diary and Correspondence, III, 298,
dated
191
Hero-worship, soon to grow factitious in the heroic
play, shades into worship of every fragment of the past, however
inconsequential. If Colonel
Hutchinson “was not so much affected with the antiquity as the merit of the
work,” he was an exception to the rule. 73 In the Palazzo Barberini, it was
not the great collection of medals, marbles, and manuscripts that Evelyn found
most exciting, but “an Egyptian Osyris, remarkable for its unknown material and
antiquity.” 74 The
medieval worship of Christian relics, no longer possible for a Protestant, is
sublimated into the Renaissance worship of classical relics, so that while
Evelyn smiles at a fragment of the cross and some of Judas’s pieces of silver,
shown him at a church in Rome, his credulity is untaxed by a great nail of
Corinthian brass which, he is told, came from “Nero’s golden house.” 75
No less than Ciriaco’s, his
travels are a passionate search not only for whatever is “rare and singular,”
but for all that can revive, in a moment of wonder, the golden age of the
ancients. In spite of its dry and
matter-of-fact tone, Evelyn’s diary is actually the record of a sentimental
journey a hundred years before Sterne.
In the fields of science, the same general reaction was
produced, of course, by the same kind of stimulus, natural and artificial
rarities, only here, as in the case of antiquities, with a further and special
form of delight. In the study of
the earth, “consider,” says Peacham, “the wonder of wonders, how the Ocean so
farre distant, holdeth motion with the Moone.” Read of “what strange Earthquakes,
removing of whole Townes, Hilles, &c. have beene upon the face of the
Earth.” Is geometry no more than a
dull study required for building and engines of war? By no means. It is an “admirable Art, that… dares
contend even with natures selfe, in infusing life as it were, into the senceless
bodies of wood, stone, or mettall: witnesse the wooden dove of Archytas,”
the wooden eagle and iron fly of Regiomontanus. Or think of the “delight and admiration”
of seeing at
73. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs, p.
19.
74. Diary, I, 112 (
75. Diary I, 180 (
192
of a basket, wherein were fifteene paire of Dice
distinct.” And so, he concludes,
“see the effects of this divine knowledge, able to worke wonders beyond all
beleefe.”
76
The same passion for the marvelous, whether strange
phenomena of nature or ingenious inventions of man, is everywhere present in
Evelyn. The superb cabinet of
Signor Rugini abounded, above all, “in things petrified, walnuts, eggs in which
the yolk rattled, a pear, a piece of beef with the bones in it, a whole
hedgehog… divers pieces of amber, wherein were several insects, in particular
one cut like a heart that contained in it a salamander without the least
defect.” 77 Almost as
fascinating were actual monstrosities - pearls and stones of unnatural size, “a
cock with four legs,” “a hen which had two large spurs growing out of her
sides.” 78 And
complementing such miracles of nature were the artificial miracles of man, the
surprising inventions like hydraulic organs, singing birds moving and chirping
by the force of water, or “a conceited chair to sleep in with the legs stretched
out, with hooks, and pieces of wood to draw out longer or shorter.” 79
Nowhere, I think, does he
show the slightest concern with what to Bacon was the main raison d’être
of the study of nature or mechanical art - the discovery of law; which is
hardly surprising, since a rarity explained is no longer a
rarity:
What pleased me most was a large pendant candlestick,
branching into several sockets, furnished all with ordinary candles to
appearance, out of the wicks spouting out streams of water, instead of flames.
This seemed then and was a rarity, before the philosophy of compressed air made
it intelligible. 80
One is reminded of the lingering regret with which
Browne explodes some of the fabulous rarities of natural history. Sprat might deny that the new philosophy
“makes our Minds too Lofty
76. Pages 67, 69, 73-74, 75, 76. The last italics are mine. The virtuosi were apparently fascinated
by minute carving, especially on fruit stones: cf. Butler, cited in the previous
note; and especially Museurn Tradescantianum: or, A Collection of Rarities
Preserved at South-Lambeth neer London by John Tradescant, ed. R. T. Gunther
(Old Ashmolean Reprints I, 1925), in a section partly devoted to “Mechanick
artificial Works in Carvings,” pp. 36-41. The first edition is
1656.
77. I, 221 (
78. I, 97-98, 23 (
79. I, 185-187 (
80. I, 26 (August, 1641).
193
and Romantic;” he might protest that the Royal Society “endeavours rather to know, than to admire; and looks upon Admiration, not as the End, but the Imperfection of our Knowledge.”
81 These were fine Baconian sentiments, but the virtuoso members were, in fact, anti-Baconians, reluctant to serve the cause of science at the expense of romantic wonder. And Sprat recognized as much when he wrote:In every one of these Transplantations [of vegetables and living creatures], the chief Progress that has hitherto been made, has been rather for the Collection of Curiosities to adorn Cabinets and Gardens, than for the Solidity of Philosophical Discoveries
.82In a word, the virtuoso stops at the very point where
the genuine scientist really begins, which is the distinction we started with,
and have now explored until we have caught the quality of delight and the
special kind of curiosity on which it thrives, namely, wonder and admiration for
the rare, the strange, and the incredible.
Such an appetite was bound to exist, of course, in the
transitional period of the Renaissance. A new intellectual curiosity, not yet
equipped with scientific procedures, was exploring a world still largely
unknown, and a universe still largely miraculous. And in the same period, hardly a voyage
but brought home extraordinary tales and specimens of natural history, with the
result noticed by John Gerard in The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes
(1597). In his youth, he said,
golden rod, the best herb for the stopping of blood, was held in great
estimation because it then “came from beyond the sea,” but now is little valued
since it was found in Hampstead wood:
which plainly setteth forth our inconstancie and sudden mutabilitie, esteeming no longer of any thing, how pretious soever it be, than whilest it is strange and rare. 83
Ironically enough, it was Bacon himself who, in spite of
every precaution, helped to extend this taste through the seventeenth century.
Because he would not have any
phenomenon excluded from
81. Pages 334, 335. Cf. Bacon, The Advancement of
Learning, in Works, III,314.
82. Page 386.
83. I quote from the second edition, enlarged and amended
by Thomas Johnson (1633), p. 430. Cf. Evelyn, Diary, III, 258
(letter to William London, Sept. 27, 1681): “In your account of plants, trees,
fruits, &c., there are abundance to which we are here utter strangers, and
therefore cannot but be desirable to the curious.”
194
careful examination, he had called not only for
histories of Creatures and Mechanical Arts, but also for a history of
Marvels:
We have to make a collection or particular natural history of all prodigies and monstrous births of nature; of everything in short that is in nature new, rare, and unusual. 84
It was in vain that he warned against including “fabulous experiments, idle secrets, and frivolous impostures, for pleasure and novelty;” and strongly insisted that the end of the work was by no means “to gratify the appetite of curious and vain wits, as the manner of mirabilaries is to do.” 85 The caution was powerless to curb the appetite of the virtuosi, to which Bacon’s project, and its adoption by the Royal Society (they proposed to study “the Common, or Monstrous Works of Nature”), 86 lent specious support. The advancement of learning might justify even such a prize wonder as Peacham’s, to be seen, he says, at Swartwale near Brill in Holland – “a Mermaides dead body hanging up;” or the prize exhibits in the Tradescant museum – “a natural Dragon” and “two feathers of the Phoenix tayle.” 87
The love of marvels was also encouraged from another
quarter, in the cause not of science but of religion. In the seventeenth century the common
apologia for natural philosophy, outlined by Bacon, was, of course, the study of
nature as the second book of God, where man could read in the creature the power
and wisdom of the creator. In
theory the attributes of God could be found among his ordinary works, and the
proper reaction of wonder could be had by men of no special learning. But in practice the apologists for
science tended to stress the extraordinary works of God, that is to say, the
unfamiliar, either in the sense of uncommon, found rarely and in distant corners
of the globe, or in the sense of unknown, unrecognized by men without special
learning or special apparatus. The
obvious argument was that then the admiration would be all the greater, and the
resulting praise be all the “more suitable to the Divine Nature, than the
blind Applause of the
84. Novum Organum, bk. II, sec. xxix, in Works,
IV, 169. The main accounts of
the history of marvels are in The Advancement of Learning and the De
Augmentis, in Works, respectively, III, 330-332, and IV,
294-296.
85. Works, IV, 295.
86. Sprat, p. 251.
87. Peacham, p. 69; Musaeum Tradescantianum, pp. 6
and 2.
195
Ignorant.” 88 So it was that Baptista Porta urged
the study of everything curious, “secret and concealed,” because “the most
Majestick Wonders of Nature” will best teach us to “admire the Mighty Power of
God, his wisdom, his Bounty, and therein Reverence and Adore him.” 89 In Peacham’s chapter on natural
history the same correlation is made:
Excellent is that Contemplation, to consider how Nature
(rather the Almighty Wisdome) by an unsearchable and stupendious worke, sheweth
us in the Sea the likenesse and shapes, not onely of Land-Creatures,… but of
Fowles in the Ayre. 90
In this case the parentheses may well betray a mere rationalization of “profane” wonder. Certainly that is the charge which Meric Casaubon brought against the virtuosi in 1669. The glory and wisdom of God, he said, is made the pretence for “hunting after Novelties.” Because these “sick brains” will wonder at nothing “but what is unusual, far fetch ‘d, and seldom seen,” they will not recognize God in the sun or the moon, in the vicissitudes of the year, or the flux and reflux of the sea, “because daily and ordinary.” They can find Him only, they say, in “a Meteor, the shooting of a Star, as they call it, or an ignis fatuus.” 91
More often, I suspect, we need not question the
religious orientation. If Sir
Thomas Browne could never content his contempla-
88. Sprat, p. 349. Cf. Browne, Religio Medici
(1642), in pt. i, sec. 13, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed.
Charles Sayle (1927), I, 22: “The Wisdom of God receives small honour from those
vulgar Heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his
works; those highly magnifie him, whose judicious inquiry into His Acts, and
deliberate research into His Creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned
admiration.”
89. Natural Magick… wherein are set forth All
the Riches and Delights of the Natural Sciences (1589), anonymous English
translation (1658), preface, sigs. Cl, Cl*. See Preserved Smith, A History of
Modern Culture, I (1930), 60-61, for a notice of Porta which brings out his
virtuosity.
90. Page 69. And cf. p. 125.
91. A Letter of Meric Casaubon DD. &c. to
Peter du Moulin… Concerning Natural Experimental Philosophic (1669), p. 22.
Cf. a different angle of attack,
but one which also assumes the same element of natural theology, in Pope’s
Dunciad, bk. iv, 11. 453-454, 457-458:
0! would the Sons of Men once think
their Eyes
And Reason giv’n them but to study
Flies!
… … … …
Learn but to trifle; or, who must
observe,
To wonder at their Maker, not to
serve!
196
tion “with those general pieces of wonder, the Flux and
Reflux of the Sea,” he found in the vast, and still more so in the minute,
phenomena of nature a genuine source of “devout and learned admirations.
92 Yet in illustrating
this, the following passage manages to reveal, in two respects, how close this
wonder is to the profane:
Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of
Nature, Whales, Elephants, Dromidaries and Camels; these, I confess, are the
Colossus and Majestick pieces of her hand: but in these narrow Engines there is
more curious Mathematicks; and the civility of these little Citizens, more
neatly sets forth the Wisdom of their Maker. Who admires not Regio-Montanus his
Fly beyond his Eagle...?
The sudden leap of Browne’s mind to this illustration
has a double significance. It
suggests, I think, that the kind of experience he found in natural theology
could be very similar to what he found in mechanics; which simply indicates how
readily the secular and the religious view of marvels could be blended and
mutually encouraged.
The second implication is more interesting. When we ask what is stimulating the
wonder, we realize that it is not so much God’s wisdom as his ingenuity - that
is, precisely the same kind of skill shown by Regiomontanus himself; and indeed
the connection is clear enough in the metaphor of engines and “curious
Mathe-
92. Religio Medici, pt. i, sec. 15, in
Works, I, 24. This is also
the reference for the quotation that follows. I do not mean to imply that Browne is
a virtuoso. In many respects he
fails to fit the type - his serious concern with metaphysics, his Platonic and
mystical turn of mind, both are far from the study of things as they are; and on
the other hand, G. K. Chalmers, in “Sir Thomas Browne, True Scientist,”
Osiris, II (1936), 28-79, has shown conclusively that much of his work
was a serious and valuable contribution to scientific knowledge. To a considerable extent, however, Browne
shares the tastes and the sensibility of a typical virtuoso. H. H. Cawley’s article on his reading
[PMLA, XLVIII (1933), 426-470] demonstrates his passion for books like
Petrus Bellonius, Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses
memorables en Grece, Asic, Judée, Egypte, Arabic, et autres pays estranges
(1553); and Evelyn (Diary, II, 71, under Oct. 18, 1671) speaks of
Browne’s “whole house and garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities, and
that of the best collection, especially medals, books, plants, and natural
things,” a description paralleled earlier in the diary by scores of visits to
Italian virtuosi. It is only the
extremes of the movement which Browne satirized in Certain Miscellany Tracts
(1683), no. xiii, called “Musaeum Clausum, or Bibliotheca Abscondita:
containing some remarkable books, antiquities, pictures & rarities of
several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now
living.”
197
maticks.” 93 No doubt this is a special case in
natural theology, but it is the rule in mechanics. All the machines that fascinate the
virtuosi, from trick mirrors and minute carvings, to artificial storms and
automata, are highly ingenious: they are all “strange inventions of
Witt.” The phrase is Nicholas
Breton’s, but it is not applied to mechanical arts, it is applied to poetry;
94 which at once suggests that the appeal of mechanics was
only a special form of the Renaissance passion for intellectual
subtleties.
In Harvey and Puttenham, for example, we find a demand
for the same kind of enjoyment. To
Harvey the test of great poetry is “that singular extraordinarie veine and
invention… in all the most delicate and fine conceited Grecians and Italians…
whose chiefest endevour and drifte was to have nothing vulgare, but in some
respect or other, and especially in lively Hyperbolical Amplifications, rare,
queint, and odde in every pointe.” 95 In Puttenham’s essay, the
insistence on “a certain noveltie and strange maner of conveyance,
96 is illustrated not only by hundreds of tropes, but by
anagrams, emblems, acrostics, and epigrams. Thirty years later, in both Burton and
Peacham, the same literary ingenuities reappear, side by side with the
ingenuities of science; and Peacham’s phrase for the first applies equally to
the second - “conceits of wit and pleasant invention.” 97 Indeed, we remember that Plat’s
drinking-glass and Bate’s pot and Evelyn’s chair were all “conceited”; and that
Casaubon charged the virtuosi with affecting the unusual and the far-fetched.
98 Surely it is no
coincidence that Gimcrack’s best friend is Sir Formal Trifle,
“the
93. Cf.
Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637), part v, in The
Philosophical Works of Descartes, translated by E. S. Haldane and U. II. T.
Ross (1911), I, 116, where a reference to people familiar with “how many
different automata or moving machines can be made by the industry of
man,” is followed by the sentence: “From this aspect the body [of each animal]
is regarded as a machine which, having been made by the hands of God, is
incomparably better arranged, and possesses in itself movements which are much
more admirable, than any of those which can be invented by
man.”
94. The Court and Country (1618), in Inedited
Tracts, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (1868), p. 178.
95. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, I,
114-115.
96. Ibid., II, 142.
97.
98. Above, note 91. And also Part I, p. 71, where Drebbel’s
perpetual motion is called a “wittie invention.”
198
greatest Master of Tropes and Figures;” 99 or that Donne ‘s flea and Regiomontanus his fly are creatures of the same age. If the roots of metaphysical poetry lie in the disintegration of the scholastic mind, may this not also, in part, explain the passion of the virtuosi for mechanical subtleties? 100
To some extent, however, the explanation lies in the
persistence of another medieval tradition. We notice that the required reaction of
wonder is produced not merely by the ingenuity, but by the “mystery” that
shrouds the creation of the machine, or its action: the effect is magical. It is not surprising, therefore, to find
the trick pots and deceptive mirrors of the virtuosi and the three types of
automata - vehicles, animals, and perpetual motion devices - all present in the
so-called books of “secrets” or “experiments” that make up a large part of the
literature of natural magic. 101 The tradition goes back as far as the
pseudo-Aristotelian Liber Secretorum and the works of Hero of Alexandria,
was carried on by Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus, and was given fresh stimulus
in the mid-sixteenth century by Alexis of Piedmont, Baptista Porta, and many
others.
Yet here again we find that Bacon himself, for all his
scornful criticism of natural magic and of virtuosity, lent dubious authority to
the study of the miraculous. Even
in the curriculum of Solomon’s House “artificial miracles,” as Evelyn called
them, had their place:
We imitate also flights of birds; we have some degrees
of flying in the air; we have ships and boats for going under water, and
brooking of seas; also swimming-girdles and supporters. We have divers curious clocks, and, other
like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also
99..Shadwell, The Virtuoso, act I, in Works,
III, 107. Cf. Butler’s comment
in his character of a virtuoso, in Morley, Character Writings, p. 343:
“He differs from a pedant as things do from words, for he uses the same
affectation in his operations and experiments as the other does in
language.”
100. The best statement known to me on the
relation between scholasticism and metaphysical poetry is in W. J. Courthope,
A History of English Poetry (1895) III, 103-117.
101. See Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and
Experimental Science (1923=1941), I, 187-193, on Hero; II, 654, 720-812, on
the medieval tradition; VI, 215- 218, 418-423, on the sixteenth century. Also, John Ferguson, Bibliographical
Notes on Histories of Inventions and Books of Secrets
(1883).
199
motions of living creatures, by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents. We have also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty. 102
This would seem to threaten the sharp opposition I have
raised between Bacon and the virtuosi, but actually his purpose here and his
attitude are consciously opposed to theirs. The injection of swimming-girdles warns
us at once that he must have viewed the study of automata as a potential
contribution to the ultimate benefit of man; and this is borne out by a section
in the Novum Organum:
As by rare and extraordinary works of nature the understanding is excited and raised to the investigation and discovery of Forms capable of including them; so also is this done by excellent and wonderful works of art; and that in a much greater degree, because the method of creating and constructing such miracles of art is in most cases plain, whereas in the miracles of nature it is generally obscure. 103
And then, a little below, he not only urges his
disciples not to limit their studies to those machines that “excite wonder,” but
he distinguishes between “false” and “true” wonder in sentences which perfectly
set off the virtuoso from the scientific spirit:
For wonder is the child of rarity; and if a thing be
rare, though in kind it be no way extraordinary, yet it is wondered at. While on the other hand things which
really call for wonder on account of the difference in species which they
exhibit as compared with other species, yet if we have them by us in common use,
are but slightly noticed...
As among the singularities of nature I placed the sun, the moon, the magnet, and the like, - things in fact most familiar, but in nature almost unique; so also must we do with the singularities of art. For example, a Singular Instance of art is paper, a thing exceedingly common. 104
In short, the case of miraculous machines exactly
parallels the case of natural marvels: for Bacon, material for objective
examination; for the virtuosi, rarities latent with subjective
wonder.
In this instance, however, we have the added appeal of
magic. Whereas Bacon talked of
penetrating readily to the plain method of constructing such miracles of art,
Baptista Porta warned his
102. Works, III, 163-164. Evelyn’s remark is in the Diary,
I, 187 (
103. Book II, sec. xxxi, in Works, IV,
170.
104. Same section, pp.
171-172.
200
readers that “if you would have your works appear more wonderful, you must not let the cause be known: for that is a wonder to us, which we see to be done, and yet know not the cause of it.”
105 It is clear that in the tradition of natural magic Bacon was attracted to the “natural,” the virtuosi to the “magic.” Or to put it more precisely, the virtuosi valued the tradition for the very element which Bacon singled out to condemn - experiments “wonderful rather for the skill with which the thing is concealed and masked than for the thing itself.” 106 So it was that for Evelyn an automaton was not a machine to be “explained” but a magic toy to be enjoyed. At the villa Borghese he notedamongst other toys that of a satyr, which so artificially expressed a human voice, with the motion of eyes and head, that it might easily affright one who was not prepared for that most extravagant sight. 107
If Evelyn was not quite a Baconian, there is no question about John Wilkins and his Oxford group from which Sprat traced the origin of the Royal Society. Wilkins, indeed, was called “the principall reviver of experimentall philosophy (secundum mentem domini Baconi),” and the master’s lodgings at
When Wilkins published a volume on mechanics in 1648, he
called it Mathematicall Magick, or, The Wonders that may be Performed by
Mechanicall Geometry, and explained in his preface:
105. Natural Magick, bk. i, cli. 3, p. 4.
Cf. Leurechon, Mathematicall Recreations (1653 ed.), sig. A5: “To give a
greater grace to the practice of these things, they ought to be concealed as
much as they may, in the subtiltie of the way; for that which doth ravish the
spirits is, an admirable effect, whose cause is unknowne: which if it
were discovered, halfe the pleasure is lost.”
106. De Augmentis, bk. iii, ch. 5, in Works,
IV, 367.
107. Diary, I, 123 (
108. See Evelyn’s letter to Boyle (May 9, 1657),
in Diary, III, 92; and the significant description of the Oxford group by
Charleton in words taken directly from the New Atlantis, quoted below
(202). The description of Wilkins
is quoted, I gather, from Charleton by Humphrey Rolleston, “Walter Charleton,
D.M., F.R.C.P., F.R.S.,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, VIII
(1940), 403, but he gives no reference.
201
This whole Discourse I call Mathematicall Magick, because the art of such Mechanicall inventions as are here chiefly insisted upon, hath been formerly so styled; and in allusion to vulgar opinion, which doth commonly attribute all such strange operations unto the power of Magick. 109
The explanation is hardly complete, for a title that spoke of the wonders of mathematical magic was primarily chosen, I have no doubt, for its appeal to the country gentlemen for whom the book was written. Part one on the six mechanical faculties - the balance, lever, wheel, pulley, wedge, and screw - was designed as practical information to guide “such Gentlemen as employ their estates in those chargeable adventures of Drayning, Mines, Cole-pits, &c.”; but part two was to provide the same audience with the “great delight and pleasure” of “divers kinds of Automata, or Self-movers” - artificial birds, diving boats, sailing chariots, perpetual motions and perpetual lamps. If the ostensible object is to explain the machines, the method is largely descriptive, and occasional remarks betray a sensibility very un-Baconian: speculations on perpetual motion “doe ravish and sublime the thoughts with… cleare angelicall contentments.” 110 It looks as though Wilkins’ book were descended as much from Leurechon’s Mathematicall Recreations, with its “Secrets and Experiments” in mechanics, as from the New Atlantis. The complete give-away appears in Evelyn’s account of his visit to
It is Walter Charleton, however, who provides the
perfect illus-
109. Signatures A4v-A5.
110. The quotations are, respectively, on sig.
A4 v, and pp. 145, 293. Notice that Wilkins admits (p. 232) that
perpetual lamps have no place in a book on mechanical geometry, and then
includes them because of their “subtilty and curiosity.”
111. Diary I, 308. The italics are mine. Cf. Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick,
p. 177, which shows where he got the idea.
202
tration of how the New Atlantis could be
transformed as it passed through the virtuoso sensibility, and specifically, the
sensibility of Wilkins and the Oxford group. Of the study of optics in Solomon’s House
Bacon had written:
We represent also… all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours: all demonstrations of shadows… We have also helps for the sight, far above spectacles and glasses in use… We make artificial rain-bows, halos, and circles about light. We represent also all manner of reflexions, refractions, and multiplications of visual beams of objects. 112
In 1657 Charleton was describing recent studies at
It is their usual recreation, to practise all
Delusions of the sight, in the Figures, Magnitudes, Motions, Colours, Distances,
and Multiplications of Objects: And, were you there, you might be entertained
with such admirable Curiosities, both Dioptrical and Catoptrical, as former
ages would have been startled at, and believed to have been Magical… They will imitate Nature to the height of
perfect resemblance, in counterfeiting Rainbows, Halo’s, and Circles of various
Colours of Lights, by artificial Refractions of their
beams....
Were Friar Bacon alive again, he would with amazement confesse, that he was canonized a Conjurer, for effecting far lesse, than these men frequently exhibit to their friends, in sport.” 113
The verbal similarities are so close as to leave no doubt that Charleton had Bacon’s passage before him (he had mentioned Solomon’s House a few pages earlier). Since he had lived at
The conclusion we reach is that the virtuoso sensibility
found satisfaction in mechanics at that moment of history when
its
112. Works, III, 161-162.
113. The Immortality of the Human Soul,
Demonstrated by the Light of Nature, (1657), pp. 46, 47. (The italics are
mine.)
203
achievements were still sufficiently unfamiliar, in fact
and in theory, to retain the aura of magic. When every road is filled with chariots
that “move without an animal,” and every toystore with trick mirrors and walking
tin beetles, the same sensibility can be found only among schoolboys, or in the
vaudeville audience of Professor Moskowski, the Great
Magician.
Finally, in any attempt to explain the cult of the rare
and the marvellous, we must not overlook the element of affectation, springing
from the third motive for virtuosity, the desire for reputation. And because the virtuosi were gentlemen,
and gentlemen on the defensive, the affectation was highly class-conscious.
We see this in
114. Part 1, sec. 2, memb. 4, subsec. 7, p.
313.
115. The Advancement of Learning, in Works,
III, 332.
116. Diary, III, 115 (letter to Boyle,
204
“there are many most excellent Things fit for the
Worthiest Nobles, which should ignorant men (that were never bred up in the
sacred Principles of Philosophy) come to know, they would grow contemptible, and
be undervalued.” 117 Or
again, Evelyn refuses to publish his essays on “Painting in Oil, in Miniature,
Anealing in Glass, Enamelling, and Marble Paper” because if he did so, he would
“debase much of their esteem by prostituting them to the vulgar.” 118 Whenever he thinks of men concerned
with mechanics, he thinks of two classes – “persons of mean condition” and “the
more polite and enquiring Spirits.” 119 In the light of other connections
explored above, it is relevant to remember that the same strain of
social-intellectual affectation partly promoted the poetry of wit, especially
that of Donne and the metaphysicals. 120
§ 5. The Sensibility: Painting
An interest in painting seems to lie essentially outside the main channels of virtuoso thought and feeling. No doubt the collection of rarities would naturally enough include pictures, but the basic desire for things as they are, and the insatiable appetite for the strange and ingenious, are not the characteristics of aesthetic appreciation. The fact is, however, that a genuine taste for art did not exist among the English virtuosi of the seventeenth century. On the contrary, they looked at painting in the same way that they looked not only at coins, but even at nature and mechanical inventions
. 121The pleasures of the imagination as defined by
117. Natural Magick, sig. Clv. Cf. Roger Bacon,
Letter Concerning the Marvellous Power of Art and of Nature, translated
by T. L. Davis (1923), pp. 38-41. Hugh Plat, The Jewell House of Art and
Nature, sigs. B3v-B4v, criticizes this affectation
from a Baconian point of view.
118. Diary, III, 92 (letter to Boyle,
119. Above, text of note 114, and Evelyn’s Sculptura,
ed. C. F. Bell (1906), p. 151. Also, ibid., p. 114, where the
virtuosi are called “the refin’d, and extraordinary spirits in all the Arts
and Sciences.”
120. Cf. the quotation from
121. In addition to the evidence that follows, see the
comment and list of sources in U. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts
(1928 ed.), p. 7.
205
A Man of Polite Imagination is let into a great many
Pleasures, that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving. He can converse with a Picture, and find
an agreeable Companion in a Statue… It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in
every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature
administer to his Pleasures.
By the Pleasures of the Imagination… I here mean such as arise from visible Objects, either when we have them actually in our View, or when we call up their Ideas into our Minds by Painting, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion.122
In spite of the word “Ideas,” it is highly doubtful if
This indeed had been the popular conception ever since
the time of Zeuxis and Apelles, repeated not only through literature, but also
in treatises on painting. Lomazzo
himself had said emphatically (and his words were passed on directly to the
English nobility in Haydocke ‘s translation):
Painting is an arte; because it imitateth naturall
thinges most precisely, and is the Counterfeiter and (as it were) the
very Ape of Nature: whose quantity, eminencie, and colours, it ever
striveth to imitate… by the helpe of Geometry, Arithmeticke, Perspective,
and Naturall Philosophic, with most infallible demonstrations.
124
122. The Spectator, no. 411,
123. Two Discourses (1725 ed.), no.1, p.40; no.
II, pp. 8-9.
124. A Tractate Containing the Artes of curious
Paintinge (1598), p. 14.
206
The virtuoso found the same theory in the literature of courtesy - in Castiglione ‘s discussion of the relative merits of painting and sculpture (which can imitate nature more exactly ?), or in Peacham’s definition of painting as “onely the imitation of the surface of Nature.” 125
Apart from theory, the practise of art as a gentleman’s
study was not intended in the least to develop an “aesthetic sense” or give play
to the imagination. Its purpose was
training in exact reproduction, partly for use in war and navigation
(sea-charts, maps and sketches of the enemy’s country), 126 and
partly for foreign travel, where it was indispensable before the days of the
camera, especially for the virtuoso, as we see from the following passage in
Peacham:
It bringeth home with us from the farthest part of the
world in our bosomes, whatsoever is rare and worthy the observance. the formes and colours of all Fruits,
severall beauties of their Flowers; of medicinable Simples never before scene or
heard of: the orient Colours, and lively Pictures of their Birds, the shape of
their Beasts, Fishes, Wormes, Flyes, &c. .
It preserveth the memory of a dearest Friend, or fairest
Mistresse… 127
It will be noticed that Peacham makes no distinction between painting or drawing as a scientific tool, and painting or drawing as an art, since both have the same photographic aim; and as the century advanced, these studies became more and more closely associated with natural history and mechanics. From the passage just quoted it is only a step to Evelyn’s advice to William Landon that his account of the Barbadoes should contain careful “draughts of the animals, plants, and other things that you describe in the natural part.” 128
125. The Courtier, pp. 79-80; The Compleat
Gentleman, p. 125.
126. Elyot, The Govenour, in ch. viii, p. 29; Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, Queene Elizabethes Achademy (c. 1572), ed. F. J.
Furnivall (1869), p. 5; Peacham, p. 124.
127. Pages 124-125. Cf. Evelyn on his travels, Diary,
I, 104 (
128. Diary, III, 257 (
207
This typical remark illustrates what C. F. Bell had in mind when he spoke of Evelyn and his contemporaries holding “a system of ideas which aspired to include the exact sciences and the fine arts in one great harmony of knowledge. 129 However vaguely realized, that system is implicit in a review of Evelyn’s translation of Fréart’s, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting (1668), which appeared, significantly, in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
. 130 The reviewer hopes that the book will “animate many among us to acquire a perfection in Pictures, Draughts and Chalcography, equal to our growth in all sorts of Optical Aydes.” And although he recognizes in theory, as of course Evelyn did too (it was stated by Fréart), that painting and drawing could pass beyond “reality” in their “Emulation of all Beauties… whether Angelical, Divine or Humane,” he concludes by asking, “what Art can be more helpful or more pleasing to a Philosophical Traveller, an Architect, and every ingenious Mechanician’?” In this way, the growth of science confirmed the conception and developed the practice of art as literal imitation.Once that conception is adopted, there are two possible
responses to the actual work of artists: either to the subject alone,
irrespective of the art, of the painting as painting, or simply to the skill
with which reality has been reproduced. Both responses are found in Evelyn, -
indeed, only those responses; and when we remember that Evelyn was as
distinguished a connoisseur and critic as any Englishman of the century, we have
a significant measure of virtuoso taste. The first is seen in Evelyn’s complaint
to Pepys about the pride of painters who refuse to add the names of their
sitters:
I am in perfect indignation at this folly, as oft as I consider what extravagant sums are given for a dry scalp of some (forsooth) Italian painting, be it of Raphael or Titian himself; which would be infinitely more estimable, were we assured it was the picture of the learned Count of Mirondola, Politian, Guicciardini, Machiavel, Petrarch, Ariosto, or Tasso; or some famous pope, prince, poet, or other hero of those times. 131
The subordination, to put it mildly, of the aesthetic to
the antiquarian point of view could scarcely be more explicit. Evelyn
129. Evelyn’s Sculptura, p.
xvii.
130. III (1668), 784-785. I owe the reference to
131. Diary, III, 295 (
208
looked at an unknown face in a portrait precisely as he looked at an unknown face on a coin: the color, the design, were ignored. When Peacham said it was “not enough for an ingenuous Gentleman to behold these with a vulgar eye: but he must be able to distinguish them, and tell who and what they be,” he happened to be talking of statues. 132 He might as well have been talking of coins - or portraits. And in both cases the appeal is exactly the same. As Evelyn passes from the collecting of coins to portraits, he uses the same rhetoric of proper nouns to excite in Pepys the same desire for contact with an heroic past. Adorn your library, he says, “with the pictures of men illustrious for their parts and erudition,” great captains and politicians, the worthies of Europe and England - “Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Cecil, Buckhurst, Walsingham, Sir Francis Bacon, King James and his favorite Buckingham, and others (who made the great figure in this nation). 133
When Evelyn turns from subject to artist, he naturally
insists upon historical accuracy and reserves his greatest praise for
verisimilitude. The preface to his
translation of Fréart’s The Idea of the Perfection of Painting contains
an outburst against anachronisms, condemns a picture of “our first parents with
navils upon their bellys,” and explains the superiority of certain modern
painters as due to their being “learned men, good historians, and generally
skill’d in the best antiquities.” 134 Raphael’s portrait of Guicciardini
taking dictation from a minister of state is called an “incomparable piece”
because the earnestness of the face “looking up in expectation of what he was
next to write, is so to the life, and so natural.”
135
From delight in photographic imitation, it is only a
step to delight in actual deception, a taste so common in the Renaissance that
Bacon included the Arts Jocular, “the deceiving of the senses,” in the De
Augmentis Scientiarum, and Richard Haydocke could refer to the “pleasures
and recreation” of “this Arte of Painting, whereby the unskilfull eye is so
often cozened and deluded, taking counterfeit creatures for real and naturall.”
l36 Even
132. The Compleat Gentleman, p. 109. The italics
are mine.
133. Diary, III, 294, 297, in letter dated
134. In The Miscellaneous Works of John Evelyn,
ed. William Upcott (1825), pp. 560, 561.
135. Diary, II, 116 (
136. Bacon, Works, IV, 395; Haydocke, preface,
sig. ¶ ~iii.v
209
more astounding than the grapes of Zeuxis, or the horses
of Apelles, which Haydocke describes, was a picture Evelyn saw in
At the end of it is the Arch of Constantine, painted on a wall in oil, as large as the real one at Rome, so well done, that even a man skilled in painting, may mistake it for stone and sculpture. The sky and hills, which seem to be between the arches, are so natural, that swallows and other birds, thinking to fly through, have dashed themselves against the wall. I was infinitely taken with this agreeable cheat
. 137This is not a minor aberration. After a close study of Evelyn’s criticism, C. F. Bell concluded that “an effect of salient relief, and what the French call trompe-l’oeil, was in his opinion, as in that of most of his contemporaries, the consummate triumph of graphic art.” 138 By the eighteenth century this might be the taste of “Wretched Connoisseurs,” 139 but in the seventeenth it was the taste of intelligent virtuosi, brought up on the theory of representation and the function of drawing in war and science; and more than that, men naturally fascinated by another strand of natural magic as popular as the automata - deceptive mirrors and artificial storms. In a chamber of the Borghese palace, Evelyn wondered at another perspective, “composed by the position of looking-glasses, which render a strange multiplication of things resembling divers most richly furnished rooms.” 140 At the villa of Cardinal Aldobrandini, nature was imitated as ingeniously by science as by art: “the representation of a storm is most natural, with such fury of rain, wind, and thunder, as one would imagine oneself in some extreme tempest.” 141
The more we examine the normal response to painting in
the seventeenth century, the more convinced we become that it
con-
137. Haydoeke, sigs. ¶ vi-viv; Evelyn,
Diary, I, 57 (
138. Evelyn’s Sculptura, p.
xvi.
139.
140. Diary, I, 123-124 (
141. I, 186 (May 5, 1645). For other examples of mechanical
imitation, see above, text of notes 93 and 94. An artificial garden was seen at
Theobald’s in 1592 (Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners, p. 44); and one
of
210
tained no element different from the response to
antiquities or to scientific phenomena; and that on the contrary, the fine arts
simply provided the same satisfaction in another medium.
The wide circumference of virtuoso activity has its
common center - the study of things as they are in themselves for the subjective
pleasure they can yield. Whether
focussed on coins or ancient statues, natural history or mechanics, drawings or
portraits, the curiosity is avid for what is strange and rare; and the resulting
delight is that of wonder and admiration. No one has described the sensibility we
have been analyzing better than Descartes, and in a passage making, by
implication, the same contrast with the scholarly or philosophic temper that has
been fundamental to this analysis. His remarks on wonder in The Passions
of the Soul may therefore stand here as an ideal
summary:
When it is excessive, and causes us to arrest our attention solely on the first image of the objects which are presented, without acquiring any other knowledge of them, it leaves behind it a custom which disposes the soul in the same way to pause over all the other objects which present themselves, provided that they appear to it to be ever so little new. And this is what causes the continuance of the malady of those who suffer from a blind curiosity - that is, who seek out things that are rare solely to wonder at them, and not for the purpose of really knowing them. 142
§6. The Decline of the Movement: 1680-1710
Of all the aspects of the virtuoso movement, its decline toward the end of the century is best known. The satirists saw to that. As early as 1667 Sprat recognized in “these terrible Men,” as he called them, the greatest enemies of the Royal Society,
143 though in fact they were enemies only of the virtuosi. The real scientists, men like Hooke and Boyle, Ray and Newton, were then as always beyond the reach of ridicule, but gentlemen with a social standing to maintain and no passionate attachment to research, are, and were, highly vulnerable. When William Wotton in 1694 sought to explain why “Natural and Mathematical Knowledge… begin to be neglected by the generality of those who would set up for Scholars,” he discounted the attacks of men like Stubbe and Casaubon,142. Article lxxviii, in The Philosophical Works of
Descartes, translated by Haldane and Ross, I, 365-366. Les Passions de l’Ame was written
in 1645-1646, and first published in 1649.
143. Page 417.
211
who had argued that science would “introduce Skepticism
at least, if not Atheism, into the World.” The real cause, be thought, lay
elsewhere:
The sly Insinuations of the Men of Wit, That no great Things have ever, or are ever likely to be perform’d by the Men of Gresham, and, That every Man whom they call a Virtuoso, must needs be a Sir Nicolas Gimcrack: together with the public ridiculing of all those who spend their Time and Fortunes in seeking after what some call useless Natural Rarities; who dissect all Animals, little as well as great; who think no part of God’s Workmanship below their strictest Examination, and nicest Search: have so far taken off the Edge of those who have opulent Fortunes, and a Love to Learning, that Physiological Studies begin to be contracted amongst Physicians and Mechanics. For nothing wounds so much as Jest; and when Men do once become ridiculous, their Labours will be slighted, and they will find few Imitators
. 144This quotation tells much of the story, and much of it
was justified. Evelyn was not a
Gimcrack, and yet the rarities he sought – “eggs in which the yoke rattled, a
pear, a piece of beef with the bones in it,” - are quite as funny and bizarre as
the items in Gimcrack’s famous will - three crocodile’s eggs, the skin of a
rattle-snake, and so on. 145 These are indeed useless rarities
and the wits were right - but for the wrong reasons. When Mary Astell ridicules the virtuoso
for knowing all about silkworms except how to make them “serviceable to
Mankind,” she was adopting a standard of immediate utility which is, of course,
fatal to the full advancement of science, as Bacon recognized. 146 Or again, while ignorance of
bio-chemistry may be offered in excuse, the choice of insect study for special
ridicule was scarcely a happy one. When Shadwell laughs at “a Sot, that has
spent 2000l. in Microscopes, to find out the Nature of Eels in Vinegar,
Mites in Cheese, and the Blue of Plums, which he has subtilly found out to be
living Creatures,” the laugh is now on Shadwell. 147 It is neither the rarities
themselves nor the particular experiments of the virtuosi that could justly be
called useless. What was useless is
indicated by the heterogeneous and indiscrimi-
144. Reflections upon Ancient and Modern
Learning (1697 ed.), pp. 418, 419.
145. Diary, I, 221 (
146. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, p.
103; Bacon, Works, IV; 29, and elsewhere.
147. The Virtuoso, act I, in Works,
III, 113.
212
nate character of both, betraying at once the lack of any principle of selection and any concentration of energy. The minutes of the Royal Society are filled, literally, with hundreds of topics discussed and dropped, promises for papers never written, isolated experiments never repeated. And we know the explanation, the passion for “things,” the thirst for curiosities. Shaftesbury was wrong when he said their cabinets were full of “Trash and Trumpery,” or satirized their “Contemplation of the Insect-Life,” but he was right when he claimed that “in seeking so earnestly for Raritys,” the virtuosi fell in love with “Rarity for Rareness-sake.”
148The context of this passage makes the charge of
uselessness from another angle, far more damaging, the angle not of science but
of man. To study “the Habitations
and Economy of a Race of ShellFish” seems to Shaftesbury utterly
trivial in comparison with the study of “Mankind and their Affairs.”
Or as Shadwell put it earlier, in
the mouth of Gimcrack: “‘Tis below a Virtuoso, to trouble himself with
Men and Manners. I study Insects.” 149 The protest goes deeper than
virtuosity. While the Restoration
conception of men and manners is superficial in comparison with Shakespeare’s,
its adoption as the right subject of human art and thought was nevertheless a
reaffirmation of the humanist tradition in the face of scientific revolution.
On this front, therefore, the wits
have the whole-hearted support of men like Stubbe and Meric Casaubon, South and
Eachard,
148. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
(1723), III, 156—157. This part of the Characteristics was first
published in 1714. Descartes, quoted above, end of section 5, makes the same
point.
149 Act III, in Works, III,
142.
150. A Letter . . . to Peter du Moulin
(1669), p. 24.
213
classical over what was then called a “mechanical”
education, helped to undermine a movement so closely identified with the Royal
Society.
In the meanwhile, however, the older pursuits were carried on. A Society of Virtuosi was founded in 1689, composed of “Gentlemen, Painters, Sculptors, Architects”;
151 and Addison, who laughed at the study of natural rarities, never hesitated to recommend coins and medals, painting and sculpture. On those sides the movement continued in the eighteenth century. But for deeper reasons than any yet mentioned, its vigor was permanently impaired. From the analysis we have made, this might seem a consummation devoutly to be wished, yet such a conclusion would be radically unjust. In order to define the virtuoso sensibility, emphasis has had to be placed on its extreme manifestations, those most open to criticism, both then and now, so that the solid intellectual core has tended to be overlooked. As a matter of fact, even the Gimcracks contributed their infectious enthusiasm to the cultivation of painting, antiquities, and especially of science; and moreover, as Wotton pointed out, every virtuoso was by no means a Gimcrack. No doubt the same traits may be found in Evelyn, but the respect that he instantly commands marks the difference between a fashionable fool and a gentleman of culture. In other words, if we define the virtuosi as men powerfully attracted to the strange and the rare, we must not forget they were also powerfully attracted to learning; and who shall estimate how deeply they contributed to the quickening and disseminating of Renaissance culture among the aristocracy, and the transformation of the “degenerous gentleman” of the Tudors, with his passion for hawks and his contempt for knowledge, into the educated Cavalier and country gentleman of the Stuarts? That is why the decline of the movement about 1700 is devoutly to be regretted.Though positive proof is not available, there is reason
to believe that the number of gentlemen devoted to learning of all kinds, and
not simply to science, was far fewer in 1720 than in 1680. This was due in part to conditions more
favorable to active life; in part to the resulting growth of attitudes toward
learning hostile to virtuosity. In
1667 Sprat noticed that “now the World is become more active and
industrious,” the nobility “more apply themselves
151. Lionel Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti
(1914), pp. 6-7.
214
to Trafic and Business than ever,” - a fact
which, instead of lamenting, he is only too willing to
encourage:
Nor ought our Gentry to be averse from the
promoting of Trade, out of any little Jealousy, that thereby they shall
debase themselves, and corrupt their Blood: For they are to know, that Trafic
and Commerce have given Mankind a higher Degree than any Title of
Nobility, even that of Civility and Humanity itself. And at this time especially above all
others, they have no reason to despise Trade as below them, when it has
so great an influence on the very Government of the World… It is now most
certain that in those Coasts, whither the greatest Trade shall constantly
flow, the greatest Riches and Power will be establish’d.
152
This business ideal is not, of course, new in Sprat: it
is in
152.Pages 407, 408.
153. Section 182. I quote from The Educational Writings
of John Locke, ed. J. W. Adamson (1922 ed.). “Business” has its older and
broader sense of active life, political as well as
commercial.
154. Sections 181, 190-194; 174, 197;
203.
155. Swift, An Essay on Modern Education (1729) in
Satires and Personal Writings by Jonathan Swift, ed. W. A. Eddy (1932),
p. 83.
215
The plea for practical studies is an explicit criticism
of academic education, and Locke was not alone in feeling that the universities
filled one’s head with a “deal of trash,” niceties of grammar, subtleties of
logic and metaphysics. The product
was not a man of business, but a pedant, ignorant of the world and hopeless in
polite society. 156 This
criticism was traditional (it had been made, for example, by Montaigne) but it
was repeated with new conviction in this period of increasing trade and
refinement. At first thought the
virtuosi would seem quite safe from this attack on their enemies, but the attack
was, in fact, a boomerang. In his
highly interesting account of the decline of learning since the Renaissance,
Our Youth… seem to have their only Chance between two
widely different Roads; either that of Pedantry and School-Learning,
which lies amidst the Dregs and most corrupt part of antient Literature; or
that of
156. Section 94.
157. An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning”
(1690), in Spingarn, Critical Essays, III, 71. This result is latent in
158. For Shadwell and Shaftesbury, see just below in my text;
for Swift, note 159; for Norris, A Collection of Miscellanies (1710 ed.),
p. 125: it is now counted [that is, in 1678] “a piece of errant Pedantry,
and defect of good Breeding to start any Question of Learning in Company.”
And with special reference to the
virtuosi of the Royal Society, he notices (p. 126) that “as for Learning (which
is the only thing they are supposed able to Discourse well of) that in
point of Civility they decline.”
216
the fashionable illiterate World, which aims
merely at the Character of the fine Gentleman, and takes up with the
Foppery of modern Languages and foreign Wit.
159
This tendency had existed before the Restoration. It had been satirized by Shirley in
The Lady of Pleasure (1637), where its origin in the reaction from
pedantry to French fashions was explicitly noted. 160 But after 1660 what had been a social
anomaly before, became an accepted ideal, complementing the man of business, and
so doubling the forces hostile to the virtuoso. The wits might laugh at Gimcrack, but it
is only the gallants who “laugh at any Gentleman that has Art or Science,” and
who are “the only Animals that live without thinking.” “If they go on as they begin,” wrote
Shadwell in 1676, “the Gentlemen of the next Age will scarce have Learning
enough to claim the Benefit of the Clergy for Man-slaughter”; which, with due
allowance for satiric exaggeration, is an astute prophecy of the “fashionable
illiterate world” described by Shaftesbury and Swift. 161 Its generic causes are many and complex,
but they include those suggested by Swift: French tutors and drawing-masters,
army officers returned from campaigns in
The last suggestion is particularly relevant, since the
substitu-
159. Characteristics, I, 334. Cf. Swift, Satires and Personal Writings,
p. 78: “The Current Opinion prevails,… that Universities make young Men
Pedants; that to dance, fence, speak French, and know how to behave your self
among great Persons of both Sexes, comprehends the whole Duty of a
Gentleman.”
160. Act II, sc. i, and act III, sc. ii, in James
Shirley, ed. Edmund Gosse (The Mermaid Series, 1888), pp. 281-286, 310-313.
This cult of ignorance should be
distinguished from the stubborn persistence of the medieval tradition that no
gentleman should stoop to learning, which is reflected in English courtesy from
Elyot to Defoe, including Peacham’s reference (end of epistle dedicatory) to the
common education “of these ignorant times,… which is, to weare the best
cloathes, eate, sleepe, drinke much, and to know nothing.” Properly speaking, this is the
“degenerous gentleman,” who by the seventeenth century is usually a country
squire. The “fine gentleman,” is a
later development, centered at
161. All three quotations are from The Virtuoso, acts
II and I, in Works, III, 131, 106. It is interesting to notice that the most
vicious attack in Shadwell’s satire is reserved for the gallants, and not for
the virtuosi, who at least respected and cultivated learning, however absurd
their methods of study might seem.
162. In Satires and Personal Writings, pp.
78-80.
217
tion of the chocolate-coffee-gaming-houses for the
gallery and the cabinet, of gazettes and conversation for books and collections,
was bound to sap the strength of virtuosity, and facilitate the transition from
gentleman-scholar to gentleman of the world. Roger North was speaking of
In the face of these conditions, the virtuosi themselves
attempted to complement the attack on fashionable ignorance by bolstering the
prestige of learning among gentlemen, and facilitating its acquirement. Before 1681 Evelyn had written a
discourse “to show how far a gentleman might become learned by the only
assistance of the modern languages,” and containing a list of authors with “a
method of reading them to advantage.” He explains his motive to
Pepys:
It was written with a virtuous design of provoking our court fops, and for encouragement of illustrious persons who have leisure and inclinations to cultivate their minds beyond a farce, a horse, a whore, and a dog, which, with very little more, are the confines of the knowledge and discourse of most of our fine gentlemen and beaux. 165
On a larger scale and with deeper concern (the
implications were clearer by 1714), Shaftesbury attempted to rescue the word
“virtuoso” from contempt; to broaden the old ideal, purified of scientific
contamination; to revive the middle group; and once again
to
163. The Life of the Hon. and Rev. Dr. John North,
in Roger North, The Lives of the
Norths, ed. Augustus Jessopp (1890), II, 292. For similar evidence, see The Life and
Times of Anthony Wood, ed. A. Clark (1891-1900), II, 429. It is true that claims were often made
(see John Houghton, quoted in David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II
[1934], I, 101, and the anonymous author of The Coffee-Houses Vindicated
[1675]) that learning was advanced rather than retarded by the coffeehouses,
but what was meant was either “knowledge of the world” or else the spread of
learning downward through the middle-classes.
164. Satires and Personal Writings, p. 79.
165. Diary, III,
261-262 (letter dated
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unite the courtier with the scholar. Speaking of the “Virtuosi or refin ‘d
Wits of the Age,” he continues:
In this… general Denomination we include the real fine Gentlemen, the Lovers of Art and Ingenuity; such as have seen the World, and inform’d themselves of the Manners and Customs of the several Nations of Europe, search'd into their Antiuitys, and Records; consider’d their Police, Laws and Constitutions; observ’d the Situation, Strength, and Ornaments of their Citys, their principal Arts, Studys and Amusements; their Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Musick, and their Taste in Poetry, Learning, Language, and Conversation
. 166This is the broad ideal of the eighteenth-century
virtuoso; but its very breadth suggests cultured refinement more than passionate
study, and in any event it never won wide support. The decline of culture among the
aristocracy, which was complete in
166. Characteristics, III, 156.
167. A note on bibliography. In England the only phase that has been
described is the satiric attack of the wits, most fully by C. S. Duncan in
The New Science and English Literature in the Classical Period (1913),
supplemented by an article, “The Scientist as a Comic Type,” Modern
Philology, XIV (1916-1917), 281-291.
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