As the foregoing repeatedly shows, the seventeenth century falls into two distinct halves. In the first half, scientific endeavour was an individual matter, with informal exchanges between enquirers mediated through correspondence. In the century’s second half the enterprise of scientific enquiry had come to be more organised and formally collegial, no longer a matter only for self-financing individuals but, in the most developed cases, backed by state patronage. The Royal Society of London is the paradigm.
Other changes are as marked. At the beginning of the century the forms and styles of literature were still Renaissance in character, in the case of Marlowe and Shakespeare achieving a peak, but in too many other cases – even in Ben Jonson and John Donne – evidencing the beginnings of decay into over-elaboration. In prose the English language was written in a florid extravagance of manner, with deliberate obfuscation of reference, and erudite allusion taken as the mark of excellence. By the second half of the century a plainer, more direct style dominated. The same was true in French and Dutch, as demonstrated by the admiration with which François de Malherbe’s restrained classical style was viewed in France, and by the influence of the Muiderkring in the Netherlands, this being the group that gathered round the poet Pieter Hooft and included Constantijn Huygens, the distinguished Golden Age poet Joost van den Vondel, the Visscher sisters and others.1
Examples of the baroque affectation of English in the early seventeenth century are afforded by John Florio’s translation of Montaigne, and Sir Thomas Browne’s ornate meditations. Florio is well anatomised in the following magisterial comment on his flourishes and neologisms: ‘Turn where you will in his translation, and you will find flowers of speech, which grow not in the garden of the original. “Je n’y vauls rien,” says Montaigne, and Florio interprets: “I am nothing worth, and I can never fadge well.” For soufflet Florio can find nothing simpler than “a whirret in the ear”; for finesses verbales he gives us “verbal wily-beguilies”,’ nor could he resist neologising out of the French original: ‘tintamare’, ‘entrecuidance’, ‘friandize’ and ‘mignardize’ are among the more exotic and obscure – none of them made a permanent lodging in English.2
Likewise Sir Thomas Browne could not be content with one word if several will do, or with a plain word when a more ornamental coining can be found. ‘Had not almost every man suffered by the press,’ so Browne writes in his ‘To the Reader’ in the Religio Medici,
or were not the tyranny of it become universall; I had not wanted reason for complaint: but in times wherein I have lived to behold the highest perversion of that excellent invention, the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved, the writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted; complaints may seem ridiculous in private persons, and men of my condition may be as incapable of affronts as hopeless of their reparations.
Count the syllables while you work out what he means.
Compare this with the plainer style of English prose in the later seventeenth century and the century following. The principal cleanser of style was the growing tendency of scientific and philosophical thought, and with it, naturally enough, the need for clear means of expression. In his history of the Royal Society, written just a few years after its founding, Thomas Sprat wrote that it was an express obligation for members to adopt ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness; bringing all things as near the Mathematicall plainness as they can’. Likewise their written style was to avoid ‘amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things almost in an equal number of words’.3
These principles quickly spread to all forms of polite writing. Locke and not long after him Swift and Addison are not just examples but – especially in the two latter cases – exemplars of the modern English prose thus emerging. Addison wrote that he championed ‘the essential and inherent perfection of simplicity of thought above that which I call the Gothic manner in writing’.4 References to ‘Gothic’ and ‘amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style’ are apt descriptions of the Florio–Browne approach.
It was not just the scientific revolution that was responsible for this revolution in thought and its expression. Science might have rejected the ideas of the ancients, but it retained and indeed promoted the style in which the ancients stated their ideas. The direct, economical prose of the Latin authors, in which the manner lucidly and snugly fitted the matter being conveyed, was rightly admired. The effect on the seventeenth century was salutary – as regards prose; though the same cannot be said for poetry. Nicolas Boileau in France and Alexander Pope in England were influenced by Horace’s strictures in the Ars Poetica, leading Pope to write:
Words are like leaves; and where they most abound
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
That speaks well to the condition of prose, and perhaps to some poetry too; but in the latter case it is questionable whether it relates to literary quality as much as it does to the ‘fruit of sense’. This couplet occurs in Pope’s Essay on Criticism (lines 311–12), an imitation of Boileau’s L’Art poétique, itself based on Horace. Boileau’s rules on all forms of poetry – ode, lyric, epic, elegy, satire, pastoral, tragedy – were highly influential, but like all rules attempting to dictate how a creative art-form should conduct itself, too limiting and formulaic. As a follower of the same principles one can say that Pope’s verses – can one really call them poetry? – exemplify some of them too far.
Classicism denotes harmony and purity, dignity and measure. It denotes these characteristics not just in matters of style but in the sentiments that the style serves to convey. Later admirers of the Greeks were most drawn by the directness of their gaze at reality, and the hard tussle they were prepared to fight between reason and irrationality. In the seventeenth century what was even more admired was the Latin authors’ clarifying plainness of manner, characterised by order in presentation, and an economy that verged on the pithy and aphoristic. Those who took the ‘pointed’ or epigrammatic style of Seneca as a model were on the road to Pope’s overuse of that manner – or mannerism – which even in antiquity had been assaulted by critics, who argued that it took the form itself too far – not its clarity and directness, note, but because it so readily collapsed into nothing more than a relentless iteration of epigrams.
Where Shakespeare had been the outstanding literary genius of the early seventeenth century, that palm passed to the French dramatists of the century’s second half. This was the Parnassian point of classicism in theatre, which observed the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action, and demanded of the subject matter that it be realistic, instructive and elevating – this last being the demand that it promote les bienséances or moral good taste. In practice of course these strict rules were often broken, usually to achieve some dramatic effect; but the writing for theatre at the end of the seventeenth century in France conformed more than otherwise to these powerful constraints.
Jean Racine is the leading figure of this period and style. Molière and Corneille are great names of theatre, but Racine outpaces even them. In the language of his Phèdre and Andromaque there is the elegance, purity and pace of the alexandrine metre as he wrote it, while in the conception there is an electrifying fury and tension that his handling of language creates. He is often said to be untranslatable, because the effects produced by his verse defy even the best efforts of poets who have tried, as did Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes – in the German case Schiller – to render the effect of his lines.
OENONE:
Hélas! Seigneur, quel trouble au mien peut être égal?
La Reine touche presque à son terme fatal.
En vain à l’observer jour et nuit je m’attache:
Elle meurt dans mes bras d’un mal qu’elle me cache.
Un désordre éternel règne dans son esprit.
Son chagrin inquiet l’arrache de son lit.
Elle veut voir le jour; et sa douleur profonde
M’ordonne toutefois d’écarter tout le monde.
(Alas my lord! What trouble could equal mine?
The queen is close to ending her life;
In vain I’ve watched over her, day and night.
She’ll die in my arms of the illness she keeps secret;
An eternal disorder rules in her soul,
Sorrowful disquiet tears her from her bed;
She wishes to see daylight, yet with profound sadness
Orders me to shut out all the world.)5
The high drama of classical themes was not irrelevant to the times, because human nature is a perennial, and the greatest stories from all ages are those which, every time they are told, investigate and illuminate its concerns afresh. But the literature of the time also addressed its own concerns. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the hunger for knowledge and power, gained by the short-cut of alchymia, cabala, magia, is at the heart of the tragedy. The play opens with Dr Faustus dismissing logic, medicine, law and divinity in preference for the ‘metaphysics of magicians and necromantic books’:
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters;
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,
Is promis’d to the studious artizan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a mighty god:
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.6
In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero does just what Faustus wishes to do: raises the wind and rends the clouds. Miranda, pitying those she sees aboard the storm-endangered ship, pleads with him:
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out.7
Both playwrights wrote as the high point of hopes in alchymia, cabala, magia was passing and science proper was emerging. Yet not everyone was convinced enough, or perhaps brave enough, to accept and apply the new vision of the world when they still found the old so compelling. Milton, one recalls, had visited Galileo while on his Italian travels, and in Paradise Lost twice referred to the latter’s observations of the moon. But when he has Adam question the archangel Raphael on the movements of the heavenly bodies, the archangel seems quite behind the times:
This to attain, whether heav’n move or Earth,
Imports not, if thou reck’n right; the rest
From man or angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scann’d by them who ought
Rather admire.8
The first version of Paradise Lost was published in 1667, after the founding of the Royal Society and therefore long after the triumph of the world-view which Galileo unwillingly had to disclaim to save his life. Perhaps when the poet met the scientist the latter did not add eppur si muove at the last moment. On the other hand, there is something doubtful about what Milton puts in the archangel’s mouth; for the ‘great Architect’ did indeed divulge the answer several times – in Genesis, in Psalm 104 and in the Book of Joshua, among other passages, we are told quite clearly that earth non si muove. Perhaps Raphael in the courts of heaven was in the same quandary as Galileo in the courts of the Vatican, and had to equivocate likewise. But his journeys between the crystal spheres and the Garden of Eden would have given him empirical grounds for making up his own mind; and in that way he would have been a true seventeenth-century archangel after all.
But what of religion? As the Thirty Years War attests, the seventeenth century was as tumultuously and violently at war with itself over matters of religion as the preceding century had been, and the great argument of the century’s first half – that selfsame war – was directly the result of the wide and bloody divisions that had opened in the preceding century. In the seventeenth century’s first half Calvinists and Puritans exerted a quelling influence on social life as great as the Roman Church’s attempt to stifle ‘libertinage of the mind’, that is, freedom in intellectual life. In the second half of the century ‘libertinage’ became not just an intellectual style – the style in which anything can be questioned and discussed – but a life-style, as in the courts of Versailles and London where monarchs had official mistresses and the likes of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, could riot in the streets and successfully set themselves to die young from debauchery.
The word ‘libertine’ plays an illuminating role in the changes of the seventeenth century. The period of the 1620s and 1630s saw the first ‘libertine era’ in the free-thought sense of the term, denoting no-holds-barred discussion of new and radical ideas. Scepticism and open-ended enquiry were the first fruits of the new era’s liberty of enquiry. The ‘liberty’ in ‘libertinage’ then meant freedom from two species of constraint: the constraint of religious orthodoxy, and the constraint imposed by the authority of the ancients.
But ‘libertine’ did not keep this sense for long. An interesting history lies behind the term. It was used first as the label for a Protestant sect in the Low Countries and Picardy which, on the basis of unimpeachable logic, had come to the conclusion that since everything had been created and ordained by God, nothing is sinful. They acted on this view, to the great disapproval of everyone else. As a result the term ‘libertine’ came to suggest sensuality, debauchery and depravity.9 This is the origin of the now familiar sense of ‘libertine’. But in the first half of the century the word denoted scientists and philosophers, not debauchees. Then, by association with the reference to advanced philosophical and scientific views, the idea arose that anyone who held such views must therefore be likely to reject the principles of religion. ‘Libertine’ was accordingly a misleading term, because not all of the scientists and philosophers of the time were atheists or anti-theists. Some were sincere Christians, or at very least took the view that religious orthopraxis – outward observance – was necessary, not only for their personal safety but for the good of society.
The developing use, later in the seventeenth century, of ‘libertine’ to denote debauched people rather than just those with intellectual interests rested not only on the assumption that advanced thinking implies rejection of religious beliefs, but on the further assumption that rejection of religious beliefs implied a decay of morals. This of course is nonsense. But so firmly established in the public’s mind was this view that by the eighteenth century a distinction had expressly to be drawn between immoralists and intellectuals. Accordingly the term ‘libertine’ was kept as a label for the former while the latter came to be described as ‘free thinkers’ or philosophes. While the term was still in transition, authors such as Pierre Bayle had to mark the difference between intellectual and moral libertinage by describing adherents of the former as ‘libertines of the mind’ (libertins d’esprit) and of the latter ‘libertines of the body’.
In the age of Louis XIV in France morals and language were equally liberated – moralists would say: degraded – so that ‘libertines of the mind’ in Bayle’s sense might well have been libertines of the body also, maintaining a number of mistresses, frequenting brothels and larding their speech with profanities, all quite acceptable to everyone but the most straitlaced of puritans. Morals are things of fashion; laxity and puritanism come and go in cycles, independently of the long progress of thought; but it is natural to make a connection between the liberation of thought and the loosening of moral straitjackets as the seventeenth century progressed. The connection is unlikely to be a simple causal one, but rather a non-accidental covariance, doubtlessly predicated on the fact that a dispassionate scrutiny of straitlaced moralities finds most of what they enjoin illogical and absurd.
The 1620s and 1630s are labelled ‘the libertine crisis’ by some historians because they were a particularly significant moment in the separation of the new thought from the old. These years saw the last major effort by guardians of the old way of thinking to repress the new; the stories of Vanini and Galileo illustrate this fact.
The difference made by mere decades is striking. In the 1640s in England Puritans at last got their way and closed the theatres of London, criminalising theatrical performances and declaring actors ‘rogues and vagabonds’. By the laws then passed anyone caught watching a play was to be fined five shillings, and those acting in it were to be whipped and imprisoned. For three-quarters of a century beforehand the more zealous among Reformed believers were splenetically hostile to theatre, and efforts had been made to prevent plays being performed even before Shakespeare arrived in London as a youth. The Civil War gave Puritans their chance, and they took it. It is astonishing therefore to think that not much more than twenty years after those anti-theatrical ordinances had been passed, the wild Earl of Rochester could be entertaining his friends with squibs like this:
Rouse stately Tarse
And lett thy Bollocks grind
For seed.
Heave up, faire Arse,
And lett thy Cunt be kind
To th’ Deed.
Strong as a horse:
Spend till my Cunt overflow . . .
If it be thought that Rochester was merely an example of the foul-mouthed swaggerer one finds among graceless young men in any age and clime, his own poetry suggests something different; namely, that he was of his time, not out of it:
Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St. James’s Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th’ honor on ’t,
’Tis consecrate to prick and cunt.
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict began to whore,
Deluded of his assignation
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother’s face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.
Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove
Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,
Footmen, fine fops, do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.
Samuel Pepys was Rochester’s contemporary and his Diaries give no different impression of the London which had succeeded the Puritans’ London of two decades earlier. This was almost certainly a reaction to Puritanical zeal, but it was a big reaction: not until the Victorian era did anything like a similar repressive moralism arise from religious sentiment.
The thought these considerations prompt is that the immense struggle of religion had not made the kind of impact its fiercest votaries, on whatever side of the argument they lay, most desired. By the end of the century weariness with religious disputes had set in, and expressed itself in the partial retirement of belief – though not of religious organisations as such – from the front lines of debate. It is in fact noticeable how far apart both the personnel and the discourses of religion and science had drifted as the century progressed. In England the preparedness to forgo quarrels to the death over details of doctrine, just so long as everyone would pay polite lip-service to the forms – the attitude known as ‘latitudinarianism’ – sums up the development well.
The only figure who made noticeable contributions in both the spheres of religion and science was Blaise Pascal (1623–62). He was a prodigy, a brilliant mathematician whose work on probability is lasting, and a scientist who demonstrated the existence of the vacuum. He was also an amateur theologian, whose Pensées, published after his death, are a minor classic for some devotees, though far more admired for the beauty of their prose than the convincingness of their arguments. They are fragments of what was to have been a much longer defence of Christianity. Note this fact: a defence of Christianity; it is of interest that Pascal felt it necessary to defend Christianity against the growing unbelief of the age. In the early history of the Church, apologetical literature – works explaining and defending the doctrines of the faith – were written by Origen, Augustine, Tertullian and others, in an effort to convince a sceptical age. By the high medieval period apologetics had ceased to be necessary, because by then it was a criminal offence not to believe those doctrines.10 But the success of the revolution in mind-set of the seventeenth century made a return to apologetics necessary. In the century after Pascal’s own there appeared numerous books on the ‘evidences of Christianity’ – William Paley’s Evidences is one of the most famous – and in more recent times G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis and numerous lesser figures have attempted the same.
One of the arguments of the Pensées has become well known. It is that even if there is only a tiny probability that there is a God – and Pascal took it that there has to be at least some probability that there is11 – it is in one’s interests to believe and act accordingly, because the benefit of doing so is infinitely great, whereas if one is wrong the loss is merely finite. (Voltaire acidly remarked that if there is a deity and one’s reason for belief in it is this profit-and-loss calculation, the deity would not be impressed.) Another way of putting the argument is to say that philosophical scepticism of the kind practised by Montaigne, and employed by Descartes to clear the way for a positive epistemology, shows the finitude and impotence of the human mind; this, contrasted with the promise embodied in the idea of an infinite and omnipotent deity, makes it rational to believe in the latter and act on that belief. Pascal took the very existence of scepticism to be proof of the fallen state of man and his need for a God, and on this basis he accepted the whole raft of doctrines in which Christianity consists. We should, he wrote, submit ourselves completely to the Church, adopt a life of self-renunciation (of ‘dying to the self’) that turns its back even on personal affections and attachments, and accept that the natural state of man is sickness, weakness, affliction and suffering. Living to die, but in such a way as to attain eternal felicity, is the whole aim of life in this dispensation.
For all the charms of Pascal’s prose, his views had little effect. ‘Many of those who were able to appreciate his arguments’, wrote G. N. Clark, ‘were steadily drifting into rationalism, whether of the deistic or some other type, and ceasing to regard faith as co-ordinate with reason, let alone superior to it.’12 Instead, as always happens when mainstream religious influence is in decline – relative decline, in the case of the seventeenth century – various minority movements appeared, such as the Quietism promoted by Miguel de Molinos, the Pietism that developed as a more austere and unworldly side-branch of Lutheranism, and – at the end of a different spectrum – a form of ecstatic mysticism with erotic overtones, as portrayed by Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa (carved between 1647 and 1652), to be seen in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. St Teresa of Avila (1515–82) had written of visions in which she was repeatedly pierced by the arrows of Christ while in a ‘devotion of union’, experiencing ‘sweet happy pain’ from the piercings, accompanied by a ‘fiery glow’ and feelings of suffocation; when she recovered from her rapturous states she would be exhausted and in tears. Rapturous union in prayer with Christ or God as a form of sexual sublimation is further evidenced in some late seventeenth-century religious figures such as Marie Alacoque and the devotees of the Sacred Heart.13 How close opposite extremes approach each other is well exemplified by the substance of St Teresa’s and Rochester’s respective experiences.
For Protestants the Bible gave shape and colour to the way they expressed themselves, even if its contents were increasingly taken metaphorically rather than literally. For Catholics it was the legends and teachings of the Church that provided a frame of reference at the personal level. In their respective ways these were the unquestioned backdrop of the lives of people at the time, even though the disconnection between them and the radically different world-view formulated by the sciences, and especially by astronomy, meant that the book and the traditions were shifting from the realm of information to a realm more like that of mythology. In this way the old mind could live on alongside the new, in a less central way and in a different key. Those who still fully lived the old mind, however, whatever their numbers, were now in the margins of things: the new mind was developing the technologies and social structures that were transforming the world.
There were obvious concrete results of this. For one thing, as already noted, politics was no longer as influenced by religion as it had been. Theology went one way, science and philosophy another; the place of theological considerations in the two latter were drawn from ‘natural theology’ as the residuum of explanation that, until Darwin two centuries later, and physics-based cosmology three centuries later, showed how life, and before it the universe itself, did not require a creator. Popular works like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress struck a chord with people who did not know science and who needed to hold on to the allegories that gave explanations and hope. Bunyan’s readers and the Pietists of German Lutheranism despised learning and science, even feared it; in this they represent one trend that has always accompanied the growth of knowledge, a trend that attaches itself ever more firmly to knowledge’s opposite – namely, the absolute certainties of faith, as a bulwark against the vertiginous alternatives revealed by enquiry.