Flesh in the Age of Reason (18 page)

Popular writers like Dunton were no longer prepared to let the clergy exercise a monopoly over matters transcendental, and began revamping heaven after their own image. Highly influential was Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s
Friendship in Death
, a mailbag of letters from the dead to the living, which went through an impressive fifteen editions between 1728 and 1816, becoming a key source for popular views on the fate of the soul and fulfilling a role rather as spiritualism did later for the Victorians. Love, Rowe assured her readers, was the very essence of futurity. Altamont had died grieving for his dead wife Almeria. As he floats up to heaven, Rowe has the husband tenderly gushing,

The first gentle Spirit that welcom’d me to these new Regions was the lovely
Almeria
; but how Dazling! how divinely Fair! Extasy was in her Eyes, and inexpressible Pleasure in every Smile!… With an inimitable Grace she received me into her aetherial Chariot, which was sparkling Saphire studded with Gold: It roll’d with a spontaneous Motion along the Heavenly Plains, and stop’d at the Morning Star, our destin’d habitation. But how shall I describe this fair, this fragrant, this enchanting Land of Love!

Popular though such effusions proved, describing heaven nevertheless required tact, and authors had to steer a tricky course between extremes, so as to avoid creating more problems than they solved. It was easy for Pope to sneer at the proverbial North American Indian who thought that he would be reunited in heaven with his creature comforts –

Go, like the Indian, in another life
Expect thy dog, thy bottle, and thy wife…

– but how was Christian thinking superior? Quizzed whether negroes would arise on the last day, the
Athenian Gazette
responded: ‘Taking then this blackness of the Negro to be an accidental Imperfection… we conclude thence, that he shall not arise with that Complexion, but leave it behind him in the darkness of the Grave, exchanging it for a brighter and a better at his return again into the World.’ And what of all those other hoary objections to resurrection? What would be the fate at the Last Trump of corpses mutilated on the battlefield, dissected or cannibalized? And what about anomalies like Siamese twins, then much in the news? Lazarus Coloreda and his brother John Baptista, who grew from his navel, had been exhibited in freak shows around 1640. A query as to their fate was later posed to the
Athenian Gazette
. ‘We find no lineaments of a Rational soul in
Baptista
, nor so much of the Animal as Brutes have,’ the answer cautiously suggested:

his brother shall rise without him at the Day of Judgment, for there will be no Monsters at the Resurrection… but if he has a Rational Soul… then he will be ranked among Children, Fools and Ideots at the last Day; but will rise separate with a perfect Body, not with another Body, but the same specifick Body, adapted and fitly organised for a future State.

As will be discussed in
Chapter 9
,
The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus
, authored by a bunch of Tory wits, gleefully burlesqued all such vain attempts to fathom the mystery.

It was James Boswell, however, who perhaps predictably got to the heart of the matter. If Christianity taught a rematerialization of our embodied selves in the afterlife, what would follow? That pious drunk and godfearing lecher got into a discussion on ‘the subject of a future state’ with the altogether more sceptical Lord Kames:

I said it was hard that we were not allowed to have any notion of what kind of existence we shall have. He said there was an impenetrable veil between us and our future state and being sensible of this, he never attempted to think on the subject, knowing it to be in vain.…

Boswell was never one to be fobbed off:

I told him how Maclaurin had pushed Sir John Pringle at Lord Monboddo’s upon the subject, and had asked him what we were to have that could make us wish for a future state: ‘Shall we have claret, Sir John?’ ‘I don’t know but you may, Mr. Maclaurin.’ ‘Well,’ said my Lord, ‘it is true this body is put into the grave. But may we not have another film, another body, more refined? The ancients,’ said he, ‘all describe a future state as having enjoyments similar to what we have here. Let us lay aside the prejudices which we have been taught. Suppose we have other bodies. Why may we not have all the pleasures of which we are capable here? For instance, the pleasure of eating. Why not that, in a more delicate manner?’ I mentioned, before he spoke of eating, our being told we are to have music. ‘And,’ said he… ‘and there is another pleasure’; (I thought, though I divined what he meant clearly enough, that he should speak it out plainly, so waited in silence till he proceeded) ‘why not have the pleasure of women?’ ‘Why not,’ cried I, with animation. ‘There is nothing in reason or revelation against our having all enjoyments sensual and intellectual.’

The irony, here revealed, of the orthodox Christian position on reincarnation was that it paradoxically seemed to sanction the flesh in all its unregenerate concupiscence.

This chapter has addressed a dilemma that had often been raised by the odd heretic but which was in the eighteenth century growing more insistent. In associating identity with consciousness – man is essentially his memory – Locke advanced a doctrine rather congenial to progressive aspirations and sensibilities. It accorded that self a heightened dignity (it resided in the mind), and elevated it above the base, vulgar and physical. For Locke at least it was Christian: that self was evidently the soul.

Such a view ran into trouble with the Churches, however, because its dematerialization of personal identity hazarded the key doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, the heart of Christian soteriology and eschatology, to say nothing of popular hopes of an afterlife.
Prima facie
, it might seem paradoxical indeed that the teachings of the Churches should so insistently have clung to the indispensability of
the flesh. The new thinking adopted by Locke and the intellectual élites established distance from a clerical creed which could now be spurned as pandering to the vulgar even as it served the interests of the powers that be.

There is nothing which I contemplate with greater pleasure than the dignity of human nature.

RICHARD STEELE

Hopes vied with fears in the breasts of late-seventeenth-century Englishmen. Great expectations had been raised by the Glorious Revolution of a final escape from the crises of the Stuart century, with its bloody civil strife and wars of faith embroiling Anglicans, Catholics, Puritans and militant sectaries. Charles Stuart, Oliver Cromwell, God-intoxicated zealots and the ‘infallible artillery’ of the church militant – all had to be consigned to the nightmare past.

Concerns remained for the present, however. Tainted by the louche glitter of the Merrie Monarch and the Catholic interlude of James II, the court was distrusted as corrupt and disreputable. And many an upright gentleman detested the ‘great wen’ – London, resurgent, phoenix-like, after the Fire – as a sinkhole of vice, where
parvenu
wealth strutted its stuff and such quackish financial innovations as the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange were rising, like mushrooms on a dunghill, to threaten honest wealth.

And there was another equivocal novelty: Grub Street. Newspapers, pamphlets and magazines proliferated, especially once the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 put an end to censorship; but would all that ephemeral paper spread sense and civilization, or yet more divisive folly? Claiming to harness the power of print to a civilizing mission were Richard Steele, who founded the
Tatler
, and
Joseph Addison, his collaborator from 1711 on the
Spectator
. The mission of these magazines was to refashion man – and woman – for the bewildering post-1688 age of opportunity. It proved a turning-point: the press was in effect becoming the new pulpit, sermonizing lifestyle.

The first of a new breed of media-men, Addison and Steele set out to woo not just the capital’s smart urbanites and the propertied classes of the shires but also those on the make who aimed to emulate their betters. They wrote to instruct old stagers and
nouveaux riches
alike how to conduct themselves in the new public sphere – how to want to be perceived and received. The
Spectator
thus held a mirror up to society, albeit one which broadcast new images rather than simply reflecting old ones. It was to be the inner censor of the new generation and its instructor.

The paper’s literary trademark was ‘Mr Spectator’ himself, ‘a Spectator of Mankind’, silent, omnipresent but unseen in all the capital’s coffee houses and clubs, theatres and taverns, nooks and crannies. His goal, Addison famously announced, was to rescue philosophy (rational thinking, that is) from obscure academic cloisters and libraries to dwell among this up-and-coming coffee-house and tea-table society, and he cloaked himself at such venues in his fictive presence. An all-observant censor, ‘Mr Spectator’ would seek out follies and foibles and then offer correctives.

Mr Spectator doubled as Mr Dissector, anatomist of the modern breast. In an image pioneered a century earlier by the metaphysical poets, various
Spectator
papers picture the wielding of a social scalpel, penetrating the veneer of fashionable social bodies to lay bare the diseased innards. In one vignette Addison imagined attending the dissection ‘of a
Beau’s Head
’. At first sight this looked just ‘like the Head of another Man’, but

upon applying our Glasses to it, we made a very odd Discovery, namely, that what we looked upon as Brains, were not such in Reality, but an Heap of strange Materials wound up in that Shape and Texture, and packed together with wonderful Art in the several Cavities of the Skull.

Two birds could be killed with one stone: that beau, and the by-then discounted philosophizings of Descartes:

The
Pineal Gland
, which many of our Modern Philosophers suppose to be the Seat of the Soul, smelt very strong of Essence and Orange-Flower Water, and was encompas’d with a Kind of horny Substance, cut into a thousand little Faces or Mirrours, which were imperceptible to the naked Eye; insomuch that the Soul, if there had been any here, must have been always taken up in contemplating her own Beauties.

Other hollows were ‘filled with Ribbons, Lace and Embroidery’ or with ‘invisible Billet-doux, Love-Letters, pricked Dances, and other Trumpery of the same Nature’. And further:

There was a large Cavity on each Side of the Head, which I must not omit. That on the right Side was filled with Fictions, Flatteries and Falsehoods, Vows, Promises and Protestations; that on the left with Oaths and Imprecations…. the large Canal entered into a great Cavity of the Skull, from whence there went another Canal into the Tongue. This great Cavity was filled with a Kind of spongy Substance, which the
French
Anatomists call
Galimatias
, and the
English
Nonsense.

The anatomist then applied his knife to the heart of a jilt. This was found to have suffered ‘Millions of little Scars, which seem’d to have been occasioned by the Points of innumerable Darts and Arrows’. The organ contained a liquor which had in it ‘all the Qualities of that Spirit which is made Use of in the Thermometer, to shew the Change of Weather’:

He affirmed also, that it rose at the Approach of a Plume of Feathers, an embroidered Coat, or a Pair of fringed Gloves; and that it fell as soon as an ill-shaped Perriwig, a clumsy pair of Shooes, or an unfashionable Coat came into his House…. Having cleared away the
Pericardium
, or the Case and Liquor above-mentioned, we came to the Heart itself…. Upon weighing the Heart in my Hand, I found it to be extreamly light, and consequently very hollow.

Autobiography was inscribed upon the flesh and, in pursuit of his vocation as censor and reformer, Mr Spectator thus played the part not just of all-seeing observer but of assistant surgeon.

Mention of Mr Spectator and Mr Dissector serves as a reminder that the running trope in the
Spectator
was ‘all the world’s a stage’. ‘
Totus mundus agit histrionem
’, quoted Addison: everyone is a player, conjuring up a theatre of the world upon whose boards all must perform. Allusion to part-playing had ever been the weapon of stern moralists exposing insincerity and duplicity. As employed in the
Spectator
, however, the device was positive and edifying: modern man would do well to copy the actor who had mastered his lines and gestures, who possessed consummate stage presence and played his part word-perfect in life’s comedy – good humour being as essential for Addison and Steele as for their contemporary, Lord Shaftesbury.

This social comedy, in other words, called for a transformed presentation of the self. Yesterday’s men, readers learnt, had the wrong acting style: their looks were too grave, saintly, sombre, fastidious (‘nice’ in the old and strict sense – ‘picky’) and hotheaded, always standing upon their honour or quick to take offence; and there was more than a grain of truth in Hobbes’s characterization of the solitary, poor, nasty and brutish quality of the human condition. An end to all such spleen! Spectatorial man would be an upbeat sociable performer, one of the troupe rather than a solitary, melancholy star. The newly eligible persona would display a refined yet relaxed public presence and man’s potential would be polished up to perfection: ‘I consider an Human Soul without Education like Marble in the Quarry, which shews none of its inherent Beauties, till the Skill of the Polisher fetches out the Colours, makes the Surface shine, and discovers every ornamental Cloud, Spot and Vein that runs thro’ the Body of it.’ That, in a nutshell, was the
Spectator
’s ambition, to fashion man anew. If Shaftesbury’s good nature provided the raw materials, the polishing would be achieved through Lockean education.