Preface

Preface At the end of a three-year editorship of this volume, I cannot but be struck by one aspect above all of the eighteenth century — its modernity. Whereas one must approach the eras of Renaissance and Reformation with a sense of strangeness and wonder, it is easy —perhaps too easy — simply to feel at home in the eighteenth century. Voltaire, Walpole, Goe­ the, and Blake all seem our contemporaries in ways that Pico and Luther — or even Erasmus and Spinoza — can never be. We are indeed children of the eighteenth century. I say 'eighteenth century" and not "Enlightenment" because the century contained and extended well beyond the Enlightenment, as does its mod­ ernity. Still, even where our essayists in this and other volumes have dwelled well outside the circle and concern of Enlightenment proper, their subjects seem to share an essential style with that of its avant garde, its philosophies: a certain critical detachment from the past, a bracing sense of confidence in intellect, a compulsion to disassemble and reassemble the inherited elements and categories of culture. Whatever the activity— be it creating the category of "aesthetics," or deciding what children should read, or designing a town — one senses what one historian of Enlighten­ ment, Peter Gay, calls simply "nerve." Not everything was open to question, of course; not everything was substantially changed. There is an inherent ideology — to use the term in a neutral sense — which underscores much of this activity, built on a com­ plex mixture of old paganism and new science, aristocratic libertinism and bourgeois restiveness. Some, like Blake and Berkeley, would call this world view into question, but most would not listen or worry. Indeed, perhaps it is this residual ideological confidence which divides these eighteenth-century moderns from their distant progeny, the modernists of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ix x / Preface We have here, then, a set of essays on the eighteenth century whose cast of characters (excluding Hume and Diderot) worked largely outside the Enlightenment of the philosophes. Yet, except perhaps in the radical critique of Blake, they are clearly close cousin in spirit to their avant garde. These essays approach the eighteenth century at some of its most sensitive nodal points — as limited as the composition of a single essay, as expansive as understanding a New World. Yet each implies the other; they belong together. The task of linkage must, as always, rest with the reader, but it is the implicit assumption of this volume and this society that the links are there and worth thinking about. We may well have exhausted for a long while the possible definitions of that movement called "Enlight­ enment," but we are only beginning to put together the century of which Enlightenment was only a most radical expression. These essays should, therefore, be read on their own merits but also as notes toward the defini­ tion of a culture as a whole. Selected from among the papers delivered in 1980-81 at the regional and national meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, they are worthy representatives of the soci­ ety and the century it studies and, by that study, celebrates. Harry C. Payne Colgate University October 1981 ...