Preface

Th e AMERICAN SOCIETY for Eighteenth-Century Studies held its second annual meeting in College Park, Maryland, in April 1971. Its program chairman, Paul Kent Alkon, had arranged for the presentation of a wide variety of papers, from many disci­ plines. As a result, the essays that follow—all chosen from those read at the meeting—are diverse in their interests and methods. The title of the present volume was taken from the meeting’s one symposium, which treated Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Cen­ tury, even though no more than one third or so of the essays here presented fall under this heading. There are such obvious advan­ tages to joining the actual meeting to the record of the meeting (these Proceedings) by means of a single title that the Publications Committee of the Society decided it might easily resign itself to the inaccuracy of a partial misnomer. Surely no principle can make the eighteenth century coherent without reducing the age to a shadow of itself. Students of every age are probably right to suppose their period is complex, but there seems a particular justice in the claim when it is made by students of the eighteenth century—a conclusion borne out by the history of the histories that purport to explain it. Nevertheless one con­ tinues to believe that the period (at least aspects of the period) can be characterized in general terms, representing patterns of the age—patterns of idea and of action—in its art and its life. Though most of the essays in this collection confine themselves to limited subjects in one sense, almost without exception they offer generali­ zations that may be taken to be representative of the period. Whether they dwell, like Henry Commager’s on the extra-national sense of man’s obligation to man, or like Francois Jost’s on Tieck’s debt to Jonson, Restif, and others, they address themselves at least ix Ir r a t io n a l is m in t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y indirectly to ways in which the age may be defined, though ulti­ mately in fairly broad terms. Professor Commager argues, for ex­ ample, that the attitude towards learning in the age moved nations at war to cooperate in certain scientific matters, despite general hos­ tilities. In a differently ordered realm, Professor Jost distinguishes epistolary novels whose characters write letters that jihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFE report the ac­ tion, from epistolary novels whose characters write letters that stimulate the action. In the process, he makes the point that Eng­ lish and German novels belong to the first, and French novels to the second group; and he notes a crucial exception to this general truth. It should be obvious that each of these two essays goes about its individual business. On the other hand, each is able to offer a gen­ eralization that contributes to one’s sense for the period, and not only in the obvious regard that it adds to one’s knowledge of the more or less confined subject it nominally treats. Both essays as well add to or modify that structure in the mind of every reader which for him is the eighteenth century. Such structures are probably in­ dispensable to the imagination. The doubts raised by some recent historiographers as to the possibility of writing history imply as much about the way in which men conceive and understand the past as they do about the "truth” of the past. It may be just a limi­ tation of the mind that its control of past events is in flux. On the one hand, men seem to require simple, even primitive, formula­ tions in order to grasp the relationship of events to each other— the myth or whole cloth. On the other, they remain critically un­ satisfied with elements of the myth, which they restlessly modify or correct. Such "truth” about the past as the mind can accommo­ date apparently exists in the continuity of this tense process, which includes both the myth and its perpetual correction. Treating irrationalism in the eighteenth century offers no pecu­ liarly valuable opportunity for characterizing the...