What Is Modern in Eighteenth-Century Literature?

V C h a t Is M o d e r n in rqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA E ig h te e n th -C e n tu ry L ite ra tu re ? R o n a ld P a u lso n On e OF BRIGID BROPHY’S more endearing o b ite r d ic ta is that the two most entertaining subjects in the world are the eigh­ teenth century and sex. She is, as Anthony Burgess has noted, only half right.1 I’m here to see whether she is right about eighteenthcentury literature. First I must dispose of the word "modern” in the topic. If by "modern” we mean post-Renaissance, then of course eighteenthcentury literature is modern, along with seventeenth and nine­ teenth. But if we mean "contemporary”—whether "1900 to the present” or "of the 1960’s”—there is, to be exact in a scholarly way, nothing modern about eighteenth-century literature. Every century, every author, every work of art is obviously su i g e n e ris, and the more parallels you examine between eighteenth- and twentiethcentury literature, the more differences appear. In that direction, it seems to me, lie fun and games. Even pornography, that most stable of genres, is quite a different thing in J u stin e and in our equivalent of the 196O’s, T h e S to ry o f O . If we admit as "modern” anything timeless, universal, then Pope and Swift and Johnson and Voltaire and Diderot—I could go on— are modern in the same sense, though perhaps not in the same de­ gree, as Shakespeare and Dante and Virgil and Homer. The best way to see Swift "in o u r changing world is to see him in h is, re c o g ­ n izin g that the two worlds, though very different, are at the same time a unity.”2 However, we are surely not concerned with univer­ sality but with applicability to our own time—not with unchang­ ing human nature but with what is peculiarly germane to our century. 75 Th e Mo d e r n it y o f t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y By' modern” we must mean YXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA re le v a n t, and no more, if we are not to be frivolous and unhistorical. Does eighteenth-century literature —rather than Shakespeare or Keats or Wordsworth—have the most precise relevance for our particular moment in time? By reading works like Swift’s T a le o f a T u b and Burke’s F re n c h R e v o lu tio n can we be enlightened about our present concerns ? For the most obvious relevance we must return to that use of "modern” which had a precise meaning to Swift and Pope. "Mod­ ern” referred to the opposite of "ancient.” Johnson defined "mod­ ern,” essentially by negatives, as "late, recent; not ancient; not an­ tique”; and what he meant by ancient and antique becomes clear in his definition of modernism (a word which he says was invented by Swift): "deviation from the ancient and classical manner”; and modernness is defined as novelty—the new, the rootless and tradi­ tionless. Here we may have struck a responsive chord. These two periods may have in common a central problem, explored in litera­ ture: call it that of authority versus freedom. On the one side we have the belief in traditional values: civilization depends upon pro­ tecting certain values and monuments against the erosion of time and on building the future upon them. On the other we have Marcel Duchamp’s drawing of a mustache on a reproduction of the L isa , and William Carlos Williams’ saying that "nothing is good save the new.”3 From Swift we can get an insight into the fallacy that something is good precisely because it is new, and also into the tendency of the fashion of the moment to become a temporary absolute. "I here think fit,” writes his Grub-Street Hack, "to lay hold on that great and honourable Privilege of being...