The Joy of Reading

chapter seven

The Age of Reason…

The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of a hundred years, more or less—has often been called the Age of Reason. I’m not sure how accurate a term that is. True, the Renaissance was pretty much over and done except in Germany, where the Thirty Years War delayed everything for a long generation. It was a time when Europeans, for the most part, were feeling their way, looking backward with very little regret and forward with some trepidation. The idea of the sanctity of kings was being questioned, and there were shadows of an emergent capitalism based not on the ownership of land but instead on an incipient money economy.

At the same time there was a deep nostalgia for the Augustan Age, so-called, of the early years of the Roman Empire. The literary hero was not so much Virgil as were Juvenal and Horace, whose satirical and critical writings (notably Ars Poetica—The Art of Poetry) were taught in every school and helped shape the culture for a hundred and fifty years.

John Dryden and Alexander Pope were particularly influential. Pope especially mined Horace’s Art of Poetry in several famous works. His mastery of the heroic couplet—rhymed iambic pentameter couplets—was imitated by everyone, as he himself had imitated Dryden’s. When he died in 1744, it seemed that they would endure for all time. However, in twenty years they had practically disappeared. It was not the first time nor would it be the last when a literary fashion bloomed and was then discarded in a short period of time.

You will see that in the title of this chapter the word “Reason” is followed by ellipses. By this device I am trying to suggest that although reason was the idea of the time, revolution was also lurking there in the shadowy future (see Chapter 8).

ISAAC NEWTON

1642–1727

Principia

Isaac Newton was born in 1642, the son of a small farmer who died before his birth. The boy’s upbringing and schooling were both irregular, but his native brilliance, although usually hidden, emerged often enough so that he managed to be accepted at Trinity College, Cambridge. There is no record of his career as a student, but it is known he read widely in mathematics and science. He studied Euclid but found him trivial; he later returned to the Elements and mastered the work in a few hours. Descartes’s Geometry inspired him to do original work. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1665; he was twenty-two but he had already discovered the binomial theorem.

The history of science was much changed by an event that occurred the same year. Plague had decimated London; it spread to Cambridge, and college was dismissed. Newton returned to the farm. Farming did not interest him; instead he equipped a room with instruments he had brought from Cambridge and conducted experiments in optics and continued his mathematical studies. During this year he performed many of the experiments that led, forty years later, to the publication of his Opticks. But the year held even more revolutionary thoughts and events for Newton.

According to the traditional account, he was sitting one day in the shade of an apple tree when an apple fell on his head and he discovered the law of gravity. The account is not all wrong. He was sitting under an apple tree, and he did note an apple’s fall, though not on his head. He did not discover the law of gravity, because everyone had known for centuries that the force of gravity attracts all bodies toward the center of the Earth. What Newton discovered, then and there, was the law of universal gravitation, which is a very different thing.

What it occurred to him to ask, as he sat and watched the apple fall, was whether the gravitational force that drew the apple toward the Earth extended as far as the orbit of the Moon. If so, would it account for the Moon’s orbit around the Earth? He knew, from his reading of Galileo, the actual force of gravity at sea level, and that the force decreased with distance from the Earth’s center (gravity is weaker on a mountaintop than at sea level). He also knew how far the Moon was from the Earth, on the average. Quickly he scratched out some calculations. The theory worked. No other assumption needed to be made to explain the workings of the solar system than that the system was held together, and its motions controlled, by a single force that was everywhere the same and that affected all bodies according to a very simple formula: in which F is the gravitational force, m1 and m2 are the masses of two bodies interacting upon one another, and d is the distance between them. Gravity varies, in other words, directly as the product of the masses of the two bodies, and inversely as the square of the distance between them.

Newton, in short, had solved the greatest puzzle in the history of science up to his time—a puzzle that the most learned philosophers and scientists had been struggling with at least from the time of Ptolemy, fifteen hundred years before, a puzzle furthermore to which the best minds of the previous century had been devoted, from Copernicus to Gilbert to Kepler to Galileo. It was an exciting moment for this young man of twenty-two. He worked out half a dozen theorems and propositions that accounted not only for the orbit of the Moon about the Earth but also for the orbits of the planets—including the Earth—about the Sun. But in doing so he also thought he had discovered a new mathematical way of describing and measuring planetary orbits. He called it the method of fluxions; we call it the integral calculus. This new mathematical tool interested him even more than his solution of the problem of the ages, so he put that aside, placing the sheets of paper on which he had written out the solution in a portable desk, and began to work in earnest on the calculus. He told nobody what he had done.

It was obvious to all at Cambridge that he was the best mathematician in England. The professor of mathematics at the university resigned his post so Newton might have it, at the age of twenty-six. He built telescopes, experimented with optics, did mathematics. In the meantime others, notably Edmund Halley (the discoverer of Halley’s Comet), had come to some notion of the law of gravitation but were having no success in using it to explain the orbits of the planets. In 1684 Halley journeyed up to Cambridge to consult Newton. He explained the problem and asked whether Newton would consider helping him and his friends solve it.

“I have already solved that problem,” Newton said. “I did so twenty years ago.” It is one of the most incredible moments in the history of science, indeed of human thought. Halley was dumfounded but Newton scrambled among his papers and presented to Halley the sheets on which were written four theorems and seven problems. They are the nucleus of his major work.

It took him eighteen months to write, in Latin, Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy—Principia for short). The Royal Society could not afford to publish the work, so Halley personally footed the cost.

Probably there is no more daunting book to nonmathematicians. But if you have some courage and are willing to devote some effort this need not be so. Many books are harder to read than Newton’s Principia. Few books are so important to read, and so gratifying.

The work is divided into three books. Book I presents the general theory of gravitation; it deals with “The Motion of Bodies.” Book II treats “The Motion of Bodies in Resisting Mediums,” to show that the Cartesian theory of vortices was not tenable and incidentally creating the modern sciences of hydrostatics and hydrodynamics. Book III, with a grandeur typical of Newton, is titled “The System of the World.”

There is a great deal of mathematics in Books I and II but most of it can be skipped over and ignored, although it will be useful to read the statements, if not the proofs, of many of the theorems. Read the beginning of the Principia, with its remarkable set of Definitions; they establish the ground rules of classical mechanics and of Newtonian physics. Read also the following Scholium, or general note. Its half-dozen pages describe the point of view that will be adopted throughout the work. Following that, read the Axioms, or Laws of Motion. They are basic to all modern science. Read the half-dozen Corollaries that follow them, together with the Scholium following Corollary VI.

At this point Book I begins. Skip through it, noting the theorems and problems and reading the Scholiums and Lemmas, getting an idea of what is going on. Pay special attention to Proposition 66, Theorem 26; this is the famous three-body problem, which is unsolved (except for trivial instances) to this day.

Skip through Book II in the same way, trying as hard as you can to follow the general line of the argument even if you do not grasp all of its details. Read carefully the Scholium at the end of Section VIII, concerning the motions of light and sound. And read as carefully as you can the entire Section IX—only a few pages. It is the preparation for what follows in the third book.

It is also true that many pages of Book III need not be read carefully; they can be very quickly skimmed. But some of these famous pages should be dwelt on. The very first page of Book III, for instance; a short preface in which Newton explains what he will now do, which is to explain how the world as a whole works. Even more essential are the following two pages: “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy.” These too are at the heart of modern science. No scientist of our day wants to break any of these four rules. They are the essence of a common sense view of the world and the epitome of the scientific empiricism that has dominated human thought ever since Newton.

Move forward through Book III. Much of it will be more or less incomprehensible, some of it brilliantly clear. The best is saved for last. The book, and the entire work, concludes with a General Scholium, into which Newton poured his soul.

The General Scholium, probably the most famous few pages in the history of science, asks very great questions. For the most part it does not answer them. Some of them are still unanswered today. They may never be answered. Isaac Newton died in 1727. Does he now know the answers, wherever he may be? I like to think so.

ISAAC NEWTON

Opticks

CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS

1619–1695

Treatise on Light

At the midpoint of the seventeenth century, two great scientific puzzles obsessed the best minds of Europe. One was very old, going back to Ptolemy and, indeed, to his ancient Greek forebears. How does the solar system work? What is the force that drives the planets, in what orbits, around what central point? Advances had been made on the problem by Copernicus in the fifteenth century and by Kepler, Gilbert, and Galileo in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But the precise workings of the great system were not known, a fact that tormented the leading scientists of every modern country.

Sir Isaac Newton, the Englishman, solved this puzzle. How he did it is told, and the book he wrote about it described, in the preceding entry.

The other great seventeenth-century puzzle was new. It involved that most omnipresent of things—but was it a thing?—light. Light manifested very strange behaviors. Dozens of natural philosophers set up telescopes (thanks to Galileo) and used prisms and arranged black boxes. How did light work? What explained its well-known powers of reflection and refraction? What was color? What was light itself? Isaac Newton solved this puzzle, too.

Not by himself, however. He did not find all of the answer—even all of it that could be known in the late seventeenth century. The strange and puzzling behavior of light was beyond even his enormous capacity to understand simply. His solution of the puzzle of light was therefore incomplete and partial. The other part of the solution was provided by an almost equally brilliant mathematician and experimenter in Holland, Christiaan Huygens. Together, these two extraordinary contemporaries produced a theory of light that in many respects still stands, although the underpinnings of some of their most inspired guesses would not be discovered for two centuries or more.

Newton was a man, essentially, of two works. One was the Principia; the other was called, simply, Opticks. The latter is divided into three books, each of them fascinating in its way.

Part I of Book One begins with a few pages that review what was known about light before Newton began his experiments, many of which were done in 1665-66 when he was still in his early twenties. These Axioms and Definitions are followed by seven Propositions that are among the most revolutionary in the history of science. He shows that the spectrum of white light produced by a prism consists of rays of light of different indexes of refraction and reflection, and that the white light of the Sun consists of these same different rays; and he accurately measures the difference in “refrangibility” and “reflexibility” of the different colors of light in the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). He goes on in Part II to treat colors, about which he knew almost everything that we do. He is particularly acute in discussing our sensation of color. For the rays, to speak properly, he writes, are not colored:

In them there is nothing else from a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that colour. For as sound in a bell or musical string, or other sounding body, is nothing but a trembling motion, and in the air nothing but that motion propagated from the object, and in the sensorium ’tis a sense of that motion under the form of sound; so colours in the object are nothing but a disposition to reflect this or that sort of rays more copiously than the rest; in the rays they are nothing but their dispositions to propagate this or that motion into the sensorium, and in the sensorium they are sensations of those motions under the form of colours.

Book Two of the Opticks deals with the colors formed by refraction in and reflection from very thin and very small bodies, such as bubbles or thin plates of glass, or films of water trapped between two prisms. Here Newton not only goes further than anyone before him to explain the nature of color, but he also comes to remarkable conclusions about the bodies themselves with which he has been experimenting. They must, he says, be made up of very small particles between which is something extremely diaphanous or even empty space; and the size of the small particles determines the color of the body. He further shows that bodies can be “extremely porous”—there can be thousands of times as much empty space in them as “solid” matter, yet they may appear to be solid through and through because of the reflections from the particles within the body. “But,” he adds modestly, “what is really their inward frame is not yet known to us.” That inward frame was not discovered and known until the beginning of the twentieth century.

The first two books of the Opticks are interesting and readable. There is little mathematics, for those who detest it; instead there are page after page of fascinating descriptions of Newton’s experiments (which can be duplicated at will), together with his astute conclusions from them. Book Three begins in the same manner, dealing with the bending of light rays around a small object. But this book soon takes another tack and does something that is not to be missed.

When I made the above observations, says Newton, I intended to do them again and more accurately, and I had other experiments in mind to do as well. But I was interrupted, “and cannot now think of taking these things into further consideration. And since I have not finished this part of my design, I shall conclude with proposing only some queries, in order to a further search to be made by others.”

That is modest enough. But what follows is simply amazing. No other man could have written the thirty-one Queries that occupy, with their explanations, the last thirty or so pages of the Opticks. For those thirty-one Queries come very close to defining and outlining the history of physics for the following three hundred years.

Consider just a few of them, as examples. Query 1: Does gravity act upon light at a distance? (Einstein suggested it did; this was confirmed in 1920.) Query 6: Do black bodies absorb light and grow hotter than white ones because they do not reflect the light? (Planck’s experiments with black bodies in the 1890s led to quantum theory.) Queries 8–10: Is heat produced by the rapid agitation of the parts of a body, and if this agitation increases sufficiently, does the body begin to emit light? (The nineteenth century was obsessed with heat; Newton here prefigures many of the most important discoveries of classic thermodynamics.) Query 12 anticipates modern neurophysiology. Query 16 suggests the underlying phenomenon that makes motion pictures possible. Most astonishing of all, Query 30 asks whether gross bodies (we would say matter) and light (we would say energy) are convertible, one into the other. (Einstein, three hundred years later, determined that the answer was yes and that the formula was a simple one: Set as an equation, E = mc2, where E is energy, m is matter, and c2 is the square of the speed of light.) Perhaps equally astonishing, however, is Query 31, which in effect proposes that there must be within bodies a force, different from gravity or magnetic force, that holds the parts of the bodies together and that may even have an effect beyond the bodies. (Here we have the molecular force that could not be accurately measured and defined until the second quarter of the twentieth century.)

You don’t have to know a lot about physics to be excited by these thirty-one Queries. The more you know about what has happened in physics since 1704 (the year that Newton, at the age of sixty-two, published the Opticks), the more exciting it becomes to read the book. If you are lucky, the hair will rise on the back of your neck and you will walk down the street whistling in admiration of the mind of this man who knew so much so long ago.

Newton was not right in all of his ideas. His major error—indicated in Queries 27 through 29—was in believing he had proved (or in believing that it would some day be proved) that rays of light are very small bodies emitted from shining substances. He proposed, in other words, and placed all of his scientific credit on, the corpuscular theory of light, and opposed with all his strength the wave theory that was being put forward during Newton’s time by the Dutch experimenter and mathematician Huygens. In fact, we have finally decided we know that both theories are correct, depending on circumstances: light sometimes behaves like a wave, sometimes like a stream of particles. We could not do physics today without these hypotheses about the nature of light, and we have agreed to ignore what seems like a contradiction. Newton, unfortunately, could not ignore it. Neither could Huygens.

Christiaan Huygens was born in 1629, some thirteen years before Newton, into a very eminent Dutch family at The Hague. He showed the extreme precocity typical of great mathematicians and was internationally famous by the age of twenty-five. He invented the pendulum clock, built larger and better telescopes than ever before, and produced a nearly perfect eyepiece still known by his name. He published his Treatise on Light in 1690, although the researches on which it is based had been done ten or a dozen years before—not long after Newton’s work, which he had also failed to publish for some years.

Huygens’s book is remarkable in its strict insistence on a wave theory of light and its brilliant success in explaining the observed phenomena of refraction and reflection with the use of the theory. In addition, Huygens included a long description of his experiments with Iceland spar, a strange crystal that produces a double refraction of the light that passes through it. Newton thought that Huygens had not explained these optical phenomena in Iceland spar by means of wave theory—the theory that light is propagated through an ethereal medium in waves instead of in corpuscular form—and Huygens thought Newton’s corpuscular theory could not explain them. It is curious, in fact, that they were both wrong on a major point that escaped each of them.

Both Newton and Huygens believed there must be an ether—enormously more rarefied than air, as Newton insisted—either to support the propagation of waves or to transmit the effects of force acting at a distance (gravity, for instance). Scientists searched for evidence of this ether for two centuries; it was not until the 1880s that the theory of an ether was finally disproved. This would have been incomprehensible to Newton and Huygens, who would have asked, If there are light waves, then what are the waves in? Indeed, it is a good question, an adequate answer to which requires some very fancy partial differential equations.

Newton and Huygens, who died in 1695, are not “just for scientists.” These two works on optics are readable by and important for nonscientists. Do not let their titles, the few diagrams, or the mention of axioms, definitions, and theorems discourage you. These books document and reveal the great journey of the modern mind, from Galileo to Einstein, from Newton to Planck and Heisenberg, Fermi and Bardeen. They are beautiful and moving books, clear as all good books should be, mind-expanding as only the greatest books are.

JOHN DRYDEN

1631–1700

Selected Works

John Dryden was born in 1631 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He inherited a small estate but he soon decided he wanted to be a writer and nothing else, and in fact he may have been the first professional writer in the sense that he supported himself entirely by writing (of course with help from time to time from noble patrons). He never stopped writing until his death in 1700 and therefore had a long career in which he wrote many works: numerous plays, satirical writings, literary criticism, and a few occasional poems, several of which are good. See especially “To the Memory of Mr. John Oldham” and “A Song for Saint Cecelia’s Day,” which he composed near the end of his life and close to the end of the seventeenth century. Dryden, a Catholic, here pays tribute to one of his most loved muses, St. Cecelia, patron saint of music. Another is a song from “The Secular Masque,” which he wrote in 1700, the year of his death. It pulls no punches about the age then coming an end:

All, all of a piece throughout:

Thy chase had a beast in view;

Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue. ‘

' Tis well an old age is out,

And time to begin a new.

A professional writer in the seventeenth century needed to publish translations to keep his head above water. Dryden’s large achievements in this field include works by Theocritus, Horace, Homer, Juvenal, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. His major translation was Virgil’s Aeneid, and I think it is the best rendering in couplets of this work, fully comparable to Pope’s Iliad (also in couplets).

My favorite work of Dryden’s is his prose essay, “Of Dramatick Poesie,” which he wrote in 1668. It has at least two things to recommend it. First, it is probably the earliest serious study of the work of Shakespeare in English. This paragraph (which I quote only in part) is deservedly famous:

He [Shakespeare] was the man who of all modern poets, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of Nature were still (i.e., always) present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily (i.e., easily); when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacle of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.

That is very good criticism, and it is also written in what is close to being modern English. (In a sense, Dryden almost invented modern English.) As compared to the prose of Milton, for example, or other seventeenth-century prose stylists, it is clarity itself.

ALEXANDER POPE

1688–1744

Selected Works

Alexander Pope, another Catholic in an age of Protestants, was born in London in 1688. When he was twelve years old his health was ruined and his growth stunted by a tubercular affliction of the spine. That he lived at all is remarkable; that he became one of the greatest poets in the English language is almost a miracle.

Deciding at the age of sixteen that his only chance for happiness was to be a poet, he began to write and also publish before he was twenty. His “Essay on Criticism,” based on Horace’s Art of Poetry, was published in 1711 and is a wonderful work by a very young man. The next year, when he was twenty-four, “The Rape of the Lock,” a mock epic, was published; it is a delightful romp. It tells the story of a pretty young woman who loses a lock of her hair to an equally young swain and of her efforts to regain the lock without losing any other part of her. She does so and of course he has to marry her.

Despite his infirmities Pope was in love with at least two women, one of whom remained his friend for life and the other must have been very unkind to him because he attacked her in several satirical pieces. He was a master of satire, taking his cue from Horace and the Roman satirist Juvenal, and it was never wise to criticize or disappoint him because of his sharp, barbed satirical tongue. In one of his best and most amusing works, “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” he attempted to defend himself against the charge of being “malignant,” but the piece contains several brilliant and devastating descriptions of various enemies (who are not named but of course everybody at the time knew who was meant).

I like almost all of Pope’s poems but I think my favorite is the four part Essay on Man. It is absolutely superb, particularly at the beginning of the Second Epistle, which describes its subject (i.e., man) in these famous lines:

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

These are not Pope’s only famous lines. Look him up in Bartlett’s or The Oxford Book of Quotations, where you will find that, after Shakespeare, he is probably the most quoted of all authors. Actually, that’s not a bad way to begin reading Pope.

DANIEL DEFOE

1660–1731

Robinson Crusoe

There are not many “world-books,” as a German critic has called them: books that are known everywhere, that are translated into every literary language, that are read by almost all children, that strike a chord in the breast of almost every man or woman of every culture and clime. Perhaps there are no more than a dozen such books. Robinson Crusoe is one of them.

It would have been a good bet that Daniel Defoe would never write such a book. Born in London in 1660, his life was a race, run at breakneck speed, against disaster. He wrote, usually in desperate haste, to stave off the creditors who never ceased to pursue him and who are said to have hounded him to his death in 1731. He spent various periods in jail and was exposed three times in the London pillory, a punishment he had dreaded; but with characteristic courage he wrote a dashing “Hymn to the Pillory” and the common people of London, who loved him, draped the stocks with flowers and came not to jeer but to drink to his health. A political moderate, he was as a result in constant difficulties with both Tories and Whigs, who in an age of violent partisanship were often unable to abide a fair-minded man who did not care so much who was right just so long as there could be peace. Attacked by both sides, Defoe also worked for both sides as pamphleteer, publicist, and propagandist, in his constant effort to help the people of England steer a middle course.

Almost everything he wrote was written too fast and on merely ephemeral subjects, but starting in 1719, and for five years thereafter, there flowed from his pen a nearly miraculous series of books. These included Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (also 1722), The History and Remarkable Life of Col. Jack (also 1722!), and Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress (1724). They are all fine in their way, but the first and best of all was The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Written by Himself (1719).

Robinson Crusoe was not “written by himself,” of course, even though like all of Defoe’s novels it was in the first person singular. This was a bit puzzling to readers at the beginning of the eighteenth century, who had practically no other novels to compare it to; their natural reaction was to believe there was such a man as Crusoe and that this was his story. So much the better for it, Defoe felt; at least the book was based on the more or less true accounts of such shipwrecked mariners and castaways as Alexander Selkirk. The question is not, however, whether Robinson Crusoe is a “true story.” Its truth is more than ordinary truth; it is the truth of every man and woman’s hopes, fears, and dreams.

Crusoe is shipwrecked, and all the rest of the ship’s company are lost. Crusoe manages to swim to an island nearby; his ship remains snagged on a reef for several weeks and he is able to obtain a good deal of useful material from it before the hull finally breaks up and is swept to sea. He uses this material to create a new life for himself. But he is desperately lonely in his isolated grandeur, though “the monarch,” as a poet put it, “of all he surveyed.” The first half of the book is taken up with the careful and wonderfully detailed account of what Crusoe did to survive. Every choice he made, every success and every failure, is described with patient carefulness. We read, fascinated by this question: Would we have been able to do as well?

Then, with startling suddenness, a great change occurs. A footprint is seen in the sand—Crusoe is not, after all, alone on his island. He retires to his house, now nearly a fortress, and contemplates all the possible consequences of company. None of them are very good; the maker of that footprint is almost certainly an enemy. He turns out not to be, everyone knows; he is a poor benighted black man, as lost as Crusoe himself, Crusoe names him Friday because that is the day on which he finds him. Friday becomes Crusoe’s man Friday, a collocation of ideas and words so powerful that even girls can be Fridays now, and on any day of the week.

The last third of the book deteriorates, to our modern eyes, as Crusoe spends more and more time trying to convert Friday to the true faith. But this hardly matters. The first four hundred pages of Robinson Crusoe are one of the treasures of mankind. And, for a final accolade, if you had but ten books to take with you to a desert island, what single title would you place before Robinson Crusoe? It is not written as well as Hamlet, its story is not as tragically great as The Iliad, and it is not as deeply humorous as Don Quixote. But it, and not they, would help you to survive.

WILLIAM CONGREVE

1670–1729

The Way of the World

The greatness of this play starts with its title. All comedy is properly about “the way of the world”—about the way life actually is, in all its foolishness, and not the way it ought to be. It is astonishing that no comic playwright had used the title before; it was reserved, by some fortunate accident, for this, among the best of all comedies.

Born in 1670 near Leeds, William Congreve wrote only a handful of plays, but all were successful. He even wrote a tragedy, The Mourning Bride, which was successful, too. After writing The Way of the World, in 1700, when he was only thirty, he retired from the stage and devoted the rest of his life to being a gentleman. Voltaire traveled from France to seek him out. When they met, Voltaire praised Congreve’s plays. Congreve affected hardly remembering that he had written them; he was now engaged, he allowed, on more important business (giving and receiving invitations, going to dinner, and so forth). “But,” said Voltaire, “if you had not written them I would never have sought you out!” The resolution of this absurd impasse is not recorded, but the lesson of the tale is that Congreve ended up becoming one of his own fops.

Congreve’s next-to-last comedy was Love for Love, an erotic romp whose great popularity helped to call down the wrath of one Jeremy Collier, a reforming clergyman whose 1698 pamphlet, “A Short View of the Immorality and Profanity of the English Stage,” shocked London with its undeniable truths. Puritanism being a recurrent mania with the English, they turned upon the playwrights they had loved and drove them from the boards. Congreve composed a vapid “defense” of the comic drama of his epoch; more importantly, he wrote one more comedy before he ceased writing plays forever. The Way of the World has been called the only possible answer to Collier, among other things.

The play is not at all profane, and it is extremely moral. The good people are rewarded and the bad are punished, but in a comic way—that is, without much pain and certainly without bloodshed. But that is all merely superficial. The play is not moral in Collier’s sense of the term. The real conflicts are not between good and bad, but between witty and foolish, smart and dumb. The witty triumph, and the foolish come to grief.

The heroine, Millamant—she of a “thousand lovers”—is the wittiest of all and one of the great female characters in the drama. She teases all of her lovers. She admits, in an aside to the audience toward the end of the play, that Mirabell (“admirer of beauty”) has her heart and that without him she cannot live. She is young and worldly. She amuses herself in all the customary ways. But she is bored by her social whirl, desiring higher things. Congreve is able to suggest this about her without the slightest hint of priggishness, a remarkable achievement.

Mirabell is a wonderful part, too. So is Millamant’s aunt, who is also her guardian (and thereby hangs most of the plot), Lady Wishfort. (Pronounce the name quickly and you will know her character.) The impatient old lady is superb in her cupidity, vanity, and folly. The more foolish she is, the more delightful. In the end, of course, she has the opportunity to reveal her good heart. No other ending would be acceptable.

In the end, as well, Millamant and Mirabell find one another and plan to marry. Millamant, however, does not look forward to this union with the silly anticipation of other girls. She is highly intelligent and knows how much women—especially beautiful, rich, young women—give up when they marry. She therefore spells out, to Mirabell, the terms on which she will accept him. These terms are tough and unsentimental, and the scene in which these two young people, wild about one another, work out their mutual destiny and write a marriage contract, is one of the most bittersweet in the history of comedy.

The Way of the World long remained a standard dramatic work, but today it is hard to put on the stage; few actors can resurrect and maintain its languid grace. (Two of the few are Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright, who, in the parts of Millamant and Lady Wishfort, illuminated a production of the play during the 1984–85 London season which may have been the finest production the play has ever received. Incidentally, the audience cheered and applauded the famous proviso or marriage contract scene.) Despite such noble exceptions, the play is probably best put on in the theater of your mind. Say the lines softly out loud, half under your breath; imagine a proscenium arch lit by a thousand candles; and suppose an audience of beautiful women and gay blades, of whom you may decide to be one.

VOLTAIRE

1694–1778

Candide

François-Marie Arouet, who wrote under the non de plume “Voltaire,” besides being the most famous writer in Europe in the eighteenth century, was also the most sardonic. Brilliant, fascinating, and cynical, he believed in nothing except the power of the human mind, and especially his own mind, to pierce the fogs of ignorance and prejudice that enveloped Frenchmen in his time, and lead them to a world of wealth, comfort, and peace built on scientific progress.

Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694 and was well educated by the Jesuits. He early determined to be an author, and his first plays were successes. A quarrel with a favorite of the king led to his being exiled to England; as a result of this visit, in 1727–28, he decided that Englishmen had clearer heads and a more solid grasp of reality than did Frenchmen. He never ceased to admire the freedom of English institutions, a freedom conspicuously lacking in France. But the brutality of the English temperament (as he saw it) finally turned him against the English.

He returned to France in 1729 when he was thirty-five and began to build the fortune by speculation that allowed him later independence. He was one of the richest literary men who ever lived, thanks to his close friendship with Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV; he put to good use the inside information about the king’s plans she supplied him. But even her friendship, and that of others highly placed in the French court, could not save him from himself. His real foes were intolerance, tyranny, and official torture, and his long life—he died in 1778—was spent in continuous, often spectacular, protests against the cruelty that filled the world around him. But Voltaire had a tongue—and a pen—as sharp as a razor, and he made many enemies, some in high places. He was imprisoned more than once, harassed by the police of several countries, and exiled for many years from his native land.

Things came to a head in the year 1758. Voltaire had quarreled not only with his countrymen but also with Frederick the Great, who for a while had been a willing pupil. He had also insulted the Swiss with his article about Geneva in L’Encyclopedie. Madame de Pompadour was dead. Her successor, Madame de Berry, was a charming nitwit. At sixty-four; where was he to turn?

Voltaire outfaced the crisis with his customary bravura. He was rich enough to buy an estate, Ferney, on the Swiss side of the SwissFrench border, and another, Torney, just over the line in France. If the French police desired to interview him, “Pardon,” he would reply, “but I am just at the moment living in another country”; the same ruse worked in reverse when he was persecuted by Swiss officials. Furthermore he gained the adherence of the townspeople and the peasants, for he defended them for years, not only in his writings but also in the courts, arranging for reviews of particularly outrageous judicial decisions and calling for the removal of particularly cruel judges. Above all, he was world-famous, and tyrants preferred, at least until recently, to torture and kill small fry.

For twenty years, from 1758 until his death, Voltaire lived at Ferney like a little king of the intellect, “The Innkeeper of Europe,” as he was called, receiving guests and admirers, sometimes fifty at a time, expounding his opinions and arguing against intolerance and for the rights of man. In one famous interchange he summed up his life’s work. Exasperated by a long argument with a visitor, “Monsieur,” he said, “I find your opinions indefensible and myself totally unable to agree with them—but,” he added, “I will defend to the death your right to express them.”

The other great event of the year 1758, besides the purchase of Ferney, was the writing of Candide. Voltaire produced scores of volumes of plays, poems, and histories, but only his superb letters and, especially, his contes, or short novels and tales, are still read. The best-known of these tales, Candide is in part a response to the “optimistic” position in philosophy (the view that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” a proposition ascribed by Voltaire, somewhat unfairly, to the German philosopher Leibnitz), and partly a response to the disasters that were overtaking Voltaire at this period in his life. There are ironies here. All his life Voltaire wrote plays, but none of them is played today; he wrote Candide in four weeks, and its fame will never die. Its hero, moreover, the simpleton Candide, is about as different from its author as can be. These comments would have amused Voltaire.

Candide is born in the best of all castles to the best of all parents and soon falls into the clutches of the best of all tutors, the philosopher/ lecher Dr. Pangloss, who persuades his pupil that this is indeed the best of all possible worlds. Whereupon the disasters begin. The castle is besieged and captured, Candide’s family is butchered, he escapes with Pangloss and his beloved Cunégonde, not caring or even noticing that this damsel has been repeatedly raped—since such things do not happen in the best of all possible worlds—and they proceed to travel everywhere and are everywhere tricked, cheated, beaten, and robbed. Although it may not sound like it, all of this is hilarious, mainly because of Candide’s incurable optimism, which no misfortune can abate. At last, however, having lost everything, he is reduced to living on the shores of the Prepontis, far from the turmoil that surrounded Voltaire himself, there to “cultivate his garden.”

The earthy philosophy of life, which denies both idealism and fuzzy metaphysics, had a great attraction for Voltaire’s contemporaries—as for many today. The world is confusing, and often our best efforts to improve it only make it worse, or at least more confusing. As to reformers, we wonder why they do not spend more time tending their own gardens. Nevertheless, this philosophy is lazy and cowardly; if everyone of good faith were merely to cultivate his garden, the world would be left to be run by those of bad faith. (Maybe it is anyway.) And of course during his last twenty years at Ferney Voltaire did not merely cultivate his own garden but everyone else’s business as well.

Candide is one of the swiftest of stories. It proceeds at breakneck pace from start to finish and never flags or runs out of steam. You can read it in an hour, and the hour will be an unalloyed delight. But the story will also make you think. This is a premium that only the best entertainments provide.