gidal, e - civic melancholy, english gloom & french enlightenment, (2003) 371 18th-cent studies 23

23Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (2003) Pp. 2345.

IVIC MELANCHOLY: ENGLISH GLOOMAND FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

C

Eric Gidal is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of PoeticExhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (Bucknell Univer-sity Press, 2001). He is currently studying manifestations of civic melancholy in English,French, and American literature during the eighteenth century.

Eric Gidal

When French writers and travelers looked across the Channel in the eigh-teenth century, the chief characteristic they were likely to focus on was Englishlibertyintellectual, economic, religious, and political.1 The empirical investiga-tions of Locke and Newton, the expansion of English trade, the proliferation ofdissenting religious communities, and the balance of power born of the GloriousRevolution: all testified to a spirit of liberty that encouraged the arts and sciences,supported commercial growth, and produced a degree of civic participation un-paralleled in Europe. Bat de Muralt, a Pietist from Bern, praised England for itsprosperity and freedom. England is a Country of Liberty, he asserted in hisLettres sur les Anglois et les Franois (1725), every one lives there as he wishes. . . it is in England that a Man is Master of his own, without the Oppressions ofthe Great, or ever knowing them, if he thinks fit.2 In 1727, Csar de Saussurewrote from London to his family, Protestants exiled in Lausanne, that the Englishadvances in the arts and sciences were cultivated by the liberty which the gov-ernment affords, and in which Englishmen take great pride, for they value thisgift more than all the joys of life, and would sacrifice everything to retain it.3

Similarly, Abb Jean-Bernard Le Blanc wrote in his 1745 Lettres dun Franoisthat what is properly stiled the People, is what most distinguishes the Englishfrom their neighbours; the share they have in the government by their right tochoose their representatives inspires them with a certain courage, which is not tobe found in other countries in those of the same rank.4 Voltaire was thus in goodcompany when he repeated the common observation that the English are the

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24 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 37 / 1

only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power ofKings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last establishdthat wise government, where the Prince is all powerful to do good, and at thesame time is restraind from committing evil; where the Nobles are great withoutinsolence, tho there are no Vassals; and where the People share in the govern-ment without confusion.5

Nevertheless, if admiring English civic culture was a commonplace of theFrench Enlightenment, so too was wondering at the English penchant for melan-choly. Whether attributed to their cold and foggy climate, the coal-smoke of theircities, their excessive consumption of meat and ale, the severity of their Protestantsects, or the systematic rigor of their empirical sciences, melancholy was viewedas a distinguishing feature of the English nation.6 Le Blanc quipped that When Isee an Englishman laugh, I fancy I see him hunting after joy, rather than havingcaught it . . . the most laughing air is instantly succeeded by the most gloomy: onewould be apt to think that their souls open with difficulty to joy, or at least thatjoy is not pleased with its habitation there.7 Finding the entire nation both mel-ancholy and passionate, Muralt was struck by the frequency of suicide amongthe English, a common point of observation among his contemporaries.8 Aubryde La Mottraye, who traveled to England three times in the early decades of thecentury, noted that barely a month passes, nor even a week, that somebody doesnot hang himself, or throw himself into the Thames, or cut his throat, or take apistol to his head.9 Both Muralt and La Mottraye repeat the story of a French-man who, visiting England, contracted this prevailing humor and took his life.Saussure himself wrote that though he was initially surprised at the light-heart-ed way in which men of this country commit suicide, he too fell ill to the blackhumor:

Little by little I lost my appetite and my sleep; I suffered from greatanxiety and uneasiness, and that without any reason. Finally I fell intothe deepest and blackest melancholy, and suffered untold misery. . .Everything made me sad and anxious; I could no longer sleep, and myfood disgusted me. Had I been an Englishman I should certainly haveput myself out of misery.10

Even Voltaire, despite his admiration for the English, observed that philosophy,liberty, and climate are productive of misanthropy: London has scarcely anyTartuffes, while it abounds with Timons.11

French travelers were by turns amused and appalled by the gloomy dis-position of the island nation, but they often viewed the English melancholy asinextricable from the very civic culture they so admired. Linking the melanchol-ic disposition of the English to the foggy climate, Le Blanc reasoned, this sametendency to melancholy prevents their ever being content with their fate, andequally renders them enemies to tranquility and friends to liberty.12 Formalizingsuch speculations into a broader system of comparative climates and politicalcultures, Montesquieu argued in LEsprit des lois (1748) that cold climate led theEnglish not only toward suicide, but also toward constitutional government:

In a nation so distempered by the climate as to have a disrelish ofeverything, nay, even of life, it is plain that the government most

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suitable to the inhabitants is that in which they cannot lay theiruneasiness to any single persons charge, and in which being under thedirection rather of the laws than of the prince, they cannot change thegovernment without subverting the laws themselves.

The obstinate impatience so characteristic of the English humor thus frustratesthe establishment of tyrannical government. Slavery is ever preceded by sleep,Montesquieu opines, but a people who find no rest in any situation, who contin-ually explore every part, and feel nothing but pain, can hardly be lulled to sleep.13

Germaine de Stal would later bring the question to bear on literary expressionwhen she argued that the melancholy poetry of the North was much more suit-able . . . to the spirit of a free people. In her essay of 1800, De la littratureconsidre dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, Stal asks

why the English, who are contented with their government and customs,have an imagination so much more melancholy than was that of theFrench. The answer is that liberty and virtue, those two great results ofhuman reason, require meditation, and meditation necessarily leads toserious pursuits.

For Stal, the gloomy imagination of the English as expressed in landscape poetryand epistolary novels is superior to the levity of French romance and attests to theliberty of every individual and the economic health of the nation. Happy thecountry, she writes, where the writers are gloomy, the merchants satisfied, therich melancholy, and the masses content!14

To modern readers, this conjunction of civic harmony and melancholicgloom may seem counterintuitive. As the disposition of the autonomous self parexcellence, melancholy would seem to belong more to the realm of the privatespirit than to the public sphere. When we think of melancholy in the eighteenthcentury, we more likely picture ruined abbeys than halls of parliament, cemeteriesrather than coffeehouses, the call of nightingales rather than the pronouncementsof periodicals. Whether attributed to humoral imbalance, aesthetic sentiment, orpsychological trauma, expressions of melancholy traditionally remove the indi-vidual from the world of social commerce, privileging in its place religious orphilosophical speculation. Following Ecclesiastes, the melancholic views all hu-man endeavor as vanity and vexation of spirit, a fallen state redeemable onlythrough the rejection of the worldly and the perception of the divine. Dividedfrom the bulk of humanity by a profound skepticism of social mores, the melan-cholic might find him or herself in a condition of abject despair, meditative con-templation, or heightened sensitivity, but in any case well removed from the van-itas mundi of our common life.

Still, a countertradition exists in both French and English letters thatunites the skeptical peevishness of the melancholic soul with the civic virtue of themagnanimous hero to articulate what we may call a civic melancholy. Groundedin classical and medieval humoral theory, yet aligned with the methods and aspi-rations of the Enlightenment, this tradition understands melancholy as the darkundercurrent of political identification, removing the individual from vain aspira-tions and luxurious self-indulgence while simultaneously promoting civic idealsand public engagement. As French Protestants and philosophes came to identify

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England as a model of liberty to counter their own experiences of religious, polit-ical, and intellectual repression following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in1685, they elevated the traditional characterization of the English melancholyinto the mark of a free society. Joined with evolving speculations on physiologyand climate, the French view of England as that country of liberty and spleen,15

was codified and elaborated within theories of public culture and national mores.Writers from Prvost and Voltaire to Montesquieu and Stal transformed melan-choly from a sign of humoral imbalance, intellectual genius, or religious vocationinto both a symptom and cause of political freedom and national identity. In turn,these French accounts were speedily translated and disseminated among the En-glish themselves, providing artists, philosophers, and statesmen with a self-emu-lative model of an atrabilious public body.

Numerous doctrines on melancholy, from classical physiology and Aris-totelian philosophy through medieval medicine, Arabian astrology, and Floren-tine Neoplatonism, have all sought to reconcile the varied conditions of the mel-ancholic within broader economies of humoral, seasonal, geographical, andcosmological order. In the intellectual tradition charted most famously by Kliban-sky, Panofsky, and Saxl in their landmark study Saturn and Melancholy, thesemacrocosmic systems of balance and harmony offer redemption if not relief forthe melancholics perpetual vacillation from extreme frenzy of inspiration to ex-treme torpor of dejection.16 Jennifer Radden, in her fine anthology of primarywritings from Aristotle to Kristeva, has complemented this earlier study by delin-eating a progression from descriptive to expressive accounts of melancholy andarguing for the emergence in the nineteenth century of a distinction between sub-jective temperaments and behavioral pathologies. Unlike the earlier studys em-phasis on Renaissance Neoplatonism and its system of allegories, Raddens se-quence of primary texts explicitly privileges Freud and the psychoanalyticaltradition. In this model, subjectivity emerges not as a microcosm of larger harmo-nies, but as a function of desires founded in loss and displacement.17 Still, theFrench contribution to the discourse of melancholy in the eighteenth century pointsless toward Freud and more toward Durkheim; less, that is, toward theories ofthe subject and more toward theories of society.18 Suggesting neither cosmic unitynor subjective isolation, a wide range of French writings both frivolous and ambi-tious offer a third means of understanding melancholy as a sign of cultural con-tingencies and national distinctions. While English physicians such as GeorgeCheyne, Bernard Mandeville, and Richard Blackmore viewed melancholy as theennui of a leisure class set apart from the mechanisms of society,19 an argumentechoed by Wolf Lepenies in his more recent sociological study,20 French writers ofthe period viewed it as the foundational temperament of an active and engagedcitizenry. In their typically sanguine emphasis on behavior over confession, Frenchobservations on the English malady offer confident accounts of a political culturethey both admired and pitied, and, in so doing, conjoin the psyche with the socialas a means of promoting intellectual freedom and civil liberties.

The union of melancholy and civic virtue in the English character recastsin the language of temperament and sensibility the traditional stoic advocacy ofpublic service as a rational response to the hardships and vicissitudes of life. In-deed, the figure of the Englishman in French drama, prose fiction, and political

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theory recurrently embodies the vacillation between stoicism and sentiment thatJulie Ellison has recently observed as a central trope in Anglo-American perfor-mances of civic heroism.21 Franois-Ignace Espiard, in his admiring portrait of theancient Romans in LEsprit des nations (1752), contended that Melancholy . . .is ever a Concomitant of Magnanimity,22 and throughout the eighteenth century,as John McManners and Dorinda Outram have argued, French intellectual cul-ture from the philosophes to the Conventionnels recalled both Socrates and Catoas exemplars of intellectual defiance and heroic self-sacrifice, viewing their sui-cides as compelling acts of republican freedom and virtuous self-dignity.23 In hisGrandeur et dcadence des Romains (1734), Montesquieu claimed that Romeowed its best emperors to the Stoic sect and, in praising heroic suicide, be-moaned that men have become less free, less courageous, less disposed to greatenterprises than they were when, by means of this power which one assumed, onecould at any moment escape from every other power.24 Such noble precedentsnotwithstanding, the French understood the English melancholy more properlyas a constitutional condition rather than a philosophical position. As Montes-quieu put it later in LEsprit des lois, this action [suicide] among the Romanswas the effect of education, being connected with their principles and customs;among the English it is the consequence of a distemper, being connected with thephysical state of the machine, and independent of every other cause.25 Frenchaccounts consistently portray the English as suffering from a splenetic tempera-ment with as much potential for misanthropy and useless self-destruction as formagnanimity and heroic selflessness. In this respect, they situate civic melancholyas Anne C. Vila has positioned sensibilit in French medical and imaginative liter-ature during the period, between enlightenment and pathology.26

As a simultaneously physical and moral condition, English melancholywas thought both to emerge from and in turn to promote a volatile liberty, bothpersonal and societal. Englishmen were observed to vacillate between proud self-justification and suicidal despair, just as their nation lurched from constitutionalfreedom and civic pride to regicide and civil war. Voltaire observed, it was liter-ally the East wind that cut off the head of Charles the First and that dethronedJames the Second,27 and French travelers throughout the century expressed con-sistent horror at the gloomy English history of the previous century. But they alsoperceived that in its more moderate form melancholy might regulate pride aspowerfully as any Roman precedent, producing a golden mean between vanityand dejection by which the melancholic might find relief through active participa-tion in the affairs of state. Voltaires observations are in this respect, as in mostothers, exemplary. He noted the members of the English Parliament are fond ofcomparing themselves to the old Romans, but that besides the common corruptionof their politicians, the two nations were entirely different. Whereas the Romansnever knew the dreadful folly of religious Wars . . . the English have hangd oneanother by law, and cut one another to pieces in pitch battles over ecclesiasticaldisputes. But here follows a more essential difference between Rome and En-gland, Voltaire continues, which gives the advantage entirely to the latter, viz.that the civil wars of Rome ended in slavery, and those of the English in liberty.28

The opposition of the vain yet cheerful Frenchman and the proud yetmelancholic Englishman was a dominant clich of the stage on both sides of the

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Channel. Louis de Boissys comic drama Le Franais Londres (1727) offersnational characterizations of the Frenchman as amiable, lively, light-hearted,energetic, amusing, delightful company, a fine speaker, full of pleasant banterand the Englishman as dull-witted, pedantic, melancholy, taciturn, boring, thecurse of a party, a moralizer, a futile dreamer.29 The Marquis de Polinville, a vainFrench rake convinced of the superiority of his own nation, complains that thesad residents of London spend all of their time in coffeehouses, debating politicsand reading papers when they should be refining their social graces. His rival,Jacques Rosbif, an English merchant, counters the false airs of the Marquis withhis own blend of somber eccentricity and plain speech. Boissy reconciles thesepolarities in the Baron de Polinville, who combines the politesse of the Frenchwith the common sense of the English and thereby wins the hand of the covetedEnglish maid. The English, he notes, countering his countrymans vanities, arenot brilliant, but they are profound. 30

Later British adaptations of Boissys drama from the 1750s were predict-ably less conciliatory. The plots of Samuel Footes two farces, The Englishman inParis (1753) and The Englishman Returnd from Paris (1756), and Arthur Mur-phys The Englishman from Paris (1756) move away from international uniontoward virulent anti-Gallicism, yet maintain the oppositional clichs. The Frenchto be sure, are the dearest creatures in the world, remarks Murphys young JackBroughton, recently returned from Paris, Under an absolute Monarch, youll seethem dance, and sing, and laugh, and ogle, and dress, and display their prettylittle small talkwhile an English John Trott, with his head full of Politics, shallknit his brow, and grumble, and plod, unhappy and discontented amidst all hisboasted Liberty and Pudding.31 The plots of Foote and Murphys plays rejectBoissys vision of international union, portraying the two nations as humorallyirreconcilable, an argument presented even more aggressively in John Brownscontemporary Jeremiad, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times(1758). Brown argued that a Spirit of Chagrin, and splenetic Turn of Mind,seems the original Cause of our Spirit of Liberty, just as the gay, cheerful, andcontented Turn of the French, is certainly one ruling Cause of their Slavery. TheTruth is, they are happy under it; and therefore no Desire of changing their Con-dition ever ariseth in their Hearts; For it is Uneasiness alone, that prompts tochange.32 Brown, Foote, and Murphy recast the classical figures of the sanguineand the melancholic in terms of French servility and English liberty, convertingthe sociability of the former into the bane of the latter.

Yet following the 1763 Treaty of Paris, these clichs served just as well aspropaganda for reconciliation. Charles Simon Favarts LAnglais Bordeaux(1763), written expressly as a celebration of the treaty, presents Milord Brumton,a student of Locke and Newton, expressing his disdain of French levity whilegazing upon a pendulum: Now while this ball, with its solemn balancing, makesme count my advancing minutes toward death, the thoughtless French, hurriedon by a squall of frivolous desires, read on each sun-dial a round of pleasures;nay, so alien are they from the proper feelings of humanity, that they dance inchurch-yards; and fiddle in charnel-houses. His lover the Marquise de Flori-court admires the sincerity and nobility of the English soul, but implores him tonot be for ever on the stretch to hunt out new matter, as fuel for the devouring

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melancholy of your mind . . . The English think; the French enjoy . . . take myfriendly advice, renounce philosophy, it is good for nothing but to give the spleen,and rob the heart of tender sensibility. The drama culminates in their marriageand the declaration of peace, with appropriate songs and panegyrics to universalharmony and a reconciliation of national humors: We [the French] are too gay,they frequently too sad;/ We run stark wild; they, melancholy mad. / Extremes ofeither reason will condemn, / Nor join with us, nor vindicate with them. Favartstranslator (an English Lady now residing in Paris) resolved, she wrote in herdedication, to give it an English dress; a free not a servile one: in order to at-tempt, in my country, what you have so laudably endeavoured in yours [sic], theremoval of national prejudices, which are a disgrace to humanity.33 Such senti-ments were not universally embraced. While Footes dramas enjoyed a substantialrevival during the 176364 season, Favarts LAnglais Bordeaux seems never tohave been performed on the London stage.34

The melancholic yet civic-minded Englishman is no less a common figureof the French novel, from Prvosts Cleveland to Rousseaus douard Bomstonand Stals Oswald, Lord Nelvil. But rather than presenting stock characters inthe service of farce or propaganda, these novels offer the Englishman as a focalpoint for philosophical reflection and sympathetic identification, key elements ofan emergent realist aesthetic that, as Patrick Coleman has argued, negotiates be-tween individual loss and narrative production.35 Prvost had included extensivepanegyrics on English libertysocial, political, and religiousin the fifth bookof his earlier Mmoires et aventures dun homme de qualit (173031), contrast-ing the frivolity, presumption and inconstancy of the French with the naturalgood sense and the purest reason of the English.36 In Le Philosophe anglais, ouhistoire de Monsieur Cleveland (173239), he reflects on the consequences ofthat freedom as he creates a melancholic embodiment of the countrys splenetichistory of political upheaval and reconciliation. Cleveland, the denied bastardson of Oliver Cromwell, spends his formative years as a fugitive in a cave inDevonshire, learning stoic philosophy from his mother and developing sentimen-tal relations with other fugitives from Cromwells tyranny. As we follow his trav-els to an audience with the exiled Charles II at Bayonne, his half-brothers adven-tures in a Protestant utopian community in St. Helena, his attempts to found arationalist society among tribes of noble savages in America, his return to Resto-ration England where he is made a Privy Counselor, and his final retreat fromcourtly intrigue following the Glorious Revolution, Cleveland figures as a dis-tinctly political man of feeling. Clevelands history of personal tragedies and philo-sophical disillusionment is explicitly aligned with the fate of England during theperiod of civil war and monarchical crisis, but it is his constitutional melancholy,a kind of delirious frenzy, which is found to rage more among [his] countrymen,the English, than the rest of the Europeans, that motivates him first toward self-destruction and later toward religious reflection and political engagement.37 Onlyafter William assumes the throne and the nation is at peace may Cleveland retreatto the blissful tranquility of his country estate.

Rousseaus Bomston, or the Englishman, as he is denominated in theinstructions for the engravings for Julie (1761), suggests a sentimental update ofthis figure, a melancholic source of stoic advice to the young impetuous lovers.

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He wears an air of grandeur that comes from the soul more than from his sta-tion; the mark of courage and virtue, but a little ruggedness and harshness in thefeatures. A grave and stoic demeanor under which he barely hides an extremesensibility. Bomstons philosophy is distinctly humoral in origin, less a productof reflection than of mood. As Saint-Preux puts it, I think he is by temperamentwhat he thinks he is by method, and the Stoic veneer he gives to his actions con-sists only in embellishing with nice reasonings the choice his heart has led him tomake.38 Though most remembered for talking Saint-Preux out of committingsuicide, resisting the despairing lovers attempt to model his impulses on the stoicexample, Bomston nonetheless exemplifies English melancholy, motivated by sen-sibility as much as philosophy in his rejection of false hierarchies and decorum.Like Cleveland, Bomston stands as a figure whose personal sentiments vie withphilosophical and religious imperatives in his engagement with public affairs.

This figure finds its romantic apotheosis in Oswald, Lord Nelvil, thedoomed hero of Stals Corinne (1807). Oswald, while a Scot, plays the part ofthe melancholic Englishman to perfection, mourning his lost father to the point ofself-destruction and consistently demonstrating noble and egalitarian kindred withhumanity. Corinne, the sensuous and imaginative Italian, offers Oswald a perfectobject of desire, the promise of an ideal spiritual marriage fated never to be con-summated in this world. A secondary character, Count dErfeuil, provides therecurrent commentary of the vain and frivolous, yet decidedly happier, French-man. Despite his love for Corinne, Oswald is fated to fulfill his national destinyand wed Lucile, the English half-sister to Corinne, whom his father had preferred.Back in England, a country where political institutions give men honourableopportunities for action and public appearances, Oswald soon turns from thevisionary passion of the Italian south: The entrancing pictures, the poetic im-pressions, gave way in his heart to the deep feeling of liberty and morality.39

Stals personifications of an imaginative yet decadent Italian culture in contestwith a sober yet melancholy English philosophy give expression to her contentionthat free countries are and ought to be serious,40 and unites the philosophicalimpulses of the sentimental novel with the political engagement of the Englishnation. For all three of these works, as well as many of the more minor novelssurveyed by Josephine Grieder in her study of French popular fiction during theperiod, the figure of the gloomy Englishman serves both as a model of politicalmorality and as a focus for sentimental identification. 41

While the dramas and the novels engage primarily with questions of cul-tural mores and philosophical temperaments, most expositions of melancholy asa distinctive trait of English liberty emerge from humoral and climatic theorieshanded down from Hippocrates and Galen. Montesquieus elaborate explicationof climate as determinative of social mores and political institutions in LEspritdes lois offers the most influential but by no means the only eighteenth-centurymanifestation of a Hippocratic tradition that Clarence J. Glacken has traced from theclassical world through its development in the Middle Ages, the early modern peri-od, and the Enlightenment.42 The Hippocratic essay On the Nature of Man wasfirst to situate melancholy as one of the four humorsthe others being blood, yellowbile, and phlegmand to align them with the four seasons and the four ages ofman, thereby reconciling individual imbalance and cosmological harmony.43 A

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similar economy of physical dispositions informs the Hippocratic essay Airs,Waters, Places, which assesses the effects of weather, topography, and waterdrainage on the physical constitution of a countrys inhabitants and the nature oftheir customs and institutions. The essay speculates on the choleric hardiness ofnorthern cultures and their superiority over the phlegmatic indolence of those inthe temperate zones, characterizing the Europeans as hot-headed and courageous,self-ruled, and hence more willing to sacrifice themselves, and the peoples of Asiaas lethargic and cowardly, easily dominated in body and soul. Like the theoreticalexposition of the four humors, the Hippocratic theory of climate relies on struc-tures of opposition, establishing a larger order, tendentious to be sure, by whichindividual extremes may be understood and contained.44

In the eighteenth century, these theories provided a framework for a rangeof nationalist caricatures and especially for increasingly sophisticated specula-tions on the English civic melancholy.45 As early as the 1690s, English writerswere defending the liberality of the English drama as a cathartic expression oftheir nations politically volatile melancholy. Our country, William Templeobserved, must be confessed to be what a great foreign physician called it, theregion of spleen, which may arise a good deal from the great uncertainty andmany sudden changes of our weather in all seasons of the year. Explaining thevariety of characters to be found in the English drama, Temple reasons, this mayproceed from the native plenty of our Soil, the unequalness of our climate, as wellas the ease of our government, and the liberty of professing opinions and fac-tions.46 In 1698, John Dennis found himself indicted for libel against the govern-ment for making similar claims in defense of the usefulness of the English dramafor counteracting that gloomy and sullen Temper, which is generally spreadthrough the Nation, a temper which he blamed on the reigning Distemper ofthe Clime and which, he asserted, [has] so often made us dangerous to theGovernment, and, by consequence, to ourselves.47 As Roy Porter argued, a dis-tinctively Whig discourse of English physicians subsequently sought to recast theEnglish melancholy from an unstable condition of revolutionary madness to amanageable condition of a free and advancing society.48 In 1733, George Cheynefamously blamed what he dubbed The English Malady on

the moisture of our air, the variableness of our weather, (from oursituation amidst the ocean) the rankness and fertility of our soil, therichness and heaviness of our food, the wealth and abundance of ourinhabitants (from their universal trade), the inactivity and sedentaryoccupations of the better sort (among whom this evil mostly rages) andthe humour of living in great, populous and consequently unhealthytowns.49

Cheyne significantly joined climate with the effects of trade and urbanization, aview complemented in the same year by John Arbuthnot. In the midst of his scien-tific Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies, Arbuthnot ascribed alivelier imagination to those in warmer climates, while viewing those in colderclimates as more prone to labor and exercise, requiring a regular rule of law toprotect property and the produce of ones labor. Despotick Governments, hewrote, tho destructive of Mankind in general, are most improper in cold Cli-mates.50

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French writers offered complementary, yet more elaborate and reflectiveaccounts of the English nation, expanding the Hippocratic formulas beyond purelymaterialistic explanations toward increasingly nuanced theories of civic ideology.What began as a general discussion of the relationships between the murs andlois of a nation evolved by mid-century into a series of complex meditations onthe interplay between physical, emotional, and moral attributes in a free society.In his Rflexions critiques sur la posie et sur la peinture (1719), the Abb du Bosforwarded a deterministic account of climate, arguing that the humor, and eventhe spirit and inclinations of adult people, depend very much on the vicissitudesof the air. According as this is dry or moist, according as it is hot, cold, or temper-ate, we are mechanically merry or sad, and pleased or vexed without any partic-ular motive. Hence climate distinguishes the French, with their insurmount-able propensity to gaiety from the suicidal English and other northern countries.A French refugee in Holland, Du Bos observes, complains at least three timesa day, that his gaiety and vivacity of spirit has abandoned him.51 Franois-IgnaceEspiard joined these purely physiological explications with sociological consider-ations in his Essais sur le gnie et le caractre des nations (1743), later reworkedas LEsprit des nations (1752). Espiard significantly joined climate with laws,institutions, customs, and manners as equally important influences on the geniusof a people in order to provide a more comprehensive theory of national charac-ters. The picturesque gallery of nations that concludes his work unites his the-ories of physical and moral influences, producing a detailed visualization of na-tional spirit. The French character is uniform and agreeable, vague in manner,mild yet noble in coloring, the Picture full of Hurry and Noise. By contrast, theEnglish are characterized by free and original strokes, the Colouring inter-spersed with Savageness, and even the Manner a little inclineable to the gloomy:

In the Shades place melancholy Figures; deep Shades express theirMisanthropy: Liberty requires strong Lights; and Gleams, flashingamidst the Darkness, express the English Genius breaking out indetermined Sallies . . . The Scene of the Picture, however, is august; itexhibits the greatest Objects: The Sea, the Parliament in Front, withParties for and against Liberty; all which add an extreme Fury to thePicture.

Where the French are well served by the pleasingly mild and correct style of Rapha-el, the Englishman is better portrayed in the style of Michelangelo, haughty andterrible, profound and learned, but harsh and exaggerated.52 Espiards portraitssolidify in aesthetic style and political allegory the contrasts of temperamentshanded down from the Hippocratic tradition, offering a more detailed conceit ofthe English civic melancholy.

It was Montesquieu, however, who drew upon this growing body of spec-ulative literature to establish, in the third part of LEsprit des lois, a systematicconnection between the effects of climate and the general spirit, the mores, andthe manners of a nation. If it be true, Montesquieu premises, that the char-acter of the mind and the passions of the heart are extremely different in differentclimates, the laws ought to be relative both to the difference of those passions andto the difference of those characters. Where Hippocrates based his theories ofnational customs on the circulation of humors in different climates, Montesquieu

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bases his speculations on the responses of the papillae on a sheeps tongue tovariations in the temperature. From this model of empirical observation, he ex-trapolates a familiar sequence of characteristics for the inhabitants of colder cli-mates: they are confident and courageous, honest in disposition and insensitive topleasure and pain. Residents of warmer climates, conversely, are self-deprecating,deceitful, and prone to decadent sensuality. But while such a schema would seemto bestow only enlightened confidence upon northern Europeans, the English standout in Montesquieus survey of climates as a people particularly prone to self-destruction: In all probability it is a defect of the filtration of the nervous juice:the machine, whose motive faculties are every moment without action, is wearyof itself; the soul feels no pain, but a certain uneasiness in existing. Such nationalexistentialism is even more surprising in that the English provide Montesquieuwith the model of an ideal constitution from which he derives his theory of theseparation of powers. And in the final chapter of Book 19, How the Laws con-tribute to form the Manners, Customs, and Character of a Nation, he elevatesthe condition of England to a speculative esprit gnral of a free people: Theirlaws not being made for one individual more than another, each considers himselfa monarch; and, indeed, the men of this nation are rather confederates than fel-low-subjects. Their climate gives them a restless spirit and extended views,yet most of those who have wit and ingenuity are ingenious in tormenting them-selves: filled with contempt or disgust for all things, they are unhappy amidst allthe blessings that can possibly contribute to promote their felicity. Their nation-al character is more particularly discovered in their literary performances, inwhich we find the men of thought and deep meditation. Their satirical writingsare sharp and severe, while their poets have more frequently an original rude-ness of invention than that particular kind of delicacy which springs from taste;we there find something which approaches nearer to the bold strength of a MichaelAngelo than to the softer graces of a Raphael.53 Montesquieu, like his contem-porary Espiard, provides us with a portrait of England as tormented but free, asublime alternative to the vanity and luxuriousness of the French character.54

Montesquieus formulations proved influential and provocative to writ-ers on both sides of the Channel, from Rousseau, who, in The Social Contractand Emile, argued for the importance of temperate climate for political and mor-al maturity respectively, to Hume, who sought to reassert the importance of mor-al and institutional forces over physical conditions as promoters of national liber-ty.55 Yet, it is Pierre Jean Grosley, a member of the Acadmie Royale and anintellectual disciple of Montesquieu, who provides the most complete theoriza-tion of the English civic melancholy. Grosleys early writings promote the theoryof climate and national mores advocated by Espiard and Montesquieu. Climate,he had written in his Mmoire for the Socit Royale de Nancy, is above all elsethe key to the sanctuary of legislation, the axis on which the economic universeturns, the universal grounds of the moral and political order, just as it is the gen-eral basis of the physical world.56 But in Londres (1770), his popular and eruditetravelogue concerning England and its inhabitants, he moves beyond the limitedcharacterizations of Espiard and Montesquieu to provide an extensive analysis ofmelancholy as a foundational temperament of English civic culture.57 Grosleydevotes over a hundred pages of his observations to the English spleen, dividing

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his consideration of melancholy into meditations on its causes, effects, and reme-dies. The fog and smoke from coal fires which darken the skies combine withexcessive consumption of meats and dark ales to give rise to a chyle, whoseviscous heaviness can transmit none but bilious and melancholy juices to the brain(L., 1:165). Add to this unfortunate combination of climate and diet the severityof the public education system; the sobriety of the Protestant religion; the mor-bidity of such public diversions as executions and tragic dramas; the satiricalpungency of such writers as Steele, Addison, and Swift; the English penchant forserious conversation; and Grosley finds ample sources for the gloomy disposi-tion of his brethren across the Channel.

In treating melancholy as pathology, Grosleys comments on its effectsare well within the medical and literary traditions of the eighteenth century, link-ing the English melancholy to fanaticism, superstition, madness, lunacy, and sui-cide. Contemplating the beneficial effects of this humor, Grosley partakes in thetraditional association of the melancholic with the man of genius and notes theEnglish aptitude for abstruse science and philosophy, classical learning, and anti-quarian pursuits. But at the core of his ruminations on melancholy, Grosley ex-pands the notion of solitary erudition to encompass a public sphere of culturaland political engagement. He links melancholy to a concern with public affairs,noting the English favor for newspapers, revolution, and popular participation inaffairs of state:

The whole English nation adopts [that rigid philosophy] by constitu-tion; that is, with all the ardour that melancholy inspires for thoseobjects upon which it happens to be concentered. This occasions thegreat sale of those news-papers, which are published daily, and whichthe generality of the English spend a considerable time in reading: hencearise those revolutions, which have so often changed the government ofEngland . . . In the present state of that kingdom, public affairs arebecome the concern of every Englishman: each citizen is a politician.(L., 1:189)

Grosley links the English melancholy to their burgeoning republicanism and therebycharts a history of English politics along the trajectory of the dismantling of su-preme authority. In the times of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, the case wasquite different, the royal authority then concentering the whole power, and, likethe divine agency, not discovering itself otherwise than by its effects, left the citi-zen no other merit but that of obedience and submission(L., 1:189). However,the twin strains of independent thought and religious fanaticism, two expressionsof the English malady of which Newton and Cromwell are exemplary, tore apartthe authority of the monarchy and the Church. Melancholy thus stands as a markof a potentially destructive skepticism and religious delirium, standing in opposi-tion to the maintenance of a regular rule of law.

Yet in contrast to such isolating forms of melancholy, Grosley perceives anational pride that does not reject melancholy so much as it works through it,rebuking the vanities of private luxury all the while maintaining a commitment tocivic duty. In an extensive chapter entitled National Pride, How far Melancholymay be productive of it. Effects of this Pride, with regard to England, Grosleyoffers a philosophical model of political self-identification:

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The impetuosity, and the perseverance, with which melancholy dwellsupon such objects as interest and engage it, are the principles, whichinduce the English to concern themselves so much about public affairs.Each citizen identifying himself with the government, must of necessityextend to himself the high idea which he has of the nation: he triumphsin its victories; he is afflicted by its calamities: he exhausts himself inprojects to promote its successes, to second its advantages, and to repairits losses: he may be compared to the fly in the fable, which, when itapproaches the horses, Thinks to animate them by its humming, stingsone, then another, and imagines every moment that it makes thecarriage go forward; it sits upon the pole, and upon the coachmansnose: and no sooner does it see the carriage driven on, and the peoplecontinuing their journey, but it arrogates the glory of the wholemovement to itself. (1:1912)

Grosleys analogy suggests a dynamic relation between melancholy and pride, amovement from determined antagonism toward collective identification. Englishmelancholy, in its impetuous obsessions, motivates national solidarity and engen-ders a pride, which, being the first foundation of public strength, and multiply-ing it ad infinitum, subdivides, and, in some measure, distributes itself to everycitizen(L., 1:192). Grosley quotes the sixth book of the Aeneid regarding theNeoplatonic union of souls as a model of this patriotic identification: Totamdiffusa per artus / Mens agitat molem ac magno se corpore miscet( L., 1:192).58

In a cosmic dialectic of melancholy and pride, the nation redeems the spleneticsoul whose great actions in turn promote the national good. Grosley notes withadmiration, whatever does honour to the English nation, at the same time, throwsa luster upon each citizen( L., 1:196), and offers a litany of noble figures com-memorated by public monuments in the inns, gardens, abbeys, and museums ofLondon, the Royal Society, Garricks Shakespeare Gallery, the Royal Exchange,and, finally, in Westminster Abbey, the grand depository of the monuments erectedto the glory of the nation:

The abbey in which they stand is incessantly filled with crowds, whocontemplate them: the lowest sort of people shew also their attention: Ihave seen herb-women holding a little book, which gives an account ofthem; I have seen milk-women getting them explained, and testifying,not a stupid admiration, but a lively and most significant surprise. Ihave seen the vulgar weep at the sight of Shakespeares beautiful andexpressive statue, which recalled to their memory those scenes of thatcelebrated poet, which had filled their souls with the most livelyemotions. (L., 1:205)59

As the centerpiece of his discussion of the English melancholy, Grosleys extensivesurvey of memorial pride presses beyond the deterministic climatic explanationsof the Hippocratic tradition toward what must be recognized as an early theoryof civic ideology. A capacious national pride inspires dialectically the idea of thenation and the observation and emulation of its citizens. It is founded in temper-ament, but given expression and modification by public institutions and the ac-tions of private individuals of all classes and, as Grosley discusses at length, ofboth men and women alike. The pride that Grosley identifies is not mere patrioticbluster, but the positing of a totality by which the isolation and insufficiency of

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the individual might be at least partially relieved, a collective ideal that trans-forms personal despondency into a recognition of common interests and accom-plishments.

The national pride of which Grosley speaks is distinct from vanity, andhe goes to great pains to distinguish between the two:

In the one, men appear and shew themselves such as they really are: inthe other, they exist only by illusion and deceit: at the bottom, both areactuated by the self-same love: in great souls, this is pride; in narrowminds, it is vanity. Pride is the source of all great achievements: vanity isthe mother of all things of a frivolous nature, as for example, offashions, of the etiquette of court punctilio, of ceremonial, of prece-dence, of honorary privileges, of pomp and parade, and all thoseobjects, with which little souls are so greatly captivated. (L.,1:212-13)

Citing such artists as Michelangelo, Malherbe, Corneille, Lully, and Milton along-side such eighteenth-century figures as Voltaire and Rameau, Grosley argues thatthe morality of the Christian religion offers humility as a counterpoise to vanity;but it gives none to pride, which, without debasing itself in its own eyes, canperform all the duties enjoined by the most profound humility (L., 1:216). Asisolated men of genius, such luminaries would seem to embody the positive achieve-ments of melancholy without the despair and self-loathing. Neither pathological-ly humble nor contemptuously vain, Grosleys men of genius, and the emulationthey inspire, partake of a noble pride that breaks from social custom only toreinvigorate it. In turn, such a melancholic pride becomes the basis for importantpublic foundations, from Gresham College and the Garden of Apothecaries toGuys Hospital and the British Museum. These institutions supply the place of avariety of equipages, of lace, jewels, and all the transient brilliancy, that nationalvanity elsewhere substitutes to solid and durable monuments, such as adornedAthens and Rome, and, in the eyes of posterity, will also be the ornament ofEngland (L., 1:223-24).

Grosleys distinction between pride and vanity is hardly original, partak-ing as it does in a tradition that, like that of the melancholic genius, goes back toAristotle, who, in the Nicomachean Ethics, distinguishes between the megalopsy-chos and the mikropsychos, or men of great and small souls.60 The former knowshis true abilities and acts upon them. The latter underestimates his worth andtherefore under-utilizes his capabilities. Aristotle distinguishes both from the fool-ishly vain man who overestimates his own value: A man is regarded as high-minded when he thinks he deserves great things and actually deserves them; onewho thinks he deserves them but does not is a fool, and no man, insofar as he isvirtuous, is either foolish or senseless.61 In this respect, and as Aristotle formu-lates it even more explicitly in his Magna Moralia, the megalopsychos representsa golden mean between vanity and dejection. Such a man derives moderate plea-sure from honors properly bestowed but does not, as with fame and wealth, de-sire them disproportionately to the actions that deserved them.62 Cicero adoptedthis formulation in his advocacy of political engagement, arguing, the personwho embarks on affairs of state . . . must be sure not to succumb to thoughtlessdespair through cowardice nor to become overconfident through greed.63 TheChristian era, however, promoted a very different sense of pride, equating super-

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bia with vana gloria and marking it as the chief cardinal sin, if not the root ofthem all. As Gregory the Great formulated it most influentially, pride separatesthe individual from the bulk of humanity so that he walks with himself along thebroad spaces of his thought and silently utters his own praises.64 But, in the earlymodern era, the Aristotelian distinction re-emerged in many of the key works ofpolitical and ethical philosophy and pride became viewed as a necessary passionfor unifying and promoting a societys achievements. In his chapter of Leviathan(1651) on the passions, Hobbes distinguishes a laudable form of what he callsGlorying from Vaine-Glory on the one hand and Dejection on the other.Either extreme may lead to madness, whether choleric rage or melancholic gloom,but proper Glorying arising from imagination of a mans own power and abili-ty leads toward a properly social confidence and political ambition.65 In theeighteenth century, Adam Smith, taking his cue explicitly from Aristotle, intro-duces in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) a distinction between pride andvanity based upon the sincerity of self-estimation.66 Promoting a self-commandand noble pride to steer between the alternate passions of fearful anger and selfishpleasure, Smith contends, vanity is almost always a sprightly and a gay, and veryoften a good-natured passion. Pride is always a grave, a sullen, and a severe one.67

Smiths formulation underlines the affinities between political temperament andindividual passions that were already evident in Aristotles original conception ofmagnanimous virtue.

It is but a short step from such ethical distinctions to the nationalist car-icatures we have been observing. Grosley cites Montesquieus own observationfrom his discussion of English melancholy that Free nations are haughty; othersmay more properly be called vain,68 a point touched upon by Le Blanc when heobserved that a Frenchman seems to esteem his nation only with respect to him-self: an Englishman appears not to set any value on himself, but with respect tohis nation: which gives an air of vanity to the one, and to the other an air ofgreatness.69 Rousseau had likewise contended in Emile (1762) that the English-man has the prejudices of pride, and the Frenchman has those of vanity, andnoble pride is at the core of Rousseaus psychological and historical narratives.First introduced in a lengthy note to his Discours sur lorigine et les fondemens delingalit parmi les hommes (1755) as a counterpoint to the misery of modernsociety, what Rousseau distinguishes as lamour de soi stands apart as a naturalself-esteem that bears little relation to amour propre, a vain love of self that evi-dences the corrupting influence of social divisions. For Rousseau, society anddespair are inextricable. I ask if anyone, he writes, has ever heard it said thata Savage in freedom even dreamed of complaining about life and killing himself.Let it then be judged with less pride on which side genuine misery lies.70

Clearly, national pride comes at quite a price. Grosley commends theEnglish for their civic institutions, their concern with public affairs, and even themilitary valor that their contempt for life engenders. Nevertheless, like manyFrenchmen before him, he is aghast at the frequency of suicide among the En-glish, the fanaticism of their political and religious rebellions, the superstition oftheir national tales, and the insanity and lunacy on constant display at Bedlam.Such are the advantages and disadvantages, the good and the evil, which resultfrom the English character in its present state, he concludes, and in this state, I

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doubt very much, whether the French, who affect a strong passion for every thingEnglish, would consent to change condition and manners with that people.71 Hisremedy for such morbidity of soul is taken from the book of Proverbs: Givewine to those that be of heavy hearts, let them drink:

We see in France itself the power, that a more or less extensive use ofwine has upon a nation. Our ancestors regulated the affairs of state overa bottle; but, at the same time, regulated themselves so ill, that all theirprojects vanished with the bottle, from whence they took their rise. Allthat remained, after their consultations, was a few songs, which littlealarmed the government: the French were neither devoted to politics,nor a prey to vapours. (L., 1:247)

Grosley recalls that the English themselves were once more partial to the juice ofthe grape, and fears that exorbitant duties on wine have caused even the Frenchto change their national manners so that insipid raillery, pitiful conundrums,dull metaphysics, and plaintive elegies, have supplied the place of light conversa-tion, amiable simplicity, sprightly wit, Bacchanalian songs, and joyous parodies:in fine, funeral urns, coffins, and melancholy cypress-boughs, are become fash-ionable even in buildings of the most elegant taste (L., 1:248). He thus urges thelowering of duties in order to better compete with the wines from the Americancolonies and to bring about an equilibrium in the temperament on both sides ofthe Channel:

The use of wine being restored in England, whether by France orAmerica; the English [will grow] more tractable and less speculative,more gay, and less addicted to dispute and wrangling, more friends tosociety, and less saturnine, more submissive, and less occupied withstate affairs, less profound in their speculations, and more religious. (L.,1:249)72

Commerce in wine may achieve what the marriages staged by Boissy and Favarthad proposed: a mutually beneficial tempering of national spirits, providing asanguine amendment to Englands melancholy constitution.

Grosleys elaborate fusion of medical diagnosis and sociopolitical analy-sis exemplifies the periods discourse of national temperaments, a discourse thatreconciles rather than opposes personal melancholy and civic culture in the En-glish character. This reconciliation assumes many formstravelogue, theatricalfarce, sentimental novel, aesthetic defense, physiological treatise, cultural critiqueworks that offer us less a consistent theoretical model and more a recurrent topicfor reflections on national mores and cultural institutions. Though the medicaland institutional paradigms upon which they draw may seem outdated, their si-multaneous emphases on physical and social contingencies connect melancholywith histories and theories of ideology and the political subject. By groundingpolitical culture in the idiosyncrasies of the body and the weather, these eigh-teenth-century reflections complicate any purely discursive model of public soci-ety. Conversely, by fusing physiology with political philosophy, they advance modelsof subjectivity beyond the reductions of Hippocratic materialism while suggest-ing a provocative counterpoint to a purely psychoanalytical model. Above all,they offer an emphatic promotion of public life as an amelioration to melancholy,

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an alternative to pensive isolation, which, in its rejection of social engagement,can be as narcissistic as the vanities it seeks to escape. Grounded in a fusion ofhumoral and stoic philosophy, this insight may be re-emerging in our own post-Freudian moment.

Melancholia is not French . . . The rigor of Protestantism, or the matri-archal weight of Christian orthodoxy admits more readily to a complicity withthe grieving person . . . while . . . the Gallic, renascent, enlightened tone [tends]toward levity, eroticism, and rhetoric rather than nihilism. So writes Julia Kristevain Soleil noir (1989), her influential study of depression and melancholia in liter-ature and psychoanalysis. Her redeployment of these nationalist clichs is all themore intriguing given the enormous power she ascribes to melancholy as a foun-dational moment for the entrance into language and society. Without a bent formelancholia, she writes, there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.Indeed, there is meaning only in despairthere is no imagination that is not,overtly or secretly, melancholy. 73 In this context, the French predilection forcheerfulness and style would seem to condemn them not only to political enslave-ment but also to psychic atrophy. But, following Freud, Kristeva counters suchdegenerate frivolity with a pathological melancholy that marks a failure of self-integration, an incapacity to move from a necessary prelinguistic experience ofobject loss toward a primary identification with a communal schema, be it lan-guage, family, or law. Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, she writes,noting the despair attendant upon the melancholics inward gaze. Absent a com-pensatory signifier of identification, the melancholic withdraws from all socialintercourse toward inaction or self-destruction. Analysis therefore may offer alucid counterdepressent, not so much negating or neutralizing depression asenabling the transference into language that is melancholys ultimate triumph andthe foundation of civil society.74

In her more overtly political writings, Kristeva has offered the nation as aparticularly compelling compensatory sign, forwarding an ideal of cosmopolitannationalism adopted directly from Montesquieu. In her Lettre ouverte HarlemDsir (1990), Kristeva recalls Montesquieus advocacy of a national identity basedin heterogeneous and dynamic confederacy as a means of redeeming nationalismfrom its nineteenth- and twentieth-century corruptions. Seeking to avoid both thealienation of a purely individualistic society and the violent authoritarianism ofracist philosophies of the Volkgeist, Kristeva advocates a nation without nation-alism, an historical and thereby contingent esprit gnral encompassing a multi-plicity of identities and a range of causalities, from climate and diet to laws, cus-toms, and manner. Seeing in Montesquieus formulation a means of avoiding bothabstract idealism and ethnic determinism, Kristeva celebrates a vision wherebythe different levels of social reality are reintegrated into the esprit gnral with-out being absorbed; and this is accomplished, quite obviously, under the influenceof the English model, but also, in very original fashion, through the synthesizingpower of the French philosophers thought.75 Kristeva demonstrates the possi-bility of wedding Montesquieu with Freud and conceives of national pride ascomparable . . . to the good narcissistic image that the child gets from its motherand proceeds, through the intersecting play of identification demands emanatingform both parents, to elaborate into an ego ideal (N., 52). Failing to achieve this

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ego ideal, one risks either a fall into an individualized or communal depressioncharacterized by idleness, withdrawal from communication, and any participa-tion in collective projects and representations, or, alternatively, a perverse devel-opment of a negative narcissism of superegotic, hyperbolic ideals of which theaggressive, paranoid excesses are well known (N., 52). Kristeva reproduces Gros-leys theory of the nation as an intermediary between dejection and vanity in heradvocacy of a national pride positioned between suicide and barbarity (N.,52), between the failure of identification and its excess. It is here that she turns toMontesquieus dictum that men, in such a nation, would be confederates ratherthan citizens (N., 57). Contending that the heterogenous, dynamic, and con-federate formulation of the esprit gnral is one of the most prestigious cre-ations of French political thought, Kristeva argues that it suggests the integra-tion, without a leveling process, of the different layers of social reality into thepolitical and/or national unity (N., 57).76

Here, then, is the powerful and recurrent theme voiced in French ac-counts of the English nation. Inheriting the stoic commitment to public life in animperfect world, yet grounding such commitment in the passions of the indepen-dent soul, the French tradition from Montesquieu to Kristeva recasts the despon-dency of the individual into both a symptom and an amelioration for a worldbereft of final truths. As both Grosley and Kristeva contend, in their different yetcomplementary accounts, absent the assurances of absolutism, monarchical ortheological, the subject is at risk of a profound loss of meaning and a retreat toeither the isolation of despair or the enslavement of collective arrogance. We avoidsuch narcissistic self-cancellations by means of an endlessly repeating movementfrom semiotic incoherence to ethical union. As Kristeva puts it in Soleil noir, whatmakes . . . a triumph over sadness possible is the ability of . . . the dead languageof the potentially depressive person [to] arrive at a live meaning in the bond withothers.77 French accounts of the English malady suggest that this manifestly inte-rior struggle may find solace, all the more powerful for its insufficiency, in thevanities and vexations of public life.

NOTES

1. Ira O. Wade provides an excellent survey of the English influence on French thought duringthe period in The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,1977), 1:12071. A more archaic yet still valuable study of the influence may be found in JosephTexte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitanisme littraire; tude sur les relationslittraires de la France et de lAngleterre au XVIIIe sicle (Paris: Hachette, 1895), translated by J.W.Matthews as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (London: Duckworth,1899). See also F.C. Green, Eighteenth-Century France: Six Essays (London: Dent, 1929), 2969;Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant lopinion franaise au XVIIe sicle (Paris: Gamber, 1930);Gabriel Bonno La Culture et la civilisation britanniques devant lopinion franaise de la Paix dUtrechtaux Lettres Philosophiques (17131734) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1948); FrancesAcomb, Anglophobia in France, 17631789 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1950); Gerald B. Maher,LAnglomanie en France au XVIIIe sicle, La Revue de LUniversit Laval 10 (1955): 12542; andJosephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 17401789: Fact, Fiction, and Political Discourse (Gene-va: Librairie Droz, 1985).

2. Bat de Muralt, Letters Describing the Character and Customs of the English and FrenchNations (London: Tho. Edlin, 1726), 24. The majority of French works studied in this essay weretranslated into English soon after their French publication and I have used those editions whenever

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possible. All other translations are either from modern scholarly editions or my own, as noted, withthe original provided in the notes.

3. Csar de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I & George II. TheLetters of Monsieur Csar de Saussure to his Family, trans. and ed. Madame van Muyden (London:John Murray, 1902), 179.

4. Abb Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations (London: J. Brindley, 1747), 4.

5. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: Oxford Univ.Press, 1999), 34. For the frequent occurrence of this formulation, both before and after Voltaire, seeVoltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson (Paris: Cornly, 1930), 1:9495 n. 9.

6. For the prevalence of this view, see Cecil A. Moore, Backgrounds of English Literature 17001760 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1953), 179235. See also Oswald Doughty, TheEnglish Malady of the Eighteenth Century, Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 25769; and PaulLangford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 16501850 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,2000), 5064.

7. Le Blanc, Letters, 135.

8. Muralt, Letters, 34. On the English reputation for suicide, see S.E. Sprott, The English De-bate on Suicide from Donne to Hume (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1961); John McManners, Deathand the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Ox-ford Univ. Press, 1981), 42837; Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Sui-cide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); and Georges Minois, History ofSuicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniv. Press, 1999), 179209.

9. The Voyages and Travels of Aubry de La Mottraye (London, 1732), 213.

10. Saussure, A Foreign View, 197.

11. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 2:104. La Philosophie, la libert, & le climat conduisent la Misantropie. Londres, qui na point de Tartuffes, est plein de Timons.


13. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (London: J. Nourse and P. Vaillant, 1758), 1:3312.

14. Germaine de Stal, Madame de Stal on Politics, Literature and National Character, trans.and ed. Morroe Berger (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1964), 1012.

15. The phrase is taken from the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, Letters of the Marchioness of Pom-padour from MDCCLIII to MDCCLXII (London: W. Owen and T. Cadell, 1771), 94, a fictional-ized account of courtly intrigue during the Seven Years War.

16. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in theHistory of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964; Nen-deln: Kraus Reprint, 1979).

17. Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press, 2000). Other recent studies in the cultural history of melancholy by Juliana Schiesari,Lynn Enterline, and Guinn Batten have likewise privileged Freudian models of subjectivity even asthey have critically analyzed historical divisions of gender and modern systems of commodification.Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics ofLoss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992); Lynn Enterline, The Tears ofNarcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,1995); Guinn Batten, The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culutre in EnglishRomanticism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998). Stanley W. Jackson offers a clinical history ofmelancholy as a medical and psychological condition in Melancholia and Depression, From Hippo-cratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale, 1986).

18. Although Durkheim explicitly rejected the climatic and physiological explanations of suicidepromoted by Montesquieu, his own landmark study of suicide of 1897 helped to establish modernsociological method by which ostensibly personal and affective phenomena are understood in rela-

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tion to structures of social organization. In this respect, and as Durkheim himself explicitly argued in1893, he stands as Montesquieus intellectual descendant. See Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study inSociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1951) and EmileDurkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology, trans. Ralph Manheim (Ann Ar-bor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960).

19. Roy Porter offered a synopsis of the medical associations between melancholy or hypochon-dria and the refined nervous systems of the civilized classes, a view most famously propagated byGeorge Cheyne in The English Malady (1733). Porter, Civilization and Disease: Medical Ideologyin the Enlightenment, in Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 16601800, ed. Jeremy Black andJeremy Gregory (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1991), 15483. See also John Mullan, Senti-ment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988),20140.

20. Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1992). Lepenies focuses upon the seventeenth-century French aristocracy andeighteenth-century German bourgeoisie, but French accounts of the English call to mind more theutopian strains that Lepenies finds in writings on melancholy from Robert Burton to Edward Bel-lamy. Melancholy, in such formulations, offers a sign of disorder that must be subordinated by thestate, or society, which functions as an intermediate domain, which is neither as universal as thecosmology of antiquity or the Middle Ages nor as micrological as the medicine of antiquity or of theArabic and medieval worlds (19).

21. Julie Ellison, Catos Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1999). In readings of English and American drama and poetry of the long eighteenthcentury, Ellison demonstrates a foundational link between assertions of heroism and presentations ofbereavement in the language of republican sensibility.

22. Franois-Ignace Espiard, The Spirit of Nations (London: Lockyer Davis, 1753), 402.

23. McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 40937; and Dorinda Outram, The Body and theFrench Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 90105.

24. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their De-cline, trans. David Lowenthal (New York: Free Press, 1965), 145, 118.

25. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:249.

26. Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine ofEighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998). Vila provides a learnedstudy of how French physiologists and men of letters placed the sensible body at the center of discus-sions of organic dynamics, socio-political classifications, and cosmological harmonies, thereby cre-ating a tension between rational virtue and physical excess.

27. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 2:263. Ctait la lettre par un vent dEst quon coupa latte Charles Ier, & quon dtrna Jacques II.

28. Voltaire, Letters, 3334.

29. Louis de Boissy, Le Franais Londres (Utrecht: Etienne Naulme, 1767), 30. Cest lui quifait un homme aimable, vif, lger, enjou, amusant, les dlices des socits, un beau parleur, unrailleur agrable, et, pour tout dire, un Franais. Le bon sens, au contraire, sappesantit sur les mat-ires, en croyant les approfondir; il traite tout mthodiquement, ennuyeusement. Cest lui qui fait unhomme lourd, pdant, mlancolique, taciturne, ennuyeux; le flau des compagnies, un moraliseur,un rve creux; en un motUn Anglais, nest-ce pas?

30. Boissy, Le Franais Londres, 4. Les Anglais ne sont pas brillans, mais ils sont profonds.

31. Arthur Murphy, The Englishman from Paris, ed. Simon Trefman (Los Angeles: William An-drews Clark Memorial Library, 1969), 24.

32. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London: L. Davis andC. Reymers, 1758), 2:3132.

33. Charles Simon Favart, The Englishman in Bourdeaux (London: G. Kearsley, 1764), 22, 33,61, iii.

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34. George Winchester Stone, Jr., ed., The London Stage, vol. 4 (Carbondale, IL: Southern IllinoisUniv. Press, 1962). An English owner of a French copy of the play wrote in his copy that he kept itnot for any merit in the work, but as a mark of the joy which the French received at the Peace . . .I think [the author] says somewhere Deux nations faites pour sentre estimer [two nations made foreach others esteem]which is vainly begging a foolish question, for the English despise and imitatethe French and the French esteem without imitating the English, under which a later French ownercommented on the all too common English presumptuousness (loutrecuidance anglaise qui nestque trop commune). Charles Simon Favart, LAnglais Bordeaux (Paris, 1763), British Librarycopy 11737 cc.17(1), quoted in Derek Jarrett, The Begetters of Revolution: Englands Involvementwith France, 17591789 (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 40.

35. Patrick Coleman, Reparative Realism: Mourning and Modernity in the French Novel, 17301830 (Geneva: Droz, 1998). Coleman studies Prvosts Manon Lescaut alongside Rousseaus Julie,Constants Adolphe, Stals Corinne and Balzacs La Peau de chagrin. His emphasis is not the Englishmalady, but rather a recurrent tension between sentimental affection and spiritual retreat that re-deems itself in public engagement as both a thematic and aesthetic quality of the French novel duringthis period.

36. Abb Prvost, Adventures of a Man of Quality, trans. Mysie E.I. Robertson (London: GeorgeRoutledge and Sons, 1930), 8687.

37. Abb Prvost, The Life and Entertaining Adventures of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of OliverCromwell, Written by Himself (London: T. Astley, 173435), 4:4748.

38. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. 6, ed. Roger D. Masters and ChristopherKelly, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vach (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1997), 621, 103.

39. Madame de Stal, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998),318, 304.

40. Stal, Politics, Literature, and National Character, 120.

41. Grieder provides an extensive bibliography of Novels and Stories from, by, and about theEnglish, 17401789,as well as a chapter-length survey of their basic thematic elements. See Anglo-mania, 65116, 15162.

42. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thoughtfrom Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967).See also Robert Shackleton, The Evolution of Montesquieus Theory of Climate, Revue internatio-nale de philosophie 9 (1955): 31729, and Montesquieu. A Critical Biography (Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press, 1961), 30219.

43. See Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 89.

44. Hippocratic Writings, ed. G.E.R. Lloyd (London: Penguin, 1978), 14869, 26071.

45. For the revival of these theories in the debate between Murs and Lois as constitutive ofnational character, see Wade, French Enlightenment, 1:435515 and Glacken, Traces on the Rhodi-an Shore, 551622. For their importance in eighteenth-century British formulations of race, seeRoxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century BritishCulture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

46. Sir William Temple, Five Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Ann Arbor: Univ. ofMichigan Press, 1963), 199200. The foreign physician does not seem to have been identified.

47. The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,1939) 1:151. Hooker provides an account of this indictment and the relevant manuscript accounts inhis note to this passage (1:47172).

48. Roy Porter, The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry? Medical His-tory 27 (1983): 3550.

49. George Cheyne, The English Malady (London: S. Powley, 1733), i.

50. John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London: J. Ton-son, 1733), 153.

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51. Abb du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (London: John Nourse, 1748), 2.180,184, 194.

52. Espiard, The Spirit of Nations, 4056.

53. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:316, 331, 44951.

54. C.P. Courtney offers a basic survey of Montesquieus view of English political culture in En-glish Liberty, Montesquieus Science of Politics: Essays on The Spirit of the Laws, ed. David W.Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A Rahe (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 27390.More extensive treatments may be found in Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition politiqueanglaise en France; les sources anglaises de lEsprit des lois (Paris: Lecoffre, 1909); and GabrielBonno, La Constitution britannique devant lopinion franaise de Montesquieu Bonaparte (Paris:Champion, 1931). Chloe Chard offers a provocative comparison of Montesquieus climatic distinc-tions between the south and the north and Edmund Burkes aesthetic distinctions between the beauti-ful and sublime in Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geogra-phy 16001830 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), 11925.

55. For more extensive discussions of Montesquieus immediate influence, see Glacken, Traces onthe Rhodian Shore, 592622; and F.T.H. Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics (17501800)(London: Edward Arnold, 1939), 93103.

56. Pierre Jean Grosley, De lInfluence des Loix sur les Murs, quoted in Wade, French En-lightenment, 44344.

57. Pierre Jean Grosley, A Tour to London; or, New Observations on England and its Inhabitants(London: Lockyer Davis, 1772). Hereafter L.. Grieder notes that Londres was second in popularityonly to Le Blancs Lettres, going through three editions in the 1770s in addition to its Englishtranslation. She views it as ushering in a period of more profound interest in English society and citesthe Vie de M. Grosley, crite en partie par lui-mme; continue et publie par M. labb Maydieu(Londres et Paris, 1787), which claims, All the truly learned and all sensible readers will alwaysview London as one of the most instructive, most interesting, and most enjoyable writings that wehave about England and its inhabitants. (25859; Grieder, Anglomania, 37 n. 11).

58. and a Mind / Infused through all the members of the world / Makes one great living body ofthe mass(6:97577). Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 185.

59. Prvost had offered a comparable account of the sweet and delightful melancholy (douce& ravissante mlancolie) to be found in Westminster Abbey and the noble emulation inspired by itsmonuments in Le Pour et contre, ed. Steve Larkin, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century309 (1993), no. 56, 6048.

60. Key discussions of the structure and history of the idea of the megalopsychos may be found inMaurice B. McNamee, Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimityin Philosophy and Epic Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960); Robert Payne, Hu-bris: A Study of Pride (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960); Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeareand the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960); Margaret Greaves,The Blazon of Honor. A study in Renaissance magnanimity (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964);and Stanford M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil (New York: St. Martins Press,1978). None of these studies note its affiliation with melancholy.

61. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962),93.

62. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935),5235.

63. Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 26.

64. Gregory the Great, Moralia, XXIV: 48; quoted in Robert Payne, Hubris, 73.

65. Hobbes discusses this distinction in chapters 6, 8, and 11 of the Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 3746, 5059, 6975.

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66. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianap-olis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 23764.

67. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 257. Smith associates vanity with the French, and pride with theSpanish, a nation whose reputation embodies, in his view, Aristotelian magnanimity.

68. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:450. Grosley and Montesquieu had earlier corre-sponded on just this passage and an earlier chapter of Book 19, in which Montesquieu reflects atlength on the vanity (la vanit) and the arrogance (lorgueil) of nations. See Montesquieu, uvresCompltes, ed. Andr Masson (Paris: Les ditions Nagel, 1955), 3:129397.


70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings, 3:34.

71. Grosley, A Tour to London, 1:246.

72. Espiard had suggested an analogously beneficial relation between French levity and Englishgloom, noting, the Wines and Brandies of France impart to [the] melancholic Spirits [of the English]such enlivening Sensations as they would otherwise be Strangers to. The Use of these Liquors isbecome necessary to, and proves the chief Delight of the North (The Spirit of Nations, 18).

73. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), 6, 4, 6.

74. Kristeva, Black Sun, 5, 25.

75. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press, 1993), 55. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as N.

76. For a more extensive discussion of Kristevas theories in relationship to political identifica-tion, see Nolle McAfee, Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000).

77. Kristeva, Black Sun, 2324.

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