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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT THE WAYS IN WHICH ENLIGHTENMENT WATCHERS OF the night sky made poetry and aesthetic theory out of their Newtonian inheritance. (1) The discussion looks at eighteenth century celestial poems and at a few of the century's many theories of the sublime, including Adam Smith's essay, The Principles which lead and direct Philosophical Enquiries; illustrated by the History of Astronomy. Smith's discussion was written in the 1750s, around the time that Edmund Burke wrote his Enquiry Concerning Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime, but unlike Burke, Smith does not offer a psychological argument based on an individual and inward response to the astounding appearances of visible nature. Quite differently, Smith's essay is, in part, a celebration of the Newtonian explanation of the universe with its rational abstractions from the visible, and, in part, a reply to Addison's 1712 formulation of a proto-theory of the sublime. (2) Smith's astronomy essay reproduces and explains the subjective experience of the astronomical universe as a hindrance to rationality and gives a warning about the pernicious effect of the imagination upon natural philosophy. Romanticists often focus their attention on Burke's essay when proposing the impact of theory on the poems in our field, on Kant's theory of the sublime when making sense of the grounds of thought in romantic theory, and on the sublime as an aesthetic of psychological response, but it is, I believe, worth looking at earlier eighteenth-century debates to enrich our discussion of the intentional structure of the commonplaces of sublimity.
While the study of romantic landscape aesthetics and poetics has been a central theme within literary history and criticism, much less attention has been paid to the conventions of the skyscape, or more particularly, to the phenomena of the night sky: the tropes of stars and planets and comets that are ubiquitous in landscape poetry and in its predecessors, the progress poem and the prospect poem. The present essay is part of a larger project on stellar poetics, and one of the themes of that project is the affinity between the astronomical mathematics of the Newtonian synthesis and the belle-lettristic discourse of the sublime, an affinity that suggests its role in the transformations of natural philosophy into the scientific disciplines of the nineteenth century. The discourse of the sublime took on the theological and then psychological work that had earlier been part of the domain of natural philosophers. In particular, early eighteenth century discussions of the celestial sublime offer a set of reflections on the astonishing implications of the calculus, the mathematics of both infinite and infinitesimal series that allowed for the extrapolations required for Newton's mathematic assertions that the laws of the heavens were the same laws that worked on earth. (3) The growing independence of mathematical conceptualization from other forms of knowledge offered a model of autonomous rationalities, or disciplines, while it also helped to develop the discourse of the experience of these mathematical innovations.
If cosmologists and astronomers shared intellectual ground with the theorists of the Sublime, eighteenth-century poets who interpreted the night sky for imaginative ends wondered at its enormity and orderliness and were astonished not only by its sights, but also by the kind of mental abstraction demanded by natural philosophers. Witnessing the celestial sublime, the alert eighteenth century mind had to process the alien immensity of the universe in accordance with the difficulty of the concepts entailed by the new astronomy. The landscape poetry of looking, in both georgic and meditative modes, depended upon and reinforced the poet's ability to totalize and monumentalize the vista, and worked upon the assumption that there was some reciprocity between human cognition and the visual scene. For the poet of the night sky, however, who looks up, not out, the task is to totalize something that cannot be encompassed: the infinitude of the universe itself. And one of the clear changes in the project of totalization is how it shifts, in the course of the eighteenth century, from a confident set of assertions about universal coherence, to a more troubled, secular, and psychological representation of the experience of sublimity. The skyscape becomes something strangely alienated from the mind: unreciprocal, natural yet inhuman, mineral, visually unintelligible, and unmoored from the conventions of the Aristotelian intelligibility of the "Book of Nature" as the visible language of Divinity. (4) The origins of the commonplace of the stars as skywriting lie in the Babylonian assertion that "the signs on earth just as those in heaven give us signals," and their division of the heavens into the zones of the zodiac gave a kind of grammar to the language of the stars. (5) The trope of the "hieroglyphics of the night," is repeated in poems by Anna Barbauld and William Wordsworth, and it images the difficulty of encompassing a celestial prospect: vertical, without boundary, unprotected by the limits of the horizon.
I. The Benignant Celestial Sublime
In 1726 Newton's Principia Mathematica was translated into English, though his major theoretical insights and his mathematical inventions had over the previous twenty years already become part of polite conversation and salon demonstration. (6) And the depth of cultural relief that Newton's arguments elicited can be partly gauged by the fact that until the 1780s, Newton's natural philosophy served as the sanctioned model for social and moral theory as well, a "social Newtonianism" whose central cultural claim was to simplicity and system: the beauty of the universal arrangement of planets, stars, meteors and comments conjoined through the principle of universal gravity, "by whose simple power / the universe exists" made everything else explicable. (7) Although the great age of analogy and resemblance was over, early eighteenth-century social Newtonianism held on to the structure of analogy to make a simple parallelism between astronomical and social order. (8) The range of God's work, and the elegance of his spokesman Newton's mathematical formulae, were modelled as a cognitive experience of the vast universe, Newton having reconciled the enormity of space and the orderliness of its system. Swiftly, it appeared as an image of social happiness as well.
The optimistic experimental demonstrator for the Royal Society, J. T. Desaguliers, published a didactic poem in 1728, The Newtonian System of the WORLD, the best Model of Government: An Allegorical Poem. Desaguliers, born into a Huguenot family that had moved to England in 1685, was a dedicated Newtonian natural philosopher. (9) He was elected to the Royal Society while Newton was its president, and after a career as chaplain to many important families, including to Frederick, the Prince of Wales, he became a popular lecturer on current topics in astronomy and electricity, living above the Bedford Coffee House in Covent Garden. (10) His poem, which, like other introductions to Newton published in the first half of the century, aimed to entertain and teach, is written with the confidence that the universe as Newton proposed it would teach humanity not only how to make sense of the heavens, but also how to live on earth: "The Limited Monarchy, whereby our Liberties, Rights, and Privileges are so well secured to us, as to make us happier than all the Nations round about us, seems to be a lively Image of our System; and the Happiness that we enjoy under His present Majesty's Government, makes us sensible, that ATTRACTION is now as universal in the Political, as in the Philosophical World." (11) Desaguliers begins by calling the Newtonian cosmos an "image" of government, but then slips into using the image of gravity as "attraction" as a statement of fact, not analogy. (12) The Newtonian System of the WORLD, celebrating the new King George n, offers not only a textbook of astronomy (hinged to the poem through a series of explanatory footnotes) but of the parallel worlds of cosmic knowledge and good (i.e. British) government. Desaguliers dismisses Descartes' theory of celestial vortices as dumbed-down science, "An easy, probable, Philosophy; / No conjuring Terms or Geometrick Spells; / His gentle Readers might be Beaux and Belles" (97-99). The "bold Britons," on the other hand, "who all Tyrants hate, / In sciences as well as in the State" condemn Descartes' theory. Gravitational attraction is the principle of balance at work, Desaguliers writes, maintaining the equilibrium of the planets through a law that "Directs but not Destroys, their Liberty" (130-31). The poem makes associations amongst national pride, scientific knowledge, and the moral foundations of governance, and the Newtonian System's imagery combines martial and sexual conventions, presenting a Nature who "gladly shows him all her secret Ways" and then finds that "Gainst Mathematicks she has no Defense, / And yields t'experimental Consequence" (17-20).
Desaguliers didacticism is as peculiar as social Darwinism, and apparently was just as persuasive for a period of time. Newton's universe provided an image for an equanimous social coherence underpinning the apparent disorderliness of human endeavor. Other branches of analogical structure grew: Richard Glover, for example, who became a respected poet and member of the political world (rumored at one time to be the author of the Letters of "Junius") had as a sixteen-year-old described Newton as having "open'd nature's adamantine gates, / And to our minds her secret powers expos'd" (9-10). (13) Glover equates Newton with the universe, itself the model and instance of Divinity. So Newton is figured as Divine because he has discovered the secret...
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