In his analysis of the passions that belong to the sense of the beautiful, Edmund Burke defines two sorts of possible social relation that provide the basis: first, there is the society of the “sexes,” man’s passion for woman, which has “the purpose of propagation”; second, the “general society,” which is the passion “we have [to be]
with men and with other animals, and which we may in some sort be said to have even with the inanimate world” (A Philosophical Enquiry 37). Although Burke’s focus is mostly on his first definition, that is, the passion man carries toward woman’s body and his desire to be with her, the second definition, based on the first, elaborates on the passion to dominate to the full by extending the idea of the beautiful to the
realm of society as a whole. To see society as an agreeable wholeness has its archetype in a man’s love for a woman. The beauty of a woman evokes a man’s passion, and the beauty of society, likewise, arouses a man’s passion to get connected.
However, there is a sequential logic here: in Burke’s definition, the object desired needs to be beautiful in the first place, including traits of smallness, smoothness gradual variation, and delicacy, in order to be the catalyst of man’s passion. In regards to “general society,” society as a whole, following Burke’s logic, has to be constituted hierarchically, with no abrupt intrusion, like a woman’s body, from head to neck, breast, and feet. Members of this society, in the eyes of the viewer, are
supposed to follow certain rules to reach this harmonious beauty. Differences do exist, but the function of these differences is to bring out the effect of harmony on a broader scale. As Francis Hutchenson defines the meaning of beauty: “The Figures that excite in us the Ideas of Beauty, seem to be those in which there is Uniformity amidst Variety…. what we call [the] Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the
Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety” (qtd.
in Hipple 27; original italics). Hutcheson’s metaphysical definition of the beautiful elevates this aesthetic idea from one specific object to “other animals” and even the
“inanimate world.” To see the beauty of “uniformity amidst variety” in a society requires regulation, specific types of rule to identify and hierarchically place individuals. In this sense, Burke’s second definition of the beautiful and
Hutcheson’s own both suggest a world picture of regularity. Varieties are allowed to remain stable within the social hierarchy, but in order to look beautiful, they are not allowed to endanger the hierarchy itself. Therefore, the aesthetic of the beautiful, with its implications for rule and order, in this way relates itself with the idea of health in the realms of the medical and political.
With rule and order as their common denominators, medical health in the late
eighteenth century infiltrated the realm of the political and provided effective anti-revolutionary rhetoric. Infection of the national body derived from political errantry, and to cure the disease of the country and restore health, the nation needed only one opinion on political affairs, national as well as domestic. On July 9, 1798, The Anti-Jacobin magazine published a poem named “New Morality” to inculcate and promote the importance of national health:
From mental mists to purge a Nation’s eyes;
To animate the weal, unite the wise;
To trace the deep Infection, that pervades The crowded Town, and taints the rural Shades, To mark how wide extends the mighty Waste O’er the fair realms of Science, Learning, Taste;
To drive and scatter all the brood of Lies, And chase the varying Falsehood as it flies;
The long arrears of ridicule to pay, To drag reluctant Dulness back to day;
Much yet remains.--- To you these themes belong,
Ye favour’d Sons of Virtue and of Song! (qtd. in Barfoot 1; my italics) False ideology was deemed the cause of infection of the country. The aim of the Anti-Jacobin, as the author self-righteously believed, was to “purge” the “Nation’s eyes” and “unite the wise,” to heal national disease in disparate disciplines and places now spreading from “[t]he crowded Town,” and “the rural Shades.”
In Book Eleven of The Prelude, Wordsworth describes his enthusiasm for the French Revolution as “the crisis of that strong disease” (XI. 306). This seemingly metaphoric usage, with its attempt to disarm the sting of his Jacobinical politics, involves a history of body regulation in the name of health. First finished in 1805,
The Prelude was written in a time when neuroscience took the place of Galenic humoral pathology as a legitimate medical discipline. Neurophysiologists in the late eighteenth century such as William Cullen, John Brown, and Thomas Beddoes saw the human body in the light of a nervous system instead of a humoral model.
Trained at the Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland, these medical doctors viewed life as a function of nervous energy, whose blockage or overexcitement damaged the health. Therefore, health meant the regular and balanced fluctuation of nervous energy. One popular medical theory in the late eighteenth century was John Brown’s principle of “excitement.” According to Brown’s theory, health depends on the body receiving appropriate stimuli, with too much or too little excitement causing disease:
Excitement, the effect of the exciting power, the true cause of life, is, within certain boundaries, produced in a degree proportioned to the degree of stimulus. The degree of stimulus, when moderate, produces health; in a higher degree it gives occasion to diseases of excessive stimulus; in lower degree, or ultimately low, it induces those that depend upon deficiency of stimulus or debility. (qtd. in Youngquist, Monstrosities 31)
When one is not in a healthy state, it is due to either too much or too little excitement.
To regain health, increasing or decreasing the excitement is the cure, according to Brown. This principle of moderate stimulus envisions a regulated body, a body that avoids deviation from the norm of health or any immoderate behaviors.52
Underlying the distinction between health and illness is its moral implication. This tendency of medical discourse to relate health with morality in the late eighteenth century functions as a “governmental restriction on behavior and activities,” relating personal health with moral health in the way that “the health of the body politic is…
threatened by infectious immoralities, and diseased ideologies” (Wallen 6).
52 Ironically, John Brown became a notorious drunkard in his later years.
The propagation of theories of health in medicine coincided with the time when the healthy mind was regulated by politics. “In the years following the French Revolution,” as G. C. Grinnell points out, “the rhetoric of health or sickness” became
“a predominant means of policing the social and political unrest in Britain” (On Hypochondria 12). Neurophysiology provided politics with the medical terms and knowledge to portray a picture of the abnormal mind, through which are regulated the possible disorders of any unhealthy body politic and political deviance. In the battle against the pro-revolutionaries and the domestic reformers in the 1790s pamphlet war, the William Pitt campaign usually diagnosed the French enthusiasts with excessive imagination and passion, which were detrimental to the health of the body politic. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke repudiates the
“metaphysical abstraction” of the theory of liberty, which allowed that only a
“madman” would wish to escape “from the protecting restraint” of rules based on habits (7). For Burke, a political system based on imagination rather than custom and habit only results in political upheaval, as in France, because “the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men” always end in “an ignoble oligarchy formed of coteries of rootless men” (190; 223). Passions had to be
restrained, and the imagination had to be confined. When “reason being overborn by the fervor of the passions,” and “an imagination inflamed with an idea of advancing God’s glory,” argues William Fox in his Thoughts on the Death of the King of France written after Louis XVI’s execution, it is always “productive of no less dreadful consequences” (155). Likewise, George Canning (founder of The Anti-Jacobin) denounced the “new Theory of Government” as “false, visionary, and impracticable,”
totally “inconsistent with the nature of man, and with the fame of civil society”
(209-210). All these anti-revolutionary discourses had as critical target “the troubled Mind” that blindly adored the “airy Vision” (Ann Yearsley, “Reflections” 174). This
pathology of mind, from the perspective of the anti-revolutionaries, derived from an excessive passion (Brunonian “excitement”) that led the imagination astray.
Contemporary medicine identified this mental problem as “hypochondria.” In Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), it was an aspect of melancholy (“Hypochondriacal Melancholy”), a disease related to an excess of black bile. In the eighteenth century, however, hypochondria became an official term embracing the concept of melancholy. As G. J. Barker-Benfield points out, “‘Hypochondriasis’ was the eighteenth century’s version of the ancient ‘melancholy’ and the ancestor of modern ‘neurosis’” (25). After neurophysiology replaced Galenism in the early eighteenth century, hypochondria was considered a problem of the nervous system, usually deriving from delicate nerves. In the neurophysiological pattern, the major function of the nerves was to receive sense data from outer stimulation; therefore, delicate nerves suggested a refined sensibility. “By the common eighteenth-century conception of sensibility,” Daniel Sanjiv Roberts observed, “the more refined or civilized a person was, the more likely he or she was to be affected by the sufferings of others” (122).53 Hypochondria in the early eighteenth century, therefore, became a fashionable disease, in its cultural meaning referring to a refined sensibility and a powerful imagination. Whether locating the pathological area in the spleen or stomach, contemporary neurophysiologists believed that the fabricated nerves were pre-requisite for the animal spirit to be extraordinarily transmitted to the brain where it would cause hallucinations.
In Bernard Mandeville’s Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711), wealth and leisure are viewed as two important factors resulting in
53 In his Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals, Robert Whytt hypothesizes the
“sentient principle”: “Nerves are endued with feeling, and … there is a general sympathy which prevails through the whole system; so there is a particular and very remarkable consent between various parts of the body” (qtd. in Steven Bruhm, 11).
hypochondria, businessmen and scholars being seen as the major sufferers of
hypochondria. Hypochondria was also called “the Disease of the Learned,” because the sufferers “continually fatigue their Heads with intense Thought and Study, whilst they neglect to give the other parts of their Bodies the Exercise they require” (qtd. in Barker-Benfield 25). Following Mandeville, George Cheyne, in The English Malady (1733), identifies hypochondria along with melancholia as a class-specific disease that beset the English aristocracy. Because of their overuse of mind and lack of exercise, aristocrats and scholars were believed to be the major sufferers of hypochondria. In the second-half of the eighteenth century, hypochondria “became increasingly
characteristic of the mercantile classes” and “a disease of affluence and intellectual refinement” (Grinnell, “Thomas Beddoes” 226). After the French Revolution, hypochondria seemed to be a suspicious disease connoting political dissent. In their efforts to normalize the body, both medicine and politics found similarities between a hypochondriac and a political dissenter: they both shared the symptoms of an
abnormal sensibility and imagination. Nevertheless, this boundary between medicine and politics was never really crossed: the political dissenters were not denunciated as sufferers of hypochondria nor were the hypochondriacs charged with being political deviants. Even so, hypochondria provided the political dissenters with medical justification for their political deviance.
The distance held between the politicized imagination and medicalized
imagination made possible James Currie’s vindication of Robert Burns. In his Works of Robert Burns (1800), Currie portrays Burns as an innocent victim of hypochondria rather than a French enthusiast. Receiving his medical training in Edinburgh, Currie had adequate knowledge of hypochondria to play down any possible charges against Burns’s political stance and shelter Burns’s embarrassing history under the protection of his medical diagnosis. As Leith Davis points out:
he [James Currie] shows Burns’s politics as a kind of national prejudice which is associated with a specific disease, hypochondriasis…. It is this hybrid disease of the emotions and of the body which, according to Currie, eventually causes Burns’s early demise and which… becomes an appropriate means of deflecting the threat of Burns’s undesirable political notions. (49) Associating Burns’s political notions with hypochondria, James Currie grasped the ulterior meaning of hypochondria in England after the French Revolution.54 In his explanation of the popularity of hypochondria, Esther Fischer-Homberger noted two interrelated meanings: first, the sufferers believed they partook of civilized culture because hypochondria was considered typical of scholars and might indicate the victim’s intelligence and learnedness. Second, sufferers of hypochondria could use their illness to explain away their failings because hypochondria, with its protean nature, could be indicated by the widest variety of symptoms (qtd. in Potter 8).
The discipline of health, either in medicine or in politics finds its aesthetic counterpart in Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1800). At the beginning of the “Preface,” Wordsworth explains the subject matter of this preface: “it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved” (Prose I, 120). Though the aim of poetry is to give the reader pleasure, Wordsworth believes that too much pleasure would pose a threat to their health.
the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants…. For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost
54 It may not be a coincidence that many pro-revolutionaries in this period (before 1793) were sufferers of hypochondria: Robert Southey, Mary Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, etc.
savage torpor…. The invaluable works of our elder writers… are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. (Prose I, 128)
In his denouncement of this “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” (129), Wordsworth envisages the healthy effect that poetry has “to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure” (146). While “gross and violent stimulants” express the same idea of the political “fervor of the passions,” the balanced pleasure echoes John Brown’s principle of “excitement.”55 Similar to the medical/political discourses after the French Revolution, the aim of the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads was to correct the sick body, both the personal body and the
body-politic. Seen in this light, the famous “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” with “its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (148) is not just an individual poet’s enchanting experience of poetry but a manifestation of health.
With Robert Burns in mind, Wordsworth in Resolution and Independence resents that “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness” (Poems I, 553). Ross Woodman points out that “[t]he
‘madness’ that Wordsworth feared as psychosis, having had a first-hand experience of it, he also defended as divine, the difference between them becoming difficult to distinguish, so that the latter appeared to contain the former as the spectral form of it”
(112). Living in a time when both genius and madness were problematized,56 Wordsworth separated himself from this spectral form in his appeal to “a healthful state of association” or lively imagination in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, contrasting his natural sensibility with Burns’s diseased sensibility.
55 Paul Youngquist suggests that “the word ‘excitement’ ties Wordsworth’s aesthetics directly to Brown’s physiology” (Lyrical 157).
56 “In the 1790s Edmund Burke used his political aesthetics to argue that the spurious ‘genius’ of natural philosophers had fomented subversion through intellectual conspiracy” (Schaffer, “Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy.” 84).
The dichotomy of sensibility and reason held in balance in Wordsworth’s definition of poetry acquires its importance in literary history. As Åke Bergvall suggests, “the period Wordsworth wishes to bypass is the immediately preceding century, distinguished by a combination of cold reason and ‘frantic’ and ‘sickly’
emotionalism” (17). In eighteenth century theory, poetry had its origin in passion.
As Hugh Blair makes clear in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), poetry
in its ancient original condition, was perhaps more vigorous than it is in its modern state. It included then, the whole burst of the human mind; the whole exertion of its imaginative faculties. It spoke then the language of passion, and no other; for to passion it owed its birth. Prompted and inspired by objects which to him seemed great, by events which interested his country or his friends, the early bard arose and sung. (qtd. in The Poems I, 113)
However, the political undertone of Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” stops short of waywardly emotional expression. Unharnessed by reason, feeling would degrade to the “savage” and “sick”; on the other hand, reason misused would not result in good poetry. The balance kept between the two faculties is where social/medical health resides. David Simpson identifies the two
contemporary political theories at work behind Wordsworth’s definition of poetry.
In the “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” informed by thinking “long and deep,” “[c]ustomary habit and Rousseauvian (Jacobin) sensibility are here yoked together,” as Wordsworth “attempts a synthesis of the otherwise antagonistic
principles of Burke and Paine” (Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory, 152-53).
Although Wordsworth promoted the balance between feeling and reason, this distinction is not without the separation of the primary from the secondary. Passion,
before being expressed, must undergo thinking “long and deep.” It is not to be immediately expressed, but held in reserve until the power of the mind matures enough to give voice to it. In other words, it is an incubated representation of passion. Therefore, reason has its privileged place in poetry. The immaterial mind and material body still function as hierarchical distinctions. As Martin Wallen points out, the “discriminating powers” Wordsworth advocates to distinguish good poetry from the bad
belong to the mind and raise the person above the appetites. With this tension between mind and appetites, we get the oppositional extremes of the ethical hierarchy. Appetites lie at the low end, with their need for hourly gratification--- immediate and therefore unsustainable. Undirected by higher faculties, appetites steer a person to ephemera, which are more readily
available than the joy found by the mind. So we have the contrast between superficial stimulation associated with physical hunger and the deeper satisfaction found by the mind, and which is non-physical. (21)
Tranquility is a mental state that leads to self-reflection, reasoning, yet under the surveillance of reason the passion of feeling deriving from sensibility may also erupt.
For Coleridge, passions aroused by direct bodily encounter, must be encapsulated in masculine Reason, for it is this dichotomy of male reason and female sensibility
For Coleridge, passions aroused by direct bodily encounter, must be encapsulated in masculine Reason, for it is this dichotomy of male reason and female sensibility