our lives in this posture or that will be gone in two hundred years as surely as the Holy Roman Empire or Byzantium.
Europe’s security was threatened by Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The removal of that threat in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries paved the way for a comparatively halcyon period for Europe (already prospering from its scientific discoveries and its ventures in the New World or round the globe) which we call the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.
The Ottoman Empire was once as mighty as China. In July 1683, Ottoman armies stood at the gates of Vienna, and Christendom itself was besieged. After sustained fighting, the Turks retreated, leaving behind colossal hordes of treasure, as well as piles of coffee which, disseminated through coffee houses, helped to make Europe a more civilised place. From this battle dates the rise to power of the Habsburg Empire.
A distinguished part in the battle for Vienna was taken by Prince Eugène of Savoy, a great general who was later to play a larger and more decisive role in the fight for the integrity of Europe.
If you sail down the Danube from Vienna, you come eventually to a place where the river flows round a dramatic outcrop of rock. Standing on top of this rock is a great fortress with green roofs. You can enter the fortress nowadays and eat an excellent meal in its chambers. This is Petrovaradin; before the country became Jugoslavia, these lands belonged to Austria, and the fortress was Peterwardein, but wienerschnitzel has given way to razniči and hajdučki čevap. Here, in 1716, Eugéne and his army defeated a great Turkish force, killing six thousand of them. The spoils were enormous, and enriched the European imagination as well as the pockets of Eugène’s men. Eugène himself retained the Grand Vizier’s tent, which was sumptuously decorated in gold and contained many apartments; it was so large that five hundred men were required to pitch it.
Sail a little farther down the Danube. Where it meets its tributary, the Sava, Belgrade stands, set in a great curve of the river, now a modern capital, once an Ottoman fortress. There, almost exactly a year after his victory at Peterwardein, Eugène of Savoy inflicted another defeat on the Ottoman Power.
There is never security without arms. Following the Turkish defeat, Belgrade itself, Hungary, sections of Bosnia and Serbia became part of the Habsburg domains, and the menace to western Europe was dispersed. Over the mounds of corpses and coffee, the way for the enormous progress of the eighteenth century was open – though of course the European states still squabbled amongst themselves.
The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason sought for balance, the kind of balance enshrined in the great houses of the period, with East wing balanced against West, in the rapid advance of justice and civil order, in the antitheses of Johnsonian prose, as well as in the paradoxes and heroic couplets of Pope’s poetry. Humanism progressed, science progressed, all arts elaborated themselves – not least in music, where the pale counterpoint of Domenico Scarlatti was transformed into the complex statements of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. And the industrial revolution gathered in a tide which still floods round the remotest shores of the world.
There now appears something slightly one-dimensional about the world of the Enlightenment, so greatly has social modification worked since then. In its peaceableness, its reasonableness, the Enlightenment lacks our painful perspectives on human nature. We can no more resurrect its values than read the poems of Ossian. Captain Cook was allowed to sail where he would in time of war, unmolested by his enemies, who recognised the value of his scientific research. G.B.Tiepolo painted the Queen of the Nile in High Renaissance costume, being concerned not with anachronism but with what looked best. In the eighteenth century you dressed up for science, as you did to have your portrait painted.
It is less with Tiepolo than Cook that we are concerned, although art and scientific discovery are closely linked during this period.
Tiepolo, luminary of a maritime republic, like Turkey in eclipse, died at virtually the same time as Cook was setting up his observatory in Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. The old painter’s day was done, his style superseded by the classicism of Mengs. James Cook also represented a new style. His painters, under Sir Joshua Banks, had no truck with queens or goddesses; they were trained to scientific observation. Cook himself was an excellent cartographer, and carried on his voyages new-style theodolites and accurate chronometers to chart his way.
Nor was it only in instrumentation, in the gadgetry, that things were changing. Other mariners, such as Samuel Wallis, had sailed the Pacific before Cook, and sought the mysterious Southern Continent; but they had been too ill on reaching those far waters to carry out their proper duties. Scurvy and dysentery claimed their crews. Cook observed proper diet, proper hygiene, and his crews stayed fit.
The South Seas acted as counterbalance to what enlightened Europeans experienced as the smallness of Christendom. Eighteenth-century security bred boredom. A new world was needed. In fact, what was eventually discovered was unsought: new dimensions of time, evolution, Romanticism and the complex of ideas which dominate our own times, whether we realise it or not.
We have a sense of the future very clear in our age, but all ages have their infancies in previous ones. Romanticism, evolutionary theories, speculations on time, were none of them new to the nineteenth or even the eighteenth century. While the bells of Rome and every other European capital were ringing for the relief of Vienna and the defeat of the Turks, Thomas Burnet in Cambridge was translating into English his Telluris Theoria Sacra; it was published in 1684 as The Sacred Theory of the Earth. In a sonorous style which imitates Sir Thomas Browne, Burnet reveals his cosmological theory, which states that, before Creation, Earth was perfectly smooth like an egg until such time as it hatched and released a universal Flood. Burnet remarks, in a striking phrase, that we ‘have still the broken materials of that first world, and walk upon its ruins’.
Despite his egg theory, Burnet was no fool, and believed that since we had been endowed with Reason, we should exercise it to discover and understand the world in which we found ourselves. This is the doctrine of the Age of Reason.
Burnet continues, ‘The greatest objects in Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold … Whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration.’ Perfect Romantic doctrine, looking forward to Burke – and back to Lord Bacon: ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’
The great philosophers of the time, Berkeley in particular, were more effectively working changes in perception. But new philosophies filter only slowly through the general populace; it was the voyages of men like Cook in undiscovered places which immediately caught the public imagination.
The motives behind the exploration of those distant regions were mixed, as man’s motives generally are, as the motives for the Apollo flights to the Moon in the sixties were. Unlike the discovery and opening up of the North American continent, the story of the South Seas must remind us of our own generation’s experience of space travel – not least in a remark Cook makes in one of his letters; in his reference to his ‘ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go’, even the phraseology forges an unsought parallel between the Endeavour and the starship Enterprise.
To an eighteenth-century man, that distant part of the globe was the equivalent of a new planet, a watery planet like Perelandra. In some respects very like Perelandra; for, as in C. S. Lewis’s novel the inhabitants of Venus act out a religious drama, an allegory, so the inhabitants of the South Pacific served to act out some of the preoccupations of eighteenth-century man. Were they models of what the Ancient Greeks had been, enlightened people in a state of grace with nature; were they corrupt savages in need of a missionary; or were they sinless, Adams and Eves before the Fall, inhabitants of multitudinous Edens?
More than one construction can generally be made from one set of facts. Just as SF writers become accustomed to hearing from uninformed reviewers that they are ‘new Wellses’ or ‘latter-day Vernes’, so Europeans, striving to focus on the essential qualities of newly discovered races, claimed that they were ‘what the ancient Britons were before