Matthew Head

Sovereign Feminine


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the emergence of capitalism and consumption, sought to reinstate luxury as both civilized and civilizing. According to earlier civic- humanist rhetoric, luxury erodes manliness, weakens the body politic, and causes decline into decadence. Acknowledging that some Latin authors attributed the fall of the Roman republic to the influx of “Asiatic luxury,” Hume critically reviewed the evidence and concluded that uncontrolled territorial expansion and poor government were more likely causes of the loss of (some version of) democracy in Rome.16 Situating luxury not in superfluous goods and leisure but in the elevated pleasures they afford, Hume redefined it as a “great refinement in the gratification of the senses.”17 As such, luxury was morally neutral prior to its use toward good or bad ends: “Any degree of it may be innocent or blameable.”18 At the heart of Hume’s argument was the contention that luxury, even as private pleasure, could serve the collective good and thus, implicitly, fulfill the civic humanist requirement of public virtue. It could do so because it was a stimulant to personal as well as economic growth, at once a school for private manners and a means by which the laboring poor are enriched through manufacture and trade.

      Part of the power of Hume’s account of luxury was the flexibility he granted the term to stand, metonymically, for other key words of the period—not only such words as pleasure and virtue but also art, woman, and liberty. If luxury consists in “great refinement in the gratification of the senses” it is at home in artistic practices and the discourse of aesthetics. If luxury is pursued in leisure and in private, if it suspends (even as it enjoys the fruits of) trade and the professions, it exists in the kind of purposeless and polite realm enjoyed, presumably, by women. (Indeed, “woman” in Hume is herself luxurious insofar as she is leisured and well read.) And if luxury provides the male citizen with necessary reenergizing recuperation, if it stimulates the production of consumer commodities, increases the flow of wealth, and empowers the serf to trade in goods and labor, it emerges as something close in meaning to national liberty: “The liberties of England, so far from decaying since the improvements in the arts [that is, manufacture as well as the fine arts], have never flourished so much as during that period [of commerce actuated by aspirations to luxury].”19

      Burney was already using Hume’s arguments in the preface to his first tour (France and Italy). Indeed, with a mission to make space for music, and writing about it, in the luxurious world, he not only described it as “a charming resource, in an idle hour, to the rich and luxurious part of the world” but made a detailed claim for music as a form of public virtue. In so doing he retraced the movement from private pleasure to public virtue at stake in the luxury debate. Playing wittily against the fabled power of ancient music, he emphasized the “assistance” music gives “to open the purses of the affluent for the support of the distressed.” In the most explicit of his arguments for music as a moral force, a means of reform and refinement, he highlighted charitable uses in London, detailing benefit concerts for orphans, the maternity hospital in Brownlow Street, the Lock Hospital (where syphilis was treated), and the Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians and Their Families.20

      Not everyone was convinced by Burney’s arguments, or by the man himself. A contemporary satire of Burney’s Tours by one Joel Collier (the pseudonym of John Bicknell) seized on the comic potential of Burney’s modish critical framework, an indication of how contentious Burney’s framework could still appear in the 1770s. Bicknell’s Musical Travels through England (1774) lampooned Burney’s use of music and femininity as measures of national refinement and progress. Marshaling every possible slur on Burney’s manliness, the parody engineered the traveling musician’s castration by a cuckolded barber, a turn of events that the musicological capon embraces, since he had long doubted “whether the characters of a man and a musician were at all compatible.”21 The parody, though gleefully spilling over into the absurd, involves a severe rejoinder from a civic-humanist position, so pointed that the rejoinder itself did not escape caricature. In response to Burney’s contentions that music serves the public good, and that his project is of national interest, Bicknell in his preface extolled a ludicrous initiative in which a hundred orphans are to be trained to become “Doctors, and Doctoresses of music” at public expense, despite some prejudiced reservations that training in the areas of agriculture or navigation would be of greater benefit to the students and the nation.22 Burney’s own manliness (that key term of civic-humanist value) is the next target. At the start of his travels, an organist (Burney’s representative in the text) abandons his family to beg his way around the north of England under the less than exalted Italian name Collioni (colloquially, “bollocks”). Utterly lacking in manly responsibility, he leaves his family destitute and imposes himself on the reluctant hospitality of a series of musical madmen—and their wives and daughters. The notion of music as a refining force finds a grotesque counterpoint near the end of Bicknell’s Musical Tours when the reader finds Collioni in the moist embrace of a C.P.E. Bach surrogate, one Signor Manselli. Manselli’s improvisations on the fiddle, accompanied by “harmonious” farts, burps, hiccups, coughs, sneezes, squeaks, and whistles, give both the performer and his visitor hope that Manselli might yet “polish this brutal nation.”23 The pains of castration cannot match those inflicted by this erudite lampoon of Burney’s tropes.

      THE REFORM OF MALE MANNERS

      The “indexical theory” formalized for historical writing a widespread—even foundational—trope of the period, according to which leisured, educated women acted as a refining force within what Hume in his “Of Essay Writing” called the “conversable realm.”24 Hume’s conversable realm presumably included coffee-houses, private parties, theaters, concerts, clubs, societies, academies, and salons as contexts for exchange, but, employing a broad brush, he styled it the “republic of letters.” That republican metaphor figured the conversable realm as a relatively free zone for exchange in which protocols of rank were partly and temporarily set aside in the interests of rationality, wit, and pleasure. But within the same paragraph from “Of Essay Writing” Hume also characterized this republic as an empire governed by a female monarch. Specifically, he installed “women of sense and education” as “sovereigns of the empire of conversation” and claimed to address them in his published work “with reverence.” The mixed political metaphors do not necessarily reveal a text spinning out of authorial control. They enabled Hume to characterize the conversable realm as being at once relatively free and tightly organized, a place in which despotism (here another name for sovereignty) is softened by female embodiment and acts less as a source of severe legislation than as a template for emulation. The political system enacted, in miniature, in the salon is what Hume called “civilised monarchy”—his description of the then current British system of monarchic despotism reformed by (some degree of) democratic government and Enlightenment legal reform.25 Male gallantry toward women resembles that “inclination to please superiors” that characterizes the gentle hierarchy of “civilised monarchy [in which] there is a long train of dependence from the prince to the peasant, which is not great enough to render property precarious, or depress the minds of the people; but is sufficient to beget in every one an inclination to please his superiors, and to form himself upon those models which are most acceptable to people of condition and education.”26 A context for intellectual exchange, undoubtedly, Hume’s vision of salon culture also rehearsed deference and emulation as responses to inequality. Indeed, the desire to please united the politics and literary production of the salon.

      Hume bestowed the sovereign’s crown on women because they are “better judges of all polite writing than men of the same degree of understanding.” This superior critical faculty, however, involves and valorizes conventional notions of female weakness and closeness to nature. Women, Hume asserted, possess more “delicacy of taste” and a greater sensitivity, all the more authentic for being “unguided by rules” (that is, by knowledge of literary-critical theory). These characteristics are not valued in isolation but through their transformative power over men, who, without female influence, pursue knowledge in the dark, dank cell of isolated rumination, ensnared in pedantry, pursuing intellectual chimeras.27 Of the instrumental function of women Hume observed that “both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace.” Elsewhere he spelled things out: “What better school for manners than the company of virtuous women, where the mutual