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Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Lawrence E. Klein
Lawrence E. Klein
Affiliation:
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
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Extract

In the early eighteenth century, the language of politeness became a major fixture of English discourse. Centring on the term ‘politeness’ and consisting of a vocabulary of key words (such as ‘refinement’, ‘manners’, ‘character’, ‘breeding’, and ‘civility’) and a range of qualifying attributes (‘free’, ‘easy’, ‘natural’, ‘graceful’, and many others), the language was used to make a wide range of objects intelligible. Though the word ‘polite’ had been in the English language from at least the fifteenth century, denoting the state of being polished or neat in quite literal and concrete ways, the term entered on its significant career only in the mid-seventeenth century, when it began to convey the meanings of studied social behaviour of the sort inspired by and associated with princely courts. However, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ‘politeness’ grew to cover a range of meanings, considerably freed from the initial association with courts. Several broad categories of usage of the term ‘polite’ are indicative: as a behavioural and moral standard for members of an elite (e.g. ‘polite gentlemen’, ‘polite ladies’, ‘polite society’, ‘polite conversation’); as an aesthetic standard for many kinds of human artifacts and products (e.g. ‘polite arts’, ‘polite towns’, ‘polite learning’, ‘polite buildings’); and as a way of generalizing about and characterizing society and culture (‘polite age’, ‘polite nation’, ‘polite people’). In the latter usage, ‘politeness’ was frequently deployed retrospectively as an attribute of classical civilizations. ‘Politeness’ helped recast the renaissance model of history, in which modernity was separated from its true ancestor, the ancient world, by the vast dark gulf of the middle ages: the ‘politest’ nations were ancient Greece and ancient Rome; the ‘politest’ ages, the spells of Hellenic and Roman creativity.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 1989 , pp. 583 - 605
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 The following paragraph summarizes portions of Klein, Lawrence, ‘The third earl of Shaftesbury and the progress of politeness’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, XVIII (1984–1985), 186–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Saint-Evremond, widely translated in pirated editions, perhaps gave a lead to this sort of conflation, pointing out that ‘every one knows that Greece has given to the World, the greatest Philosophers, and the greatest Legislators: And one cannot deny, but that other Nations have taken from thence all the Politeness they have had’ (de Saint Denis, Charles de Marguetel, de Saint-Evremond, sieur, Miscellaneous essays [London, 1692–1694], p. 213Google Scholar). Other instances include: Gildon, Charles, ‘An essay on the art, rise and progress of the stage’, in The works of Mr. William Shakespear, Volume the seventh (London, 1710), pp. xxi–xxiiGoogle Scholar; Addison, Joseph, The Tatler, No. 122 (19 09 1709/1710)Google Scholar; Addison, Joseph, A discourse on antient and modern learning (London, 1734), p. 3Google Scholar.

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9 We are used to thinking of the peculiarities of this era's political discourse in terms of the relations between virtue and commerce, between the civic tradition and the recognition of economic and social change. (Pocock, Machiavellian moment, ch. 13 and 14; Virtue, commerce and history: essays on political thought and history, chiefly in the eighteenth century [Cambridge, 1985], pp. 230 ffGoogle Scholar.) It is incontestable that a neo-Harringtonian line, ultimately of Machiavellian inspiration, was alive and well in the 1690s and that a major component of the political discourse of the era concerned itself with questions of the character of wealth and its implications for politics. However, the theme here, the politics of culture, is only tangentially related to matters of commerce. Later indeed the Scots were to make much of the connexions between commerce and politeness. However, that link is only weakly implicit in the third earl of Shaftesbury, the principal subject here.

10 Worden, A. B., introduction to Ludlow, Edmund, A voyce from the watch tower, part five: 1660–1662, Camden Fourth Series, 21 (1978), 39–46Google Scholar; Robbins, Caroline, The eighteenth-century commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 129–30 and also 56, 88–91, 128, 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holmes, Geoffrey, British politics in the age of Anne (London, 1967), p. 221Google Scholar; Plumb, J. H., The growth of political stability in England, 1675–1725 (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 138nCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Aside from these brief discussions, there is little work on Shaftesbury's writing from the perspective of the history of social or political; thought. Shaftesbury scholarship has dwelled on his philosophical or literary contributions (e.g. Grean, Stanley, Shaftesbury's philosophy of religion and ethics (Athens, Ohio, 1967)Google Scholar, for the first; Brett, R. L., The third earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1951)Google Scholar, for the second). A sound guide to the career is now available in Voitle, Robert, The third earl of Shaftesbury 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, 1984)Google Scholar.

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34 Sidney, , Discourses, p. 116Google Scholar. In the introduction to the translation of Hotman's, Franco-Gallia (1721)Google Scholar, Molesworth traced the growth of wealth and population to the guarantees of liberty and property (p. XV).

35 Wellek, Rene, The rise of English literary history (Chapel Hill, 1941), pp. 32–4, 58–9Google Scholar. Meehan's, MichaelLiberty and poetics in eighteenth-century England (London, 1986)Google Scholar is devoted to exploring this theme, which is also implicit throughout Weinbrot's, HowardAugustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar.

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37 On luxury, see Sekora, John, Luxury: the concept in western thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977–1938)Google Scholar.

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42 Ibid. p. 204.

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45 Ibid. p. 196.

46 Moyle's, argument against standing armies turned in part on Roman example, in which ‘luxury’ sapped ‘the strict rule and discipline of freedom’ creating an entrance for standing armies and the loss of liberty (‘An argument, shewing that a standing army is inconsistent with a free government…’, in Select collection of tracts, p. 237)Google Scholar. As Neville had earlier pointed out, if the Romans, had wanted to preserve their virtue, they would have had to preserve their poverty (Plato redivivus, p. 57)Google Scholar. Similarly, Molesworth elicited both ‘Greeks and Romans’ as exemplary in the ‘Conservation or Recovery of the publick Liberty’ and in the development of educational forms to cultivate the appropriate correlative manners(Account of Denmark, sigs. b2v–b4v).

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55 Ibid. pp. 236–7.

56 Ibid. p. 239.

57 Ibid.

58 Shaftesbury to Michael Ainsworth, 3 Dec. 1709, London, Public Record Office (P.R.O.), Shaftesbury papers, 30/24/20/143; ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, in Characteristicks, III, 138, 152, 231.

59 ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 139.

60 ‘Soliloquy’, I, 250.

61 Ibid.

62 ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 138.

63 ‘Soliloquy’, I, 247–8.

64 Ibid. I, 246–7.

65 Ibid. I, 220, 251, 252n, 271.

66 ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 141.

67 ‘Soliloquy’, I, 216–17, 222–3.

68 Ibid. pp. 215–16.

69 ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 150–1.

70 ‘Sensus Communis’, I, 64–5.

71 Recognizing the importance of Shaftesbury's choice of politeness opens up other rich veins in Shaftesbury's writing. Politeness is the touchstone of his ethics, though most commentators have not noticed this. Cf. the quintessentially Shaftesburian statement: ‘To philosophize, in a just Signification, is but To Carry Good-breeding a step higher’ (‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 161).

72 Shaftesbury to [Somers], 30 Mar. 1711, P.R.O. 30/24/22/4, fos. 153–6.