This brings us to another class of words—appropriate enough to the century which produced Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge—describing external things not objectively, from their own point of view, but purely by the effects which they produce on human beings, such, for instance, as affecting, amusing, boring, charming, diverting, entertaining, enthralling, entrancing, exciting, fascinating, interesting, and pathetic in its modern sense, none of which are found before the seventeenth and only a few before the eighteenth century. These adjectives can be distinguished sharply—indeed they are in a sense the very opposite of those older words, which can also be said, though less accurately, to describe external objects “from the human point of view”. Thus, when a Roman spoke of events as auspicious or sinister, or when some natural object was said in the Middle Ages to be baleful, or benign, or malign, a herb to possess such and such a virtue, an eye to be evil, or the bones of a saint to be holy, or even, probably, when Gower wrote:
The day was merry and fair enough,
it is true that these things were described from the human point of view, but the activity was felt to emanate from the object itself. When we speak of an object or an event as amusing, on the contrary, we know that the process indicated by the word amuse takes place within ourselves; and this is none the less obvious because some of the adjectives recorded above, such as charming, enchanting, and fascinating, are the present participles of verbs which had implied genuine, occult activity.
The change is an important one; it is a reverberation into wider and wider circles of the scholastic progress from Realism to Nominalism, and inside the walls of the Church we can perceive the same movement going on at the Reformation in the Protestant and Dissenting tendency to abandon belief in the Real Presence. Perhaps the somersault was turned most neatly by the old Aristotelean word subjective, which developed in the seventeenth century from its former meaning of ‘existing in itself’ to the modern one of ‘existing in human consciousness’. Objective made a similar move in the opposite direction. When using such words as “progress” and “develop” in this connection, however, we must remember that the semantic histories of words merely inform us of changes which have actually occurred in a large number of minds or “outlooks”. They tell us of what is earlier and what is later, but not of truth and error. In this direction all that a knowledge of them can do is to equip us a little better for forming opinions of our own.
At the same time we find a few words to denote the kind of people who are easily “affected” in this way. Susceptible is first found in Clarendon, and in the eighteenth century the words sensible and sensibility acquire their special sense of ‘easily affected’ or ‘having the emotions easily aroused’; and as this kind of experience grows more familiar, clearer heads become conscious of it, and the new words sentiment and sentimental appear. Sentimental, which was first used in the title of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, published in 1768, was found so convenient that the French language borrowed and the German translated it. No doubt these new notions of ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentimentality,’ of a variety of emotions lying dormant in the bosom and waiting eagerly to be called forth, combined with the recently developed interest in character to produce the curious personality, which acquired its modern meaning a few years later and has gone on increasing in popularity ever since.
It is impossible in the short space that is left to us to do justice to that extraordinary interlude in England’s literary and social history—the eighteenth century. The age of powder and platitudes, of charmers with automatically heaving bosoms, ogling and simpering at their corseted swains; the age of ugly shaven heads secretly perspiring under fashionable periwigs; the age when country gentlemen erected artificial “ruins” at the bottom of their gardens, and serious poets could hardly mention the sea without adding a reference to the finny drove—this age seems to us now to have faded away as suddenly and inexplicably as it arose, leaving only the faintest traces upon our language. Those half-hidden vestiges, however—the just slightly different shades of meaning with which sundry familiar words were used a hundred and fifty years ago—sometimes seem to fascinate us by the very paradox of their proximity and elusiveness. We feel that, if we could only bring them out in some way, we might take from them the very form and pressure of the age. And so, when we come across some particularly popular word like reason in eighteenth-century literature, we are sometimes tempted to lay down the book, while imagination goes groping vainly round the impenetrable fringe of that mysterious no-man’s-land which lies between words and their meanings.
If we would seek for the genesis of the curious clockwork cosmos through which the minds and imaginations of the period seem to have moved with a measure of contentment, we should find it, perhaps, not so very far back in the past. Emotionally, the age was still dominated by a pronounced reaction against religious fanaticism—an attitude we see reflected in the changeable meaning of enthusiasm, which in Plato’s Greek meant ‘possessed by a god’. Spenser uses it in its Greek form in a good sense, but by the end of the seventeenth century we find Henry More writing: “If ever Christianity be exterminated, it will be by enthusiasm”; and even as late as 1830 a certain zealous, if dogmatic, Churchman thought it worth while to write and publish a Natural History of Enthusiasm, in which that dreadful vice, especially in its theological aspect, is castigated with much vigour. Fanatic, which had also meant ‘possessed by a god or demon,’ underwent the same change of meaning and gave birth to fanaticism about the middle of the seventeenth century. Extravagant, which had formerly meant ‘non-codified’, got its new meaning and produced extravagance. And the way in which the word Gothic was used to describe anything barbarous and uncouth reminds us of how the eighteenth century perceived barbarity and uncouthness in many places where we no longer see it—such as medieval architecture, much of which was pulled down at this time and replaced by buildings which were felt to be more “correct” and classical.
Intellectually, on the other hand, men’s minds seem to have been influenced above all things by that conception of impersonal “laws” governing the universe which, as we saw in the [last chapter], was scarcely apprehended before the previous century. Poets and philosophers alike were delighted by the perfect order in which they perceived the cosmos to be arranged. They sought everywhere for examples of this orderliness. Pope, for instance, praises Windsor Forest on the ground that it is a place:
Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d;
But, as the world, harmoniously confus’d: