Flesh in the Age of Reason (106 page)

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Swift is here playing philologically on the etymology of inspiration:
spiro
: I breathe.

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Some are Sterne’s inventions, some of the foreigners having obscenely comic names (an unconscious shaft against Walter). Thus Coglionissimo means Bigbollocked, and Hafen Slawken-bergius means Shithouse Shitheap.

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Ossian, of course, turned out to be a forgery.

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Watson is an interesting figure. He was perhaps the most liberal of the bench of bishops in the 1790s, one of the very few who felt at all sympathetic to the French Revolution. But he was also a notorious placeman and pluralist, and his writings would readily communicate to Blake the complacency of rationalist divines.

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Blake made much of the tension (usually a creative one) between the male and the female principles. In paradise man was originally one, that is, androgynous. Then Eve was created. Blake had a vision that the gendered self would finally be reunited.

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The book originated with Lord Monboddo’s positive belief that the orang-utan was not an ape but a variety of the human species, and that its lack of speech was incidental. Peacock’s idea was that this would furnish a central character who should be introduced to polite society, attend the opera, receive a baronetcy, be elected for a pocket-borough and take his seat in the House of Commons.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, was a Scottish judge, who put forward, as original, the views of Rousseau, which he expounded with no sense of the need for experiment or of the value of evidence. He was serious, confused and gullible, and occasionally, by pure chance, one of his absurdities came near to being the truth. Peacock delighted in him and handled him most tenderly, with his tongue just perceptibly in his cheek. This tenderness did not extend to the Tories. The Napoleonic wars had been won; the British people were impoverished, and the Government was using victory to stamp out liberty at home and abroad, muzzling freedom of speech and the liberty of the press. Its power was based on a mockery of the parliamentary representation and functioned partly by widespread bribery and corruption.

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Both of these spelt out a doctrine of progressive salvation which was congenial to the Victorians. It was a kind of backdoor purgatory.