Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano

Jacob Sider Jost

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2020 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sider Jost, Jacob, author.

Title: Interest and connection in the eighteenth century : Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano / Jacob Sider Jost.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020015349 (print) | LCCN 2020015350 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813945040 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813945057 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813945064 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | Interpersonal relations in literature. | Literature and society—Great Britain—History—18th century. | Interest (The English word)

Classification: LCC PR448.I55 S43 2020 (print) | LCC PR448.I55 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/005—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015349

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015350

Cover art: The Hervey Conversation Piece, William Hogarth, 1738–40. (Ickworth, Bristol Collection; acquired through the National Land Fund and transferred to the National Trust in 1956; © National Trust Images)

Reigning words are many times of such force, as to influence us considerably in our Apprehension of things.

–Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous Reflections

Whenever a word means a variety of things, the differences are not entirely distinct, for the unity of the word points to some unity, no matter how hidden, in the thing itself.

–Theodor W. Adorno, The Essay as Form

Contents

Introduction

1. The Whig Theory of Mind: Influence and Interpretation in Lord Hervey

2. The Variety of Human Wishes

3. Professor Smith

4. Interesting Narratives

Conclusion: Reigning Words and Glorious Revolutions

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

We live in interesting times. When we examine a text or work of art, we seldom ask, as the medieval scholastics did, whether it participates in the beautiful and the good. We are more likely to talk about whether or not it is interesting or reflect on what we find interesting about it. When we divide our political world into groups, we do not use the ancient Roman categories of patrician and plebeian or the early modern English categories of lords and commons; rather, we talk about class interests, special interests, and interest groups. Homer’s Greeks fought for kudos, glory, while the medieval crusaders claimed that they were following the will of God. We explain war and peace by imagining that rulers pursue their respective national interests. When we analyze, model, or predict the actions of individuals, we tend not to talk, as Plato did, about the struggle between reason and passion within the will. Instead, we postulate self-interest as the basis of human behavior. And when we give a price to have access to money, we do not follow the Bible or its medieval readers in branding the transaction with the morally pejorative title of usury. We are simply paying interest. In each of these disciplines or discourses—what we would now call aesthetics, political science, international relations, economics, and finance—interest emerges as a concept at some point between the Middle Ages and the early nineteenth century. When it does, new ways of thinking become possible.

The idiom of interest has likewise changed the way we understand romance. Consider the following two autobiographical passages, written just over seven hundred years apart by two authors whose works are preoccupied with love. The first: "At that very moment, and I speak the truth, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabit michi (Here is a god stronger than I who comes to rule over me). Dante understands the sight of Beatrice, when both she and the narrator are eight years old, in terms of divine possession and domination: the eponymous new life" of the thirteenth-century Vita Nuova begins when the god of love conquers the poet. Everything that Dante was before that moment is driven out: From that time on, Love governed my soul.¹

The philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose 2010 memoir has the more ironic title of Little Did I Know, does not see love as a break or as a new life. On the contrary, Cavell brings his full social, emotional, and intellectual self to the pursuit of love. Recalling the winter of 1963, he describes the wish to test one side of himself—an early midcareer Harvard philosopher in New York for a conference—against a side that feels reverberations of loneliness, desire, and apprehension toward Cathleen Cohen, just over half his age and halfway through her senior year at Radcliffe:

When I phoned her then from my hotel she was about to dress for a wedding rehearsal in which she was a bridesmaid and afterward have dinner with the participants. When she named the hotel in which the event was to take place, I noted that I was meeting friends for drinks at the Algonquin Hotel, which was near her destination. She agreed to my suggestion that she step up the tempo and make room to join us for half an hour on her way. It was in obvious respects a pointless plan, but the group of friends I was meeting included Jack Rawls and Rogers Albritton and Ronald Dworkin and Marshall Cohen, and I suppose I wanted a signal opportunity to have the two sides of my life, as it were, or the two imagined sides, meet on an interesting neutral field and test each other.²

Cavell brings his friends, his philosophical pursuits, and his artistic tastes (he was a gifted saxophonist, and he and his fellow philosophers ask Cohen to recommend Greenwich Village jazz venues) to the table of the Algonquin bar, while Cohen for her part is in her home city, on her way to a wedding rehearsal and dinner with friends. The neutral field where the professional-social and lonely-desiring sides of Cavell’s life meet is interesting because it occurs where Cavell’s and Cohen’s whole selves—all of their interests—can be present. It is interesting because Cavell’s episode imagines human intimacy not through a metaphor of conquest but with the mixture of involvement and prudence that is compacted in the modern idiom, first found in seventeenth-century literature, of romantic interest. When we say "I’m interested in N or N is interested in M," we posit an affective and erotic world at home over drinks at the Algonquin rather than the vital spirit of Dante’s narrator conquered by the god of love.

In examining this passage, I am not so much interested in the romantic fortunes of Cavell and Cohen as I am in the concepts and assumptions about intimate life through which Cavell recollects their encounter. I’m just kidding: that’s nonsense. I want to know how the story ends, and I hope you do too. Though it had seemed in obvious respects a pointless plan, Cavell reports that in the event the half-hour date was an inspired idea, and the pair embark a year later on a marriage that was to last over a half century, until Cavell’s death in 2018 (439). Since this is a book about interest, I am, however, interested in why contemporary scholars so often find it necessary to introduce their work by telling their readers or auditors what they (the scholars) are and are not interested in, especially when the line between interest and its absence seems to be drawn perversely or to impose a false choice. I am not so much interested in the rights and wrongs of urinating in public, as in the discursive tensions that frame this topic, announces the abstract to a 2010 article by a sociologist of the nighttime use of public space in twenty-first-century Britain.³ I think that both of those things are in fact worthy of interest and deserve consideration together: that is why I read part 1 of Gulliver’s Travels and book 2 of The Dunciad. But the author’s temptation is easy to understand: "I am interested in X" implies, on the one hand, that X is interesting. It is cognitively involving, worth knowing, a stimulating area of research. But the clause may also simply mean "X is one of my scholarly interests; X is my topic or field. I am interested in X thus compactly asserts I know something about X, and you should want to know something about it too. By the same token, I am less interested in Y than X turns what may be a defensive admission (I don’t know, or have not had time to think, about Y) into a self-favoring judgment (Y is less worth knowing about than X").

Expressions of interest and lack of interest have thus become stock formulas in academic writing because they exploit this ambiguity, and I am interested in them (they matter to me, and I hope I can make them matter to you) because they are therefore part of the much larger pattern that is the topic of this book. Because interest and its variant forms have such a wide range of meanings, including several that are fundamental axioms for modern disciplines such as economics, political science, and aesthetics, it is a powerful engine for creating not only ambiguities but other tropes that rely on the interplay of similarity and difference, including puns, analogies, and metaphors. Befitting its derivation from the Latin verb interesse, to be between or among, interest is a go-between, allowing authors to think about one realm of experience using another. When Macheath, the rakish hero of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), sings a world-weary complaint that Friendship for interest is but a loan / Which they lend out for what they can get, his pun makes a trenchant point: the way that an interest-bearing loan grows, making ever-greater claims on the unfortunate debtor, is indeed a good way of understanding the extractive pretended friendship of the self-interested thieves and informers among whom Macheath lives.⁴

The object of this book is to explicate such go-between moments, describing the intellectual and literary work that the polysemous word interest does. The history of the word as a noun dates back to the twelfth century, when one of the highwayman Macheath’s punning meanings (interest as the price of money) emerges, originally as a euphemism to evade Christian prohibitions on usury. But the efflorescence of interest into its full importance and range comes in Macheath’s own era, the long eighteenth century. This is the period when the political settlement that followed the Revolution of 1688 and the first appearance of organized political parties bring interests to the forefront of British politics, when the newly founded Bank of England and the attendant financial revolution give monetary interest unprecedented prominence in British life, when self-interest becomes an explanatory axiom for moralists from François de la Rochefoucauld (whose Maximes were translated into English by the woman of letters Aphra Behn) to Jeremy Bentham, and when literary critics and authors from Voltaire (writing in English in the 1720s) to Olaudah Equiano start calling objects and texts interesting. The association between modernity and interest is in fact part of the century’s self-conception. Thus Adam Smith, whose stadial historiography sees human societies passing through the stages of savagery, barbarism, and feudalism before reaching the modern state of commerce, argues that interesting narratives and self-interested economic behavior distinguish modern commercial nations from their more primitive predecessors, whose stories evoke wonder rather than interest and whose economies rely on hierarchical subjection. Indeed, as Bruno Latour noted a quarter century ago, the very idea of historical change and progress, the archmyth of a modernity that distinguishes itself from a premodern past, is itself modeled on the figure of a loan or deposit that is accumulating interest.⁵

Some of this terrain, particularly that related to individual benefit (self-interest) and imaginative involvement (the interesting) is already well charted. This study builds on A. O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, with its celebrated argument that European moralists paved the way for capitalism by advocating for interest as a safe alternative to passion in the eighteenth century.⁶ And when William Empson reviewed Raymond Williams’s Keywords in the New York Review of Books in the same year that Hirschman’s study appeared, 1977, he chose the word interest as his example when scrutinizing Williams’s method.⁷ Hirschman brilliantly charts the efflorescence of the word’s meanings that relate to Machiavellian reason of state, domestic political faction, and individual advantage, while Williams speculates about the relationship between interest as a legal stake or share and interest as a mental involvement. But each of these titans focuses only on a selection of the word’s meanings in the early modern period and neglect some important senses entirely.

In particular, they and more recent scholars of the long eighteenth century have written far too little about interest as the name for a relationship of patronage, obligation, or concern. This sense is distinct from the neighboring sense of interest as a name for a political grouping (the Tory or Whig, court or country interest), though this too is an important development in the period, replacing the earlier and less flexible idea of a kingdom divided into estates.⁸ Interest is not just a name for groups: it connects individuals. A client who can make a claim for assistance or protection has an interest with a patron; reciprocally, such a client is in the interest or belongs to the interest of that patron. To interest someone in you is to secure not merely their attention but their allegiance: such interests link parliamentary candidate to constituency, courtier to monarch, lover to beloved, and author to patron. This characteristically eighteenth-century usage of interest is central to the book’s first chapter, on the courtier, poet, and memoirist John, Lord Hervey, but it runs through the entire study. Such interests link Nekayah and Pekuah in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, motivate lairds and their followers in the Scottish Highlands of Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, and inform the abolitionist tactics of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.

For a distinguished sequence of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers—Martin Heidegger, Susan Sontag, Sianne Ngai—the merely interesting names a relationship of bloodless, cerebral engagement: Interesting is the sort of thing that can freely be regarded as indifferent the next moment.⁹ This usage emerges at the end of the period under consideration here; looms large early nineteenth-century German criticism, particularly in Friedrich Schlegel; and is familiar to every student or scholar who has used the judgment I thought it was interesting to damn with faint praise or abdicate critical responsibility.¹⁰ This study is deeply indebted to Ngai’s brilliant study Our Aesthetic Categories, in particular to her ability—reminiscent of Smith as well as her more explicit influence, Marx—to explicate aesthetics in terms of economics and vice versa. But her merely interesting postdates the period I discuss. In the eighteenth century, Locke and others used indifferency to name an affectless, disconnected stance toward facts or arguments.¹¹ Interesting, in contrast, describes a far warmer affect, combining mental and imaginative engagement with passionate involvement. An early use of this affective sense appears in John Dryden’s Heads of an Answer to Rymer, a work of theatrical poetics first drafted in 1677: All the Passions in their turns are to be set in a Ferment; as Joy, Anger, Love, Fear, are to be used as the Poets common Places, and a general Concernment for the principal Actors is to be rais’d, by making them appear such in their Characters, their Words and Actions, as will Interest the audience in their Fortunes.¹² In the century that follows, interesting is the adjective that Lord Kames uses to describe King Lear’s obsession with the ingratitude of his daughters; that Samuel Richardson uses to describe Sir Hargrave Pollexfen’s attempted rape of Harriet Byron in Sir Charles Grandison; and that Olaudah Equiano uses to describe the narrative of a life that contained kidnapping, enslavement, and shipwreck.

Because of its multiple, distinct meanings, the word interest is foundational to the modern division of knowledge into separate discourses and disciplines: the divorce between economics and literature, for instance.¹³ Yet interest functions at the same time as what I have called a go-between, allowing authors in the period to think about one realm of experience using tropes and structures derived from another. Thus Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe differs from narratives that precede it because its idea of what makes for an interesting story is modeled on the gradual accumulation of an interest-bearing loan, and the philosopher and nobleman Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, explores the problem of whether human nature is and should be self-interested by using images and metaphors taken from the Whig and Tory interests he knew from his years as a member of the House of Commons and peer in the House of Lords.¹⁴ Indeed, previous scholars have noted several such go-between moments in modern thought without recognizing them as part of a larger pattern or attending to their influence on literary form. The philosopher Mikhail Epstein argues that scientific ideas are interesting insofar as they promise a profitable return on cognitive investment like that of an interest-bearing loan, while the historian of science Isabelle Stengers argues that an experiment, apparatus, or hypothesis is interesting only if it links scientists together in a community that resembles a political interest group. For the legal historian Christine Desan, the idea that individual self-interest contributes to the common interest, traditionally if somewhat inaccurately associated with Smith’s image of the invisible hand, is an extrapolation from the interest-bearing loans that both financed the British war effort (the common interest) and created a class of rentiers (individual self-interested bondholders) between the accession of William III in 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.¹⁵ In a similar vein, the economic historian James MacDonald suggests that the interest-based politics of a democracy and the interest paid on government debt are causally and conceptually connected: a regime that borrows from its citizens is constrained to give them a voice in government.¹⁶

This study is thus at once a work of analysis (breaking down the distinct meanings of interest in the long eighteenth century) and synthesis (showing how these meanings are connected). I have written under the sign of the Homeric heroine Penelope, who for years worked on a loom each day and then unwove her day’s work every night.¹⁷ As a philological study, Interest and Connection does Penelope’s night work, unweaving the word interest into the familiar and less familiar eighteenth-century semantic strands that this introduction has discussed. To summarize, the most important of these include

1) the price paid for a loan of money;

2) dynastic security and territorial aggrandizement (the interest of princes, ancestor to modern national interest);

3) care for one’s own material advantage (self-interest);

4) the flourishing of a people or group (the common interest);

5) a material share or stake (an interest in, for instance, an estate or joint-stock corporation);

6) a faction or party within a larger group (the Whig, Tory, city, court, or country interest);

7) a hierarchical connection of help and obligation (the interest one has with a patron or client); and

8) a cognitive and emotional involvement (in, for instance, the interesting sufferings of Behn’s Oroonoko or Racine’s Phèdre).¹⁸

But unlike Penelope, who was trying to keep importunate suitors at bay by telling them she could not choose a new husband until the shroud was finished, my study does not take endless analytic unweaving as its goal. By day, as a work of literary criticism, it shows how these strands are woven together in texts. Sometimes these connections happen through the figure of paronomasia, the humble (and in the period often disparaged) puns uttered by characters like Macheath. When John Dryden’s All for Love, first performed in 1677, rewrites Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607), Dryden’s Antony has a new vocabulary, not available to his Shakespearean predecessor, for describing the political prudence of his unsoldierly rival Octavius Caesar: He / Is full of deep dissembling; knows no Honour / Divided from his Int’rest. And Dryden goes on to make exactly the same connection between self-interest and lending that Gay’s highwayman will make a half century later: Fate mistook him; / For nature meant him for an Usurer: / He’s fit indeed to buy, not conquer Kingdoms.¹⁹ Or the multiple meanings of the word may suggest an analogy or metaphor, such as Defoe’s and Shaftesbury’s intuitions, mentioned above, that a narrative is like a loan and the human mind is like a parliament. Such structures may not explicitly involve the word interest at all; sometimes, as when Lord Hervey imagines literary influence in terms borrowed from political patronage, they instead furnish evidence for the habits of thought that brought new meanings of the word interest into being. In the writings of Johnson in particular, interest traffics between disciplines and discourses through the figure of exchange: he constructs formal and thematic parallels, in which the structure of a text shows how two different meanings of the word interest are in fact commensurable or equivalent. Thus the love interests of private life, in Irene and Rasselas, have the same narrative shape as the interests active in the public realm of politics. Smith is unusual in that his use of the concept of interest in many different kinds of writing—on the topics of art, literature, morals, and political economy—goes beyond analogy to evince an underlying conceptual unity, the idea of productive involvement across a gap or break. Interest is also united in Smith, as I have already mentioned, by a historiographic metonymy: interesting narratives and self-interested economies are alike at home in the modern commercial era as opposed to its savage, barbaric, or feudal past. The book’s final chapter shows how various eighteenth-century senses of interest are braided together in the title of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, which expresses the text’s hybrid appeal to the sympathy, loyalty, and material advantage of its British readers as it argues for the abolition of the slave trade.

This is an avowed work of literary studies. It is not merely a history of what people meant by the word interest over the course of a century, though I certainly hope it is that: it is an explication of the texts that authors themselves weave when the word interest and the concepts it names are basic to their worldview. I have profited enormously from scholarship, created from the late nineteenth century to today, that takes as its unit of analysis the word, the concept, or the trope: this includes the enduringly valuable Oxford English Dictionary; the works of Empson and Williams (particularly Empson’s ideas of ambiguity and his description of words as compacted doctrines that express a broader worldview); the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history); and the recent digital humanities work of scholars of metaphor such as Brad Pasanek.²⁰ But my own key units of analysis and organization