Dear Reader: This is a crude draft as of August 15, 2018. The three asterisks or the bold

British imitation of Dutch in late seventeenth C. Bring in Appleby. England was just acquiring an admiration for a bourgeois version of the virtues as Holland came to its height. ….. And so they did, in many things: naval, financial, etc. Defeat in the Solent? Other reasons? Use Pepys.

Brilliant article on Sweden under the Dutch model: English by no means the only Europeans startled by the economic success of the United Provinces : http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5075136/Swedish-variations-on-Dutch-commercial.html; Thomson, Erik. 2005. “Swedish Variations on Dutch Commercial Institutions, 1605-1655.” Scandinavian Studies 77 (3, Sept.): 331-346. Do on Questia, and Susan Lewis Hammond

&Chapter 15:

The Words Show the Change
The trouble with word-evidence, of course, is that people—and chimpanzees and camouflaging plants—can be dishonest. That is, they can fashion a gap between what they say and what they mean, if no material payment or other physical act is involved. “I just love that outfit!” can mean in the right circumstances, “Thank God you got rid of that hideous orange dress!” Words—and my claim is that the initiating change was words—can be “cheap talk,” as the economists put it, that is, merely words. The evidence for the rhetorical change to a bourgeois civilization, then, has to catch people talking unawares. Otherwise, if you simply ask them outright, the people are liable to affirm indignantly that they are still enthusiastic advocates for aristocratic or Christian virtues. We need verbal thermometers of the change in civilization that made the modern world.

Start with a word once redolent of an aristocratic civilization.

In English our bourgeois word “honest,” surprisingly, once meant not mainly “committed to telling the truth” but mainly “noble, aristocratic.” After all, what true aristocrat would bother to care about truth, when style, gesture, heroism, and social position are the life of man? Honestus in classical Latin never meant truth telling or keeping ones word. For those concepts, uninteresting ones in a society obsessed with honor and nobility, the Romans used the word sincerus (“pure”). In the late Roman Empire the honestiores were the people who mattered— not because they made a habit of the truth but because they were rich and honorable.

The modern and secondary meaning of “truth telling and keeping ones word, whether or not of high social rank” occurs in English as early as 1400. Shakespeare uses the ambiguity of the two meanings, “worthy of honor” and “genuine” in many place, for example in Cymbeline. The loyal servant Pisanio says to himself that he must dissemble to remain true to a wider truth: “Wherein I am false, I am honest [that is, honorable and genuine]; not true, to be true” (that is, not truth-telling but faithful; IV.iii, 42). But nonetheless in Shakespeare’s time a phrase like "honest, honest Iago" mainly meant, with a certain coy ambiguity, that the lying Iago in Othello, a soldier by profession, was "honorable, noble, warlike, aristocratic."³⁰⁰ The famous definition of a “diplomat” by Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639) also plays on the ambiguity: “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” “Honest” here means “noble, distinguished,” but dances prettily with “lying.” The old phrase in men’s mouths, “an honest woman”—thus Desdemona in the play, repeatedly, an ironic commentary also on her fate—preserves the original meaning of the word “honest,” with adjustments for a woman’s place in a system of manly honor. In David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words (2002), four definitions of “honest” are given, never straightforwardly “truth-telling” in the modern sense. The closest is 3: “genuine,” as in “The knave is my honest friend” (2HenIV, V.i.44). All the other definitions tell of knightly honor. Thus too Milton, in 1674. The one occurrence of “honest” in Paradise Lost comments on Eve’s nakedness before her disobedience. “Then was not guilty shame, dishonest shame/ Of nature’s works, honor dishonorable” (IV: 313f, second ed.). And so to the Duke of Shaftesbury in 1713, a late occurrence in the aristocratic sense, unsurprisingly by an aristocrat looking into what “honesty or virtue is, considered by itself.”³⁰¹

Contrast Tom Jones (1749). Fielding uses “honest” only four times in this, one of the first English novels, all in Book 1 of the 18 books: “the honest and well-meaning host”; “these honest victuallers”(Chap. 1); “he lived like an honest man, owed no one a shilling” (Chap. 3); and “a good, honest, plain girl, and not vain of her face (Chp. 8).³⁰² All mean “upright, sincere,” with by then an old-fashioned and even slightly parodic air. By 1749 they have nothing to do, as they once did, with honorableness in the aristocrat’s sense. In Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) the senses of “honest” are (1.) upright, true, sincere, (2.) chaste, (3.) just, righteous, giving every man his due. Under “honesty” he quotes Temple late in the century past: “goodness, as that which makes men prefer their duty and their promise before their passions or their interest, and is properly the object of trust, in our language goes rather by the name of honesty, though what we call an honest man, the Romans called a good man; and honesty, in their language, as well as in French, [and I am saying in earlier English] rather signifies a competition of those qualities which generally acquire honor and esteem.”

The idea of honest dealing comes from merchants and tradesmen, such as Quakers insisting on fixed prices instead of bargaining, not ever from the gentry and the aristocrats.  Adam Smith admired honesty, sincerity, candor in a way quite foreign to Shakespearean England, and bordering on the wild enthusiasm for such Romantic qualities of faithfulness to the Self in Wordsworthian England. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, 1790) Smith writes:

Frankness and openness conciliate confidence. We trust the man who seems willing to trust us. . . . The great pleasure of conversation and society . . . arises from. . . a certain harmony of minds, which like so many musical instruments cannot be obtained unless there is a free communication of sentiments and opinions. . . . The man who indulges us in this natural passion, who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more delightful than any other.

Smith 1789 (1790) VII.iv.28, p. 337

By contrast, an Othello or an Hamlet who opened the gates of his breast would invite a fatal wound, and even in the comedies it was prudent to dissimulate.

In Adam Smith’s two published books, of 1759 and 1776 in their first editions, “honest” means “upright” or “sincere” or “truth-telling,” never “aristocratic.” Even a poor man, he argues in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is constrained not to steal by “the man within”: “there is no commonly honest man who does not more dread the inward disgrace.”³⁰³ “Commonly honest” would be in Shakespeare a contradiction in terms. In the eight works of Jane Austen, written from 1793 to 1816 (including The Watsons, 1804, unfinished, and her early and unpublished Lady Susan, but not including her last, unfinished Sanditon), “honest” occurs 31 times.³⁰⁴ It means “upright” in six of these 31 occasions, dominantly in the old phrase an “honest man,” but never “of high social rank, aristocratic.” Another third of the time it means “genuine,” as in “a real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school” (Emma), very far indeed from “honest” as “aristocratic.” In its dominant modern sense of “truth-telling” it occurs again a third of the time in the meaning “sincere,” and in four out of the 31 total occurrences simply “truth-telling.” The 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary labels “honesty” in sense 1, “held in honor,” as archaic, with the example of “honest” (chaste) as in an “honest woman.” It labels “honesty” in sense 1a, “honor,” as obsolete. “Honest” in the dominant sense 2 means fair, upright, truthful “as, an honest judge or merchant, [or an honest] statement” (italics supplied). No talk of aristocrats and honorable war.

* * * *

The shift from “honorable, aristocratic” to “truth-telling, ” was not merely English. It occurs in all the commercial languages of Europe, with the suggestive exception of Spanish. English is Germanic in a good deal of its structure (though in verb placement not is) and is thoroughly Germanic in its homely vocabulary of hearth and bread. But in its elevated vocabulary, as a French friend of mine likes to say, it is merely French or Latin spoken with a strange accent. Thus in that very sentence the words “English,” “strange” and “accent” are from Latin by way of French and the words “Germanic,” “structure,” “vocabulary,” and “merely” are directly from Latin.

In most Romance languages, including English looked at from the upper classes, the honesty-word once also meant the same honorable thing—and nothing like mere telling the truth or paying your debts. In English, French, Italian, Spanish, and so forth the word is derived from Latin honestus, from honos, “honor, high rank.” Thus in the first book of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, written after 1508 and published in 1528, words or compounds of onesto occur in the Italian eight times, and always mean gentlemanly “honorable” or, in the case of women, “chaste.”³⁰⁵ Never “truth-telling” or even simply “honorable” in a modern meaning that might apply to mere peasants. In The Prince (written 1513) onesto occurs three times: once it means “just” (“the goal of the common people is more onesto than that of the nobles, the latter wishing to oppress and the former wish to not be oppressed”); once it means “decent” (“the soldiers. . . could not put up with that onesto way of life to which Pertinax wished to discipline them”); and once it means, with dis-, “dishonorable” (“men are never so disonesti to turn on you with such obvious ingratitude”).³⁰⁶

Thus French honnête still in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French meant what Shakespeare and Castiglione and Machiavelli meant by “honest.” The imposer of the French legislative attitude towards bon usage, François de Malherbe (1555-1628), appealed to the linguistic standard of “honest” men, that is, a nobility or at worst a gentry worthy of honor. He was outraged when beggars would address someone as a “noble gentleman,” since the word “gentleman” already entailed the notion of nobility, and the phrase was therefore an irritating and even insulting redundancy.³⁰⁷

The historian George Huppert notes that in the “Age of Tartuffe,” as he puts it, the honnête homme loses his strictly aristocratic connotation but exemplifies instead the intellectual fruits of over a century of “the style of Paris,” skeptical, anti-clerical, right down to Voltaire and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. ³⁰⁸ To the honnête homme—the enemy of the Counter-Reformation and therefore an enemy of the state when, as it periodically was in France, it was captured by the dévôt party—“religious zeal is an embarrassment.” The honnête homme’s “morality is that of the pagan authors,” the auctores (Latin “authorities”). “Reasonable, courteous, tolerant and well-intentioned towards others,” Huppert writes, “one pictures him holding Montaigne’s Essais.” The Essais of the late sixteenth century became, Huppert observes, quoting contemporary praise for it, “une bréviaire des honnêtes gens,” the breviary of the cultivated man. Honnête has shifted from praising dukes to praising humanists.

In Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), however, sixty-five years after Othello, the romantic lead, Cléonte, uses honnête in the same way that Shakespeare did, with much talk of honneur associated with it. The idiotic bourgeois pretender to nobility, M. Jourdain, asks Cléonte if Cléonte is a gentilhomme, which meant “of gentle birth, an aristocrat” in the wide and purchasable sense of French society at the time. The recent Oxford-Hachette labels the French gentilhomme “historical,” with only the meaning of a member of the gentry or aristocracy. (English “gentry” is cognate in its French origin with “gentle.”)

And by the way, of course, the usual French word for what we call “mister” (from old “master”; Italian messer), or a “gentleman” as in democratic phrases like “ladies and gentlemen,” is another piece of hierarchical talk brought down to earth, “my senior, my superior,” “my sire,” “sir,” monsieur. It had not been brought down entirely in 1830. The hero of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel, a peasant’s clever son employed as tutor in the household of a local worthy, triumphs in Chapter 6 by earning the title of monsieur. At first the monsieur is bestowed reluctantly by his employer, who wishes only that the newly hired tutor appear more dignified, to overawe his children: “And now, Sir, for by my orders everyone in this house is to address you as Sir.” But Julien shortly overawes them all with a display of his command of the New Testament in Latin: “This scene earned for Julien the title ‘Sir’: the servants themselves [who knew well that he was merely the son of a sawyer in town] dared not withhold it from him.”³⁰⁹

In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme Cléonte replies at length to My Sire Jourdain:

No one scruples to take the name [of gentilhomme], and usage nowadays seems to authorize the theft. For my part, . . . I find that all imposture is unworthy of an honest man [honnête homme, that is, honorable, in Huppert’s formulation “classically educated gens de bien”], and that there is a bit of cowardice in disguising what Heaven has born us into. . . and to give the impression of that which we are not. I was born, certainly, of parents who held honorable [honorable] position. I achieved honor [l’honneur] in the armed forces through six years of service. . . . But . . . I say to you frankly [franchement, not honnêtement, as still often in French and English, though “honestly” is taking over] that I am not at all an aristocrat [gentilhomme].

Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 1670, act 3, sc. 12.

A few lines later Madame Jourdain advises her fool of a husband, who wishes “to have an aristocrat as son-in-law,” that “your daughter would do better to have an honest [that is, honorable] man, rich and well-favored [un honnête homme riche et bien fait] than a beggarly and poorly built aristocrat” (gentilhomme). In the big Hachette-Oxford nowadays both honnête homme and honnête femme are labeled obsolete. Honnête itself is translated as “honest, decent, fair.” The more normal modern French for the English “honest” applied to a person is intègre, sincere, franc; one who is honest in the sense of truth-telling about (something) is said être honnête au sujet de (quelque chose). “Honestly” is honnêtement. And the commercial proverb, “honesty is the best policy,” is rendered as honnêteté est toujour recompense, honesty is always rewarded. Would that it were true, honest though it might be.

A big 1987 dictionary of Italian notes that the root of onesto is Latin honestus, but does not trouble to mention its obsolete Latin and olden Italian meaning, “noble.”³¹⁰ The first four meanings given are in English translation 1. unwilling to violate moral law, 2. conforming to the moral law, 3. pure, 4. just—all of which are modern English “honest”; with two more: “[rarely] dignified,” and “[obsolete] handsome.” The entry does not mention nobile, aristicratico, signorile, English “noble” in the social class sense, or onorevole, venerando, onorato, English “honorable” in the aristocratic sense—able to be honored, that is, taken for a literal aristocrat. In the Concise Cambridge Italian Dictionary 1975 onesto does come late in the list of Italian words for “honorable,” though then in the modern sense, namely, “honest,” not in the original sense of “having aristocratic honor, that is, high rank justified by noble blood or by military or other noble deeds.”

Thus English and the commerce-drenched Romance languages from 1600 to the present embody the shift from honos meaning “aristocratic” to merely bourgeois “reliable.”

What is surprising is that the identical shift occurs in non-English Germanic languages, too. That is, in the Germanic languages during Shakespeare’s or Molière’s time the same honor-code meaning of “honest” is attached to an honesty = honor-word, though arising from an entirely different root than the Latin—in Dutch for example eer, aristocratic (and cognates in all the Germanic languages from Sweden to Austria). Though from a different root it comes to have the same modern history as “honest” in the Latin-derived word of English, French, and Italian.

In other words, both Romance and Germanic languages start at the same place in their expressions of honor in, say, 1500. When the bourgeois south Netherlanders printed in 1516 the medieval romance Heinric en Margriete van Limborch, I noted, they added that Sir Heinric would achieve eer, honor, by paying his debts generously: so sal men eer van u spreken, literally “so shall people honor of you speak,” if you act as a bourgeois and not only as a knight.³¹¹ But the tale is still of knights and their ladies, of whom eer is routinely spoken. In the twenty-first century the normal German word for pride is still Ehrsucht, “honor-seeking.” ***Check to be sure, and compare with Dutch. The Dutch eer and German ehre ***check spelling of adjective still nowadays mean “noble, aristocratic”—like English “honorable” when used among wanna-be aristocrats on the dueling grounds. The word persists in dead metaphors remembering hierarchy. And indeed: "Meine Ehre heißt Treue ("My Honor is Loyalty.")—motto of SS. Using it as a noun, the Dutch say de eer aandoen om, “to do [me] the honor of.” Or a German politely answering the telephone will say, mit wem habe ich die Ehre zu spreken?—“with whom do I have the honor to speak?”

But in Dutch and in German the addition of –lijk/-lich (-like) yielded an eerlijk/ehrlich that comes to mean simply “honest,“ like the modern English commendation of the truth-telling necessary for a society of merchants. Thus too Danish and Norwegian aer, honor, parallels aerlig, honest. In other words, the surprising fact is that both the Germanic languages and the commercial daughters of Latin developed from their respective root words meaning “aristocratic, worthy of honor” a new word appropriate to an increasingly bourgeois society meaning instead “truth telling, worthy of trust.”

That is to say, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in both families of languages the primary and older and Iago-ite meaning of “noble, aristocratic, worthy of being honored,” fades, leaving mainly our modern notion of “that deals uprightly in speech and act. . . that will not lie cheat or steal.”³¹² The title of the poem of 1705 by Shaftesbury’s opponent, Bernard Mandeville, is The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest. Mandeville—who not incidentally, though writing in English, was a Dutchman—meant by “honest” nothing like “partaking of nobility,” but instead “not cheating,” in the modern sense. He cynically condemned such behavior as naïve and profitless: “Then leave complaints: fools only strive/ To make a great an honest hive.”³¹³ The honest/honor split is not sharp in Spanish, as one might expect in a society obsessed with honor in an old-fashioned sense. Honesto in Spanish to this day does not mean “honest = truth-telling” but “chaste, modest, decent.” By 1800 at the latest, many Romance and all Germanic languages have come to use the honesty word to mean pretty much exclusively "sincere, upright, truth-telling, reliable for a business deal."³¹⁴ 

Honesty now means honesty.
* * * *

If you can stand any more of this sort of evidence, consider that translations of the New Testament register the change, too, though unevenly. In many recent translations of the Parable of the Dishonest Manager into English the word “honest” is used in the sense of “upright, plain dealing.” The Greek is adikias, literally “un-just.” Thus the New Revised Standard Version (1989) of Luke 16:8 is “And his master commended the dishonest manager.” The New English Bible (1961) is “And the master applauded the dishonest steward.” The New International Version (1973-1984): “The master commended the dishonest manager.” Thus also the Weymouth NT and the World English Bible. But the New American Standard (1960-1995), the Darby Version, and Young’s [old] Literal Translation use “unrighteous,” and Douay-Rheims and Webster’s use the wholly Greek-justified “unjust.” The Basic English Bible makes do with plain “false.”

In the earlier context in which English “honest” meant “aristocratic” the word is never used in its modern sense of “fair-dealing.” Thus the King James (1611) version of Luke 16:8 speaks of the “unjust,” not the “dishonest” steward, which as I said is a literal translation of the original Greek. On the other hand, the merely seven occurrences of “honest” in the King James, all in the New Testament, appear to mean “righteous” (as in Greek, dikos, just) in the sense of following the law, of Moses or of Jesus.

In other languages having the same problem with the older meaning of “honest” it is similar. The States’ Bible of the Dutch (1618-19) calls the steward onrechtvaardigen, “unrighteous.” Some versions of Luther’s Bible calls him den ungetreuen Verwalter, the unfaithful manager, a mistranslation in context (since pistos, “faithful,” occurs two verses down in contrast, not in parallel, to dikos). But anyway it is not unehrlich, modern “dishonest”—which in 1545 would have suggested the irrelevant “un-aristocratic.” The modern (1912) Luther and the Schlachter (1951) give like Dutch ungerechten, “unrighteous.” A recent translation into Afrikaans calls the manager oneerlike, that is, “dishonest” in the modern sense, as in modern Dutch.³¹⁵ But a 1953 Afrikaans version was using the more accurate onregverdige, “unrighteous,” as did Norwegian (1930) and Swedish translations (1917).³¹⁶

In French the old (1744) Martin and Ostervald (though in a 1996 revision) use “unfaithful” and the Darby uses “unjust.” The French Jerusalem uses the modern malhonnête. In Italian the steward is in the Giovanni Diodati Bible (1649) l’ingiusto fattore and in the Riveduta (1927) il fattore infedele. No disonesto about him, with its whiff of unaristocratic. The modern Catholic Vulgate uses “unfairness,” following the Greek—not the Latin for “dishonest” in the modern sense, which would be sincerus, probus, simplex, antiques, frugii depending on the shade of meaning. Spanish translations simply call him malo and leave it at that.

The sociologist Norbert Elias noticed in his book of 1939 the same shift. “Courtoisie, civilité and civilisation mark [in French] three stages of a social development,” that is, from distinction by membership in a court, to distinction by membership of a restricted urban society, down to a universalization of, say, table manners by an entire society, rich and poor, urban and rural.³¹⁷ The changing fortunes of “honesty” signals that the old civilization, which was dominated by warriors and latterly by courtiers, needed above all a word for rank. Our civilization dominated by merchants and latterly by manufacturers and recently by risk capitalists needs instead a word for reliable truth telling. Nowadays the fancy word is “transparency.” And so from 1600 to 1776 this new civilization in northwestern Europe came into being, in its words.

* * * *

The English, I say, were notorious in the age of Sir Francis Drake and Elizabeth herself for a proud, decidedly unbourgeois way of acting. Elizabeth professed to have no doubt, as the Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel, that “we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.” A Dutch businessman in 16… declared of the still aristocratic English that “the people are bold, courageous, ardent and cruel in war, but very inconstant, rash, vainglorious, light and deceiving, and very suspicious, especially of foreigners, whom they despise.”³¹⁸ Of these qualities only courage and the suspicion of foreigners survived the embourgeoisfication of England, 1689 to the present. Jeremy Paxman, who is among the numerous tellers of the tale to use the Dutchman’s quotation, remarks that by the late nineteenth century the English had came to be viewed, as having on the contrary “honesty [in our modern and bourgeois sense], prudence, patriotism, self-control, fair play and courage.”³¹⁹ Evidently something had changed.

The language changed early. It is merely a materialist prejudice, I say again, that rhetoric always lags behind the reality to which it refers. The world-making dropping of the theistic hypothesis by Hobbes and Spinoza in the seventeenth century, for example, was not a consequence of, say, the means of production.³²⁰ Philosophically speaking the materialist prejudice is that in the first place real interests and incomes happen, and then words are fashioned to refer to them. The prejudice only makes sense when one has assumed implicitly a reference theory of language, the notion that words are merely labels for pre-existing things in the world. Yon sheep is to be named sheep. But it is one of the main discoveries of the humanities in the twentieth century that the reference theory of language, while helpful for learning Italian or Afrikaans (“Bread is pane or brood”), is nothing like a complete theory of how we do things with words. Since Saussure and Wittgenstein (Mark II) and Burke and Austin and the rest we have known that language speaks us as much as we speak language, and that we construct a world with it, or the world is constructed for us. Saussure noted in his posthumously published lectures (1916), for a minor example, that “mutton” in English is for the meat on the table, as the Norman masters called it, while the Anglo-Saxon shepherds outside in the cold kept calling it Germanic-origin “sheep.” In French there is no such distinction, as also not in bœuf, beef, and the rest of the edible animals and their corresponding meals. The major examples are speech acts, as John Austin dubbed them, that drive our personal and national histories: “I thee wed”; “I ask that the Congress declare that . . . a state of war exists between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

So also in the matter of attitudes towards trade. "Credit" comes from creditus, "believed." Each of the hundred-odd quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the noun and the verb date from after 1541, but most of the commercial quotations during the sixteenth century are suspicious of it. An act of 34-35 Henry VIII (that is, 1542) noted that “sundry persons consume the substance obtained by credit of other men.” Shame on them. But contrast the neutral language of Locke in 1691: credit is merely “the expectation of money within some limited time.” A shift in talk had taken place, 1542-1691, and a shift in the ideological support for innovation. How did this take place?

&Chapter 16:

Novels and Plays Measure It, Too

The virtue of prudence rose in prestige in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By the middle of the eighteenth century British men—especially the men—delighted in claiming prudence for their own behavior and a cynical supposition that others were motivated similarly. Thus Adam Smith initiated the economist’s delight in the unintended consequences that lay in wait for busybodies or that up-valued the actions of the merely selfish. Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson both account for their own behavior in prudential terms, rather than in noble or in religious terms, and go about prudently measuring Gulf Streams and Scottish castles.

The voice of the novelists, beginning with Defoe (1661-1731), who pioneered the genre in English, is clearly bourgeois. The eighteenth and especially the nineteenth-century roman eventually comes to be focused indeed on the bourgeois home, in sharp contrast to adventure yarns, long called “romances,” whence the standard French word for the novel. A "romance" was since the middle ages a tale of knights or shepherds idealized. The Greeks and Romans had novels on more mundane matters, such as dinner parties. So from the twelfth century did the Japanese, for example, focusing on love and courtly life, and these written famously by women. Defoe’s version arose out of bourgeois romances like Dekker’s, out of broadsheets and pamphlets giving the news of prodigious storms and terrible murders, and out of a rich devotional literature of English Puritans.³²¹ The leading case is Robinson Crusoe (1719), but Defoe wrote also in his realist style Journal of a Plague Year (DDDD) and his masterpiece of the proto-novelistic genre, Moll Flanders (DDDD; this among hundreds of other publications: the man was a publishing house of bourgeois propaganda).

The novel is associated in every way with the middle classes, which is an old point in literary criticism, made most enthusiastically by left-wing critics from the 1930s on. An English novel was a novelty about the middling sort. As the South-African novelist and critic J. M. Coetzee put it recently in his introduction to an edition of Robinson Crusoe, “for page and page—for the first time in the history of fiction—we see a minute, ordered description of how things are done.”³²² How things are done, savoir faire, is precisely the virtue of prudence that Defoe praised in all his writings. Defoe’s imagination, as a nineteenth-century French critic wrote on the eve of the clerisy reacting to all things bourgeois, was that of a man of business.³²³ The realism ***Give analysis from If You’re So Smart, maybe supplemented by Coetzee’s novel Foe.

The realist novel perfected by the English and then successively by the French and the Italians and the Russians and the Germans was hostile to non-bourgeois cultures. (Indeed, the recent turn to magic realism and postmodernity in the novel registers the strongly anti-bourgeois feelings of the twentieth-century clerisy.) As Coetzee said in an essay about the twentieth-century Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, the realistic novel devalues tradition—“it values originality, self-founding,” as though the founder of a business, not putting high value on the invented traditions of an ancient family. “It imitates the mode of the scientific case study or the law brief rather than the hearthside fairy tale.” As the realistic novel was being devised the scientific revolution was gathering in prestige and the law was becoming the occupation for bourgeois younger sons. Writes Coetzee, the novel before high modernism “prides itself on a language bereft of ornament,” reaching its height in Hemingway’s one true sentence. It focuses “on the stead, prosaic observation and recording of detail,” as in Crusoe’s struggles with the raft and the canoe. “It is just the kind of vehicle,” Coetzee concludes, “one would expect Europe’s merchant bourgeoisie to invent in order to record and celebrate its own ideals and achievements.”³²⁴ There is some slippage here: it was the sons and daughters of the literal gentry, or the literal clergy, who above all wrote the novels, not the offspring of merchants. And so the best of the English novel does not directly celebrate buying low and selling high.

In his survey of its history 1727 to 1783 Paul Langford characterizes England as by then thoroughly bourgeois, “a polite and commercial people” (in the phrase from Blackstone that Langford uses as his book’s title). He quarrels repeatedly with the more usual notion that aristocratic values ruled in the age of the Whig grandees.³²⁵ The “seeming passion for aristocratic values,” for example, evinced in the vogue for spas (such as Bath) and seaside reports (such as Brighton), ”depended on a middle class clientele, the upper middling sorts described in Jane Austen’s novels. Britain in the eighteenth century was a plutocracy if anything, and even as a plutocracy one in which power was widely diffused, constantly contested, and ever adjusting to new incursions of wealth, often modest wealth.” As early as 1733, Langford claims, “the shopkeepers and tradesmen of England were immensely powerful as a class.” “Bath owed its name to the great but its fortune to the mass of middling.”³²⁶

Something evidently happened in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The first voice of theorizing in English is Addison: “With The Spectator the voice of the bourgeois,” Basil Willey declares, “is first heard in polite letters, and makes his first decisive contribution to the English moral tradition.” Addison was “the first lay preacher to reach the ear of the middle-classes,” though it would seem that for the less high-brow of the middling sort that Defoe scoops him by a decade or so. “The hour was ripe for a rehabilitation of the virtues [against Restoration cynicism], and [Addison and Steele] were the very men for the task.”³²⁷ ***Here work on The Spectator, esp. Steele. Decades later, incidentally, the Dutch return the favor of the Addisonian project, under the heading of “Spectatorial Papers” in explicit imitation and against a perceived corruption of the bourgeois virtues—the wannabe aristocratic sins of French manners, effeminate men, nepotism, and sleeping late.³²⁸

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