Age of splendour
PATRICK ANDERSON
The Eighteenth Century: The Age 0 Enlightenment edited by Alfred Cobban (Thames and Hudson 8 gns; up to 31 Decem- ber 6 gns) The Princes H. D. Molesworth (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 75s) Casanova John Masters (Michael Joseph 63s' The Prince of Pleasure J. B. Priestley (Heinemann 80s) The Eighteenth Century or The Age of En- lightenment deserves much closer attention than that normally accorded to the contents of the coffee-table. The late Alfred Cobban prepared and edited this sumptuous volume during the last months of his life; a group of experts (including Sir John Summerson on architecture, Professor L. D. Ettlinger on `The role of the artist in society', Mr Robert Shackleton, Bodley's Librarian, on 'Free in- quiry and the world of ideas') contribute essays which are lucid and intelligent in- troductions to their subjects. The reader will be able to sort out the differences between Roman and Central European baroque, to follow Hogarth's criticisms of Burlington or the strictures of Diderot and Winckelmann on the frivolity of Boucher and Fragonard. to discover why Britain built no palace but Blenheim, as well as many other matters less exclusively visual. Only literature is too vast to be included.
This is not a book which muffs the less pleasant aspects of le siecle des lumieres—slavery, the English attitude to the children of the poor, indeed the question of poverty itself—or which omits its more prac- tical developments: science, technology, in- dustrial expansion, rationalised farming. The illustrations alone provide a stunning com- bination of aesthetic bonanza and historical comprehensiveness. Whether grouped and captioned at length on the many pages devoted to them, or appearing as engravings of architects' plans or engineers' diagrams within the body of the text, they supplement and often dominate the description of absolutist courts and free-thinking salons. Here is Watteau's mysteriously isolated pier- rot Gilles, here the frank sexuality of Boucher's Louise O'Murphy and here the more sombre visions of Chardin and Greuze. the last two painters preparing the way for the simplicity and dignity which came with the Revolution and the work of Jacques-
Louis David. I found most of my own favourites represented : Tiepolo's ceiling to the grand staircase at Wurzbarg, the sacristy of the Cartuja at Granada, the Transparence ,il Toledo, the delicious rococo interiors of Die Wies and of the Amalienburg in ■ tunich. I could have wished, though, for more of Salzburg and for at least the Portuguese palaces of Mafra and Queluz. Visually the book benefits from some striking juxtapositions. Thus, to give one ex- ample, a double-spread of animal portraits gives us in the mellowest colour such pro- digies as the 'Pangborn Hog', a rubbery con- certina of flesh, the mountainous but gentle Lincolnshire Ox' (eleven hands high) and the crisply two-dimensional honey-coloured parallelogram which was Robert Bakewell's prize ram (worth 1,200 guineas a year), only to be at once followed by an equally generous display of Louis Quinze furniture together with examples of Meissen, Chelsea and Wedgwood, and then by the differing glows of a Swedish ironworks and a Belgian colliery, after which the engravers take over with analytical breakdowns of a seed-drill, a brew-house and a paper-mill.
We are left in no doubt that the age of enlightenment was one of paradox. On the one hand it was a period of inquiry largely derived from our own Locke, Newton and Royal Society with its motto of 'Nullius in verba'. On the, other it was an age of absolutist courts, secular or quasi-religious, vdtich established themselves in palaces reminiscent of Versailles, although often architecturally far more baroque, where they celebrated the rituals of lever and coucher, audience and banquet, the formally attended opera and the slightly more permissive fete galante.
This is the subject of Mr H. D. Moles= worth's The Princes, a useful but by no means poetic account of royal life in this period of Frederick the Great, Peter and Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria and other serene highnesses who look themselves with the utmost seriousness. Mr Molesworth is concerned with the mysti- que of royalty and the etiquette it enforced; as befits a former Keeper of Sculpture at the V and A his book is beautifully illustrated, often with objects of vertu—a royal com- mode upholstered in velvet, a royal font of silver, a domed dog-kennel made by an eheniste, an Order of the Golden Fleece in diamonds and -of the White Eagle in emeralds, a glittering crown, a painted apotheosis. Interestingly one of his most striking colour-plates is of the throne • of Ludwig H of Bavaria in the Linderhof, sym- bol of that demented young man's desire to go back almost two centuries to the age of *Le Roi Soleil'.
Many careerists less principled than Jmes Roswell must have flitted through the more accessible of these courts. One such was Casanova whose life is retold, somewhat gratuitiously, by Mr John Masters, the author of Bhowani function; once again there are some good illustrations but Mr Masters' arch and slangy prurience left a bad taste in my mouth—I couldn't help recalling that even the notorious Jack Wilkes spoke of the 'noble passion of lust' which is a good deal more to the point than some slick Americanisms about a woman being 'a les- bian, or at least, as one might say nowadays, tc/ne.
• Another was Beau Brummel who comes in for characteristically sympathetic treatment In Mr I. B. Priestley's study of the Regency, The Prince of Pleasure. Mr Priestley is warm, sensible, informative but not especially profound about any number of topics. He defends Shelley in terms of Jung, does a sort of Marjorie Proops about the Byron problem ('The real explanation, I believe, is to be found in his sexual and emo- tional immaturity'), tells us that he himself once owned Coleridge's room in Highgate and gets hot under the collar when he asks himself why some men prefer young girls to women of experience. As befits a robust and somewhat vulgar age the illustrations vary from a Cotman or the great portraits of Keats, Byron and Scott to caricatures by Cruikshank and a good deal of demotic garishness. Still, Prinny was almost a man of taste,
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