"Wicked Whiston" and the Scriblerians: Another Ancients-Modern Controversy

Abstract

“Wicked Whiston” and the Scriblerians: Another Ancients-Modern Controversy G. S. ROUSSEAU Who can the Comet's wond'rous Journey tell; Seats not unaptly deem'd the Place of Hell. Now burning in the Sun's immediate Beams; More frigid now than Greenland's frozen Streams. Of all God's Works, our Reason Nothing shows, So fitly form'd for Torments and for Woes. (quoted in Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady's Philosophy, 1756, Dialogue XV, “Of the comets”) The Scriblerians were less interested in Halley’s comet, or its implica­ tions for Newtonian astronomy and celestial mechanics, than in William Whiston’s prophecies based on comets.1 The Wits had no reason to sus­ pect Halley’s mathematical authority or astronomical competence, and Halley had prudently confined himself to the field (celestial mechanics) he knew best rather than applied these physical laws to historical events. But Whiston’s millenarian predictions were of another order, had more immediate social relevance than Halley’s tables and periodicities: indeed his predictions provided the Wits with ready-made fuel for satire and de­ rision. For them Whiston was a comic, if trifling, figure who became a natural butt for their Scriblerian satire, as he read significance into every motion of the stars and tremor of the earth. In time his public image was transformed into that of the worst type of “Ancient”: supernaturally in­ terpreting signs above and beneath the earth as proof that the hour of 17 18 / ROUSSEAU apocalypse was imminent but constantly changing his mind about the day. For this ridiculous behavior the Wits enthroned him as one of the arch­ dunces of the age, if not accorded a place in Pope’s Dunciad nevertheless the explicit target of others of their satires. Newton and Halley were —in this sense —also of the party of the “Ancients,” yet they were less objec­ tionable for their more modest millenarian activities. But “wicked Whiston,” as Pope eventually denounced him, was incorrigible: an arian heretic; a lapsed Cambridge professor; a social pariah; an eccentric millenarian, quack doctor, and fool-like character whose strengths could not redeem his foibles. The Scriblerian Wits assume the role of “Moderns” in adoption of this position against irrationalism and supernaturalism, Whiston and his millenarian cohorts, the Ancients; yet time was needed before the Scriblerians could assess his prophecies and penetrate through his mumbo-jumbo. The story of their response to cometary Whiston is my subject here. Long before 1682, comets had captured the visual and literary imagi­ nation.2 The comet’s immense size, tail, blaze, and hairiness, inflamed the imagination of poets and provided them with new sources of imagery, new senses of space and magnitude, new ways to relate the supernatural to the natural world, new empires of concrete color on which to draw, as in Donne’s “vagrant transitory Comets,” and Milton’s dozens of poetic references to comets. Long before 1682, Shakespeare had written that “Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood” reflected “disasters in the sun,” and it is accurate to note that by 1600 the comet was the single most accessible image to writers succumbing to magic and superstition. As Hora­ tio had admonished Hamlet: The moist star Under whose influence Neptune’s empire stands Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse and Gloucester had forewarned his peers that “these late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. . . . We have seen the best of our times.”3 A century later the Scriblerians would have agreed with Glou­ cester, but as the early eighteenth century wore on, the Wits’ attitude to comets gradually shifted from high seriousness to comic levity. Popular interest in comets after 1680 enhanced this transition to levity, as did in­ creasing secularism and deism. By 1682-1683 the popular imagination was saturated with all types of astronomical speculation, as well as fantastic hypotheses regarding prior collisions of comets with the earth, cometary winters as the primary cause for the death of the legendary giants, mon­ sters and dinosaurs, and astro-theological predictions, as in Christopher A N ASTROLOGICAL AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE Upon this prefent Great ConjunUion. (The like whereof hath not...