The Age of Reason

THE PROFANE VIRTUES--Peter Quennell --Viking Press ($3).

Though the intellectuals of 18th Century England mapped out an Age of Reason, God did not altogether concur in their plan. He continued to turn out many odd and upsetting creatures--parsons who were hanged, poets who went mad, lords who started riots, scholars who drank ink, dukes who lost ancestral estates on a throw of the dice. Or, if a man of reason appeared, he might be almost too rational : Admiral Byng, on the morning of his execution, blandly "took his usual draught for the scurvy."

Author Quennell, who graphically explored the Age of Reason in Caroline of England, has returned to it in The Profane Virtues, a study of one man (Gibbon) who upheld the Age's ideals, and of three men (Boswell, Sterne, Wilkes) who more or less belied them. In his cool, graceful prose Quennell has drawn their portraits, unrolled and smoothed out their time-wrinkled careers, talked very little of their masterpieces and, since their paths crossed or just missed crossing at many points, painted a whole animated, integrated 18th Century world. For in one respect these men were alike: all four were decided worldlings.

Gibbon, the only one of the four whom the world did not tarnish, carried the classical spirit to the point of perfection--and, at moments, to the point of parody. The supreme detachment he imparted to his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he imparted equally to his own life, and to his own account of it. In his Memoirs he reduced the ardent youthful romance that his father frowned upon to an immaculate antithesis: "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son"--and thereafter lived without love till the day he died. But the plump, pompous little man with the snuffbox and the button mouth had his work (the Decline and Fall took him 15 years), his noble friends, his admirers, his elegant, discreet amusements, his intimations of immortality. Small wonder if, as somebody remarked, he frequently mistook himself for the Roman Empire.

Grand Inquisitor. James Boswell was a drunkard, a tomcat, a toady, a conceited ass and at times a consummate nuisance; but he produced almost as great a book as Gibbon's, and thanks to his inveterate good nature and high spirits, probably had more real friends. Some of his biographers have been unable to get past Boswell's faults and a few have tried to argue them away, but Mr. Quennell has done the pudgy Scot exact justice. He has seen--but also seen past--the clown who strutted about the Shakespeare Jubilee in Corsican fancy dress and who "sallied forth like a roaring lion after girls." Mr. Quennell has rightly praised him as not only the author of the greatest biography in existence, but also as "one of the first English writers to be more interested in himself . . . than in the impression he made."

As the whimsical Yorick of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, the Rev. Laurence Sterne became one of the greatest professional charmers in English letters. The consumptive parson himself was more interesting than charming. So violently attracted to women that he could hardly focus his emotions on any one of them, he clothed his writing in delicate salacity, his love-making in delicate sentiment. Mr. Quennell sums up A Sentimental Journey as "a textbook on feeling"; but its author eludes him.

Cause Celebre. Mr. Quennell's liveliest figure is his least known one: John Wilkes. This squint-eyed, witty, opportunistic M.P. had immense charm, justly boasting that he could "talk away" his ugly face in half an hour. He led a dazzlingly licentious existence--swilling, wenching, dabbling in the "blasphemous and priapic" rites of the notorious Hell Fire Club. "Wilkes," said Lord Sandwich, "you will die of a pox or on the gallows." "That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

But beyond all this, Wilkes was the center of the fiercest cause celebre of 18th Century England--one that conceivably might have toppled George III from his throne. It began in 1763, at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War. Wilkes, in the 45th number of the North Briton, anonymously denounced George Ill's speech lauding the Peace of Paris -- a peace Wilkes likened to the Peace of God, "because it passeth all understanding." For this attack the Government had Wilkes arrested and his house rifled on a general warrant, which violated his civil rights. Then Wilkes, against all parliamentary precedent, was not allowed to avoid prosecution by pleading parliamentary privilege. Bolting to France, he was declared an outlaw by the Government, but acclaimed a hero by the mob. "Wilkes and Liberty" became a national outcry.

Wilkes might have fomented revolt or even revolution. But he remained cool. Let time vindicate him, he murmured. Time sent him back to Parliament, made him Lord Mayor of London.

There was nothing noble about John Wilkes, who was turned into a patriot by his own rashness, and into a hero by his enemies' folly. As he confessed, he was not himself a "Wilkite," not a republican --though he grew, with time, into a true champion of liberty and progress. But the case transcended the man.* It became one of those symbolic agitations that arouse a whole people who have been brooding over their wrongs to a furious defense of their rights.

*Wilkes-Barre, Pa. is named after Wilkes (and a fellow M.P., Colonel Isaac Barre). The American colonists, with their own mounting grievances against George III, were natural Wilkites.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.