The magical machinery of the Enlightenment

by Nicholas Cronk

The genius of our century is entirely opposed to the spirit of fables and false mysteries. We like established truths; good sense prevails over the illusions of fantasy, and nothing today pleases us apart from the solidarity of reason.

So, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Saint-Evremond sums up the new spirit of rationalism. The new century saw itself as throwing off its inherited shackles of uncritical belief in ancient and religious authority: man was at last ready to stand on his own feet and believe the evidence of his own eyes.

Eighteenth-century ancillary sphere

There has perhaps never been a period, before or since, which had quite such an undiluted enthusiasm for the unbounded power of reason. Yet the title ‘Age of Reason’ which is sometimes used to describe the eighteenth century is misleading. Even the most cursory examination of eighteenth-century belief quickly reveals aspects which seem to us distinctly irrational, for example freemasonry (whose mystical ceremonies are staged in The Magic Flute) or mesmerism (of which there are, admittedly satirical, echoes in Cosi fan tutte. What is more, by no means everyone expressed Pope’s epigraph that Newton’s laws of motion were absolute and eternal principles. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the hero visits Glubbdubdrib, ‘the Island of Sorcerers or Magicians’, whose Governor has the ability to summon up any figure from the past; Gulliver asks for Aristotle so that he can hear his views on modern philosophical systems:

This great Philosopher [Aristotle] freely acknowledged his own Mistakes in Natural Philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon Conjecture, as all Men must do; and he found, that Gassendi, who had made the Doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally exploded. He predicted the same fate to Attraction, whereof the present Learned are such zealous Asserters. He said, that new Systems of Nature were but new Fashions, which would vary in every Age; and even those who pretend to demonstrate them from Mathematic Principles, would flourish but a short Period of Time, and be out of Vogue when that was determined.

Swift is not interested in magic as such, but it is interesting that he should use the fiction of magic to cast doubt on Newton’s claims to absolute certainty. (Newton had, of course, all manner of interests in alchemy and the occult which the eighteenth century preferred to ignore.) It is now a commonplace for historians to argue that modern science was significantly stimulated by the revival of interest in neo-Platonism and the occult during the Renaissance, and that there is a complex interplay between rationalism, magic, religion and the emergence of science.

Isaac Newton (William Blake)

In the Middle Ages, it is hard to distinguish between religion and magic (think how odd a figure Faust seems by the time he appears in a nineteenth-century opera), and still in Shakespeare’s time the boundary between learning and magic was indistinct (witness the response to the ghost in Hamlet: ‘Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio’). In a famous study, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas describes how, by the end of the seventeenth century, ‘we can draw a distinction between religion and magic which would not have been possible earlier’, and evolution which he attributes in large measure to the rise of rationalism and the growth of an urban population. Yet popular belief in omens and witches continued probably as much as before, and natural disasters such as the outbreak of plague in Marseille in 1720 or the 1755 Lisbon earthquake were widely seen as divine retribution on the sinful, a view which Voltaire mocks in Candide. It may well be that the Enlightenment marks not so much a decline in the belief of magic and superstition as, rather, the emergence of a chasm between popular belief and the beliefs of the educated urban elite.

Theatrical effects: clouds opening on stage, as designed for Legranzi’s Germanico sul Reno, Venice 1676

It is at the theatre, and particularly at the opera, that the lingering eighteenth-century fascination with magic can best be understood. Eighteenth-century Londoners loved the stage, and many of Shakespeare’s most poetical and fantastic plays became popular in this period: Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, and All’s Well That Ends Well were all staged in the 1740s for the first time that century. Opera habitually drew its plots from classical mythology or from modern works of fantasy like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; the introduction of magic into plots was a pretext for the introduction of magical effects through elaborate theatre machinery, so that the audience could indulge its taste for magic twice over, in the story as well as in the realisation of the story on stage.

The eighteenth-century taste for elaborate and complex stage effects was boundless. Indeed, it was because of this that opera was so often attacked in the early eighteenth century as artificial and unnatural — that is to say foreign — contrivance. In 1711 the Spectator described opera as ‘extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience’. Opera was absurd, and ‘Common sense requires, that there should be nothing in the Scenes and Machines which may appear Childish and Absurd’. Saint-Evremond held a similar view: ‘An absurdity served up with music, and dancing, and complicated stage devices and elaborate scenery is no doubt a magnificent absurdity, but an absurdity nonetheless’. But despite the critics, opera flourished. Elaborate opera machinery allowed the Hanoverian audience to relish magic, always in the comforting knowledge that there was a rational explanation for the apparently mystifying effects being portrayed on stage. Behind the scenes, the stage manager, like the God in Newton’s universe, was manipulating the pulleys and levers to create the carefully contrived effects of mystification.

Melissa destroys the magical works of Alcina (as in Ariosto’s poem)

The enjoyment of fantasy would have been much less complete without the aid of this magical machinery, as Madame d’Aulnay found on a visit to the opera in Madrid at the end of the seventeenth century. The opera was Alcina, one of the versions predating Handel’s, but the stage effects were rather more elementary that those to which she was accustomed in Paris, and her enjoyment of Alcina’s magic was much diminished:

There never was such infernal stagecraft; the gods came down astride a plank which reached from one side of the theatre to the other; the effect of sunlight was produced by a dozen or so oiled paper lanterns each with a lamp inside it. When it was Alcina’s turn to do her witchcraft business, and she called up her demons, they obligingly climbed up from the infernal regions on ladders.

(Account of a Journey to Spain, 1691)

This feature is taken from the article The Magical Machinery of the Enlightenment by Dr Nicholas Cronk, and is reproduced here by his kind permission.