The Devil's Details (5 page)

For the attractions of the text, a careful reader finds footnotes are
The Dunciad
's obvious target. The work, after all, starts with a note. The title itself receives an asterisk. Below, a well-known critic sputters: “It may be well disputed whether this be a right Reading: Ought it not rather be spelled
Dunceiad
, as the Etymology evidently demands:
Dunce
with an e, there
Dunceiad
with an
e
….” and continues for another fourteen tiny and intricately punctuated lines, solely about that
e
. Immediately following, the editor strikes a defensive note: “I have a just value for the Letter E, and the same affection for the Name of this Poem, as the forecited Critic for that of his Author …,” and so forth.
²¹
In the succeeding seventy-nine pages 358 lines of pentameter verse are chattered at from below by approximately
*
7,000 lines of notes. The centrality of footnotes is further shown as the poem names and defames several of the era's most formidable annotators—one in particular, the armed and dangerous Richard Bentley.
*

Bentley deserves far more than the paragraph or two we can allot him. Installed as the twentieth master of Trinity College at Cambridge just as the eighteenth century began, he used his scholarship and footnotes to improve the work of Horace, Homer, Milton, and miscellaneous other poets. He exploited his position at Trinity, and Trinity's money, to improve his lifestyle. A new coach for his wife, three new coach houses, a scarlet cloth bed, a damask bed, walnut tables, a granary, a cow house, and a double-vaulted wine cellar appeared shortly after he was installed. Dr. Bentley had the college term shortened at both ends and, presumably to take advantage of the longer summer vacation thus available, he had a country house built for himself with college funds on college land.
²²
He had finally overreached himself. In 1734 he received a sentence of deprivation of his position for financial irregularities, as well as for calling one Trinity fellow an ass and a second an old shoe.
²³
He was ordered to vacate the master's house; he did not, of course. He remained there for eight more years until, still squatting, he died in one of his own fine beds.

Bentley's scholarship also overreached itself. His improvements of the writings of Romans and Greeks, though controversial, were justified by the corruption of the texts brought about by the years of copying and recopying during the centuries before the printing press. His reconstruction of a blind man's
Paradise Lost
, however, was condemned with fervent patriotism—Alexander Pope taking the lead, flag and mock footnotes in hand.
*
(It did not help Pope's mood that scuttlebutt had Dr. Bentley saying of Pope's translation of Homer, “A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”
²⁴
) The fourth book of
The Dunciad
was devoted to evicting Bentley from the house of scholarship as if under a writ of satire.

Bentley could not be expected to go easily. A fellow scholar who ran afoul of Bentley received a bullet hole in the wainscot of his study. Bentley, both of whose grandfathers fought in the English Civil War, was thought to be the most likely suspect.
²⁵
No wonder Pope took to carrying pistols and bringing his Great Dane with him whenever he went out for a stroll.
²⁶
Nor is it any wonder he lost his nerve for a time, claiming the poem referred to the mild-mannered son of Dr. Bentley and not to Dr. Bentley himself.

The risks that Alexander Pope took, and the maneuvering that he engaged in, suggest the fierce antagonism with which he sought to confront annotators and stamp out annotation. His own annotations were designed to bring the footnote into disrepute. An event much closer to our time, during the 1930s Depression, will help us understand the malicious tactics of Pope. A long-running farce on Broadway contained an effusive panegyric to Harvard. A Yalie took offense. One night he recruited a few dozen Skid Row bums (as they were known then), plied them with liquor, bought them tickets to the show, and gave them very firm instructions. When the praise of Harvard ended, scruffy, foul-smelling men popped up throughout the audience to cheer and to sing Harvard's fight song. The university's endowment has remained strong, but its reputation among the cognoscenti has never fully recovered.

Pope had his footnotes pop up in the same way—shabby, tipsy, and scented with bogus academicism—and to the same effect. The poetic footnote, and particularly the kind of dramatically integrated note that Aphra Behn pioneered, was never fully developed. That Pope had Behn's work particularly in mind, at least when he began
The Dunciad Variorum
, we can argue with some confidence. Pope's first footnote, as we have seen, is an asterisk just like Behn's in “A Letter to a Brother.” After that he refuses to use any more reference marks in the text at all, a subtle dig at Behn, who similarly immediately changed her mind and used [a] and [b] for her succeeding footnotes. Pope quite clearly is saying that he can employ the footnote, particularly the ersatz footnote, without interrupting the marvelously interminable flow of his verse; sadly, his tidy mind could not conceive of the dramatic possibilities inherent in the poetic footnote.

Some will find the Pope/Behn connection tenuous and, lacking Pope's self-confidence or temper, this admirer of both poetry and footnotes can only shake his head in bafflement and sorrow. Behn finally now is receiving the recognition as poet and dramatist and novelist and spy that she deserves; she should also add to her laurels as the pioneer of annotation.

In scholarly circles the footnote flourished despite Pope's attack; it survived even in poetry—though there Pope's unfortunate influence was much more widespread—but never with the élan that Behn had endowed it. In the end its use in the arts in general became suspect everywhere. In France the literary footnote's reputation sank so low that by the 1770s footnotes could be used by pornographers for mere titillation.
²⁷
A sad ending after such a bright beginning.

A
S THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
approached, the footnote became the young hero of a picaresque novel. Like the goodhearted Tom Jones,
*
he found himself scrambling from one hair-raising and unsavory adventure to another; like Barry Lyndon, he moved through every stratum of society and across national borders; like Simplicissimus, he found some respectable occupations and some shady ones; and, as is the case with all such heroes, he was from time to time saved from idleness and disgrace by the kind, firm, and unexpected ministrations of a miscellanea of tutors.

For the footnote, those tutors were most importantly the exuberant Frenchman Pierre Bayle; the hearty, rhetorical Englishman Edward Gibbon; and the meticulous, somewhat dull German Leopold von Ranke. All of them, with very different methods, took the footnote into their homes, gave him lessons—sternly or gently—and sent him on his way better equipped to make a living and (metaphorically) a sensible marriage. That the footnote sat still long enough to be usefully instructed by such contradictory masters proves his resilience, his determination to make his mark on the world, however unprepossessing his origins.

From where we stand now, from this distance of centuries, the formidable writings of Bayle, Gibbon, and Ranke stand out clearly against the cultural horizon of Europe's landscape, cluttered though it is with the works of the great, the near-great, and the merely mediocre. But at the time the footnote was lucky to find them, and because of them also find temporary housing and a lasting education. Bayle's great sixteenth-century
Dictionnaire Historique et Critique
is an immense, rambling farmhouse through which the loud Bayle pulled the footnote by the elbow, scattering chickens and attracting pigs, causing cows to lift their heads from their grazing, and sending horses trotting off nervously to the far end of the pasture. Gibbon's
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
makes a stately and logical impression, the estate of someone used to speaking before Parliament and bowing before kings. There the footnote learned to keep his head up during many rotund after-dinner speeches, and learned to keep his eyes open and to catch the quick, quirkish asides, the sly, personal attacks, the bits of arcane knowledge, the fragments of wisdom. Ranke's scholarly tomes present themselves as a row of immaculate town houses of sensible size, compatible with each other though with subtle distinctions sufficient to keep a passerby's interest. Inside, the footnote was to find only straight-backed chairs to sit on, plain food to eat, and a whiff of schoolmaster's chalk accompanying the scent of roses. In these three oddly different establishments the character of the footnote was shaped, his future determined. To understand the history of the footnote is to understand those three educators.

Pierre Bayle was a charming if cantankerous man cursed to live in an interesting time. Son of a Protestant pastor in Catholic France during the years when the Church tightened the bonds of intolerance about alternative faiths with excruciating meticulousness, he was a fierce pamphleteer in the War between the Sects. Eventually he fled to Holland as to a bolt-hole. (The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, an act that sealed the fate of the Protestants in France, was issued in 1685 when Bayle was thirty-eight.) From there he continued to infuriate French authorities by publishing works that tied scholarship to sarcasm in an enchanting, dangerous style. Even his enemies occasionally laughed out loud: not something the men who felt responsible for everyone's salvation could accept.

And they didn't; they went after him with a vengeance.

An unwary Bayle gave them their chance. His writings were published without his name attached to them, anonymity providing some protection for himself and his family. But then he put out an advertisement that let his name be known. Why? He felt obliged, he is reported to have said, to let the public know that “the Magistrates of Rotterdam honour the Muses with protection, and that this work was composed by one of the professors whom they had settled in their
New Illustrious School
.”
¹
His explanation is inadequate. Honoring the men who gave him sanctuary—and a job—may have been part of the motive behind the advertisement, but surely an author's pride at gaining an international audience must have been a subsidiary motive. He was, after all, a pastor's son who had grown up on a farm, with plenty of books to read but also with plenty of messy chores to do. His family had been poor enough so only one child at a time could be sent to secondary school; Pierre had had to wait while the eldest son, Jacob, preceded him before getting his own chance. And the academy he went to did not, of course, have the prestige of the Catholic universities from which Protestants were excluded. Bayle was a self-made man and proud of it; his pride led to carelessness.

The French authorities, now knowing for certain the identity of the troublemaker, still were unable to get at Pierre Bayle himself, so they scooped up his quiet brother Jacob, still in France, and stuck him in prison. Five months of bad food in a damp cell and daily visits from an importuning Jesuit priest asking him to recant were enough to kill him. Terrible guilt assailed Pierre Bayle—and toughened him. He lost his faith in a divine providence; whether he kept his faith in God is a matter of dispute. (Many early writers dismissed him as a cynic and nonbeliever; more recent writers accept his constant claim to believe in a God, though a God many would not recognize.) The source of evil in a universe created by a beneficent God became a question that bedeviled him. In the end, like many more recent theologians, the best he could do, as a later writer puts it, is to “declare a moratorium on the use of human reasoning. When, as we must, we call God holy, just and good, we should realize that these terms cannot have their purely human sense.”
²

We must keep in mind Bayle's desolation, his guilt and anger at what intolerance and his own pride wrought when we turn to his magnificent dictionary, a work in which the full splendor of footnotes is first demonstrated. Bayle thought of the dictionary originally as a compilation of other writers' errors, a reference work in which one could find out everything that had been misstated about Aristotle, Rome, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, or any of the other figures, places, and events that stocked the mind of a well-educated seventeenth-century reader. He compared the task he set for himself to the cutting off of the Hydra heads or the cleaning of the Augean stables.
³
It was the perfect image for someone convinced that intolerance bred of ignorance has fouled the world—and convinced that he has a brother's death from intolerance on his conscience.

Cooler heads prevailed, and persuaded Bayle that even the most dedicated scholar did not want in his library multiple volumes devoted to other writers' errors, any more than a mathematician would want a book of invalid equations or a farmer sacks of bad seed. Bayle finally agreed to provide the facts as he found them in a conventional presentation of alphabetized entries. But then, in what must have been one of those
eureka
moments of inventive genius, Bayle realized that he could have it both ways. The text could provide the true accounts, but errors and the chastisement of those errors could be put into long, digressive, unlimited footnotes. Footnotes that seem to breed among themselves and multiply like the proverbial rabbit, or split apart and split apart again like the indomitable amoeba. Footnotes that take up more space than the text and have as least as much interest. Footnotes that swish like swords ensuring the Hydra's heads of error rattle to the bottom of the page and collect there, the detritus of ignorance. Footnotes that frequently chastise, as Bayle exercises his judgmental side.

The five volumes of
The Dictionary, Historical and Critical
, in the edition that now occupies my desk, weigh in at forty pounds. Opened, a volume spreads out to an ample fourteen by twenty inches.
*
Open its last volume and you find just over 9 of its 1,015 pages allocated to the great Roman poet Virgil. His nine pages have forty-four lines of text and 1,144 footnotes of commentary. One hundred and nine additional margin notes refer us to Bayle's sources or, in a rare case or two, provide additional information. Commentary can delve into deeply personal biography: for example, a refutation of the charge that Virgil was “inclined to unnatural sin.”
⁴
A note can begin as a correction of a critic's grammar: “[Mr. Moréri's] manner of placing his words …,”
⁵
then lead us off to a margin note for a grammar lesson: “Logic teaches us that in all compounded and copulative propositions, all the attributes sought to agree ….”—a note that ends by referring us to the “
Art of Thinking, Part. Ii, ch. ix
….”
⁶
should we wish further instruction.

What Bayle chooses to include in his dictionary can be pleasantly idiosyncratic, and reflects his own life in a way that is charming, even touching. The River Auriege is one of those entries. The Auriege has no great claim on a historian's time. Though Bayle assures us it is “full of Fish and also very good to drink,”
⁷
that surely could have been said of any number of French backwaters that were left to splash and gurgle unreported upon by Bayle. But the Auriege entry in the dictionary hits a Wordsworthian note of reminiscence and homage. Once when young, Bayle studied so fervently that he made himself sick, and was sent to a country house “situate
[sic]
on the banks of the Auriege.”
⁸
Twenty years later he remembers the fish and the refreshing water and his slow recovery, and he gives thanks to the Auriege. We appreciate this human touch but, as Bayle must have counted on, seek an intellectual justification for our time wandering along the river in footnotes. At the bottom of the page, seventeen inches of commentary sort out the proper name for the river, whether Auriege or Ariege. The sorting out takes us over to the martyrdom of “St. Antonim
[sic]
” and requires us to watch the saint's body being placed on a raft and floated down the river. We are also presented with a critique of a map whose “Proper names” are so “disfigured, that we ought to suppose them to be faults of the engraver.”
⁹
The critique in turn provides an opportunity for Bayle to grab us firmly by the arm and argue: “I know many Authors make a jest of a Writer who takes them up for Errors of this Nature, and pretend to be above those Trifles: But they are vain Pretenders who want a Fair Mask to cover either their Ignorance or their Idleness, or their ill Taste, or their Incorrectness.”
¹⁰
This last remark makes the twist and turns of Bayle's mind transparent. The Pretenders' possible failings are hammered home as if they were four nails needed to hold up a particularly ugly poster:
bang
, Ignorance,
bang, bang
, Idleness, ill Taste, or, if none of those failings then simply flat out,
bang
, Incorrectness. We follow the trail of his thought wherever it leads, from text to footnote to margin note, to text, to another footnote. The bumps and curves of the scholarly mind are mapped for us in a way no simple text lying inert on the page can do.

The footnote does not exhaust our interest in the Auriege nor, indeed, does a second one that explores the river's various tributaries, the Lers, the Arget, the Leze, and so forth. And since a sonneteer has made verse out of his love for the river, Bayle, determined to do homage, finds room for the complacent rhymes. “Auriege, thou noble River,” it begins in the translated version, “known to Fame / for thy bright waters, and thy golden name …,”
¹¹
and known now because of Bayle's golden memories.

The
Dictionnaire historique et critique
was an immediate and overwhelming success. An educated person in the eighteenth century was more likely to have Bayle's work in his library than to have something by Locke or Voltaire or Newton or Rousseau. “In fact it was to become the philosophical blockbuster of all time.”
¹²
One is tempted to ascribe the dictionary's popularity simply to the insatiable desire of scholars of that era for reliable facts and to their gratitude for the inspiration someone else's work could provide them. Voltaire (not someone who needed any other person's inspiration, of course) had a love/hate relationship with the dictionary and with Bayle. He was dismayed by Bayle's carelessness, his failure to “chastise” or to correct his prose.
¹³
The great eighteenth-century art historian J. J. Winckelmann was so smitten by the dictionary that he copied out “1300 pages of articles … in a minute hand.”
¹⁴
Testimony from other scholars would be easy to supply.

It is equally tempting—perhaps even more tempting—to attribute Bayle's success to the amount of controversial, often salacious material that found its way into the dictionary and into his footnotes in particular. The French New Wave cinema of the 1950s provides a useful analogy. Much criticism of those films engages in a highly rarefied intellectual analysis of Goddard's distancing devices, for example, or of Truffaut's homage to Hitchcock. But one aging American critic recently admitted that his initial, youthful interest in the New Wave (and for that matter the interest of many of his colleagues) could be attributed to the films' homage to nudity.