Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment

By Kevin L. Cope, Roger D. Lund, William Stargard and 5 more

Recognizing distance as a central concern of the Enlightenment, this volume offers eight essays on distance in art and literature; on cultural transmission and exchange over distance; and on distance as a topic in science, a theme in literature, and a central issue in modern research methods. Through studies of landscape gardens, architecture, imaginary voyages, transcontinental philosophical exchange, and cosmological poetry, Hemispheres and Stratospheres unfurls the early history of a distance culture that influences our own era of global information exchange, long-haul flights, colossal skyscrapers, and space tourism.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684482030

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Stratospheres

INTRODUCTION

Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment

KEVIN L. COPE

DISTANCE, although a measure of motion, has always been something of a moving target. Online and print etymologies unanimously explain that distance derives from Latin and French words meaning standing apart, yet these origin stories omit that the modifier apart already alludes to distance: to spatial separation and to whatever it is that allows persons, places, or things to disperse. Favorite phrases, startling novelties, and landmark inventions of the long eighteenth century—Thomas Hobbes’s reduction of moral life to matter and motion, John Gay’s composition of comic pedestrian epics, Samuel Johnson’s long view survey of human misery from China to Peru, Captain Cook’s international expeditions, Alexander Pope’s astonished characterization of a world that extends through all extent—rely on a somewhat hazy, deeply backgrounded idea of distance. In the travel-minded eighteenth century, distance became an unexamined yet urgently important fact of daily life as scheduled coaches plied bumpy roads, ships sailed to and from colonial outposts, and surveyors such as William Byrd or even George Washington measured the boundaries of newfound lands. Practical activity alone, however, was not what improved, extended, or perfected the understanding of distance. Distance-related issues defined the frontiers of Enlightenment thought, science, and speculation. Isaac Newton, John Flamsteed, Charles Messier, William Herschel, and countless other votaries of the philosophic tube peered into remote heavenly realms; meanwhile, biologists edged into the minuscule world of microbes while explorers scoured the planet in search of oddities, anecdotes, anomalies, and acquisitions. Those who have read Gabriel Daniel’s A Voyage to the World of Cartesius or Rudolf Erich Raspe’s The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen or Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds wonder whether the Enlightenment could produce any work in which unprecedented, even grotesque expansion and contraction played anything less than a starring role.

A review of the ubiquity of distance in long-eighteenth-century intellectual activity should not be equated with a careful, cultural analysis of this elusive concept. During the period, distance carried multitudinous meanings, many of which have slipped into the linguistic outback of specialist jargon or have otherwise disappeared from common usage. Distance could connote disagreement in a debate, ideological contrasts, separation in social rank, the proper spacing for a duel or fencing match, musical intervals, a haughty attitude, an interval of time, or a panorama. Each of these diverse meanings draws on an easygoing, naive understanding of this most fundamental of commodities: on a useful but uncritical sense that some sort of measurable space organizes and distributes the components of complex phenomena. Helpful dispersion of this sort is at play as much in aristocratic rankings as in the gap between the musical notes C and G or in the love of intervals that marks baroque and early classical music. A convenient enough term for nearly any species of spaciousness, distance enables a casual cognitive abbreviation: a seeing and analyzing of the components of complex phenomena separately and independently.

Distance certainly had its unfiltered, public side in the appropriately named long eighteenth century. Setting the quarrels of critics and the cavils of newspaper reviews aside, it is remarkable how readily eighteenth-century audiences accepted vernacular renderings of distance, whether William Davenant’s tuneful theatrical portrayal of Sir Francis Drake peering across the seas, or the voluminous landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain or Alexander Cozens, or the deep, grand vistas elicited from estates such as Blenheim or Stowe, or the soaring fresco-festooned ceilings of Tiepolo, or the unfathomable pilings and climbing columns of buildings designed by John Vanbrugh, Christopher Wren, the Asam brothers, or Balthasar Neumann. Night after night, performance after performance, opera audiences blithely accepted and indeed reveled in colossal conceptions like those of George Frideric Handel, whose continent-spanning stories and epic arias quietly exploded the neoclassical commitment to the unities of time, place, and action while taking distance about as far as it can go. Long-eighteenth-century audiences were ready to accept almost any invocation of, experiment with, and creative distortion of distance. They gladly tolerated being hard put to explain exactly what distance might be.

A LENGTHY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE SCIENCE OF DISTANCE

The least material component of material culture and the most ethereal element in physics, distance is as pertinent to Enlightenment art, literature, and culture as to Enlightenment science and technology. Whether in discourses on perspective in painting or in imaginative tales of anticipated space travel, distance was a very long discussion thread that stitched together travelers, researchers, and the flourishing publishing trade. Although this volume addresses the cultural rendering rather than the technical analysis of distance, a basic understanding of the science of distance during the long eighteenth century can enrich our appreciation of the interdisciplinary response to this seemingly abstract quantity.

Like many ideas, concepts, or quantities that seem pure, esoteric, or abstract, the modern, detailed, and sometimes disciplined notion of distance emerged from both humble and sophisticated origins. First and foremost was a pragmatic concern with the measurement of the gaps between places and of the progress made during travel between them. Also salient were military needs, whether accurate maps or guidance in aiming of ordnance. At the other end of the intellectual spectrum, a bevy of philosophers and scientists tackled the theoretical underpinnings of distance. Some, like Newton, regarded space as ontological and distance as its measure. Others, such as George Berkeley or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, treated space and distance as matters of relation or process, whether by reducing space to the sensuous expression of relations among sentient monads or whether by regarding distance as shorthand for the array of actions required to approach or recede from a perceived object. Still others, such as John Locke or David Hume or Immanuel Kant, treated space and distance as matters of psychology, epistemology, and cognition, deferring questions about the ontology of space while treating the perception of distance as a foundation and function of perception—as a representation of the way that the mind assembles the components of empirical experience.

Distance is a foundational concern in almost all physical processes. In the materialist rendition of nature that accompanied the rise of early science—in, for example, the speculation by Hobbes that all of nature might be matter in motion—the movements carrying out the operations of nature involve the traversing of distance. Chemists such as Joseph Priestley or Antoine Lavoisier produced reactions by moving materials together; they measured the expansion of gases; they traced the dispersion of by-products. More cosmologically minded scientists, whether Galileo or Edmond Halley, assumed that their modest observatories could track the traveling planets or even overleap interstellar intervals. Geologists uncovered evidence that the land itself had changed, moved, and otherwise covered distance. Improvements and inventions in optics all but undid the intuitive association between apparent and actual distance, bringing conveniently sized images both of distant nebulas and of tiny microbes far beneath our notice direct to the laboratory bench.

The kind of memorably dramatic experiments pictured in the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby played a large but not exclusive role in revising Enlightenment conceptions of distance. Fundamental to the evaluation of distance were the rather more detailed considerations of new-wave mathematicians who scrutinized quantity. First, yet most often forgotten among these, is John Wallis, a mathematical prodigy as well as a hyperactive insomniac who proposed a rigorous account of infinitesimals: of quantities that, although infinitely small, facilitated distance-related activities such as the estimating of areas. Although not the kind of research that easily makes its way into popular culture or artistic representations, Wallis’s analysis of quantity (including its extremes, the infinite and the infinitesimal) stands as a milepost in the history of ideas about distance: as a moment at which distance moves from the background into the foreground and thus becomes an item worthy of independent consideration. Themes sounded by Wallis increase in volume in the more familiar work of Newton, for whom the study of infinitesimals supported both the calculus, a potent tool for the analysis of distance, and cosmology, including the fundamental laws of motion. The foundational analysis of distance, motion, and measure traversed all national boundaries, with German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently inventing the calculus and, later, with prolific mathematician-astronomer Leonhard Euler extending the capabilities of that mathematical tool. To speak more generally, it is fair to say that science after René Descartes represents most processes, whether planetary orbits or insurance pool distributions, as distances measured by lines and curves on graphs.

The virtuosos of the long eighteenth century simultaneously undertook a highly technical investigation of what distance might be while also considering the role of distance in a vast selection of real-world settings, processes, and activities. This cadre of clever men and women parsed the relations among the kinds of distance seen across the many tiers of creation, from the surface of the sea to the rings of Saturn or from the wee environs of amoebas to the colossal expanses of the Milky Way. Let us begin by looking at the lowest reference plane, the sea, the level from which vertical distance is measured. For an era accustomed to travel books and to the picaresque—among readers and writers who associated motion through space with series of particular, detailed adventures and events—ocean travel, with its long stretches of uniform, minimally differentiated surfaces, presented both technical and psychological challenges. On the technical and practical side, the extending of colonial holdings and the stretching of trade routes encouraged the development of methods for determining the position of ships at sea and for measuring progress across distances. Most familiar among distance-management campaigns was the British Longitude Act of 1714, which allocated cash prizes for inventors of technology capable of determining longitude. The most famous beneficiary of this state-sponsored competition was John Harrison, a builder of marine chronometers used in the trigonometric measurement of distance from a known meridian. Harrison’s accomplishments have eclipsed the historical memory of other inventors such as John Hadley and Thomas Godfrey, who independently invented the octant, which, in turn, was superseded by another eighteenth-century invention, the sextant.

Drifting upward from the sea brings us to the next domain for distance technology, the land. Surveying, the measuring and mapping of the land by the determination of distances between points, took a major leap forward during the long eighteenth century, in part owing to the sharing of technology with mariners and in part owing to the mapping of large empires. Cartography, which has enjoyed a higher level of attention from cultural historians, is dependent on surveying as well as on surveying’s sibling, maritime navigation. Surveyors were everywhere during the period, whether in India or America. Most scholars readily recall that George Washington began his career as a surveyor and that colonial virtuoso William Byrd used a surveying assignment, the measuring and marking of the Virginia–North Carolina boundary, as a platform for para-literary works such as his History of the Dividing Line. The Mason-Dixon Line, so key to the fractioning of American cultural identities, was likewise surveyed in the mid-eighteenth century. Less familiar than surveying is what might be called barometry, the measurement of vertical distance or altitude by detecting variations in atmospheric pressure. Buried in almost every travel account, whether of Alexander von Humboldt or Antonio de Ulloa ascending South American peaks or of Niels Horrebow or John Barrow climbing the volcanoes of Iceland or of the ballooning Montgolfiers or Vincenzo Lunardi probing the skies, is a passage or logbook entry recording the use of a barometer to estimate elevation. Still another step up from the planetary surface was the measuring of the earth itself, a scientific avocation that began with Jean Picard, who extrapolated his way to an estimate of the circumference of the earth by calculating the distance encompassed by one degree of latitude.

In the ambitious science of the long eighteenth century, the various kinds and scales of measurement pertaining to the earth already mix the intuitive with the nonintuitive. Travelers can see the distance from a ship to a shore or from a mountaintop to a valley, but they cannot directly experience the distance covered by a degree of latitude, nor can they sense the precise angles or long base lines required for marine navigation. At the upper end of long-eighteenth-century distance issues is the utterly unfamiliar, nonintuitive array of distances belonging to astronomy and cosmology. Most accessible among the celestial distances that interested virtuosos was the distance to the sun, which James Gregory and later Edmond Halley estimated using data from the solar transit of Venus and which Christiaan Huygens and others checked against evidence gleaned from assorted astronomical events. From the measuring of the distance to the sun it was only a small step to the measuring of the distance across the known solar system. Next came the calculation of the distances encompassed by planetary orbits, a process eased by Newton’s reduction of all orbits to conic sections. Prominent mathematicians, astronomers, and all-around virtuosos such as Huygens, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Giovanni Cassini, James Bradley, and Robert Hooke all engaged in estimating distances to stars, in determining the extent of Saturn’s rings, of measuring the space between double stars, and in discovering extremely remote phenomena. Less theoretically or mathematically inclined telescope operators also contributed to the discourse of distance. Cataloger-observers such as John Flamsteed, William Herschel, Caroline Herschel, Maria Kirch, and Charles Messier compiled vast inventories of planets, stars, and nebulas for which, sooner or later, distance estimates would be required. The provision by Danish investigator Ole Rømer of a formula and framework for measuring the speed of light subtly suggested that everything in the universe, whether near or far, stood at a double distance, on the other side of a ray of light and at a temporal distance plotted by traveling corpuscles.

From these innovative, often grand efforts to comprehend, measure, and even traverse dazzling distances derived many applied or allied distance studies and technologies. Enlightenment researchers, for example, measured the speed—the rate of travel—of sound as well as of light, thereby opening the study of acoustics (and of the architectural distances, in churches and concert halls, over which sound travels). Architecture, in turn, fostered a scientific analysis of perspective, giving rise to a disciplined understanding of real and apparent distance in relation to size (size, in turn, being the distances over which objects extend themselves). Optics, the helpmeet of astronomy, played with scales and distances in the new science of microscopy, using the same lenses that unveiled Saturn to reveal the miniature as well as the massive. Optical devices such as camera obscuras and magic lanterns brought distant prospects into the office, palace, or home. And, of course, measurement itself must get its due, revolutionary France of the later eighteenth century having been the birthplace of the metric system that remains with us today.

EXPRESSIVE DISTANCE: IMAGE, TEXT, SOUND, SPECULATION

The foregoing and many more strands of thought interweave in the pervasive Enlightenment preoccupation with distance. The Enlightenment might not have been the first period to think of distance as something real, but it was surely the first to regard distance as, if not truly palpable, at least influential—as something more than a blank backdrop for the display of god’s creativity. Thinkers and practitioners of this era imposed a new slate of assignments on themselves as they attempted to discern what, in their enlarging world, distance might mean, do, and require. Savants could respond to distance through disciplinary rotation: by serially deploying the various arts and sciences to deal with different aspects of the distance problem.

This volume studies, observes, and celebrates that disciplinary rotation. The goal of Hemispheres and Stratospheres is not to offer a history of science with special emphasis on the metric of distance, but rather to consider the many and diverse ways that the Enlightenment interest in distance influenced, was represented in, transformed, or affected a broad range of cultural activities. As the discovery of fossils affected cultural phenomena from Frederick the Great’s shell-lined ballroom at San Souci to the painting of seascapes and on to aquatically themed theater in London, so the combined scientific and popular interest in distance transformed a wide range of arts, activities, and cultural contexts. This volume works on the distant edges of metrical science: on the surprisingly far-flung manifestations and effects of the long-eighteenth-century distance culture.

Dealing with distance presents special challenges in part owing to the character of distance as a derivative or affiliated phenomenon and in part owing to its suitability for artistic representation. Those in the practical, artistic, or cultural vocations took impromptu approaches to distance-related challenges while waiting for technology to evolve. Whatever else distance might be or do, it measures, quantifies, and expresses important features of its three-dimensional sibling, space. Practical and measurable, distance is concisely expressive. It abbreviates, quantifies, and to some extent explains the activities occurring within space, whether simply going from point A to point B or whether painting a picture in the correct proportions and perspective. When novelists such as Henry Fielding or Tobias Smollett talk about the distances covered by their characters, they imply that a story is forthcoming: that a character who has walked ten miles or sailed a thousand leagues has undertaken assorted adventures and done myriad deeds. That abundant source of synonyms, the Oxford English Dictionary, delivers eleven meanings for distance as well as two dozen variations on those meanings. Reaching beyond space, extension, and ether, most of these definitions involve actions or processes, whether engaging in a quarrel or respecting social rank or taking the proper position to begin a fencing match. A definition such as the space to be passed over before reaching an object highlights the action of passing over while saying little about exactly what distance is. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that distance automatically demands action—that the mere sight of a yardstick sets men, women, or matter in motion—distance differs conceptually from space. With all its practical overtones, distance suggests the possibility of responding to or acting on something located or occurring elsewhere. Recognizing that considerable space divides North America from Europe holds intellectual interest, but knowing that the distance from Bristol to Boston is 3,169 miles implies that a shipwright might build a vessel capable of quickly traversing that gap; hearing Johann Sebastian Bach played on the organ allows for the appreciation of the voluminousness of cathedrals, but measuring distances helps architects to improve acoustics and allows artisans to tune pipes.

The lively practicality inherent in distance explains some of the optimism voiced by the denizens of a period in which the entire earth suddenly seemed small, even trivial, in comparison to a newly measured and frighteningly big universe. Big and small distances like those encountered through the telescope or under the microscope initially dazzle viewers but ultimately imply strategies for clever representation as well as for exploiting immensity. Modern readers are often confused by the apparently buoyant tone of eighteenth-century periodical articles on topics such as the possible destruction of the world through a collision with a comet or the devastation wrought by earthquakes and other natural disasters. Authors of self-styled sublime poetry often seem cruel for the apparent pleasure they take in representations of avalanches, tidal waves, storms, volcanic eruptions, and other large, damaging upheavals. In the background of these appreciations of calamity is the Enlightenment fascination with distance: with the thought that even the largest and worst experiences can be measured, traversed, processed, overcome, and turned into art.

Despite being a measure and despite being fundamentally finite, distance is so immense as to verge on unlimited. As soon as one measures all distances on the x-axis, one can begin thinking about all those aligned with the y-axis; as soon as one covers all the distance-related issues pertinent to navigation, one can begin addressing those arising in architecture, exploration, commerce, speculation, or animal migration. Hemispheres and Stratospheres focuses on the interplay of this big and manipulable quantity with culture: on the consideration, articulation, representation, and manipulation of distance in literature, the arts, and rhetoric as well as on the imaginative rendering of science for lay audiences. Moving distance into the foreground rather than leaving it as a background supposition allows for easy identification of areas in literature and the arts where the study of distance could produce provocative new interpretations. Picaresque fiction, so long explained with reference to ancient literary precedents and so often hailed for its cultivation of adventure and derring-do, takes on a new life as a special form of prose concerned with the spreading of narratives and incidents across vast spaces. Moralizing satire like that penned by Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson becomes a canvas in which the evaluative eye darts across wide spatial intervals, rhythmically perusing humankind over distances that separate people and nations but that minimize cultural differences. Opera emerges as an exercise in measuring geographically extended stories to indoor stages and in making vast movements congruent with musical scales and metronomic beats. The preoccupation of French neoclassical critics with the unities of time, space, and action ventilates a new concern about how both people and art should function in a vast universe. A similarly cosmological kinesiology comes into play in the grandiose history paintings of Benjamin West and Jacques-Louis David. Urban planners develop large public spaces such as urban parks with distance-spanning walkways as well as those long straight boulevards that grace Rome, Paris, London, and even Washington, D.C.

DEFINING THE DISTANCES: A WORLD OF ESSAYS

Heeding the linkage of separateness to connectedness that is distance, the contributors to this volume address a panorama of topics while keeping dispersive distance at the center of their attention. The contributors themselves personify the legacy of Enlightenment distance studies, hailing from universities from South Asia to the American New World and bringing to bear methodological, cultural, and educational traditions and experiences that span an entire world. The essays in Hemispheres and Stratospheres are organized into three parts: essays celebrating the art of distance, including the process by which distance migrated from the background of cultural artifacts into the prestigious position of topic, focus, or medium; essays addressing the role of distance in creating as well as transmitting culture and cultural exchange; and essays examining the discussion, representation, scientific study, and analysis of distance as distance: distance manifested in space, in time, and occasionally in the cognitive, cybernetic, and psychological processes that allow us to conceive the universe in which we live.

The first of these three parts, Best Seen at a Distance: The Art of the Far-Away, showcases three essays that evaluate the many roles of distance in the assorted arts. These essays show how distance advances interdisciplinary projects: how it connects the fine arts with the full range of intellectual and cultural production. In a magisterial essay that ranges across the vast panorama of the long eighteenth century—that considers everything from Jane Austen and Claude Lorrain to Oliver Goldsmith’s panoramic moral satire and William Wordsworth’s alpine ascents—Roger D. Lund takes on the vast topic of looking down. Reviewing eighteenth-century prospects, visionary aspirations, panoramic views, and imagination, Lund shows how the habit of seeing phenomena from afar pervades almost every aspect of eighteenth-century intellectual and artistic life, whether the creation of gigantic garden installations such as Stourhead, or whether the writing of topographical poetry such as John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, or whether dispensing prescriptions for the painterly organizing of vegetables in William Mason’s The English Garden: A Poem. Lund culminates his tour de force with an intricate comparison of the distant, downward, and occasionally elevated views to the ambitious surveys of knowledge attempted by eighteenth-century encyclopedia editors. For Lund, the idea and the artful management of distance enables and anticipates modern, comprehensive information sources. The second essay in this part, William Stargard’s Space and the Meaning of Distance in Bernardo Vittone’s Architecture, premises a new emphasis on distance, views, and the use of space to produce those views. Italian architect Bernardo Vittone created rhythmic alternations between architecture, distance, and art. His preferred method: extending and improving the already popular genre of scenography, painted vistas of architectural designs, so as to turn ceilings into expanding streets, to define long views with images of opaque buildings, and to revel in spatial illusions. A master trickster, Vittone, who often designed for the church, uses both actual and illusory distance to create connections between laity and cloistered religious personnel while also separating these two groups. Connecting while distinguishing the sacred and the profane, offering both close and far in a single structure, Vittone captures the spirit of Newtonianism, with its zeal for distance and its corresponding confidence in optics—with its expectation that the near and the far can coincide, at least in the lens. Like the encyclopedists whom Lund discusses, Vittone combines the proximate, the abbreviated, and the colloquial with the grandiose, managing distance so as to suggest the attainability of a heaven that is genially far away. The culminating essay in this part, Bärbel Czennia’s Change of Air, Change of Self: Long Distance and Human Adaptability in Imaginary Voyages of the Long Eighteenth Century, spans the gap between the familiar and the foreign, the canonical and the offbeat, and even the home planet and the cosmos. Exploring well-known but not always widely read tales of ultra-distant travels—Francis Godwin’s wryly related goose-driven journey to the moon, Cyrano de Bergerac’s extraplanetary exploits, Lady Margaret Cavendish’s sojourns in septentrional utopias, and Eberhard Christian Kindermann’s extraterrestrial encounters, aeronautical activities, and deep-space diversions—Czennia peers into distance literature through binocular lenses. With one eye, Czennia views and reviews the artistic techniques at play in the imaginative presentation of vast spaces and the travel across them; with the other eye, she resolves an underlying discussion, in these works, concerning strategies for adaptation to the foreign, the unfamiliar, and the far-away. Early expressions of what we now call globalization, these literary expositions of distance unexpectedly serve to ease interactions in and to make connections across the expanses of a world where remoteness and propinquity come closer together than anyone had previously anticipated—where a meteorite can end up in a curio cabinet and where the other side of the world can be as near at hand as a cup of