The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  Had the duke been more fully apprised of Leibniz’s mathematical interests, especially the differential calculus that provided the limit of an infinite series, he might have substituted “since 825 C.E.” or “since the birth of Christ” rather than “from the earliest times.” Between 1698 and 1711, Leibniz published nine volumes of edited archival papers as a framework and reference source for the History of the Brunswicks. He drafted a preliminary essay for the book, the Protogaea, about geology and fossil formation, and a second work on the movement of early European tribes as inferred from the etymology of place names (during the course of which, incidentally, he proved conclusively that Swedish was not the oldest known language). One can understand the frustration of the various dukes, whose thirty-year investment looked increasingly unlikely to produce a neat précis of their grandparents’ achievements.

  A mild air of fiasco, or a charming whiff of foible, surrounds the Historyof the Brunswicks in its display of Leibniz’s characteristic drive toward completeness. The same could be said about his proposed work on religion. His Discourse on Metaphysics was to be the first part of a massive disquisition that would encompass (after the proof of the existence of God through natural religion) a volume on revealed religion and a volume that explained and delimited the relative authorities of church and state. Leibniz’s estimation of the effect of the treatise was as ambitious, and as hopelessly optimistic, as the work itself: it would reconcile the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches. He even, through his notion of a “substantial connector,” claimed to be able to find common ground between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists on the question of transubstantiation.

  The Demonstrationes Catholicae never came about. Leibniz’s major lost work, however, was not misplaced, or destroyed, or even really conceived: it was impossible. His schemes for integrating all the fields of knowledge, “harmonizing the philosophers” as he put it, crystallized into the idea of the Universal Encyclopedia.

  If we are to believe his own version of the facts, the idea first wormed into his brain at the age of thirteen. Having read all the poetry, history, and rhetoric in his father’s library, he started on philosophy, and specifically Aristotelian logical syllogisms: “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.” In its capacity to provide definitions, and to verify or falsify propositions, the syllogism seemed to him to be “the official roll call of all the things in the world.”

  Complex ideas, he concluded, were made up of combinations of simpler ideas, just as words were made up of letters. Using the medieval technique of division, whereby a characteristic was identified as something certain objects possessed and others did not, concepts could be taxonomized: “everything” was made up of the “material” and the “immaterial,” the “material” could be divided into the “animate” and the “inanimate,” the “animate” into the “sensible”—or animals—and “insensible”—plants and so forth.

  Leibniz argued that the definition of the “species” always contained the “genus”: for example, the definition of “gold” included that of its genus, “metal.” By replacing a term with its definition, propositions could be tested; for example:

  All gold is metal.

  Replace gold with its definition:

  All “yellow metal” is metal.

  Since the same term appears on both sides, it is taken to be proven. This method of ratiocination was described by Leibniz as “an alphabet of human thought.”

  This method had captured Leibniz’s interest earlier in his life. His doctoral mathematical thesis, De Arte Combinatoria, had been a (not wholly successful) attempt to apply mathematical exactitude to the 256 “moods” of logical syllogisms. At stake was the possibility of a purely mechanical form of reasoning. Leibniz believed it was fundamentally possible to create a machine that, with the correct input, could imitate human reason.

  Such projects were satirized by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. On the island of Balnibarbi, Lemuel Gulliver encounters the Professors of the Academy, one of whom has a similar machine.

  He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies were composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with papers pasted on them, and on the papers were written all the words of their language in their several moods, tenses and declensions, but without any order. The professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his engine at work. The pupils at his command took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words had entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys who were scribes . . . Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour, and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences. . . .

  Leibniz had already realized that the fundamental utility of any such machine was only as good as the quality of the data used in it. What was needed was a volume that contained accurate definitions of all possible axioms and individuals, with which the computer could set its dials. What differentiated each individual from every other individual, and their relative places within their genus, was the substance of the Universal Encyclopedia.

  Leibniz’s various attempts to systematize human knowledge were never met with anything other than confused boredom or irascible impatience: they paid “no more attention than if I had related a dream,” carped Leibniz to the duc d’Orléans. He was even expressly forbidden to rearrange the library according to his principles. In Leibniz’s correspondence, he resorts to specifying a book he needs by its position in the library relative to the window, or door, or its size, or color. His attempts to found and sustain academies, the published proceedings of which would contribute to the encyclopedia, were hampered and disappointed.

  But he persisted. As early as 1676, stranded at Sheerness awaiting a boat back to the Continent, he had considered (since he could not understand the sailors) that the Universal Encyclopedia required a universal language. Chinese ideograms interested him, in their capacity to include in the word itself a sense of its definition. He also considered binary numbers, which he had invented previously. In a moment of hubris he had even grandiloquently imagined a medal in his honor being made proclaiming: “The Model of Creation discovered by G.W.L.: One is Enough to derive Everything from Nothing.”

  There is an irony here, in that Leibniz’s conception that the universal language had to be digital makes him seem shockingly modern: machines, logic, the primacy of binary—all he needed was an inkling of electricity to imagine the possibility of a computer. Leibniz’s vision of the Universal Encyclopedia relies on his microcosmic understanding of knowledge itself, where each part contains the whole. “In the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole course of things in the Universe,” he wrote. This is where the Universal Encyclopedia implodes.

  Imagine all the atoms in the universe. To record the current position of each of them, let alone their past or future, requires an equal number of entities that can signify that position. If any particular atom is recording the position of another, where is its own position recorded? The total amount of information about the universe is greater than the total number of entities in it. A Universal Encyclopedia can never be written because there is not enough matter on which it could be transcribed.

  Most of Leibniz’s ideas are known to us, not through his published works, but through correspondence with other thinkers, memos to the duke
s, and a mass of unedited notes. “He knows me not who knows me only through my publications” was one of his aphorisms. He is known now, mostly, because of one particular published work, Theodicy, and a satirist’s indignation at its explanation of the existence of evil in a perfect universe.

  Voltaire thought that Leibniz’s formulation—that everything is ordained for the best, and that our perception of things as “evil” or even “unfortunate” is merely an indication of our limitations—was ludicrous. As the ever-optimistic Dr. Pangloss in Candide, Voltaire immortalized an aspect of Leibniz. Yet the caricature contains a grain of truth.

  With his universal language, Universal Encyclopedia, and occasional recourse to the infallible machines, Leibniz believed that humanity might evolve to the extent that “correct reasoning, given time for thought, will be no more praiseworthy than calculating large numbers without any error.”

  Leibniz lived on the cusp when the dream that everything might be known was fading; yet the thought that everything might be amicably and incontrovertibly resolved still seemed feasible. His optimism, caricatured as the willful negligence of Dr. Pangloss, now seems almost touching.

  Alexander Pope

  {1688–1744}

  ALEXANDER POPE DIED in 1682, at the age of three. His mother had died in childbirth and his father, unable or unwilling to take on a nurse, had sent him to stay with his late wife’s sister in Pangbourne, Berkshire, safely away—or so he surmised—from the pestilential and unwholesome air of London. His father remarried and, in 1688, named his new son after the lost half-brother. It was a common enough practice (indeed, Pope Senior was named Alexander as well). Although it would be rash to impute any lingering psychological shadow on the young poet from his literal and nominal predecessor, it would be fair to say that his birth was attended with a little more unspoken hopefulness than was usually the case.

  The child seemed to be of a hale and sound constitution. The earliest portrait, painted when he was seven, shows a suave, poised boy. He had a “sweetness of disposition” and a voice so melodious he was nicknamed “the Little Nightingale.” He was, admittedly, slightly frail, but, one supposes, his parents may have been particularly sensitive to any signs of illness.

  Even during these tender years, the young Alexander Pope displayed an astonishing felicity in composing verses, a remarkable fluency he described in retrospect, saying, “I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”

  Then the beautiful, precocious child hit puberty.

  The best contemporary diagnosis is that Pope suffered from Pott’s disease, a tubercular infection of the bones. It may have been transmitted through his wet nurse’s milk, or through unpasteurized cow’s milk (cows appear to have had a malign effect on the young Pope’s health in general: at the dangerous age of three, his elder half-sister recollected, he had been trampled by a wild cow).

  The effect, as he began to grow, was immediate. His spine twisted like a question mark, his legs were bandied like a pair of brackets. The pain of his grinding vertebrae contorted his features into an ampersand. He was stunted, never to grow much higher than four and a half feet, constantly afflicted with cramps and seizures. As his literary star rose, his detractors took every opportunity to belittle him further: he was a hunch-backed toad, a poisonous spider, an incontinent ape.

  The “mildness of mind” was gone. Wrung out by his own body, exacerbated by the unashamed cruelty of his invidious opponents, Pope became the stiletto-sharp satirist of his age. The child that had lisped quickly learned to hiss.

  Any writer as formidably gifted as Pope will probably produce a great deal of juvenilia; the truly great will have the sense to destroy it. According to a later letter, Pope was expelled from Twyford School after only a year, on account of a satire he had written on one of the teachers. Alongside this propensity for mischievous, or even malicious, lampooning, the young Pope showed a deep fascination with the works of Homer. He recast scenes from The Iliad as a play, co-opting his schoolfellows and the master’s gardener to play roles.

  By the age of fourteen, Pope’s poetic enthusiasm was in full flood. Samuel Johnson’s Life of Pope records that he had already written panegyrics on all the crowned heads of Europe, as well as a comedy, a tragedy, and an epic poem.

  “Of the comedy there is no account,” says Johnson.

  The tragedy was based on the life of St. Genevieve. The more famous saint who bears that name, St. Genevieve of Paris, whose prayers saved the city from Attila the Hun, hardly seems a model for that kind of play: indeed, she died at the ripe old age of ninety-five, much loved and already venerated. A more likely candidate is St. Genevieve of Brabant, who was accused of infidelity by her husband and executed. Unbeknownst to him, she in fact escaped to the forest, where, with the assistance of a kindly disposed deer, she lived on fruits and shoots. The couple were reconciled just in time to die, thus offering a suitably tear-jerking tragic denouement. Why she was canonized as a saint is much less clear.

  The epic was called Alcander. Pope, so he says, “endeavoured . . . to collect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece. There was Milton’s style in one part and Cowley’s in another, here the style of Spenser imitated and there Statius, here Homer and Virgil, and there Ovid and Claudius.”

  The name “Alcander” crops up occasionally in Greek mythology. Homer and Ovid give the name to a Lycian whom Odysseus kills at Troy, and Virgil adopts the name for one of Aeneas’ companions: again, he is slain in battle, but this time by Turnus. If Pope had read the Metamorphosesof Antoninus Liberalis as well as Ovid’s better-known poem of that name, he would have known that Alcander was also a seer from Molossus, turned into a bird by Zeus, who was upset that some bandits had torched the prophet’s house. None of these seems particularly rich material for a budding epic writer.

  Pope may have come across the name in a historical text, Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus. Lycurgus, the Spartan founder of democracy, was assaulted by a gang of aristocratic thugs, one of whom was called Alcander. Alcander, who blinded Lycurgus in one eye during the attack, was also the only assailant brought to account for it. Rather than demanding retribution, the noble and ascetic Lycurgus took on the wayward youth as a companion and taught him the meaning of virtue, and Alcander became one of his strongest supporters.

  This tale seems to fit with Pope’s description of one of the “incidents” in Alcander, a side-plot about a Scythian prince who thought even a pillow made of snow was excessively luxurious. On the other hand, Pope may have just liked the name and invented his own story, as fourteen-year-olds are wont to do.

  Johnson informs us that Alcander was burned at the suggestion of Francis Atterbury, the dean of Westminster and bishop of Rochester, who was later arrested and exiled for treason in supporting the deposed Stuart monarchy. Pope had become close to Atterbury sometime before 1718. That Atterbury had read Alcander at all means that Pope had kept the manuscript for sixteen years after its creation. This retention argues that its author had some attachment to the work greater than his later wry recollection might otherwise suggest.

  Atterbury’s negative advice is typically regarded as an aesthetic verdict, but in the fractious theater of eighteenth-century politics, this may be an underestimation. Although it is highly improbable that Alcander was openly seditious, the concentration of plot and character on an earlier, less corrupted version of government could be read as a rebuke, at the very least, to the ruling administration. Pope was already well known for his friendship with Bolingbroke, who had fled to the Continent to support the Stuart pretender James III, and who had been vocal about the dishonest electioneering tactics of the Walpole government. Alcander might have furnished his detractors with copious examples of Pope’s party loyalties, dangerous political principles, and juvenile verse, had the manuscript become publicly available.

  The idea of creating the Great English Epic was to haunt Pope’s career. Five years later, age nineteen, he planned another long poem, on the immediately inspirin
g topic of Gaius Gracchus’ agrarian reforms. Timoleon, the Corinthian prince who assassinated his brother rather than let him turn the state into a tyranny, was another potential subject, which withered to a passing mention in his poem The Temple of Fame.

  The Dunciad (1728, expanded 1729 and revised 1742) united Pope’s neoclassical urge to write an epic with his talent for excoriation. He bolstered the authority of his mock-epic by referring to Homer’s lost comedy the Margites and by comparing his position to that of the satyr play which came after the classical dramatic trilogy. After the epic triumvirate of Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Milton’s Paradise Lost: the sneering farce of Pope’s Dunciad. Despite his ingenious attempts to intellectually justify the mammoth satire, and to place it in a tradition of epic poetry, Pope seems to have had qualms about it. We have Jonathan Swift to thank that The Dunciad exists: he snatched the first draft from the fire and persuaded Pope to continue.

  Instead of the heroic protagonists of Homer and Virgil, Pope’s epic is peopled by every hack, scribbler, poetaster, and publisher that ever attacked him. It was not Troy, but Grub Street that would burn. Pope had assiduously kept copies of all the pamphlets and broadsheets that mocked him, the endless vituperative polemics by Cibber and Theobald; The Dunciad would become a mausoleum in which Pope would inter his enemies. The perfectly modulated rhyming couplets belie the furious seething of this apocalyptic vision.

  The apotheosis of Dullness at the end of book IV describes a universe where every book is a lost book: the utter extinction of all culture.

  She comes! She comes! The sable throne behold

  Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!

  Before her, fancy’s gilded clouds decay,

  And all its varying rainbows die away . . .

  Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,

  Art after art goes out, and all is night . . .