[In the essay below, Shaw interprets Daniel Defoe's Consolidator as a part of the Battle of the Books, judging it “Defoe's first extended contribution to the battle of the ancients and moderns.”]

The Consolidator has long been recognized as an allegory pertaining to political events during the period 1660-1705—in particular, to the problems posed by the Spanish succession, and the High Church's move to tack an important land bill onto a bill designed to prevent the occasional conformity of dissenters.¹ Less apparent is the fact that the Consolidator represents a substantial contribution on Defoe's part to the ancients-moderns controversy, the only indication of this dimension of the Consolidator being provided by Marjorie Nicolson's brief comments upon the relevance of this work to “the perennial controversy between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern.’”² Both political and philosophical material is introduced by the narrator who, after rhapsodizing upon a recent visit to China, undertakes a voyage to the moon to review lunar politics. The apparent purpose of the China section is to promote the claim that ancient Chinese learning exceeded all modern efforts. Nicolson, accepting this material at face value, sees Defoe as turning the tables upon the moderns “by implying that all the inventions on which they prided themselves had been known to [the ancient Chinese]” (p. 184). Similarly, John F. Ross argues that Defoe “in his own person” is the narrator, documentation of superior Chinese inventiveness and learning allowing him “to glance satirically at many aspects of the English world.”³ This, however, is not the case. The narrator's “ancient” perspective upon issues ranging from the circulation of the blood to a plurality of worlds is debunked in an ironic manner which both recalls and at the same time inverts Swift's manipulation of his modern hack in A Tale of a Tub—a work which is disparagingly acknowledged in the Consolidator (p. 33).⁴ As Swift's persona “thro' the Assistance of our Noble Moderns” investigates “the weak sides of the Antients” (p. 96) and unwittingly sabotages his allies' arguments, so Defoe's persona applauds ancient Chinese ingenuity in terms which inevitably vindicate his antagonists, the moderns.⁵

Defoe's allusion to China has obvious topicality.⁶ The question of Chinese pretensions to ancient wisdom had been recently disputed in such works as Sir William Temple's An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, William Wotton's Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, and Thomas Baker's Reflections upon Learning, and it is within the context of the ancients-moderns controversy that the narrator's full-blown praise must be viewed.⁷ Defoe introduces Chinese learning casually, as a foregone conclusion: “as all Men know the Chineses are an Ancient, Wise, Polite, and most Ingenious People” (p. 4). The statement is a provocative one. The exceptions which Wotton takes to Temple's exaltation of the extent of Chinese knowledge illustrate the contentiousness of this issue. Wotton objects that if the Chinese applied themselves to learning “for near so long a Time, as their History pretends to, there is no Question but we should have heard much more of their Progress” (p. 146). Defoe's narrator follows Temple in making effusive claims concerning China's pre-eminence in the sphere of knowledge:

as the Chineses have many sorts of Learning which these Parts of the World never heard of, so all those useful Inventions which we admire our selves so much for, are vulgar and common with them, and were in use long before our Parts of the World were Inhabited. Thus Gun-powder, Printing, and the use of the Magnet and Compass, which we call Modern Inventions, are not only far from being Inventions, but fall so far short of the Perfection of Art they have attained to, that it is hardly Credible.

(p. 5)

While this seems to be clear praise of Chinese learning, Defoe himself did not actually believe the Chinese to be the inventors of gunpowder, printing, and the compass. In An Essay upon Projects (1697), the compass and gunpowder are presented as feathers in the moderns' cap, while in Defoe's writings of the 1720s Chinese claims to all these inventions are soundly refuted.⁸ This external evidence of Defoe's attitude is substantiated by clues imbedded in the Consolidator itself.

The narrator plans an exhibition of Chinese arts “for publick View, by way of Detection of the monstrous Ignorance and Deficiencies of European Science; which may serve as a Lexicon Technicum for this present Age, with useful Diagrams for that purpose” (pp. 5-6). In this scientific compendium, he promises to enlighten the world on the art of artillery as practised in China before the war of the giants. His source will be a work written “Anno mundi 114” by the historiographer-royal to the Chinese emperor. There are manifest absurdities in such a project. Most importantly, European science had already produced its Lexicon Technicum—a fact which convincingly discredits the allegation of modern ignorance. John Harris's Lexicon Technicum appeared in 1704, complete with “useful Diagrams.”⁹ In later scholarly writings, Harris's Lexicon served Defoe as a convenient reference source; the Consolidator allusion evinces that Defoe's respect for this modern text was formed at an early stage of his literary career.¹⁰ Furthermore, the narrator's proclamation that an ancient Chinese treatise on artillery exists in the library at Tonquin is palpably ridiculous. Certainly, his insistence that such is the case conflicts with what Temple, that staunch advocate of Chinese antiquity, knows of the subject. Temple relates that an ancient emperor ordered all books except those on medicine and agriculture to be burned (p. 46). Defoe's purpose in allowing the narrator's ancient tome, made of vitrified diamond, to survive the flames is clearly ironic.

The discrepancy between Defoe's position and that of the narrator also informs the reference to Chinese navigation and mathematics. Indefatigable in his praise of ancient ingenuity, the narrator decides that, on his next visit to China, he will compose “an Abstract of their most admirable Tracts in Navigation, and the Mysteries of Chinese Mathematicks; which out-do all Modern Invention at that Rate, that 'tis Inconceivable” (p. 7). The rhetoric rings false, the underlying contention being that such rivalry of modern invention is, literally, inconceivable. The narrator's project will entail his reading of the 365 volumes of one Augro-machi-languaro-zi, “the most ancient Mathematician in all China.” The sheer extravagance of the claim and, indeed, of the alleged author's name point up the narrator's lack of credibility.

The information on Chinese navigation forms a useful preliminary to ensuing material dealing with China's weathering of the deluge. Noah, it seems, was not the only human being apprised of the upcoming disaster: the emperor Tangro was also privy to the secret and consequently equipped a fleet of 100,000 ships to carry China through the flood. Every town in his dominion had at its disposal a vessel large enough to accommodate its entire population as well as provisions for 120 days. The ships were equipped with 600 fathoms of chain “which being fastned by wonderful Arts to the Earth … rid out the Deluge just at the Town's end” (pp. 7-8). When the waters subsided, “the People had nothing to do, but to open the Doors … come out, repair their Houses … and so put themselves in Statu Quo” (p. 8). Theirs was a situation vastly preferable to that of poor Noah who, when his ark rested upon Ararat, faced the immense task of rebuilding a world. Clearly, the narrator's apparent belief in such an absurd scenario does not correspond to Defoe's own opinion. The plan of the monstrous Tonquin vessel which the narrator diligently promises to obtain from the Chinese emperor is just another pin with which Defoe bursts the bubble of ancient Chinese learning.

A sharp invective against modern pretensions to learning complements the narrator's praise of China. He feels driven by benevolence to enlighten the ignorant scientists, artists, and philosophers of the west:

as these things must be very useful in these Parts, to abate the Pride and Arrogance of our Modern Undertakers of great Enterprizes, Authors of strange Foreign Accounts, Philosophical Transactions, and the like; if Time and Opportunity permit, I may let them know, how Infinitely we are out-done by those refined Nations, in all manner of Mechanick Improvements and Arts.

(p. 8)

One invention which strikes him as being most noble is an engine to prompt the memory, and the narrator plans to procure a draft of it “that it may be Erected in our Royal Societies Laboratory” (p. 9). Reference is made to the merchants, creditors, preachers, and lawyers who would find the memory engine particularly helpful. The insinuations of dishonesty and vice in these professions prevailing in Europe must be conceded; however, only the credulous narrator believes that such practices have been eradicated in the east. In “some Parts of China,” knowledge has arrived at “such a Perfection” that “all sorts of Frauds, Cheats, Sharping, and many Thousand European Inventions of that Nature, at which only we [the west] can be said to out-do those [eastern] Nations” (p. 10) have been stamped out. Although he confesses he has not yet had the leisure to visit these parts, the narrator's faith in this instance of Chinese integrity is unswerving, his firm conviction of modern supremacy in fraudulent enterprise and of ancient Chinese supremacy in the field of learning being unequivocally expressed. While Defoe may be sympathetic to the complaint of human iniquity, it is most unlikely that he would confine it to one corner of the globe. On the issue of Chinese perfection, he is profoundly skeptical. Not so the narrator: a convert to the Chinese cause, he announces that his “search after the Prodigy of humane Knowledge the People abounds with” (p. 11) soon brought him among the circle of principal artists, engineers, and men of letters. The degree to which he is impressed proves impossible to conceal: “I was astonish'd at every Day's Discovery of new and unheard-of Worlds of Learning” (p. 11). Nowhere does he experience greater pleasure than in browsing among the vast collection of books in the library at Tonquin, to which he is given access by the library-keeper himself. Surrounded by “wonderful Volumes of Antient and Modern Learning,” the narrator takes particular notice of “a few” (p. 11).

Along with questions concerning the inventions of gunpowder, printing, and the compass, that involving the discovery of the blood's circulation constituted a significant aspect of arguments regarding ancient and modern learning. In An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, Temple expressed reservations as to whether the circulation of the blood was in fact a modern discovery, attributable to Harvey rather than Hippocrates, and indeed whether the theory were viable at all: “for though reason may seem to favour [it] more than the contrary opinions, yet sense can very hardly allow [it]; and, to satisfy mankind, both these must concur” (pp. 56-57). On the other hand, Wotton's Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning claimed the discovery on behalf of the moderns. Wotton relates how, in Frankfurt in 1628, Harvey demonstrated “even to the most incredulous, not only that the Blood circulates through the Lungs and Heart, but the very Manner how, and the Time in which that great Work is performed” (p. 215). Wotton dismisses the possibility that Hippocrates made the original discovery and suggests that Temple was unwilling to believe in the blood's circulation because he could not see it (pp. 207-208, 217).

Not surprisingly then, the narrator's abbreviated catalogue of the Tonquin library includes works dealing with the circulation of the blood:

two famous Volumes in Chyrurgery [contain] an exact Description of the Circulation of the Blood, discovered long before King Solomon's Allegory of the Bucket's going to the Well; with several curious Methods by which the Demonstration was to be made so plain, as would make even the worthy Doctor B——— himself become a Convert to his own Eye-sight, make him damn his own Elaborate Book, and think it worse Nonsense than ever the Town had the Freedom to imagine.

(p. 15)

While the narrator contends that the ancient Chinese held the secret of the blood's circulation, Defoe's own attitude towards the debate becomes apparent in later writings. In A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, Defoe, basing his opinion on Ecclesiastes 12:6, states that Solomon understood how the blood circulated. He concedes the possibility that the blood's motion was perceived by the ancient Tyrians and Egyptians but assumes that the knowledge was subsequently lost when the Romans conquered the learned world (p. 94). It remained a mystery until rediscovered by Harvey in the early seventeenth century. Thus, Defoe aligns himself in a circuitous manner with the position of the moderns. Robinson Crusoe illustrates the arbitrary will of Lutheran princes by an image of the blood's circulation in Serious Reflections, and in The Compleat English Gentleman the discovery is one of many accomplishments which establish the superiority of the modern age.¹¹

The allusion to the work of “the worthy Doctor B———” is more revealing of Defoe himself than of the narrator. “Doctor B———” is Dr. Joseph Browne, whose Lecture of Anatomy against the Circulation of the Blood abounds with references to the ancients-moderns controversy.¹² Despite Browne's profession in his preface that there is “no design in my head to oppose any received Notions, either of the Moderns or Ancients,” his criticism of the moderns is undeniably severe. He rejects “all the Proofs urged by the Circulators” in favor of “a Motion in the Blood which is not always one and the same.” The world, Browne complains, has not been made sensible of the “prodigious Difficulties” attending the doctrine of circulation. There can be no other explanation of the universal acclaim with which it has been heralded. He “will not rob [Harvey] of the Honour of bringing this ingenious Hypothesis into the World”—the ancients were not guilty of such folly (p. 2). Defoe's reference to the reception of the Lecture is surely calculated to make Browne wince. In the preface to his work, a self-righteous Browne complains that he did not meet with “candid Usage” from his audience, who opposed “every sentence” he delivered: “Some … denyed my Quotations, others denyed matter of Fact, and some offer'd to show the Experiments quite contrary.” Defoe's thrust in the Consolidator may very well have precipitated their later literary war.¹³

A reference to the phenomenon of tides further reveals the distance separating Defoe and his narrator in the ancients-moderns debate. The narrator assesses the value of a favorite treatise on navigation:

It was a certain Sign Aristotle had never been at China; for, had he seen the 216th Volume of the Chinese Navigation, in the Library I am speaking of, a large Book in Double Folio, wrote by the Famous Mira-cho-cho-lasmo, Vice Admiral of China, and said to be printed there about 2000 Years before the Deluge, in the Chapter of Tides he would have seen the Reason of all the certain and uncertain Fluxes and Refluxes of that Element, how the exact Pace is kept between the Moon and the Tides, with a most elaborate Discourse there, of the Power of Sympathy, and the manner how the heavenly Bodies Influence the Earthly: Had he seen this, the Stagyrite would never have Drowned himself because he could not comprehend this Mystery.

(pp. 16-17)

The passage is rich in details which undercut the narrator's wonderment. Of most compelling interest is the role played by Aristotle. The narrator's claim that had Aristotle visited China he would have benefited from a long intellectual tradition and arrived at a complete understanding of the phenomenon of tides betrays a wanton ignorance of Aristotelian thought. In De Mundo, Aristotle recognized the lunar influence upon tides: “Many tides and tidal waves are said always to accompany the periods of the moon at fixed intervals.”¹⁴ As Henry Pemberton points out in his View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy, the ancients had grasped the essential fact of the moon's governing of tides “[t]hough how the moon caused them, and by what principle it was enabled to produce so distinguish'd an appearance, was a secret left for [Newton's] philosophy to unfold.”¹⁵ In the Principia (1687), Newton demonstrated that the mutual gravitation between the earth and the moon, and that between the earth and the sun, was responsible for tidal action.¹⁶ Judging by the evidence provided by the fabulous Vice Admiral, the assertion that the ancient Chinese understood tides is spurious and discloses the narrator's gullibility.

According to popular legend, Aristotle was unable to fathom tidal movements and committed suicide in a fit of frustration.¹⁷ Even if Defoe accepted the legend, he did not believe that Aristotle was pre-empted by the ancient Chinese, as is implied in the reference to the Chinese publication's having been issued 2000 years before the deluge. According to contemporary chronologies, the volume in question pre-dates the creation of the world. Raleigh and Ussher, for instance, agreed that the flood occurred in the year of the world 1656—an opinion which Defoe later supported in An Essay upon Literature.¹⁸ In this work too, Defoe explicitly denounces the Chinese claim to a chronology extending for 7000 years.¹⁹ The Chinese, Defoe insinuates, would have offered Aristotle no enlightenment.

A later reference to China's survival of the flood constitutes a strong indictment of the narrator as a defender of ancient superiority. Allegedly, Chinese knowledge far surpasses “our common Pitch” because it is derived from a “more Ancient Original”:

We are told, that in the early Age of the World, the Strength of Invention exceeded all that ever has been arrived to since: That we in these latter Ages, having lost all that pristine Strength of Reason and Invention, which died with the Ancients in the Flood, and receiving no helps from that Age, have by long Search arriv'd at several remote Parts of Knowledge, by the helps of reading Conversation and Experience; but that all amounts to no more than faint Imitations, Apings, and Resemblances of what was known in those masterly Ages.

Now, if it be true as is hinted before, That the Chinese Empire was Peopled long before the Flood; and that they were not destroyed in the General Deluge in the Days of Noah; 'tis no such strange thing, that they should so much out-do us in this sort of Eye-sight we call General Knowledge, since the Perfections bestow'd on Nature, when in her Youth and Prime met with no General Suffocation by that Calamity.

(pp. 60-61)

To identify narrator and author here as one and the same would be to disregard a violation of the biblical evidence in which Defoe placed his trust. As Chinese chronology is fictitious so too are the grandiose claims to knowledge. As is made clear in A System of Magick, Defoe believed that the patriarchs of the antediluvian world were divinely blessed with a consummate knowledge of nature and that this knowledge was lost at the flood.²⁰ Sympathetic to the Baconian notion that man had made substantial progress in recovering his ancient heritage, Defoe nevertheless insisted that the “brightest part of human wisdom” was the product of the last two centuries.²¹

A detail concerning the origins of the famous Chinese mathematician, Augro-machi-languaro-zi, makes plain Defoe's refusal to believe that China was an ancient source of knowledge. It turns out that the mathematician was “no Native of this World,” but “Born in the Moon” (p. 17). In later life, Defoe was to evaluate seriously the evidence for a plurality of worlds, but in 1705 he peoples the lunar world simply for satiric purposes.²² His man from the moon, having arrived in China, is prevailed upon by the Chinese emperor to remain and educate the Chinese in the accomplishments of the lunar regions: “it is not to be wonder'd at, why the Chinese excell so much in all these Parts of the World, since but for that knowledge which comes down to them from the World in the Moon, they would be like other People” (p. 33). The illusory nature of China's claims is deftly exposed by the imputation that Chinese enterprise originates in the moon.

Defoe's argument yields even greater complexities. The political section of the Consolidator is dominated by the notion popularized by John Wilkins in The Discovery of a World in the Moone, that the world is to the moon as the moon is to the world.²³ Defoe's narrator voyages to the moon and encounters a lunar philosopher with whom he discusses the nature of their respective worlds: “they were both Moons and both Worlds, this a Moon to that, and that a Moon to this” (p. 65). Wilkins's conceit serves Defoe's satiric purpose admirably. Moon and earth become interchangeable entities: by deriving its learning from the moon, China is indebted, necessarily, to the earth. Those inventions and advancements which the narrator heralds as belonging to the Chinese are actually the property of the moderns.

To assume that the voice constantly deriding the state of modern learning and lauding Chinese ingenuity is that of Defoe is to misconstrue his “damn'd Satyrical way of Writing” (p. 68). This heretofore unnoticed distinction between author and narrator in the China section of the Consolidator is of much importance, representing as it does Defoe's first extended contribution to the battle of the ancients and moderns.

Notes

1. Daniel Defoe, The Consolidator: or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (London, 1705).

2. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 184.

3. John Ross, Swift and Defoe: A Study in Relationship (Folcroft: Folcroft Press, 1940), pp. 37-38.

4. Johnthan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).

5. John Ross attributes the allusiveness of the Consolidator, its materialistic vocabulary, and the citing of mock treatises to the influence of Swift's Tale. See Swift and Defoe: A Study in Relationship, pp. 37-55.

6. William W. Appleton records the Chinese vogue in England and notes Defoe's unreceptive attitude towards China in A Cycle of Cathay (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 55-60.

7. Sir William Temple, An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, in Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1963), pp. 37-71; William Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1968); Thomas Baker, Reflections upon Learning (London, 1699).

8. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (London, 1697), pp. 22-23; A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (London, 1725-26), pp. 25, 223, 226; An Essay upon Literature (London, 1726), pp. 15, 76-77.

9. John Harris, Lexicon Technicum: or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1704).

10. Refer to Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil (London, 1726), pp. 384-85, for Harris's definition of magic as a branch of mathematics, and An Essay upon Literature, pp. 120-26, for his history of the art of printing.

11. Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelic World, vol. 3 of The Works of Daniel Defoe, 16 vols. (New York: George D. Sproul, 1908), p. 144; Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bulbring (London: David Nutt, 1890), p. 231.

12. Joseph Browne, A Lecture of Anatomy against the Circulation of the Blood (London, 1701).

13. In the Review of 21 April 1705, p. 84, Defoe advertises the publication of The Moon Calf: or, Accurate Reflections on the Consolidator. Giving an Account of Some Remarkable Transactions in the Lunar World. He identifies Browne as the author of this work in the Little Review of 8 June 1705 and proceeds to take apart Browne's sample translations of Horace (pp. 5-6). Browne responds with A Vindication of the Specimen Design'd for a General Translation of Horace, from the pretended Criticisms of Mr. De Foe, in his “Little Review” (London, 1705). While this pamphlet deals with Defoe's blunders in the field of classics, a sizeable portion of it treats the Moon Calf issue. Browne notes that Defoe is “very angry with the Moon Calf, which he Fathers upon me without any Grounds, I believe” (p. 5). While remaining non-committal on the question of authorship, Browne defends the work against Defoe's charges of inconsistency and falsehood. The conflict was acerbated by the political differences separating the two men.

14. De Mundo, vol. 3 of The Works of Aristotle, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), p. 396a.

15. Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (London, 1728), p. 283.

16. See Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1934), bk. 3, pp. 435-40.

17. For example, Galileo made use of the legend to emphasize the value of his own ideas on the causal principle of tides. See Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake, 2nd edn. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 433.

18. Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (London, 1614), see bk. 1, ch. 7, p. 102 and chronological table; James Ussher, The Annals of the World (London, 1658); An Essay upon Literature, p. 31.

19. An Essay upon Literature, p. 15.

20. Daniel Defoe, A System of Magick (London, 1727), pp. 6-8, 10-11.

21. A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, p. 238.

22. The Political History of the Devil, pp. 51, 83, 90-91, 213; An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (London, 1727), pp. 26-28, 52, 54.

23. John Wilkins, The Discovery of a World in the Moone (London, 1638), p. 143.