The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

224 chapter 18gentleman in the nineteenth century, to demand as it were laconic behaviorfrom our heroes.Mary Beth Rose suggested that a new and bourgeois and even feminine“heroism of endurance” takes the place in early modern times of the aristocraticheroism of action. 4 She notes, with Norbert Elias, that the nationstaterequired a monopoly of violence. Just as the cow towns of Kansasdisarmed their cowboys, the Tudors and Valois disarmed their barons. InMilton’s Paradise Regained (published 1671), Rose observes, Christ is not theventuring warrior of book 6 in Paradise Lost, but a hero of taciturnity. Hisvictories against Satan tempting him in the wilderness consist of not engagingin speech making, as at the end of book 1, in three lines of in effect a Valleygirl “Whatever” dismissing a loquacious twenty-five-line appeal by Satanto “talk at least.” After Christ’s brevity Milton himself adds an amazing halfline:“He added not” (1.497), embodying Christ’s noble—that is, Roman—unwillingness to talk. Satan, the great talker and venturer-forth, isthoroughly puzzled: “What dost thou in this world?” (4.372, emphasis supplied);and elsewhere:Perplexed and troubled at his bad successThe Tempter stood, nor had what to reply,Discovered in his fraud, thrown from his hope,So oft, and the persuasive rhetoricThat sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve,So little here, nay lost. 5Milton, eloquent for the Commonwealth and English poetry, here disdainsrhetoric, joining in this many seventeenth-century men of ideas and letters,from Bacon attacking metaphors with metaphors—thus too Descartes,Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza—to Newton spinning one eloquent hypothesis afteranother while declaring “Hypotheses non fingo,” I do not [deign merely to]spin hypotheses.By the end of the eighteenth century, in, for example, The Magic Flute,taciturnity has been raised to the very essence of masculinity. The one andonly test of the opera’s hero to join the men’s club of Freemasonry is to keepquiet in the face of temptations from loquacious women. No heroic action;no swordplay: just endure like a tight-lipped Roman man. Mozart’s librettiststresses over and over that silence is Tamino’s badge of heroism, onewhich his comically talkative, less-than-aristocratic sidekick Papageno fails