Finished listening to Stephen today. The second volume ends with a very boring narrative of development in which everything—Thompson's nature poetry and the evangelical revival's interest in feeling—are measured in their relation to the rise of Romanticism. For Stephen, prefiguring Wordsworth is good, and Pope is very bad. I don't really understand why Stephen has it in for Pope so badly, but he finds him boring and intellectually unsound. Furthermore, he sets up his versions of good and bad in terms of a gender politics so irritating that I could only get through the end of the book by knitting a sweater to take my mind of my annoyance. What Stephen likes is manly and vigorous; what he doesn't like is effete, by which I think he means gay—I suppose procreation is important to his system of the-baby-of-the-eighteenth-century-is-nineteenth-century-Romanticism... Urgh. Anyway, reading this much of Stephen's obsession with which philosopher has the biggest penis in the eighteenth century has made me want to punch him in the mouth. EVERYONE he writes about for 900 pages (except some disparaging references to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and a couple paragraphs on Edward Gibbon's aunt) is a MAN—so his ranking of them by their masculinity is particularly ridiculous. In a context where (at least for Stephen) women don't count as part of the discussion, the praising of manly arguments shows a complete lack of awareness of the limits of his inquiry. (And they're mostly THEOLOGIANS he's talking about, too, for heaven's sake. Really? He thinks "masculinity" is a useful category in talking about a century's worth of silly arguments about whether certain Christian miracles existed and if they didn't exist whether God still does in the way the Bible writes about God??? But Stephen doesn't get this irony—instead, he insists on praising Locke for the machismo of his arguments.)
(John Locke: THE Man, according to Leslie Stephen)
What irritates me more, though, is the fact that he never explains what "masculine prose" and a "vigorous argument" actually look like, so that masculinity becomes whatever you like, and what was supposed to be a book about eighteenth-century thought turns into a not-so-covert praise of this sort of amorphous masculinity that he loves.
