Of the writers, listed in this Plan, who had preceded him, Bunyan had read not a line. He merely quietly joined them.
C.F.
49
JOHN LOCKE
1632-1704
Second Treatise of Government
With the Restoration (1660) Locke's father, a Cromwell man, lost much of his fortune. This may have inclined his Oxford- trained son to balance his wide intellectual interests with vari- ous governmental and semigovernmental activities. As he had, among other things, studied medicine, he was able to serve as household physician, as well as personal secretary, to the first Earl of Shaftesbury. With the latters fali from power in 1675, Locke removed to France for four years; returned to England under Shaftesbury again; following the latters exile and death, sought refuge in Holland; and in 1689 was back in England, favorably received by the new regime of William and Mary. During these years he worked on his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which appeared, together with the Two Treatises of Civil Government, in 1690. The latter, how- ever, had been written twelve years before and are not, as has been thought, a defense of the Revolution of 1688, except by anticipation.
During the whole of the eighteenth century Locke's influence was marked. Through Voltaire [53] and Rousseau [57] he provided some of the ideas that sparked the French Revolution. Through Jefferson and other Founding Fathers [60, 61] he determined to a considerable extent the ideas that went into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. His views on religious toleration, education, and politics, though not in every instance original, did much to establish the mental climate of the Industrial Revolution and to promote the advance of democratic government.
His major work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is generally supposed to have founded the British empirical school of philosophy. This school rejects the doctrine that ideas are innate and derives them rather from experience. If you have a special interest in the fascinating history of theories of knowledge, you might tackle the famous Essay.
For the rest of us it is useful to have at least a rough idea of Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Like Hobbes [43], he addresses himself to the central question, What is the basis of legitimate power? His answer, though on many points open to criticism, clears the way for the development of representative government, just as Hobbes's answer does for authoritarian government. Hobbes's idea of a "contract" centers in the relin- quishment of an individual^ power to an absolute or almost absolute sovereign or assembly. Locke's "social contract" is made between equals (that is, property-holding male equals) who "join in and make one society." Government is not divinely instituted; it is not absolute; and its authority is limited by notions familiar to us: the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the permanent retention by the individual of certain "inalienable rights." For Locke these latter include life, liberty, and property. Against a government that does not guar- antee such rights, rebellion is legitimate.
While Locke's specific political doctrines are of great historical importance to us, it is perhaps the general tenor of his thought that, through the Founding Fathers, has continued to influence the American conception of government. Locke is optimistic, as we are. He is relatively undogmatic. He hates bigotry and absolutism. He conceives of society as open and experimental. He believes the state should aim to further the happiness of ali its citizens. These may seem tame ideas today, but they were inflammatory in his time. And, though few peo- ple read Locke, his views continue to exert influence.
C.F.
50
MATSUO BASHХ
1644-1694
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Bashх is probably the only Japanese poet whose name is widely recognized in the West. He is associated, rightly, with haiku, the gemlike three-line, seventeen-syllable poetic form that, for many Western readers, seems to encapsulate the Japanese aes- thetic sensibility. His best-known poem has been translated countless times:
furu ike ya Ancient silent pond
kawazu tomikobu Then a frog jumped right in mizu no oto Watersound: kerplunk
What is not so well known is that the haiku evolved rela- tively late in the history of Japanese verse, and that Bashх was one of its chief inventors.
From the late ninth century onward, Japanese poets aban- doned long verse forms and wrote almost entirely in the form called tanka (or waka), the "short poem" of thirty-one syllables in five lines: 5-7-5-7-7. (This was the kind of poem that Genji [28] wrote to his ladyfriends with such facility, and in which they replied to him.) The tanka was and is a flexible and expressive poetic form, but also a limited one; it precludes any kind of narrative or even sustained emotional development. By the thirteenth century poets regularly tried to avoid its limita- tions by composing tanka in sequential, quasi-narrative cycles of as many as a hundred poems. This led in turn to renga, or linked verse, a kind of sequential poem of indefinite length, often composed collectively by two or more poets (and sometimes as a social amusement over cups of sake). To begin, someone would propose an initial triplet (5-7-5), which always included a seasonal reference; the next person would add the closing couplet (7-7), the next would contribute a new triplet, and so on, for as long as people wanted to continue. In the hands of truly skillful poets, this process could produce long poems of delightful complexity and wit, characterized by the kind of free-association that we would expect to find more on the psychoanalytic couch than in a poem.
And this explains how the haiku became a cornerstone of modern Japanese poetry. With linked verse having freed up the poetic triplet as the starting point of a long poem, it only required a poetic genius like Bashх to realize that the triplet could stand on its own. Bashх spent much of his life refining the haiku form, in particular experimenting with ways to inte- grate haiku into prose narrative. His favorite genre for doing so
was the travei memoir, of which The Narrow Road to the Deep North is his finest and most famous work.
Bashх was born into a minor and somewhat impoverished samurai family, at a time when Japan's warrior aristocracy was making a painful adjustment to a long period of domestic peace and tranquillity, a time when abilities other than swords- manship were needed to make a good career. As a young man he was appointed to a post as gentleman-companion to a young samurai from a much more exalted family, and the two spent their time mainly in studying and writing poetry. After his mas- ters early death, Bashх left the family^ service and began a lifelong precarious existence as a wandering poetry teacher and Zen lay brother. He eventually became famous and attracted a number of students who themselves became famous poets (as well as larger numbers of hangers-on seeking to bask in his limelight). But fame seems to have meant nothing to him except insofar as it assured him a warm welcome wherever he went. He apparently owned almost nothing, lived in temples or the most frugal of rented houses, and was never happier than when he was exploring the back roads of Japan on foot, trust- ing fate to provide him each day with a simple meai, a place to stay, and fellow poets with whom to exchange verses.