and cultivate men, even converting wildness and barbarism into military bravery, as well as presiding over peacetime and home life. Invoking what would later become a racial ideal but functions here as a marker of exalted womanhood, Bossiere Chambor appealed to the physical beauty of German women, their blond hair, blue eyes, fair complexions, and long limbs. Employing a neoclassical motif, he likened them to the goddesses and heroines of antiquity, as if modern Germany were peopled with the women of classical mythology and art.11 His source was presumably the Germania of Tacitus (ca. 98 A.D.).12
Though a historiographical principle, the indexical theory traveled well beyond history books. It was dramatized, for example, in “abduction” or seraglio operas. In Mozart and Stephanie’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (K. 384) Osmin, who believes that women require incarceration to keep them faithful, attempts to force himself on the cheeky maid Blonde, who, despite her occupation, counters proudly that she is “an Englishwoman, born to freedom.” If not personifying she at least lays claim to the exalted state of free womanhood and quickly turns didactic, instructing Osmin in the fine art of coaxing and flirtation—a saucy twist on the notion that women reform male manners (see her aria “Durch Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln,” act 2).13
For the Burney of the Tours and General History the “indexical theory” was cutting edge. Although the idea of female exemplification of civility stretched back to the beginning of the century, a more systematic “theory of feminization” linking incipient capitalism, female ascendance, and a notion of progress first appeared with Adam Smith at midcentury.14 As Emma Clery has encapsulated the arguments, the indexical theory opposed (even if, initially, from within) elements of a civic humanist tradition in England that took the classical republic as its model. Anticommerce, often misogynist, and equating virtue with (a version of) manliness and public service, civic humanism summoned the imagery of the male warrior citizen as the defender against decadence and decline. An alternative model of history was characterized, in Clery’s words, by a “linear, historical narrative, involving a gendered account of progress, a positive feminization, [and] a triumphant movement towards increased civility and refinement.”15 Burney’s General History, with its overlapping celebrations of modernity, women, and commerce, offered such an alternative. Burney’s women are integral to his historiography. Had his story concerned the triumph of pure music over its historical fetters of church, court, and text, he might have needed to develop different rhetorical strategies. But that story about music’s discovery of its autonomy was not yet central to the emerging business of music-historical writing.
LUXURY
The definition of music in the preface to A General History as an “innocent luxury,” a phrase Burney silently borrowed from the Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume, provocatively situated music within celebrations of modernity (something Hume had not attempted). More was at stake than borrowing an elegant turn of phrase. Luxury was a key term in competing ideologies of political economy, history, Britishness, and morality. Hume, in arguments that express a positive excitement about the emergence of capitalism and consumption, sought to reinstate luxury as both civilized and civilizing. According to earlier civic- humanist rhetoric, luxury erodes manliness, weakens the body politic, and causes decline into decadence. Acknowledging that some Latin authors attributed the fall of the Roman republic to the influx of “Asiatic luxury,” Hume critically reviewed the evidence and concluded that uncontrolled territorial expansion and poor government were more likely causes of the loss of (some version of) democracy in Rome.16 Situating luxury not in superfluous goods and leisure but in the elevated pleasures they afford, Hume redefined it as a “great refinement in the gratification of the senses.”17 As such, luxury was morally neutral prior to its use toward good or bad ends: “Any degree of it may be innocent or blameable.”18 At the heart of Hume’s argument was the contention that luxury, even as private pleasure, could serve the collective good and thus, implicitly, fulfill the civic humanist requirement of public virtue. It could do so because it was a stimulant to personal as well as economic growth, at once a school for private manners and a means by which the laboring poor are enriched through manufacture and trade.
Part of the power of Hume’s account of luxury was the flexibility he granted the term to stand, metonymically, for other key words of the period—not only such words as pleasure and virtue but also art, woman, and liberty. If luxury consists in “great refinement in the gratification of the senses” it is at home in artistic practices and the discourse of aesthetics. If luxury is pursued in leisure and in private, if it suspends (even as it enjoys the fruits of) trade and the professions, it exists in the kind of purposeless and polite realm enjoyed, presumably, by women. (Indeed, “woman” in Hume is herself luxurious insofar as she is leisured and well read.) And if luxury provides the male citizen with necessary reenergizing recuperation, if it stimulates the production of consumer commodities, increases the flow of wealth, and empowers the serf to trade in goods and labor, it emerges as something close in meaning to national liberty: “The liberties of England, so far from decaying since the improvements in the arts [that is, manufacture as well as the fine arts], have never flourished so much as during that period [of commerce actuated by aspirations to luxury].”19
Burney was already using Hume’s arguments in the preface to his first tour (France and Italy). Indeed, with a mission to make space for music, and writing about it, in the luxurious world, he not only described it as “a charming resource, in an idle hour, to the rich and luxurious part of the world” but made a detailed claim for music as a form of public virtue. In so doing he retraced the movement from private pleasure to public virtue at stake in the luxury debate. Playing wittily against the fabled power of ancient music, he emphasized the “assistance” music gives “to open the purses of the affluent for the support of the distressed.” In the most explicit of his arguments for music as a moral force, a means of reform and refinement, he highlighted charitable uses in London, detailing benefit concerts for orphans, the maternity hospital in Brownlow Street, the Lock Hospital (where syphilis was treated), and the Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians and Their Families.20
Not everyone was convinced by Burney’s arguments, or by the man himself. A contemporary satire of Burney’s Tours by one Joel Collier (the pseudonym of John Bicknell) seized on the comic potential of Burney’s modish critical framework, an indication of how contentious Burney’s framework could still appear in the 1770s. Bicknell’s Musical Travels through England (1774) lampooned Burney’s use of music and femininity as measures of national refinement and progress. Marshaling every possible slur on Burney’s manliness, the parody engineered the traveling musician’s castration by a cuckolded barber, a turn of events that the musicological capon embraces, since he had long doubted “whether the characters of a man and a musician were at all compatible.”21 The parody, though gleefully spilling over into the absurd, involves a severe rejoinder from a civic-humanist position, so pointed that the rejoinder itself did not escape caricature. In response to Burney’s contentions that music serves the public good, and that his project is of national interest, Bicknell in his preface extolled a ludicrous initiative in which a hundred orphans are to be trained to become “Doctors, and Doctoresses of music” at public expense, despite some prejudiced reservations that training in the areas of agriculture or navigation would be of greater benefit to the students and the nation.22 Burney’s own manliness (that key term of civic-humanist value) is the next target. At the start of his travels, an organist (Burney’s representative in the text) abandons his family to beg his way around the north of England under the less than exalted Italian name Collioni (colloquially, “bollocks”). Utterly lacking in manly responsibility, he leaves his family destitute and imposes himself on the reluctant hospitality of a series of musical madmen—and their wives and daughters. The notion of music as a refining force finds a grotesque counterpoint near the end of Bicknell’s Musical Tours when the reader finds Collioni in the moist embrace of a C.P.E. Bach surrogate, one Signor Manselli. Manselli’s improvisations on the fiddle, accompanied by “harmonious” farts, burps, hiccups, coughs, sneezes, squeaks, and whistles, give both the performer and his visitor hope that Manselli might yet “polish this brutal nation.”23 The
