A New and Curious Treatise of the Nature and Effects of Simple Earth, Water and Air (1793):
The seminal principle, or luminous, ever-active balsam of life, is the grand staff, strength, all-animating vital source or principle of the beauty, vigour and serenity, both of body and of mind. Without a full and genial tide of this rich, vivifying luminous principle, continually circulating in every part of the system, it is absolutely impossible that either man or woman can enjoy either health, strength, spirits or happiness. (27)26
The rhetorical dimension is an important aspect of how the moderns would keep alive older ideas of sperm as a male quintessence linked to a semi-divine realm of spiritual fluids. But the verbal vehicles of this conceptual tradition were carried over into the literary realm as well, where semen as a sublimely-charged synecdoche of male creativity reflected a larger tendency to equate maleness with genitalia. In one of the few successfully concluded imperfect enjoyment poems of the Restoration—an anonymous poem entitled “The Lost Opportunity Recovered,” printed in Wit and Drollery. Jovial Poems (1682)—Lysander, the premature ejaculator, returns the morning after to his Cloris (a married woman) and, “With a proud Courage and with stiffness blest, / Foaming with Love he makes to Beauty’s Lap” for a second encounter. Engaging more efficaciously this time, Lysander recovers his tumescence, ejaculates, and his paramour “wip’d away those drops of Liquid Fire.”27 Nearly a century later Claude Quillet’s The Joys of Hymen, Or, the Conjugal Directory: A Poem, in Three Books (1768) prescribed nothing less than a personal technology for the most favorable production of sperm, as well as specific recommendations about the best time for intercourse. One must avoid the venereal act after the evening meal, “Fresh from the festal board,” to allow proper time for the decoction of semen from the newly supplied blood:
For sages say, the warm and active juice,
Which purple wines and Ceres gifts produce;
The kindly strength which feeds the genial flame
Of love, or nourishes the vital frame:
All these (a rude and undigested heap)
Digestive pow’rs will ripen while you sleep;
Strain through unnumber’d tubes the flowing tide,
And blood from Chyle, and sperm from blood divide.28
According to this physiologically nuanced poet, morning is the ideal moment to discharge “love’s warm balm.” Leaving aside the timing of intercourse or the happy recoveries of premature ejaculators, however, one can easily discover a vocabulary of liquid fire, genial flame, foaming energy, or spiritous fluid permeating the seed-lingo in non-medical narratives throughout the period under discussion. Swift uses the spirit-semen equation satirically in A Tale of a Tub and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,29 as does Pope in an allegedly suppressed conclusion to “Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation.”30 John Cleland’s Fanny Hill rapturously describes male ejaculate as “his soul distil’d,” “the spermatic injection … spurting liquid fire,” and, in the novel’s last sexual act, the beloved Charles’s orgasm is attended by “my dear love’s liquid emanation of himself.”31
This last passage from Fanny Hill clearly indicates the direction which Enlightenment writers would take in their refitted use of classical medical beliefs, and points to another set of beliefs about the value of semen and its effects, namely, the aura seminalis as productive of masculinity itself. In the overall economy of bodily fluids (blood, lymph, milk, menses, sweat, tears, urine, phlegm), seed had always been ranked highly, placed on a par with animal spirits. Part of the reason for this was that semen was viewed as an especially concentrated liquid whose powerful presence (or excessive loss) was not to be underestimated. Recounting earlier theories, De Graaf noted that “Some even think that a single drachm of semen is the equivalent of twenty of blood” (44). The sexologies made greater claims: “if we believe Avicenna,” Venette would explain, one unit of seed is the equivalent of “forty times the quantity of blood” (172); predictably enough, Tissot’s anti-masturbation tract would repeat the more exaggerated claim, reminding the reader “that physicians of all ages have been unanimously of opinion, that the loss of an ounce of this humour would weaken more than that of forty ounces of blood” (2). For the seventeenth and eighteenth century medical experts, however, male seed would hold precedence as a fluid also because it was a chemical agent of maleness itself. As “the heaviest humour in the human body,” according to Albrecht von Haller’s First Lines of Physiology (1747), seed’s function went beyond creative discharge, being “absorbed again into the blood, where it produces wonderful changes.”32 It was the aura seminalis, after all, which explained the journey from boyhood to virile manhood, altering the voice and skin, producing body hair, giving rise to physical strength and courage. Described at times as almost a world-soul or fiery emanation of divine-like spirit, semen was also a concentrated, essentialized masculinity—each drop a distilled and heated liquid carrying within it the potential code, as it were, of a male identity.
Indeed, one of the striking features of Enlightenment medical narratives is that it is not the yard or testicles but the seed which evoked an overall heightening of rhetoric. An important cause of this medico-scientific wonder is surely the improvement of microscopes and the discovery of sperm in the 1670s by Ham and Leeuwenhoek, the latter an acquaintance of De Graaf (both lived in Delft).33 As Marjorie Nicolson and John Harley Warner have demonstrated, the larger cultural effects which microscopic visions had on the collective imagination ought not to be underestimated,34 and in the case of Leeuwenhoek’s animalcules, homunculi, or spermatic worms (see Figure 1)—“spermatozoa” would not be used until the 1820s—the imaginative appeal is particularly noteworthy given the fact that it was not the animalculist but the ovist school of preformationist thought which dominated embryology from the late seventeenth until well into the eighteenth century.35 That is, although the miniature human was thought by most to reside within the egg, where its unfolding and growth would somehow be triggered by male semen, and, although a majority of the medico-scientific community was skeptical of animalculist arguments, the idea of the sperm as homunculus or preformed human-ness (particularly maleness) nevertheless held a wide imaginative appeal throughout the same period, showing up not only in animated debates published in the Philosophical Transactions,36 but also in accounts of intense personal curiosity by non-scientists such as Charles II, who in the mid-1680s commanded Robert Hooke, Curator of the Royal Society, to demonstrate these animalcula, or by the twenty-nine year-old Pope, who with his mother visited one Mr. Hatton “who is … curious in microscopes and showed my mother some of the semen masculinum, with animascula [sic] in it” (Corr. 1: 465, Pope to Caryll, 18 February 1717/18). Popular versions of sperm-as-man showed up in print as well, most famously in the first two chapters of Tristram Shandy, but also in novels such as The History of the Human Heart (1749) or in “Sir” John Hill’s spoof of sperm-catching machines in Lucine sine Concubitu (1750). The reasons for this appeal are not simply the new imaginative venue provided by the microscope, however; the image of the teeming seminal fluid—each drop containing the compacted human being, usually imagined male—also maintained the larger ideological construct of a superior male creativity not just at the macro levels of art, politics, and material sway, but now also at the micro level of the nearly invisible processes of life-giving itself. What microscopes brought to discourses about sperm was visible proof of maleness in its smallest constituent form. These conceptual images—sperm as male spirit, animalcule as tiny man—gave dramatic substance to the idea that masculinity and male identity itself were directly dependent on the man’s genitals and, by extension, that in the mysterious and spiritous inner workings of the organs of generation could be found an essential truth about the male mind.
But in seventeenth
