In this flourish, Dennis’s pretense that his phallic mind has been overcome by his esteem is transparent flattery whose own wit serves as a sign of his potent yard-brain.
Laurence Sterne would later offer his own idiosyncratic concoction for the connection of yard-brain to knowing and knowledge, reminding his reader that “it so happens and ever must, says Prignitz, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer’s fancy” (3: 38, 173–74). In so equating the capacity of heated imagination and euphemistic nose, Tristram announces one of the primary structures of the novel in which the mental and creative abilities of the male characters—Walter, Toby, Tristram himself—are framed by the copulatory and reproductive strengths of the yard, which the mischievous Sterne invites the reader to imagine at every conceivable moment. Thus, two chapters later:
The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms,—I mean in man,—for in superior classes of beings, such as angels and spirits,—’tis all done, may it please your worships, as they tell me, by INTUITION;—and beings inferior, as your worships all know,—syllogize by their noses. (3: 40, 177)
In this comic synthesis, the nose-penis is mental capacity (notwithstanding the phallic incompetence of the Shandy males), and Sterne is unable to resist tweaking the nose of the great Locke, whose chapter on reason (Essay Concerning Human Understanding Bk. 4, Ch. 17, Sect. 18) is ludicrously reduced to a measure by cocks:
The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us,—or the great and principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the intervention of a third; (called the medius terminus) just as a man, as Locke well observes, by a yard, finds two men’s nine-pin-alleys to be of the same length. (3: 40, 177)76
If rampant yard could signify the power of male “knowing,” it could also be figured as a sublime object of desire itself—the “pride of nature, and its richest master-piece,” according to Cleland’s Fanny Hill (46)—which promised other forms of knowledge and pleasure to those who subjected themselves to its power. Thus, in a translation of Nicolas Chorier’s pornographic Satyra Sotadica (1659 or 1660), the mother of the just-married and now-deflowered fifteen year-old Octavia solemnly lectures her daughter on the virtues brought by the enormous member of “thy dear Philander”: “thou art now born to a new Life…. Thy Wit and Understanding will clear up with thy Enjoyments, for that very Engine that opens our Bodies, will do the same to our Minds.”77 This promised “knowing,” however, is about female acquiescence to a symbolic male authority which resides in the exaggerated phallus. The yard, as Fanny Hill recognizes, is not simply a “label of manhood” (165) but, in its hardened glory, can be “an object of terror and delight” (73), “the king member” (110), or the “scepter-member, which commands us all” (183). In this direct equation of erect penis and masculine character the stiffened tarse becomes on one occasion nothing less than a “plenipotentiary instrument” (113). The phallus has become the man, a genital envoy invested with the full power and authority of the male, with its/his ability to “know” women or to elicit a sublime curiosity in them signs of the man’s will and power over bodies, language, and desire itself.
As Cleland’s metaphors suggest, the brain-phallus equation was also used as a measure of political might, where “the king member” signaled the sway and dominion of the monarch. Charles II’s private sexuality and public political role met often in such formulas—“His sceptre and his prick are of a length,” to take Rochester’s famous barb—where the king’s pretensions to godhood or potential for tyranny and absolutism were figured by the powerful rule of the over-sized royal yard. Oldham’s Sardanapalus (late 1670s) alludes to Charles’s sceptre-phallus, linking political might to “thy Soveraign Pr-k’s Prerogative”:
Methinks I see thee now in full Seraglio stand,
With Love’s great Scepter in thy hand,
And over all its Spacious Realm thy Power extend:
Ten Thousand Maids lye prostrate at thy Feet,
Ready thy Pintle’s high Commands to meet;
.............................................................
Far as wide Nature spreads her Thighs,
Thy Tarse’s vast Dominion lyes:
All Womankind acknowledge its great Sway,
And all to its large Treasury their Tribute pay,
Pay Custom of their unprohibited Commodities.78
However preposterous the image, royal command and dominion here reside in the tarse, which embodies the king’s rule over Nature herself. More exaggerated yet are the opening lines of the obscene closet drama, the Rochesterian Sodom (1684), in which the hard penis of King Bolloximian (read Charles II) literally replaces both crown and sceptre:
Thus in the zenith of my lust I reign,
I drink to swive, and swive to drink again.
Let other monarchs who their sceptres bear,
To keep their subjects less in love than fear,
Be slaves to crowns—my nation shall be free.
My pintle only shall my sceptre be.
My laws shall act more pleasure than command,
And with my prick I’ll govern all the land.79
As Harold Weber has noted, the king “insists that political power can be understood and expressed only as a manifestation of his royal phallus, the male organ that generates and sustains the patriarchal structures of society.”80 But the figurative traffic between mind and yard is equally clear: because the erect pintle perfectly reflects the royal will and character, it is an even better symbol than the sceptre and crown it replaces, serving as instrument of the sovereign’s power and as surrogate for the royal mind itself.
The non-royal yard must not be forgotten in this context. Although hardly the only marker in the hierarchy of masculinity, the privy member of the well-hung gentleman or genteel whoremaster could add to one’s stature. Bolingbroke and Bathurst were both noted for their phallic exploits, causing friend Pope to commemorate the sexual appetites of both in his Sober Advice from Horace. But their notorious cocksmanship was also appreciated as an extra mark of their status among men. For someone like the passionate Alexander, whose erotic yearnings are so palpable in his poetry and letters, Bolingbroke represented a masculine model of the many things he admired or wanted for himself, including libidinal self-indulgence. As Brean Hammond has noted astutely, “ ‘all accomplish’d St. John’ was everything that Pope aspired to be in his imagination,” and if, “ludicrously, in spite of Pope’s actual physical incapacities, the poet liked to imagine himself something of a rake,” “in Bolingbroke he found the genuine article.”81 St. John’s phallic prowess was an extra badge of virility and manliness, his ambitious yard conferring a distinction of desirable masculinity which would gather respect even from other men.
Something similar is evident in Pope’s representations of Bathurst’s copious swiving, which is presented humorously as being in competition with Pope’s loving friendship:
There was a Man in the Land of Twitnam, called Pope. He was a Servant of the Lord Bathurst of those days, a Patriarch of great Eminence, for getting children, at home & abroad. But … his Love for strange women, caused the said Lord to forget all his Friends of the Male-Sex; insomuch that he knew not, nor once rememberd, there was such a man in the Land