Restoration and the Rise of Neo-Classicism
Restoration; general conditions and characteristics
The repudiation of the Puritan rule by the English people and the Restoration of the Stuart kings in the person of Charles II, in 1660, mark one of the most decisive changes in English life and literature. The preceding half century had really been transitional, and during its course, as we have seen, the Elizabethan adventurous energy and half−naïf greatness of spirit had more and more disappeared. With the coming of Charles II the various tendencies which had been replacing these forces seemed to crystallize into their almost complete opposites. This was true to a large extent throughout the country; but it was especially true of London and the Court party, to which literature of most sorts was now to be perhaps more nearly limited than ever before. The revolt of the nation was directed partly against the irresponsible injustice of the Puritan military government but largely also against the excessive moral severity of the whole Puritan regime. Accordingly a large part of the nation, but particularly the Court, now plunged into an orgy of self−indulgence in which moral restraints almost ceased to be regarded. The new king and his nobles had not only been led by years of proscription and exile to hate on principle everything that bore the name of Puritan, but had spent their exile at the French Court, where utterly cynical and selfish pursuit of pleasure and licentiousness of conduct were merely masked by conventionally polished manners. The upshot was that the quarter century of the renewed Stuart rule was in almost all respects the most disgraceful period of English history and life. In everything, so far as possible, the restored Cavaliers turned their backs on their immediate predecessors. The Puritans, in particular, had inherited the enthusiasm which had largely made the greatness of the Elizabethan period but had in great measure shifted it into the channel of their religion. Hence to the Restoration courtiers’ enthusiasm and outspoken emotion seemed marks of hypocrisy and barbarism. In opposition to such tendencies they aimed to realize the ideal of the man of the world, sophisticated, skeptical, subjecting everything to the scrutiny of the reason, and above all, well−bred. Well−bred that is, according to the artificial social standards of a selfish aristocratic class; for the actual manners of the courtiers, as of such persons at all times, were in many respects disgustingly crude. In religion most of them professed adherence to the English Church (some to the Catholic), but it was a conventional adherence to an institution of the State and a badge of party allegiance, not a matter of spiritual conviction or of any really deep feeling. The Puritans, since they refused to return to the English (Established) Church, now became known as Dissenters. The men of the Restoration, then, deliberately repudiated some of the chief forces which seem to a romantic age to make life significant. As a natural corollary they concentrated their interest on the sphere of the practical and the actual. In science, particularly, they continued with marked success the work of Bacon and his followers. Very shortly after the Restoration the Royal Society was founded for the promotion of research and scientific knowledge, and it was during this period that Sir Isaac Newton (a man in every respect admirable) made his vastly important discoveries in physics, mathematics, and astronomy. In literature, in both prose and verse, the rationalistic and practical spirit showed itself in the enthroning above everything else of the principles of utility and common sense in substance and straightforward directness in style. The imaginative treatment of the spiritual life, as in 'Paradise Lost' or 'The Faerie Queene,' or the impassioned exaltation of imaginative beauty, as in much Elizabethan poetry, seemed to the typical men of the Restoration unsubstantial and meaningless, and they had no ambition to attempt flights in those realms. In anything beyond the tangible affairs of visible life, indeed, they had little real belief, and they preferred that literature should restrain itself within the safe limits of the known and the demonstrable. Hence the characteristic Restoration verse is satire of a prosaic sort which scarcely belongs to poetry at all. More fortunate results of the prevailing spirit were the gradual abandonment of the conceits and irregularities of the metaphysical' poets, and, most important, the perfecting of the highly regular rimed pentameter couplet, the one great formal achievement of the time in verse. In prose style the same tendencies resulted in a distinct advance. Thitherto English prose had seldom attained to thorough conciseness and order; it had generally been more or less formless or involved in sentence structure or pretentious in general manner; but the Restoration writers substantially formed the more logical and clear−cut manner which, generally speaking, has prevailed ever since. Quite consistent with this commonsense spirit, as the facts were then interpreted, was the allegiance which Restoration writers rendered to the literature of classical antiquity, an allegiance which has gained for this period and the following half−century, where the same attitude was still more strongly emphasized, the name 'pseudo−classical.' We have before noted that the enthusiasm for Greek and Latin literature which so largely underlay the Renaissance took in Ben Jonson and his followers, in part, the form of a careful imitation of the external technique of the classical writers. In France and Italy at the same time this tendency was still stronger and much more general. The seventeenth century was the great period of French tragedy (Corneille and Racine), which attempted to base itself altogether on classical tragedy. Still more representative, however, were the numerous Italian and French critics, who elaborated a complex system of rules, among them, for tragedy, those of the 'three unities,' which they believed to dominate classic literature. Many of these rules were trivial and absurd, and the insistence of the critics upon them showed an unfortunate inability to grasp the real spirit of the classic, especially of Greek, literature. In all this, English writers and critics of the Restoration period and the next half−century very commonly followed the French and Italians deferentially. Hence it is that the literature of the time is pseudo−classical (false classical) rather than true classical. But this reduction of art to strict order and decorum, it should be clear, was quite in accord with the whole spirit of the time.
One particular social institution of the period should be mentioned for its connection with literature, namely the coffee houses, which, introduced about the middle of the century, soon became very popular and influential. They were, in our own idiom, cafes, where men met to sip coffee or chocolate and discuss current topics. Later, in the next century, they often developed into clubs.
The Eighteenth Century: Pseudo-Classicism
Political Conditions: After the restoration of Charles II, the Anglican Church became lawful again while puritans became powerless and were regarded as Dissenters. An important event during Charles II reign is the Popish Plot (1678-81), an unsuccessful attempt of the parliament to force Charles II to exclude his catholic brother, James from the succession. The result was the emergence of two opposing political parties: Whig (the parliamentarians, financers, the New Order) and Tory (the royalties, landowners, the Old Order). The catholic James II came to throne in 1685 and started giving liberty and power to the Catholics. When his wife gave birth to a sun, everyone was terrified at the prospect of a line of catholic kings. The parliament started secret negotiations and in 1688 brought a Dutchman, William of Orange, who married Mary, James’ protestant daughter, to the throne. This has been referred to as the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution. James II escaped to France with his wife and son, “the old pretender”.
During the first part of the eighteenth century the direct connection between politics and literature was closer than at any previous period of English life; for the practical spirit of the previous generation continued to prevail, so that the chief writers were very ready to concern themselves with the affairs of State, and in the uncertain strife of parties ministers were glad to enlist their aid. On the death of King William in 1702, Anne, sister of his wife Queen Mary and daughter of James II, became Queen. Unlike King William she was a Tory and at first filled offices with members of that party. But the English campaigns under the Duke of Marlborough against Louis XIV were supported by the Whigs, who therefore gradually regained control, and in 1708 the Queen had to submit to a Whig ministry. She succeeded in ousting them in 1710, and a Tory cabinet was formed by Henry Harley (afterwards Earl of Oxford) and Henry St. John (afterwards Viscount Bolingbroke). On the death of Anne in 1714 Bolingbroke, with other Tories, was intriguing for a second restoration of the Stuarts in the person of the son of James II (the 'Old Pretender'). But the nation decided for a Protestant German prince, a descendant of James I through his daughter Elizabeth, and this prince was crowned as George I—an event which brought England peace at the price of a century of rule by an unenlightened and sordid foreign dynasty. The Tories were violently turned out of office; Oxford was imprisoned, and Bolingbroke, having fled to the Pretender, was declared a traitor. Ten years later he was allowed to come back and attempted to oppose Robert Walpole, the Whig statesman who for twenty years governed England in the name of the first two Georges; but in the upshot Bolingbroke was again obliged to retire to France. How closely these events were connected with the fortunes of the foremost authors we shall see as we proceed.
The general spirit of the age: The writers of the reigns of Anne and George I called their period the Augustan Age, because they flattered themselves that with them English life and literature had reached a culminating period of civilization and elegance corresponding to that which existed at Rome under the Emperor Augustus. They believed also that both in the art of living and in literature they had rediscovered and were practising the principles of the best periods of Greek and Roman life. In our own time this judgment appears equally arrogant and mistaken. In reality the men of the early eighteenth century, like those of the Restoration, largely misunderstood the qualities of the classical spirit, and thinking to reproduce them attained only a superficial, pseudo−classical, imitation. On the other hand, the 18th C. is called the Age of Reason. Due to the development of sciences and rational philosophies, fanatical religious beliefs declined. People only accepted what they understood, what was possible according to reason and science.
Characteristics of neo-Classical literature
1. The poet must imitate the ancient poets of Greece and Rome because they had truly expressed ‘Nature’ in their works; Classic works could be read, enjoyed, and used by all men at all times. Their effort, however, to attain the finished beauty of classical literature naturally resulted largely in a more or less shallow formal smoothness.
2. The poet must follow the classical rule of decorum that there should be propriety and fitness manner and matter of a literary genre, its characters, actions and diction, and that each genre has its rules and conventions which the poet has to follow.
3. They admired the great genres of epic and tragedy, but wrote their own masterpieces in lesser and less demanding forms such as the essays in verse and prose, the comedy of manners, especially satire in which they felt they had more chance to equal or surpass their classical predecessors.
4. Interest was largely centered in the practical well−being either of society as a whole or of one's own social class or set. The majority of writers, furthermore, belonged by birth or association to the upper social stratum and tended to overemphasize its artificial conventions, often looking with contempt on the other classes. Therefore, they mostly depicted city life and showed man in society, in his relationship with other people. In short, poetry was the imitation of human life.
5. To neo-Classicists, a poet must be a genius, but trained and disciplined at the same time.
6. Poetry for them is to give both instruction and aesthetic pleasure to the reader. Not are for art sake, but art for humanity’s sake is the neo-Classical humanism.
7. Poetry should represent ‘Nature’: what is universal, general, and permanent in human experience; things that are true for all men at all times and in all places, not the new, the unique, and the exceptional.
8. The men of this age carried still further the distrust and dislike felt by the previous generation for emotion, enthusiasm, and strong individuality both in life and in literature, and exalted Reason and Regularity as their guiding stars. The terms 'decency' and 'neatness' were forever on their lips. They sought a conventional uniformity in manners, speech, and indeed in nearly everything else, and were uneasy if they deviated far from the approved, respectable standards of the body of their fellows. Great poetic imagination, therefore, could scarcely exist among them, or indeed supreme greatness of any sort.
9. The poet has ‘wit’: imagination and creativity. They believed that imagination was wild and had to be tamed by judgment (neo-Classical concept of ‘restraint’). They repudiated the shocking, far-fetched metaphysical conceits and preferred more reasonable and simpler ones. In fact, they preferred intellect to imagination.
10. They favoured artificial, mechanical diction: they believed that the language of poetry should be different from that of ordinary speech.
11. They used regular meter (closed heroic couplets), and paid more attention to form than to content, and had a painstaking attention to correctness.
12. Neo-Classic philosophers denied to praise man’s pride. They viewed human beings as limited agents, so they should set themselves only accessible goals.
13. Neo-Classicists had a mechanical worldview: human and universe are machinery, soulless and lifeless.
14. They had little appreciation for external nature or for any beauty except that of formalized Art. A forest seemed to most of them merely wild and gloomy, and great mountains chiefly terrible, but they took delight in gardens of artificially trimmed trees and in regularly plotted and alternating beds of domestic flowers. The Elizabethans also, as we have seen, had had much more feeling for the terror than for the grandeur of the sublime in nature, but the Elizabethans had had nothing of the elegant primness of the Augustans.
15. They abounded in personifications of abstract qualities and ideas ('Laughter, heavenly maid,' Honor, Glory, Sorrow, and so on, with prominent capital letters), a sort of a pseudo−classical substitute for emotion.
16. There was a strong tendency to moralizing, which also was not altogether free from conventionality and superficiality.
Although the 'Augustan Age' must be considered to end before the middle of the century, the same spirit continued dominant among many writers until near its close, so that almost the whole of the century may be called the period of pseudo−classicism.
Sources:
Abrams, M. H. Glossary of Literary Terms. Thomson Learning. 2006.
Huntington Fletcher, Robert. History of English Literature. Blackmask. 2002.
Carter, Roland et al. The Routledge History of Literature in English Britain and Ireland. Routledge 1997.
Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Norton Anthology of English Literature. Norton. 2004.