The Literary History of England

Vol 3: The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1789)

Donald F. Bond, G. Sherburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134847808
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The paperback edition, in four volumes, of this standard work will make it readily available to students.

The scope of the work makes it valuable as a work of reference, connecting one period with another and placing each author clearly in the setting of his time.

Reviewing the first edition, The Times Literary Supplement commented: 'in inclusiveness and in judgment it has few rivals of its kind'.

This third volume covers the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1660-1789) and is co-authored by George Sherburn and Donald F. Bond (both at the University of Chicago).

BOOK III
The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660–1789)

PART I
The Rise of Classicism

Guide to reference marks

Throughout the text of this book, a point • set beside a page number indicates that references to new critical material will be found under an identical paragraph/ page number (set in boldface) in the BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT.

In the Index, a number preceded by an S indicates a paragraph/page number in the BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT.

I
The Spirit of the Restoration

In May, 1660, invited by Parliament, King Charles II returned from exile, and the Restoration of monarchy in England became a fact.¹ Amidst the spontaneous outbursts of joy, poets and others were not slow in asserting a parallel between this Restoration and the imperial establishment, after civil wars, of Octavius Augustus Caesar in Rome (31 B.C.). This attitude of mind is implicit in the title of Dryden's poem, Astrœa Redux, composed for the occasion, and explicit in the concluding lines of the effort:

Neo-Augustanism

Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone,

By Fate reserv'd for great Augustus' Throne!

When the joint growth of Arms and Arts forshew

The World a Monarch, and that Monarch You.

The author (Francis Atterbury?) of the preface to The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems (1690) more magisterially says, “I question whether in Charles the Second's Reign, English did not come to its full perfection; and whether it has not had its Augustan Age, as well as the Latin.” This neoAugustanism, so promptly recognized and acclaimed, we call neo-classicism. It implies a veneration for the Roman classics, thought, and way of life. It values highly a noble Roman tone. The stately enthusiasm of the time Dryden caught in retrospect as he penned his Threnodia Augustalis (1685):

Men met each other with erected look,

The steps were higher that they took;

Friends to congratulate their friends made haste,

And long-inveterate foes saluted as they pass'd.

The dignity and stateliness outlived the enthusiasm. The new Augustus, Charles II, proved to be both lazy and lecherous, and in spite of his undoubted wit and intelligence (seldom has an English monarch been personally friendly to so many distinguished intellectuals!) disillusionment soon attended his reign. In 1667 Samuel Pepys summed up this attitude:

It is strange how…every body do now-a-days reflect upon Oliver, and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him; while here a prince, come in with all the love and prayers and good liking of his people, who have given greater signs of loyalty and willingness to serve him with their estates than ever was done by any people, hath lost all so soon, that it is a miracle what way a man could devise to lose so much in so little time.

Charles and his court had brought back from their Continental exile a love of French wit, gallantry, elegance, and artistic deftness. Doubtless Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Ovid, and Juvenal meant more to the literate English gentleman of the period than did his French contemporaries, Descartes, Molière, Corneille, and Boileau—though it would be wrong to underestimate the French influence.² But the necessary social, economic, and religious readjustments crowded in upon the minds of men: their realistic, common-sense, and at times even cynical evaluation of life was at wide variance from Roman stateliness and French refinement. The spirit of the age was far from unified; and in reaction against its complexity Restoration intellectuals thirsted for a rational simplification of their existence. To understand their divergent efforts to reduce confusion to a lucid simplicity it is necessary to have some awareness of their thinking in the fields of science, religion, and politics, as well as their tendencies in the arts.³

The Court and French Influence

In science the most important work was done by men connected with the Royal Society of London.⁴ This organization emerged in 1660, or shortly thereafter, from groups meeting earlier in London at Gresham College or in Oxford at Wadham. Its technical achievements lie chiefly, but by no means exclusively, in the field of mathematics as applied to the motion of the heavenly bodies. For our purposes it cannot too constantly be remembered that the leading fellows of the Society were devoutly religious men: the work of Robert Boyle (1627–91) in chemistry, of John Ray (1627–1705) in other natural sciences, of Sir Isaac Newton⁵ (1642–1727) in mathematics and astronomy—all was designed to support religious orthodoxy, and had no subversive or eccentric ends in view. Great as were their known scientific achievements, for us their significance lies rather in their ability to popularize certain methods of thinking and writing. The motto of the Society, nullius in verba—“on the word of no one”—is a direct challenge to historians who, however wrongly, regard English neo-classicism as an appeal to the ancients as authorities. The Royal Society was experimental and empirical in method; assent to a proposition had to be suspended until the evidence was examined. They shunned purely a priori reasoning, and preached the necessity of having a hesitant or “open” mind. Frequently this attitude approached skepticism as method if not as ultimate end. The indirect influence of the Society through the Boyle lectures, founded in 1692 by Robert Boyle's will, “to prove the truth of the Christian Religion,” was great in furthering the “physico-theology” that was the answering challenge of the orthodox to certain types of deists. In general, the Society purposed to substitute experiment for disputation as a road to truth. Eventually their method would transfer attention from the pursuit of humane learning to the study of things, but at the start that was far from the intention of scientists, who at times disparaged Aristotle as a student of nature, but were seldom hostile to his efforts as a moralist or a literary critic. They tended to believe in the progress of man through the illumination of the new science; and this idea of progress was gradually to preoccupy later generations.⁶

The Influence of Science

It has been regarded as significant of the practical and perhaps even materialistic bent of the English mind that while seventeenth-century France created in its celebrated Académie Française (1635) a literary foundation, England organized a society for scientific research. The Royal Society, however, concerned itself with more than scientific experimentation. The inclusiveness of its conception of science perhaps forestalled efforts to establish an academy. It had as fellows many literary men who had slight interest in science, and it actively promoted the study and reform of English prose style, and like the French Academy was eager to improve and fix standards in language. Late in 1664 it appointed, “for improving the English language,” a committee that included, among others, Dryden, Evelyn, Waller, and Sprat. Meetings of this committee were held with such other literati present as Cowley, Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and “Matt” Clifford. Because of the death of Cowley and the interruption caused by the plague of 1665, the committee, so Evelyn wrote in 1689, “crumbled away and came to nothing.” The statement is not perfectly accurate; for though the committee seems never to have reported formally to the Society, its ideals of style became of very great importance.⁷ In a well-known passage in his History of the Royal Society (1667) Bishop Sprat has summarized these ideals:

Science and English Prose

They [the Society] have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that of Wits or Scholars.

These ideals, obviously essential to scientific exposition, were reinforced by the conversational tradition of elegant French prose, and became outside scientific circles a part of the reaction from baroque magnificence to neoPalladian simplicity. Hobbes, who interestingly enough was not approved by the Royal Society, worked “non ut floride sed ut Latine posset scribere”; and Glanvill, who was converted to the stylistic ideals of the Society, urged upon parsons the quality of plainness as opposed “First, to hard words; Secondly, to deep and mysterious notions; Thirdly, to affected Rhetorications; and Fourthly, to Phantastical Phrases.”

Under the influence of the new science, then, the useful and the plain were replacing the ornate, the rich, the complex. At first sight it may seem strange that a similar tendency to simplification can be traced in the religious thinking of the time. Certainly religious controversy—“polemical divinity” it was called—was a chief product of the fecund printing press; but gentlemen were becoming bored by such zeal. The religion of all true gentlemen was ideally something that no true gentleman ever argued about: argument might be left to the parsons! As ambassador to Holland Sir William Temple admired the effects of toleration in that country, and in his Observations upon the United Provinces (1673) he remarks concerning Dutch composure in religious controversy:

Genteel Tolerance

They argue without interest or anger; They differ without enmity or scorn, And They agree without confederacy. Men live together like Citizens of the World, associated by the common ties of Humanity…. The Power of Religion among them, where it is, lies in every Man's heart….

In England this beatific condition seemed more than a channel-crossing distant; but remotely the ideal was perceived and valued as the coil of varied controversy incessantly renewed itself at home. Weary of disputation and eager for a simplified, reasonable creed Dryden could write:

Faith is not built on disquisitions vain;

The things we must believe are few and plain.

But no great number of Englishmen followed Dryden's search for “unsuspected ancients” to serve as authoritative sanctions in faith. The age was prejudiced against any ipse dixit authority.

There were complicated positions taken.⁸ The Catholics, disliked largely for political rather than doctrinal reasons, were at times willing even to undermine the authority of Scripture, since by so doing they undermined the chief orthodox basis for Protestant faith. The Puritans were still assailing Anglicans on questions of church government; but many dissenters and Anglicans, both largely Calvinists, would unite against the rising tide of Arminianism. In the forefront of its 1629 Protestation the House of Commons had asserted: “Whosoever shall bring in innovation of religion, or by favour or countenance seek to extend or introduce popery or Arminianism, or other opinion disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church, shall be reputed a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth.”⁹ At the end of the century a kindlier attitude towards practical moral sanctions as opposed to the Calvinist covenant of grace would have made such a protest impossible.¹⁰ The blood and tears of war, controversy, and political intrigue had led gradually to a practical, if not always a reasoned, spirit of toleration.

Religious Animosities

To civic life the great contribution of “the people called Quakers” was doubtless their insistent belief in religious toleration.¹¹ Their co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• A LITERARY HISTORY OF ENGLAND
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Preface to the First Edition
• Note to Second Edition
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I. THE RISE OF CLASSICISM
• PART II. CLASSICISM AND JOURNALISM
• PART III. The Disintegration of Classicism
• Bibliographical Supplement
• Index