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A SURVEY OF ENGLISH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE Pedro Javier Pardo

Table of contents 1.1. 1.2.

1.3. 1.4. 1.5.

A Working Chronology The Augustan Age 1.2.1. The meaning of “Augustan” 1.2.2. Neo-classical Literary Principles 1.2.3. Augustan Poetry The Age of Satire The Age of Prose The Age of Sensibility 1.5.1. The Literature of Sensibility 1.5.2. English Pre-romanticism

1.1. A Working Chronology “Augustan” has been loosely applied to the age of literature from 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century, but also, more strictly, to the shorter period from 1700 to 1744 at the centre of that age, when certain seventeenth-century trends come to their prime and before they start to dissolve in the second part of the eighteenth century. This is why the literature of the period between 1660 and 1789 –also called the Neoclassical period– is divided into three shorter periods of about forty or forty-five years each: 1.

1660 (Charles II restored to the throne) to 1700 (death of Dryden), called the Restoration or the Age of Dryden (the dominant or most representative literary figure). It can be described as an attempt at bringing new refinement and new critical principles ―neo-classical ones― imported from France to English literature, in drama and poetry. The most distinctive and significant literary form of the period is the so-called Restoration comedy.

2.

1700 to 1744 (death of Pope), or 1745 (death of Swift), called the Augustan Age, the Age of Reason or the Age of Pope, which extends the new principles to a wider public and imitates the literary forms and subjects of the ancient writers of Greece and Rome, as well as their ideals of moderation and restraint, decorum and urbanity. This period gives special attention to satire and sees the rise or popularisation of new prose forms.

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3.

1744 to 1784 (death of Johnson), or 1789 (French Revolution), called the Age of Sensibility or the Age of Johnson. The now old principles are still at work, but are confronted with new cultural attitudes and theories of literature: the vogue of cultural primitivism, the emphasis on feeling and sensibility, the exaltation of genius, the sublime and imagination. These new attitudes and ideas are sometimes called Pre-Romantic, since they will become dominant in the Romantic period.

1.2. The Augustan Age 1.2.1. The Meaning of “Augustan” The Oxford English Dictionary defines Augustan as follows: “1. Connected with the reign of Augustus Caesar, the palmy period of Latin literature. 2. Hence, of the palmy period of purity and refinement of any national literature”. The Collins Dictionary is more specific about the first sense: “Characteristic of, denoting, or relating to the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, his period, or the poets, notably Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, writing during his reign”. But these definitions raise a very simple but perplexing question: why should eighteenth-century English literature be named after the Roman emperor Octavius Augustus? The explanation is both political and literary, and it lies in the second half of the seventeenth century, when some important developments in politics (the Restoration) and literature (Neoclassicism) took place. 1.

RESTORATION. In 1660, after the Civil War and the Puritan Interregnum (the Commonwealth Period), the monarchy, specifically the Stuart line, was restored: the son of the beheaded Charles I, Charles II, who was exiled in France, returned and became king. His accession to the throne gave rise to hopes that he would be a kind of Octavius Augustus (27 BC-AD 14), who re-established order and stability after the civil war that followed the murder of Julius Caesar. In addition to this, Charles, like Augustus, offered patronage to poets and artists, thus establishing a firm connection between literature and power. Dryden (who later became Poet Laureate) and some other poets of his generation drew the analogy between post-civil war England and Rome in a very explicit way. In his poem Astraea Redux (1660), he compares the return of Charles II to England with Octavius’ victory over Mark Anthony at Actium, and goes on to prophesy a new golden age of peace, prosperity and poetry. In this political sense, the term Augustan was applied to the new period.

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2.

NEO-CLASSICISM. The analogy between England and Rome was also cultivated in literary terms. The Restoration also brought a sudden change in taste. Charles imported an admiration of French literature as well as French fashions, and this included the new artistic movement known as Neo-classicism, developed in France by authors such as Pierre Corneille, René Rapin and Nicolas Boileau. Again Dryden was a key figure with his Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), which was, if not the first, at least the most influential English neoclassical poetics. Among the neo-classical literary principles, which would still dominate in the eighteenth century, the imitation of the classics -including the Roman Augustans– was a central tenet. Dryden's Astraea Redux, for example, was modelled in part on Virgil’s fourth eclogue. In this second, literary sense English literature also became Augustan.

So Augustan came to symbolise something very appreciated and valued, both in political and literary terms: (1) political stability, order, authority (or at least aspiration to them), after the extremism of the civil wars; (2) a return to the classics, who represent similar ideals in literature ―a desire for elegant simplicity, restraint, clarity, regularity, good sense, urbanity― after the difficulty and sometimes extravagance of late Renaissance literature (metaphysical and Baroque poetics). Both spheres are brought together in the term Augustan and create the correlation between politics and literature, political authority and literary refinement, which characterises the Augustan ethos. In the eighteenth century the Augustan analogy stayed alive and the term was used to refer to the new century: it was applied not only to Restoration writers such as Dryden but also to their heirs, for example Alexander Pope (1688-1744), who is the key figure in the first half of the century. The analogy, however, was questioned and became problematic in its political dimension, although it remained valid in the literary one. 1.

The POLITICAL analogy became problematic both on the English and the Roman sides. On the English part, expectations about Charles I (1660-1685) were soon disappointed, disillusionment set in, and this feeling extended to later monarchs. In addition to this, and as the result of the two revolutions in the seventeenth century (1642-49 and 1688), monarchy lost its divine prestige and the king lost his status as God's representative. Certain authors became also suspicious of the analogy on the Roman part, and they stressed that Augustus had been a tyrant who thought himself greater than the law and who destroyed the freedom of the Roman Republic. That is why some writers started to use the analogy in an ironic way to criticise the English monarchs, for example Pope in To Augustus (1737) does so with George II. The term Augustan was used in an ambivalent way, sometimes to praise, sometimes to criticise, sometimes in an ironic, sometimes in a literal sense. But the term is still useful to refer to a period of literary history when literature was

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deeply concerned with public issues and more involved in political infighting than it had ever been before, and when it became a very public and extrovert art form. 2.

Despite the negative political sense of the term Augustan on the part of some authors, the same authors used it in a positive and purely LITERARY sense. The leading writers of the time (Pope, Swift, Addison) admired and sometimes even compared themselves to the Roman Augustans (Pope in his Epistle to Augustus compared himself to Horace). The Roman Augustans became models of writing and the English ones imitated their forms and subjects: Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid, his pastorals (the Eclogues), and his celebration of rural life and work (the Georgics); Horace’s satiric epistles, Ovid’s metamorphoses and amatory poems. However hostile the general English opinion of the emperor Augustus was, poets under his reign provided significant models upon which many English poets played creatively. The Augustans detested Augustus but admired the poets of Augustan Rome. In fact the Roman Augustans were not the only classical models: there were also postAugustans, for example Juvenal's satires, and pre-Augustans, the Greek authors Homer and Theocritus (the models of Virgil’s epics and pastorals, respectively), or Pindar’s celebratory odes. In this sense, the Augustan Age of English literature is the Age of Classicism and imitation of the classics, a continuation and development of neo-classical principles, which were again formulated by Pope in An Essay on Criticism (1711).

1.2.2. Neo-classical literary principles The Augustans had a very specific set of basic tenets which oriented their literary thought and practice. These ideals, which closely followed neo-classical principles, were best embodied in poetry, which is the great Augustan genre. 1.

NATURE. What poets tried to represent in poetry was Nature. “Nature” has many meanings, but the Augustans conceived it as human nature rather than as external nature or landscape; and as the universal and permanent elements in human experience, qualities which remain fixed beneath the variety and flux of life. Nature consists of the enduring, general truths that have been, are and will be true for everyone in all times, everywhere. Poetry then is the imitation of human life, of human beings, or rather what human beings possess in common (representative characteristics and widely shared experiences, thoughts, feelings). In An Essay on Criticism, Pope says to the critic “First follow Nature“, and he adds somewhere else that “Human nature is ever the same”. The poet’s concern should not be with details and particulars, with changes and variations, but with the general which remains and reassures. The general, however, need not exclude the particular, and

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Augustan poetry leaves room for circumstances and the moment: but some abiding truth usually shines through them, so life takes the form of a perpetual allegory. 2.

The Augustans admired and imitated the literary achievements of the ANCIENTS (the classic writers of ancient Rome and Greece), who were thought to have attained excellence and established the enduring models in all the major literary genres. Imitation of the Ancients was a consequence of their desire to imitate Nature: since Nature does not change and since the Ancients had the best opportunity of representing it and excelled in its representation, later and less fortunate artists can learn of Nature by reading their works. That is why Pope said that to study the Ancients was to study Nature, and, in this sense, to resemble the Ancients was not only desirable but inevitable: modern writers should learn their craft from the ancients and should adhere to the rules implicit in their works.

3.

The emphasis upon correctness and the RULES resulted then from this principle of imitation of the Ancients. The rules were the essential properties of the various literary genres discovered and developed by the Ancients (epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire, ode, epistle…), as had been abstracted from their works. Modern writers should plan their works on one of the classical kinds or genres and observe the rules implicit in them. These genres were, by virtue of their distinctive language, kinds of plot and characteristic subjects, particularly well adapted to representing certain features of nature, certain areas of experience. This congruity between style and experience was called “DECORUM”. In this way the adherence to the rules and the respect for the hierarchies of genres were based on the desire to be truthful (to nature) rather than simply the desire to be obedient (to the Ancients). That is why Pope described the rules of art as “Nature methodised”.

4.

Admiration for the Ancients and adherence to rules were based not only on the immutability of human nature, but also on that of taste and beauty. And taste and beauty, the Augustans thought, do not change because they do not depend on subjective fancy or sensitivity, likes and dislikes, but on common sense, judgement, REASON, and this is permanent. Human nature is unchanging and so is taste, because art is founded not on imagination or feeling, which may be local, but on reason (that is why the Ancients were still valid models, because both nature and beauty were considered permanent). If reason is the creative faculty, then poetry is conceived as an intellectual activity, as a CRAFT, that is, a set of skills which must be perfected by long study and practice. This does not mean that unpremeditated strokes of imagination or feeling are left completely outside, but these must be curbed by reason: the role of judgement was not to suppress passion, energy or originality, but to make them more effective through discipline. This new conception of poetry is not surprising at all: this was the age of reason, which was applied to explore all

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areas of human experience as part of a new intellectual movement known as the ENLIGHTENMENT. 5.

The poetic craft is shown to a great extent in language, in what is called POETIC DICTION. “Diction” means the type of words, phrases, sentence structures, of any work of literature. Poetic diction is diction not current in ordinary speech: a special or distinctive kind of language employed only by poets, usually artificial and stock, that nobody speaks, different and removed from the language actually used by men. This became a special style in the eighteenth century, and it was characterised by: personification (representing a thing or abstraction in human form: “Melancholy frowns”), periphrasis (a roundabout way of avoiding homely words, the low and commonplace: “finny tribes” for fish or “household feathered people” for chickens), stock phrases or epithets (“shining sword”, “verdeant mead”), words used in their original Latin sense (“gelid”, “lucid”) and sentences forced into Latin syntax (“Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth / A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown”, where youth is the subject to the verb rests). Of course figurative language (figures of thought like simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and figures of speech like, chiasmus, zeugma, parallelism, antithesis) and versification (metrical patterns and verse forms) were abundantly used in eighteenth-century poetic diction and added to the heightened effect of Augustan poetry.

Poetry, then, was conceived as the dressing up of a general truth (about human nature and with ancients as models) in a specialised kind of language (which implies poetic diction, figurative language, versification). This is the Augustan conception of poetry, and it is expressed by the term WIT. “Wit” means quickness or acuity of mind, inventiveness, verbal ingenuity (a verbal expression is witty when it is brief, deft, and contrived to produce a shock or comic surprise). This meaning derives from the seventeenth-century application of the word to mean ingenuity in literary invention, the ability to develop brilliant, surprising, paradoxical figurative language (particularly the ability to perceive resemblances between things apparently unlike). In the eighteenth century there were attempts at distinguishing the false wit of some seventeenthcentury poets, who aimed merely at superficial puzzlement, and true wit, regarded as the rephrasing of truths of enduring validity, the power of expressing a truth with the clarity that serves it well (instead of with the showiness which obscures it). Pope defined wit as “Nature to Advantage drest”, and he also wrote that “True wit is what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”. Wit is the clear and fresh comprehension and expression of representative truth. Hence, as far as poetry is concerned, it is the point where general nature and poetic craft, universal truth and poetic diction, converge. Wit may be then considered as the eighteenthcentury formulation of creativity and originality.

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1.2.3. Augustan Poetry The dominant kind of poetry in the Augustan age was didactic, prosaic, satiric, moralistic, a poetry of statement. Since the Augustan poetic ideal was basically imitative, we can sketch a short overview of Augustan poetry by listing the models Augustan poets imitated. It should be added that Augustan imitation was comic as well as serious, that is to say, sometimes the Augustans made their imitation amusing by a ridiculous disparity between the manner and the matter (a technique called “burlesque”), mainly for satiric purposes, sometimes just for the sheer fun of it (see “The Age of Satire”). 1.

EPIC AND MOCK EPIC. Virgil's Aenid, which celebrated the imperial destiny of Rome as embodied by its hero Aeneas and the emperor Augustus, had been translated by Dryden (1697), and Homer's Iliad and Odissey by Pope (1715-20 and 1725-26 respectively). The Augustans, however, did not write serious epic works, but mock epics, which use the epic style and form to narrate trivial or prosaic affairs. Dryden's MacFlecknoe (1682) was the first notable example. It tells how MacFlecknoe, a contemporary poetaster, nominates Shadwell to succeed him as absolute monarch of the Realms of Non-sense, and describes his coronation. The poem rests on the notion that there is a mock-empire of poetical nonsense ruled by a mock Augustus and his successors. This work gave Pope the central idea for The Dunciad (1728, 1729, 1743), a longer and more elaborate mock-epic in which Colley Cibber, the actor, playwright, and Poet Laureate, succeeds to the throne of Dullness. Virgil's and Homer's works also contribute to Pope´s The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714), which narrates the quarrel between the belles and aristocrats of the day over the theft of a lady's curl. The triviality of these affairs both derides and is emphasised by the epic form, which shows them to be unworthy of it. Pope intended to write a serious epic with Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain, as hero, but he never did.

2.

PASTORAL AND MOCK PASTORAL. Pastoral, as practised in the tradition of Virgil’s imitation of Theocritus, gives expression to the urban writer’s longing for the peace and simplicity of rural existence through the representation of idealised shepherds and shepherdesses adopting elegant poses as singers, lovers, and mourners. Virgil's Eclogues were much imitated, for example in Pope's Pastorals (1709). But, as with the epic, the pastoral was more productively employed as a resource for parody, as in The Shepherd's Week (1714), where John Gay (1685-1732) mocks the notion of an Arcadia in contemporary England. Gay's characters bear plain or rustic names and the real occupations, customs, beliefs, words of the English country people of their times. His employment of the pastoral form, the eclogue, creates the characteristic incongruity between form and matter, and makes us acutely conscious of the clumsiness and grossness of his rustics; but his characters

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are so down-to-earth that we cannot avoid recognising the affectations and pretences of the pastoral form. This earthiness in fact approaches Gay’s pastoral to Theocritus, which was considered an alternative to the excessive refinement of Virgil's pastoral. 3.

GEORGIC AND MOCK GEORGIC. Virgil's celebration of rural life, his Georgics, provided a more fruitful object of imitation. The primary subject of the georgic was rural labour, sports and pastimes, so it was at once heroic and mundane: it described and recognised the importance of the ordinary activities of men, and in this sense it was descriptive and instructional, as in John Philips' Cyder (1708), Gay's Rural Sports (1713-20), or Jam...