Lecture Eight. The Augustan Age.

1. The Age of Reason.

1. The Enlightenment.

2. Neoclassical literature in England

1. Alexander Pope

1. biography

2. important works

3. Pope’s influence on the English language

The eighteenth century in European history is often referred to as the Age of Reason. The general intellectual climate of the epoch was connected with rationalism as the way of thinking. The dramatic rise in natural sciences instilled that strong faith in the potential of in the rational capacities of human mind, its reliability. Rationalism was the new philosophy (associated with the names of Descartes and John Locke). John Locke and Isaac Newton played an important role in bringing about the new, empirically oriented, and therefore more rational way of considering the world which surrounds us. The powers of reason and common sense held sway over those of the imagination and the emotions. Locke rejected the ‘innate ideas’ (Descartes), maintaining that all knowledge was based on experience. One important conclusion that the thinkers of the period drew from it was that a man’s character depended on the environment alone.

The eighteenth century took a very optimistic view of human nature. It has become a cliché, but nevertheless it is true, that for much of the eighteenth century there was a prevailing spirit of optimism. Eighteenth century philosophers asserted that human beings are naturally good and find their highest happiness in the exercise of virtue and benevolence. Such a view found the source of virtue in instinctive and social impulses rather than in a code of conduct sanctioned by divine law. It fostered a benevolence that led to social reforms seldom envisioned in earlier times – to the improvement of jails, to the establishment of foundling hospitals and homes for penitent prostitutes, and ultimately to the abolition of slave trade. The doctrine of natural goodness seemed to many to suggest that that it is civilization that corrupts us, and that ‘noble savages’ those who live in a state of nature might be models of innocence and virtue. Such notions encouraged an interest in primitive societies and ethnic culture.

The central question of the Enlightenment was certainly that of Man (“The proper study of mankind is Man” – A. Pope)

The literary history of the eighteenth century can be roughly divided into three lesser periods: the beginning was presided over by the literary movement of Neo-classicism, the second part made emphasis on realistic tendencies and is especially noted for the rose of the novel, in the third period of sentimental tendencies literature veered toward romanticism.

(This is an oversimplification, of course. We can never stamp an age with a single tendency and ignore the delicate play of tendencies and impulses that every age produces. But in a short course, some degree of generalization is inevitable.)

The early Enlightenment is dominated by neo-classical tendencies and is often summed up under such labels as Augustan Age, or the Neo-classical period. The classical school, which loved polished regularity set the fashion in literature.

The term ‘Augustan’ derives from the period of literary eminence under the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus (27 BC – AD 14), during which Horace, Ovid and Virgil flourished.

The writers of the era of Queen Anne – Addison and Steele, Pope, Swift, William Congrieve, Prior – styled theirs as Augustan Age, because they saw a parallel between the new political stability of their day and Rome under Caesar Augustus and hoped to equal the literary achievements of the Romans. They valued stability, greatly admired their Roman counterparts, imitated their works, frequently drew parallels between the two ages.

Neo-classicism is the term used to denote the practice of imitating the great authors of antiquity as a matter of aesthetic principle. The literary lawgivers of this age held that rigid adherence to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of producing a masterpiece. The belief was common that a knowledge of rules was more important than genius. The necessary rules would be disclosed by a study of the best works of the ancient.

At the end of the sixteenth century Aristotle’s Poetics was recovered, which provoked an attempt to reestablish rules or canons for using ancient genres. There appeared a number of special treatises on poetry. Theoreticians created a rigid hierarchy of literary genres which established their inequality. They also prescribed certain rules and norms for each genre (linguistic, metrical, didactic, etc) Perhaps, the most famous of their inventions was the observance of the dramatic unities of time, place and action, which won great support in France.

The usual excuse for the rules was that it helped poets to be true to nature: “Those rule of Old discover’d, not devis’d Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz’d”. (Pope) Nature was what poets tried to see and represent, which was the goal of literary creation. But the scope of what was considered natural was at the time rather restricted. Augustans tended to generalizations, to universal truth about man and the permanent typical elements in human experience.

The literary style of neoclassists was marked in the highest degree by the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. They taught the grace of style, restraints, common sense, clearness. On the other hand, Neoclassicism imprisoned imagination within a frigid framework of canons. It dwarfed poetic power and made poetry artificial.

1. Eighteenth century theorists regarded poetry primarily as an imitation of nature and human life. Art is “a mirror held up to nature”. But the poet doesn’t reflect nature as it is. He renders, puts things into an order designed to instruct and give aesthetic pleasure. An old idea dressed in exquisite form was as welcome as a new one. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed// Which oft was thought, but never so well expressed”.

2. Poets were aware of the rules governing different kinds of poetry. Deliberately employed tested means to achieve foreknown effects. “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,// As those move easiest who have learnt to dance.” Art as a craft.

3. Men and women were for the most part viewed as limited beings in a strictly ordered and unchanging world. Common sense and the golden mean, no extremes. “The bliss of man is not to act or think beyond mankind// This kind, this true degree of blindness, weakness Heaven bestows on thee. Submit.”

4. Deep-seated mistrust of radical innovation, respect for precedent established through ages. Anything strange, romantic, full of feeling, highly imaginative or improbable to the intellect was unpopular.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was probably the only true representative of English neoclassicism with its desire to curb fancy, to discipline emotion by reason and to express general truth.

Pope was born into a Catholic family, which meant that the boy could not be sent to a public school or university. He gained his education from private tutors and voracious reading. His health was ruined and his growth stunted by a severe illness at the age of 12. It left him crippled for the rest of his life.

Alexander Pope was a man-of-letters, one of the first who lived entirely by his pen.

Major works: The Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; Dunciad; The Essay on Man

Pope’s Essay on Criticism is a pleasant introduction to the canons of taste in the English Augustan Age. It assembled the most known and most received observations on the subject of literature and criticism. Pope did not try for novelty: he wished merely to give pleasing and memorable expression to generally accepted doctrines and make them useful to contemporary poets: “True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d / What oft was thought but never so well express’d”. From this point of view, the poem is remarkable.

The poem throws into polished form many of the views current at the time:

• The proper study of mankind is man

• An honest man’s the noblest work of God;

• Vice is a monster of so frightful mien// As to be hated needs but to be seen;// Yet, seen to oft, familiar with her face,// We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Words are like leaves, and where they most abound// Much fruit of sense beneath is seldom found.

By 1712, Pope had made the acquaintance of a group of writers who soon became his intimate friends: Swift, Arbuthnot, John Gay, Thomas Parnell. In 1714 they formed The Scriblerus Club – a literary association of intellectuals whose purpose was to satirize and ridicule “all false tastes in learning”. The friends proposed to write jointly a biography of a learned fool, Martin Scriblerus. Scriblerus’s life and opinions were to form a running commentary on whatever the friends considered to be the follies of the learned and pedantry. Eventually Scriblerus’s fictitious memoirs were produced (1741). The importance of the club is that it fostered a satiric temper which was later to find expression in mature works of Swift, Pope and John Gay.

After The Essay on Criticism Pope graduated to the epic. The Rape of the Lock is based upon an actual, very insignificant episode. A young noble man in a spirit of frolic cut off a lock of hair from the head of a young beauty (Arabella Fermor) The escapade provoked a quarrel between the two aristocratic Catholic families. Pope undertook to write a poem about it in the hope that a little laughter might help to soothe ruffled tempers.

The trivial episode is handled by Pope with supreme tact,. He also describes the whole thing with a mock solemnity of a heroic epic.

The Rape of the Lock is a mock heroic epic. Pope handles the trivial occurrence with playful wit, delicate fancy and a mock solemnity. The poem abounds in parodies. It echoes of the Ilyad, the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, constantly forcing the reader to compare the petty with the great.

The Rape of the Lock is a gentle satire of the fashionable society, and makes fun of its obsession with the trivial.

Alexander Pope had very high opinion of the capacities of man in general, he at the same time seemed mortally to hate a large number of individuals. His most congenial mode was satire. His satire was bitter, personal, sometimes unduly vindictive.

One of his greatest works is The Dunciad. It is written in the form of ‘high’ satire in Horace’s tradition, and contains a mockery at contemporary poetry. In Dunciad he holds up to ridicule every writer who had offended him. A great deal of the poem is now tiresome reading; some of it is brutal. Still, many lines passed intp general use, becoming aphorisms: “While pensive poets painful vigils keep// Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep”.

Pope’s last big poem – The Essay on Man – is a philosophical poem, not completed. It also expresses doctrines widely circulated and generally accepted at the time by the enlightened minds throughout Europe – ideas on which the eighteenth-century optimism rested. Pope’s avowed purpose was ‘to vindicate the ways of God to man’ . The idea is in these lines:

All nature is but art unknown to thee,

All chance, direction which thou canst not see,

All discord, harmony not understood,

All partial evil, universal good.

And spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Pope’s a champion of clarity and precision. He excels in didactic and satirical verse. He calls attention to the correctness of form and careful expression. Pope is a recognized master of style, a supremely competent technician, who taught his age the needed lesson of careful workmanship.

His style was laconic, clear, aphoristic. The style, in fact, has everything to justify his image as an heir of antique writers. He was a master of ironic observation and made the English language richer with a number of famous lines.

No other writer, apart from Shakespeare, has an equal number of lines which have passed into current quotation.

- A little learning is a dangerous thing;

• For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread;

• To err is human, to forgive divine;

• The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

• Let such teach others who themselves excel, // and censure freely who have written well.

• Go, like the Indian, in another life// Expect thy dog, thy bottle and thy wife.

• In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,// Alike fantastic, if too new or old:’// Be not the first by whom the new are tried// Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

For all the 18^th century he remained one the most influential and most celebrated poets for all Europe. His fame was undermined with the advent of the Romantics, who accused him of lack of feeling, excessive restraint and coolness. Leslie Stephen wrote: “Pope never crossed the undefinable, yet inaffaceable line, which separates poetry from rhetoric”.

Time returned him the esteem he actually deserves. Within his time he embodied the image of an ideal poet – a master who achieved perfection, and sang Nature as the great purpose of God.

Eighteenth century drama

1. The changes in English drama. New forms of theatrical entertainment.

a) neoclassical tragedy; sentimental comedy; pantomime

2. The ballad opera. John Gay. Beggar’s Opera.

3. Domestic drama. George Lillo. The London Merchant.

2. The fight against sentimental comedy. Oliver Goldsmith.

3. Social and political satire. Henry Fielding

4. The pinnacle of the English drama of the period. Richard Sheridan. The Rivals. School for Scandal.

1. After the flourishing of Elizabethan drama, after a short period of revival at the end of the seventeenth century, for almost 200 years drama played a relatively modest role in the mainstream of English culture. In the eighteenth century drama sinks into background, leaving the prominent position to new literary forms – the essay, the pamphlet, the treatise, later to the novel.

The relative stability of English society did not make for the creation of authentic tragedy, whereas the Liscensing Act of 1737 prevented the development of political satire. The prevalent dramatic forms of the period were the moral ‘domestic drama’ and ‘sentimental comedy’.

As soon as the beginning of the century, Addison and Steele, the talented and enterprising representatives of the English Enlightenment, tried to conform drama to the new tastes and tasks.

Steele made an attempt at innovating comedy, particularly its moral contents. He introduced a new type of drama – sentimental comedy, a reaction from the comedy of Restoration. His plays are notable for the change of moral tone; they are based on purely comical situations, employ theatrical stock devices and occasionally folklore motifs: The Funeral, or Grief a-la- Mode (1701); The Lying Lover (1703); The Tender Husband (1705). Steele had his followers (e.g. Hugh Kelly, The False Delicacy, 1768 – the conflict based on a mistake that arises from excessive tact and delicacy.) However, the sentimental comedy did not prove very successful.

Addison tried his hand at the classical tragedy.

Cato (1715) – very likely, the only true neoclassical tragedy in English literature. The play served educational purposes. In blank verse Addison praises the heroism of Cato the republican, who stands up to Caesar’s tyranny and commits suicide rather than submit to the dictator. The tragedy owed its success mainly to the political intentions imputed to it. As a work of art, it’s rather bland: lifeless, pretentious, explicitly moralizing. Samuel Johnson described it as ‘rather a poem in dialogue than a drama’.

b) The Ballad Opera

The rival of drama were the new genres of pantomime and ballad opera.

A pantomime – originally a piece of acting without speech; later it developed into a distinct form of theatrical entertainment consisting of dramatized traditional fairy-tales, with singing, dancing and clowning, and with certain stock roles.

A ballad opera – a theatrical and musical form, in which the action of the play (usually comic) is carried in spoken prose, interspersed with songs.

The first ballad opera (and the most important one) was John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728).

John Gay (1685-1732). Poet and playwright. A friend of Swift and Pope, member of the Scriblerus Club.

Early works: The Shepherd’s Week (1714) – a series of six witty pastorals, partly parody, partly true to life. Eclogues in mock-classical style, five of them based more or less closely on Virgil, but presenting shepherds and milkmaids not of the Golden Age but of the poet’s day, in their earthly simplicity. Rustic characters are portrayed at work and at play against a lovely background of nature. They were designed to parody those of A. Phillips. Three Hours after Marriage (1717) – a play written together with Pope and Arbuthnot.

The Beggar’s Opera arose out of Swift’s suggestion that ‘a Newgate pastoral might make an odd pretty sort of thing’.

Contents: The principal characters are Peachum, a receiver of stolen goods, who also makes a living by informing against his clients; his daughter Polly; Lockit, warden of Newgate prison, and his daughter Lucy; and Captain Macheath, a gallant highwayman. Polly falls in love with Macheath, and marries him. Her father, infuriated by her folly, informs against Macheath, who is sent to Newgate. There he makes a conquest of Lucy, who, in spite of her jealousy towards Polly , secures his release.

The play combines a burlesque of Italian opera and political satire with Gay’s brilliant songs and scenes of genuine pathos. The play contained around 70 songs: Gay wrote new words to old melodies known to the public. It contained personal attacks on Robert Walpole, the Whig prime minister (there was a character with the same name in the play, a criminal).

The Beggar’s Opera was an unparalleled success. It ran for 62 performances, the longest run known at the time and is said to have brought Gay some 800 pounds. A popular joke of the time was that the Beggar’s Opera made Gay rich, and Rich (the producer) gay.

B. Brecht’s well-known play, The Three-Penny Opera, (first performed in 1928) is a version of Gay’s opera.

c) Domestic drama

A new theatrical form, in which the main figures were not of nobility, and the vehicle was prose, not poetry. The first domestic drama in modern prose which pointed the way toward the most frequent type of play in later periods was The History of George Barnwell, or the London Merchant (1731), a drama by George Lillo (1693-1739).

Contents: It is a domestic tragedy in prose, where for the first time in the history of theatre every day commercial life was made the theme of the tragedy. The drama is based on an old ballad and tells a story of an innocent apprentice, Barnwell, who is seduced by a heartless courtesan Millwood. She encourages him to rob his employer, Thorowgood and to murder his uncle. They are both brought to execution, he – penitent, she – defiant.

The play is not exactly a theatrical masterpiece. It is too full of tearful sentiment and explicit moralizing. The style is pompous, falsely grandiose; the characters flat and artistically unconvincing. Both the language and emotions are affected and artificial. But on the other hand, The London Merchant was the first drama in European history that aimed to portray common people and their lives and was meant for ordinary public, the undereducated lower classes. The story is told directly and with force. Virtue and vice are contrasted in simple terms and clear explicit images.

The London Merchant immediately created a furore and was promptly translated into French, German and Dutch. The London Merchant by Lillo was highly commended by Diderot and Lessing and was an undoubted influence on later drama.

Another example of a popular domestic (or sentimental) tragedy was The Gamester by Edward Moore (1753) – a naive and simple hearted exposure of the vice of gambling, through which the weak character – Beverly – is brought to ruin and death.

2.Sentimentalism being the order of the day, it couldn’t but affect the art of drama. Even in comedy tears and sentiment prevailed over laughter.

However, some of the most distinguished playwrights of the period deliberately set out against “the monster called “sentimental comedy”. They believed that wit and animation were inherent in a comedy, and it should provoke laughter rather than tears. Among those dramatists were Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan.

Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774), one of the most versatile of English authors, alongside with the novel and poetry, tried his hand at comedy as well.

She Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night (1773) is one of the greatest comedies of the language, delightful to read and always successful on the stage. The play is deliciously ludicrous in situation and characters, totally unsentimental and without any attempt at moral edification. Some of Goldsmith’s contemporaries, preferring “sentimental comedy”, denounced the play as “low”; but those were laughed down by a delighted audience.

Contents: The principal characters are Mr. Hardcastle, Mrs. Hardcastle, and their daughter), Mrs. Hardcastle’s son by a former marriage, Tony Lumpkin (idle, ignorant, cunning and mischievous, but doted on by his mother) and a young man Marlow. Sir Charles Marlow, his father, proposes a match between his son and Miss Hardcastle. The young man and his friend Hastings travel to pay the Hardcastles a visit. But they lose their way and Tony Lumpkin directs them to a neighbouring inn, which in reality is the Hardcastles’ house. The fun of the play arises largely from a resulting misunderstanding, Marlow treating Hardcastle as the landlord of the supposed inn and making violent love to Miss Hardcastle, who he takes for a maid. She plays the role trying to help him overcome his shyness. The arrival of Sir Charles Marlow clears the misconception and all ends well.

The Good-Natur’d Man (1768) describes the testing and the education of an open-hearted and open-handed young Honeywood, who suffers from excessive generosity, and is cured by the experience of being arrested for debt. Goldsmith puts his characters in comic situations and gives them touching, appealing qualities in the sentimental spirit.

3. Henry Fielding wrote all in all 25 plays, largely in the form of a farce or satire. In 1736 Fielding took over the management of the New Theatre and wrote for it a number of successful satirical comedies, which aimed at various political and religious targets.

The main ways of expression in Fielding’s comedies are parody and satire. He owes a lot to Gay, still more to Swift. His theatrical pseudonym (Scriblerus Secundus) is clearly a recognition of Swift’s influence and a homage to the great satirist.

Fielding’s most celebrated dramatic works:

• The Tragedy of Tragedies, or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. An exuberant farce in mock-heroic manner, ridiculing the ‘Bombastic Greatness’. Fielding ridicules the false greatness of the rulers and the way they are portrayed in fashionable grandiose tragedies.

• Don Quixote in England (1734) –Don Quixote tries to understand the electioneering abuses and intrigues in Britain, but he is not mad enough. His madness is superior to his opponents’ base practicality, his idealism contrasts the prosaic reality of English life.

• Pasquin (1736) – an allegory, describes the fight between the troops of the Queen Ignorance and the Queen Common Sense, abused in England.

• The Historical Register for 1737 – a picture of universal corruption, personified in a character recognizably akin to R. Walpole.

In 1737 the Liscensing Act introduced censorship by Lord Chamberlain in the theatre. It brought Fielding’s career as adramatist to an end.

4. But the highest achievement of the 18^th century drama was the comedy of Richard Sheridan (1751- 1816)

Sheridan made a very early start as a comedy writer. He fell in love with Eliza Linley, a beautiful and accomplished singer, with who he eloped to France and who he married in 1773. Being short of money, he decided to try his hand at a play, and in a few weeks wrote The Rivals.

The Rivals is generally agreed to be one of the most engaging and accomplished of English comedies. It is a witty comedy which ridicules pretence, ignorance, stupidity.

Contents: Captain Absolute, an heir of a baronet, falls in love with Lidya Languish, a romantic girl, who is fond of sentimental novels. For the purpose of courtship he assumes the character of Beverly, a poor lieutenant. In this guise he is favorably received (the love of a poor man seems very romantic to Lidya). Captain Absolute himself is quite a sober-minded, practical man. The captain’s father proposes a match between his son and Lidya, and Mrs. Malaprop (Lidya’s aunt) welcomes the proposal. The rivalry between Captain Absolute and Lieutenant Beverly is a source of many comical situations, but when Lidya learns, that the two are the same person, she suddenly refuses to marry him for shattering her hopes of romantic elopement. In the end, however, the lovers reunite. Another plot neatly interwoven with the first one is the love-affair between Lidya’s friend Julia, and her jealous and perverse lover Faulkland.

The most accomplished comical characters in the play are Bob Acres (a coward who has to fight in a duel) and Mrs. Malaprop, who is noted for her aptitude of misapplying words. She never fails to laugh at others’ ignorance or mistakes, and favors long foreign words, but gets them all wrong. She says ‘epitaph’ instead of ‘epithet’, ‘illiterate’ instead of ‘obliterate’. (‘He is as hadstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile’; ‘He is very pineapple of politeness’). After the play, a new word entered the English language: ‘malapropism’. It means a word that is used wrongly but sounds like the word you should have used and creates a funny change of meaning.

The general tone of the comedy is very cheerful and light-hearted. However, the author’s aim is not only to divert his audience, but to instill respect for genuine feelings, unaffected courage, selflessness.

The Rivals was produced in Covent Garden in 1775 and established Sheridan in a fashionable society. The same year he wrote the farce St Patrick’s Day and The Duenna – a tribute to everybody’s preoccupation with ballad operas. It contains much music, a great deal of which consists of pleasant and familiar airs to the audiences of the time. At the age of 25 he became director (later the owner) of the Drury Lane Theatre.

In 1777, when Sheridan was 26, he wrote his best work – The School for Scandal.

Contents: Sir Peter Teazle, an elderly and very worthy gentleman, married a young girl from a poor family. Having found herself in a fashionable society, Lady Teazle cannot escape its depraving influence. She becomes extravagant, and even her fidelity is tested. Sir Peter is made wretched by her frivolity.

The other plot is the story of two brothers – Joseph and Charles Surface.

The characters of the two brothers remind in part those of Tom Jones and Blifil. Like Fielding, Sheridan emphasizes that outward shows of a man’s conduct cannot be seen as sufficient grounds for assessing character. If you judge by the surface, Joseph is a very decent and respectable young man, modest, virtuous, polite. But he is a sanctimonious hypocrite. Beyond the surface, he is selfish and heartless. Charles appears as a reckless rake and spend-thrift at first. He is heavily involved in debt; and the society and especially his brother look down on him. However, Charles turns out honest and good-natured.

The brothers’ uncle Oliver returns unexpectedly from India, and desides to test the characters of his nephews before revealing his identity. He visits Charles in the guise of a money-lender, and Charles cheerfully sells him all the family portraits, but refuses to sell the portrait of Sir Oliver himself, and thus unwittingly wins his heart. To Joseph he comes in the guise of a needy relative, begging for assistance. Joseph refuses, giving as his reason the avarice of Sir Oliver.

The characters of the brothers are fully revealed in their love affairs. Charles is in love with Maria, Sir Peter’s ward and his love is returned. Joseph is courting the same girl for her fortune, while at the same time he is dallying with Lady Teazle.

Joseph’s character is revealed against the background of the fasionable society he moves in. It is represented by the salon of Lady Sneerwell – a group of gossips and scandal-mongers. Each of them poises himself or herself as a perfection of virtue, good taste and tone. But they establish their reputation not by their own conduct, but at the expense of others. They at mock at people’s dignity, ridicule their feelings, ruin their reputation. They cry loud about other people’s drawbacks, weakness and mistakes to divert the public opinion from their own. In fact, they groundlessly blame others for their own ugliness, ill-will and corruption. This is the background of Sheridan’s comedy, the backdrop against which the comedy of contemporary morals is played. This backdrop, however, is not passive. The scandal-mongers corrupt Lady Teazle, ruin the reputation of Lord Teazle’s ward, Maria.

The comedy is well-paced, full of sparkling wit, the action is concentrated in a few scenes , very skillfully arranged. The weakest are the good characters – Sir Peter and Maria. They are quite traditional, conventional, and rather bland.

The play was universally acclaimed, but Sheridan’s financial anxieties became even more acute. Sheridan wrote another famous play – A Critic – where he concentrated on the theatrical stock devices – a reflection of a crisis of the theatre. In spite of the success of the play, Sheridan decided to pursue a career in politics. He won a seat in Parliament and established his reputation as a wonderful orator in the House of Commons. He became the friend of Prince regent and other royal figures.