Chapter 7. Literature at the Age of Reason. English Enlightenment

The age of Dryden, the time when the philosophy of reason started to dominate in many sides of life in England, including science, philosophy, literature and culture on the whole, was the transition period from Renaissance to the form of classicism that was marked by the full and continuous sway of reason, order and balance. English art and architecture reflected new trends which had ultimately developed a cultivated taste for the 'antique' - classicism - that became predominant through the last decades of the seventeenth century and the majority of the eighteenth century. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are known in the history of Europe as the period of Enlightenment. The central problem of the Enlightenment ideology was that of man and his nature. The Enlighteners believed in reason as well as in man's inborn goodness. They rejected the religious idea of the sinful nature of man. Vice in people, they thought, was due to the miserable life conditions which could be changed by force of reason. They considered it their duty to enlighten people, to help them see the evil, and the ways of social reformation. The Enlightenment was to establish the idea of the educational value of art.

In England the period of Enlightenment followed the Bourgeois revolution, while in other countries it came before the revolution (the French Bourgeois revolution took place at the end of the eighteenth century): therefore, the aims of the English Enlighteners were not so revolutionary as those of French Enlightenment. The English Enlighteners were not unanimous in their views. Some of them spoke in defence of the existing order, considering that a few reforms were enough to improve it. They were the moderates, represented in literature by Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Samuel Richardson. Others, the radicals, wanted more democracy in the ruling of the country. The most outstanding represntatives of the radicals were Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard B. Sheridan. In the epoch of reason (Enlightenment) the poetic primacy gave way to the prevalence of prosaic forms, which has been discussed at the finale of the previous chapter. The genre of the novel (moralising in character) appeared and became leading in the British literature of the period. Ordinary middle-class people became the main characters of those novels. The characters, either virtuous or vicious, were accordingly either rewarded or punished at the end of the novel. By these means the writers (Enlighteners) idealistically hoped to improve the morals of the people and of society in general.

The Enlightenment epoch in English literature may be divided into three periods: (1) early Enlightenment (1688 - 1740), which saw the flourishing of journalism which played an important part in the country's public life (most popular were the satirical moralising journals The Tatler, The Spectator, The Englishman, edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; in their essays these two writers touched on various problems of political, social and family life, those essays being the basis for the beginning of the realistic novel brought into English literature by Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift); (2) mature Enlightenment (1740 - 1750), which saw the birth of the moralising novel, represented in the works of Samuel Richardson (Pamela, Clarissa), Henry Fielding (The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, etc.), Tobias Smollett (The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, etc.), and Samuel Johnson; (3) late Enlightenment (Sentimentalism) (1750 - 1780), when the writers expressed the democratic bourgeois tendencies of their time through the belief in the force of human sentiments. The representatives of the late Enlightenment in England, in contrast to their intellectual predecessors who believed in the force of the intellect, considered feelings (sentiments) most important. The principal adherents of the belief among the novelists were Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield) and Lawrence Sterne (Tristram Shandy, The Sentimental Journey), and among dramatists - Richard Sheridan (School for Scandal, etc.).

The part of the Enlightenment in England - the one under the reigns of William III and Queen Anne (1694 - 1702, 1702 - 1714) - was called the 'Augustan Age' coined by the poet Oliver Goldsmith (1730 - 1774) to indicate admiration for the values of balanced judgement, refinement, clarity and elegance associated with Roman literature during the reign of the Emperor Augustus (27 B.C. - A.D. 14). It was the 'Age of Reason' and in general writers were more guided by social purpose than by the need to express personal feelings. It was also the age of satire - a form of literature attacking folly and vice by making them appear ridiculous. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries the satire of the Roman poets Horace (65 - 8 B.C.) - urbane, witty and genial - and Juvenal (A.D. 60 - 130) - sombre, dignified and self-consciously moral - were much translated and imitated. A tradition of verse satire runs through John Donne's poems and Ben Jonson's 'Comedies of Humours', but the art of satire is now more associated with the period 1660 - 1750, when it was frequently more social and personally directed in its attacks.

Also a dramatist, and a major critic and translator, John Dryden is noted for his verse satire, in particular Absalom and Achitophel, and MacFlecknoe. An extraordinary prolific talent, Dryden influenced many of the great writers of the eighteenth century. Another example of a bright satirical poetry of that time is Alexander Pope and his poem 'The Rape of the Lock'. It was written as an attempt to end a quarrel between two fashionable Roman Catholic families. Alexander Pope wrote his poem in the mock-epic style in imitation of Homer, to 'make a jest' of the incident and to laugh the both families off together.

In art, the spirit of the period was 'classical'. This is not an easy term to define, but its implications are clear: social conventions are more important than individual convictions, reason is more important than emotion, form is more important than content. Despite the calm surface of order that ruled the eighteenth century, the opposite of the 'classical' was slowly being prepared, to burst out at the time of the French Revolution. The opposite we call 'romantic', and we associate it with the individual rebelling against society - against accepted good taste and good manners - and with an unwillingness to accept conventional artistic forms. The Romantic is much concerned with himself, highly emotional, and generally impatient of the restrictions which a stable society demands. One expression that nowadays is sometimes heard in criticism of the eighteenth-century literature is 'dissociation of sensibility'. This is hard expression, but it can be explained simply as follows: the 'healthy' human soul exibits a perfect balance between intellect, emotion, and body. There is a time for reason, a time for deep feeling, a time for yielding to the demands of the senses; but no one faculty ever gets the better of the others for long. So, if, in the eighteenth-century literature, we are told to expect the bright coinage of reason, it is as well to remember that every coin has two sides.

The greatest poet of the period is Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744). In many ways he sums up the eighteenth century: son of a prosperous merchant, he lacks neither money nor leisure - the aristocratic refinement of his work has a middle-class basis. A Catholic, he could not go either to a public school or a university (Protestant England was strict about this); elegant and strong in his work, he was weak, dwarfish, and ugly in himself. Beign a classical poet, he accepted the world as it was, participated in the life of society, and worked off any resentment he may have felt about accidents of birth into satire, or allowed it to melt into philosophical accaptance. Pope is essentially the singer of order in the universe ('a mighty maze, but not without a plan') and of order in society. His Ode to Solitude and his Pastorals belong to his early 'teens, and the Essay on Criticism was produced at twenty. The views he presents in this last work are the very stuff of classicism - critically, as well as formally. Pope is Dryden's heir. He preaches correctness in literary composition, the filing and polishing of phrases and lines until perfection is reached.

The Essay on Man, produced when Pope was fifty-one, hardly seems to show any advance on the formal virtues of his earlier essay. It owes, in its contents, a gread deal to the philosophies of Viscount Bolingbroke (1678 - 1751) and the Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 - 1713). Bolingbroke was a Deist, that is to say, a man who accepted the notion of God as a purely rational idea and rejected much of the miraculous, much of what appealed purely to faith, in Christianity. This Deism is, of course, typical of an age which tried to reduce everything - even religion - to reason. Shaftesbury preached rationalism and tolerance and worked out a system of morality which was founded on a conviction we should now find it hard to accept - namely, that man is fubdamentally good, desires the happiness of others, and can distinguish instinctively between good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly. This very idea looks forward to the Romantic era and its belief in the value of instinct, the veneration of the untaught savage (as in Rousseau) and of the child (as in Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality). The rational age has thus the seeds of Romanticism in it: once reason is accepted as the prime faculty, man hardly needs external laws to tell him about right and wrong. Hence laws and religions become unnecessary, and anarchy - the essence of Romanticism - begins to appear.

To many lovers of Pope's work, the most delightful poem is The Rape of the Lock, a story of the theft of a curl from the hair of a young lady of fashion. This is told in that absurdly dignified style known as mock-heroic, in which the joke lies in the disparity between the trivial subject and high-flown language. But Pope not only entertains; he has some sharp jabs at the society of his time:

Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,

The sun obliquely shhots his burning ray;

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,

And wretches hang that jurymen may dine;

The nerchant from the Exchange returns in peace,

And the long labours of the toilet cease.

Pope's gift of sharp satire is at its scintillating best in the Moral Essays, the Epistles and Satires and the Imitations of Horace. In these latter poems the two Augustan ages meet; Pope translates Horace's satires but modernises them completely, so that ancient Rome becomes contemporary London, and the abuses of the two societies - seventeen hundred years apart - somehow become identical.

As a translator, Pope interpreted Homer for the Age of Reason, as Dryden before him had interpreted Virgil. Pope's Iliad tells us little about Homer, but plenty about the Age of Reason. The influence of Pope lies heavy on the age. For an eighteenth-century poet to take up the heroic couplet meant also taking up Pope's diction, rhythms, his epigrams, his wit. Though some poets had enough individuality to bring fresh tones and attempt fresh themes, we are always aware of the authoritative figure of Pope somewhere in the background. Oliver Goldsmith (1730 - 74) produced two long poems in heroic couplets - The Traveller and The Deserted Village, the second of which is perhaps the most popular of all eighteent-century poems.

Despite the interesting body of verse that the eighteen century produced, the works that hold the general reader most are those written in prose. Defoe, Swift and Fielding hardly seem to have dated, while Pope and his followers seem artificial to modern readers, and require to be looked at through the glass of historical perspective.

Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731) was a journalist, and the development of newspaper and the periodical is an interesting literary sideline of the seventeenth century. The public had already been stimulated for up-to-the-minute news, and the Restoration period, and the period of Enlightenment, with their interest in men and affairs, were developing that wider interest in news - home and foreign. Defoe is, in many ways, the father of the modern periodical, purveying opinion more than news, and The Review, which he founded in 1704, is the progenitor of a long line of 'well-informed' magazines. Defoe did not see himself a literary artist - there were no stylistic tricks in his writings, no airs and graces, but there was the flavour of colloquial speech, a 'no-nonsense', down-to-earth simplicity.

The most interesting of Defoe's 'documentary' works is the Journal of the Plague Year (one gets an impression that Defoe was actually present in London during that disastrous time). But his memory is revered still primarily for his novels, which we can now call novels, though in some way or another they are quite different from the form which we now tend to call a novel. Those prose works, called novels, were written by Defoe late in his life: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and others. The intention of these works is that the reader should regard them as true, not as fictions, and so Defoe deliberately avoids all art, all fine writing, so that the reader should concentrate only on a series of plausible events.

Other journalists of the time were Richard Steele (1672 - 1729) and Joseph Addison (1672 - 1719). The greatest prose-writer of the period is Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745). A great humorist and a savage satirist, his meat is often too strong even for a healthy stomach. He is capable of pure fun - as in some of his poems - but there is a core of bitterness in him which revealed itself finally as a mad hatred of mankind. His greatest books are A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels. The first of these is a satire on the two main non-conformist religions - Catholicism and Presbyterianism. Swift tells the story of three brothers - Jack (Calvin), Martin (Luther), and Peter (St.) - and what they do with their inheritance (the Christian religion). The story is farcical and at times wildly funny, but people of his day could perhaps be forgiven if they found blasphemy in it. Gulliver's Travels hides much of its satire so cleverly that children still read it as a fairy story. It really makes a lot of fun of mankind. In the book Swift's hatred of man reaches its climax. Swift is a very great literary artist. He is skilful in verse, as well as in prose, and his influence continues: James Joyce - in his The Holy Office - has written Swiftian verse; Aldous Huxley (in Ape and Essence) and George Orwell (in Animal Farm) have produced satires which are really an act of homage to Swift's genius. Yet Gulliver's Travels stands supreme: a fairy story for children, a serious novel for men, it has never lost either its allure or its topicality.

The novel develops, after the death of Defoe, with Samuel Richardson (1689 - 1761), a professional printer who took to novel-writing when he was fifty. Richardson liked to help young women with the composition of their love-letters, and was asked by a publisher to write a volume of model letters for use on various occasions. He was inspired to write a novel in the form of a series of letters, a novel which should implant a moral lesson in the minds of its readers. This novel was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which describes the assaults made on the honour of a virtuous housemaid by an unscrupulous young man. Pamela resists, clinging tightly to her code of honour, and her reward is, ultimately, marriage to her would-be seducer, a man who, despite his brutishness, has always secretly attracted her. It is a strange sort of reward, and a strange basis for marriage. Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe is about a young lady of wealth and beauty, virtue and innocence, who, in order to avoid a marriage which her parents are trying to arrange, seeks help from Lovelace, a handsome, but again, unscrupulous young man. Lovelace seduces her. Repentant he asks her to marry him, but she will not: instead, worn out by shame, she dies, leaving Lovelace to his remorse. This is a very remarkable novel: close analysis of character, perhaps for the first time in the history of the novel, looks forward to the great French novelists, Flaubert, and Stendhal, and Lovelace has a complexity of make-up hardly to be expected in the literature of the age.

The greatest novelist of the eighteenth century is Henry Fielding (1707 - 54). He started his novel-writing career, like Richardson, almost by accident. Moved to write a parody of Pamela, he found his Joseph Andrews developing into something far bigger than a mere skit. Joseph, dismissed from service because he will not allow his employer, Lady Booby, to make love to him, takes the road to the village where his sweetheart lives, meets the tremendous Parson Adams, and has many strange adventures on the road, meeting rogues, vagabonds, tricksters of all kinds, but eventually reaching his goal and happiness ever after. With Fielding one is inclined to use the term picaresque (from the Spanish picaro, meaning 'rogue'), a term originally applicable only to novels in which the leading character is a rogue. It is a term which lends itself to description of all novels in which the bulk of the action takes place on the road, on a journey, and in which eccentric and low-life characters appear. Don Quixote is, in some ways, picaresque, so is Priestley's Good Companions. Fielding's Jonathan Wild is truly picaresque, with its boastful, vicious hero. Tom Jones is Fielding's masterpiece. It has its picaresque elements - the theme of the journey occupies the greater part of the book - but it would be more accurate to describe it as a mock-epic. It has the bulk and largeness of conception we expect from an epic, and its style sometimes parodies Homer.

Tobias Smollett (1721 - 71) is responsible for Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker. The first gives us an insight into the life of the British Navy, which Smollett knew at first hand, having served as a ship's surgeon. The vice and brutality are vividly portrayed, but the satirical tone of the whole book seems to rob it somehow of the force of an indictment - exaggeration is Smollett's technique, not the direct reportage of Defoe. Laurence Sterne (1713 - 68) produced a remarkable and eccentric novel in his Tristram Shandy, which breaks all the rules, even of language and punctuation, and deliberately excludes all suggestions of plot, so that - despite the considerable length of the book - nobody gets anywhere, nothing really happens, and the hero does not succeed even in getting himself born until half-way through. The author deliberately hinders all the movement: just when we think a story is about to develop, Sterne introduces an incredible digression - a long piece of Latin (with translation on the opposite page), a blank sheet, a page with a marbled design on it, a collection of asterisks - anything to obstruct or mystify. Sterne is said to look back to Rabelais and forward to James Joyce. Sterne's Sentimental Journey is an account of travels through France and Italy. After the novel he was called the first of the English 'poor-dumb-beast' sentimentalist. Oliver Goldsmith follows Sterne in his exploration of sentimentality. A poet, and a dramatist, Goldsmith also succeeds in writing fine prose - his Vicar of Wakefield on the country idyll is great.