The 18th century
Augustan Satire
In Restoration London, the court was not very important. Wealthy
citizens now began to meet in coffee houses, where
they did business and exchanged reports of the latest news.
The wealthy were now involved in the search for profit, although
with their new wealth they tended to buy country estates and
titles. The “wit” with which young men like Donne had tried
to impress powerful courtiers a century before was now applied in
daily conversation to impress one’s colleagues. The dominant tone
was satire because almost every aspect of traditional
society had become fragile and uncertain, while there was much corruption.
The name “Augustan Age” given to the early 18th century
reflects the sense of new beginnings and increased prosperity that
marked the first years of the Roman Empire, (Augustus was
the first Roman emperor) although England very precisely had no
Augustus ruling it with dictatorial powers. Instead it had a new Horace
(great Augustan poet of satire) in Alexander Pope. His
writing reflects the intense tensions that were at work in him and
the society of his time, between tradition and innovation. In Parliament
these tensions were shown in the division between “Tories”
and “Whigs” as political “parties” began to evolve.
One element of conflict was the difference between “town”
and “country.” The older nobility owned land in the
“shires” and lived as gentry without needing much money;
the newly rich and dynamic class lived in the towns and
cities. Their money was invested to make more money. The values of
the Tory countryside were conservative, nostalgic
for the past, royalist and Anglican. The Whigs
represented the radical new ways of urban capitalism, many
were “non-conformist” (Presbyterian), not nostalgic
but rather upstart and forward-looking.
The disappearance of the court as a focus of power and the
rising importance of the House of Commons, led to a
massive increase in the power of “public opinion” and this
in turn was reflected by increasing public debate of every issue
and policy. The growth of the influence of the press went
hand in had with a realization that journalism was not always
reponsible, that the “news” reported was not always true. Many of
the Augustan concerns sprang from a sense that truth was becoming
the victim of modern finance. Their desire was therefore to educate
people through their writings to think clearly and wisely, so that
they could distinguish the folly and falsehood of modern society
from what was of real value.
The Augustans were people of sharp intelligence who had
been deeply influenced by the developments
in philosophy of the previous 100 years,
beginning with Galileo, Montaigne and Descartes. In
England, Francis Bacon was followed by Thomas Hobbes
(author of Leviathan) and the extremes of Hobbes’s
materialism provoked the work of John Locke and George
Berkeley. This latter, born in Ireland, was close to the
Augustans. At the same time, science (known as natural
philosophy) was developing, with Isaac Newton the
crowning glory. His Principia Mathematica was
published in 1687, the Opticks in 1704, and his
message of the universal harmony sustaining the universe
underlies the optimism of the 18th century’s Rationalism
and Enlightenment.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Pope’s family was Catholic and as a result were
obliged to live outside of London after the events of 1688. He had
a tutor but mostly studied alone. He spent much of his adult life
in Twickenham, up the Thames from London. In his childhood he
contracted a disease which left him stunted, deformed and
hunch-backed, although his head grew to the normal size and his
face was of striking beauty. The double handicap of Catholicism
and physical deformity meant that he was cruelly treated in many
ways and he came to value immensely the people who gave him their
friendship. His closest companion in youth was Jonathan Swift,
who then went to Ireland and later wrote “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Pope’s talents as a poet were accompanied by a sharp desire to chastise
folly. He made his money by translating Homer into
classically dignified “heroic couplets” (the most popular kind of
verse since Denham and Dryden); he made his enemies in many ways,
and wrote poems to vindicate himself. The tone of his poems is
always calm, reasonable, detached, but the satire is sharp and
sometimes extreme.
In his youth, Pope established his reputation
with his Essay on Criticism (1711) and The Rape of the
Lock (a mock heroic poem on a stolen lock of hair). After
the Homer translations were done, the Illiad in 1720, the Odyssey
in 1726, he edited Shakespeare. In later years, following Horace,
he wrote a number of epistles; An Essay on Man (1733-4) is
a philosophical poem in four epistles, which were published
separately. The first three were anonymous, and critics habitually
hostile to Pope acclaimed them, only to be made to look foolish
when the last was published with the poet’s name.
From Epistle 2
Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
The four Moral Essays (1731-5) include an Epistle Of
the knowledge and Characters of Men and the Epistle on
Women. At the same time he published a number of splendid,
free translations of the Satires of Horace, transposing
them to contemporary London. The Dunciad is perhaps his
fiercest satire, a mock-epic that expanded until its final form
was published in 1743.
Sensibility before Romanticism
Pope and the other Augustans sometimes seem
utterly intellectual and skeptical; yet their sense of irony,
their awareness of the contradictions that co-exist within
the apparent harmonies of classicism, underlie the birth of the novel
and its development at least as far as Jane Austen. At the same
time, Pope was strongly interested in landscape gardening,
the expoitation of the natural within the artificial, and in this
he was not alone. The Augustan age was marked by a growing
interest in the “picturesque” that was slowly to develop
into a taste for the “Gothic” which begins to be visible in
the mid-18th century’s taste for medieval ruins. Before
Romanticism, among the earliest novels we find a number of “Gothic
novels” set in the middle ages or in medieval buildings.
Nature in itself had been part of
renaissance literature mainly in pastoral poetry. The
first poem to celebrate nature from a new, often Newtonian,
perspective was James Thomson’s The Seasons
(1726-30). Here we begin to find a new sense of the “sublime”
in the evocation of storms. At the same time as Pope was writing
in a satirical, often acid tone about the corruptions of urban
society, Thomson (who was born and educated in Scotland) was
offering readers a completely un-ironic picture of the
appearance of the natural countryside through the different
seasons, seen reflecting Newton's harmony. Yet his diction
is as artificial as that of Pope and later romantics turned
against him. The Seasons remained immensely popular and
long continued to be published.
In art, the English painters of the
18th century produced a vast number of portraits,
corresponding to the wealth of the upper classes. Sir Joshua
Reynolds and John Gainsborough were the most famous
portrait painters. The carcicatures of William Hogarth
were also originally paintings, before being copied as cheap
engravings.
Thomas Gray (1716-1771) lived a very
quiet life. As a young man he was at Eton with Horace Walpole,
who later became one of the first admirers of “the Gothic” and the
author of The Castle of Otranto (1764), the
first Gothic novel. Gray moved to Cambridge in 1742 and
began to write poetry. His small number of works include the Elegy
printed below (1751), by far the most popular and for almost 2
centuries one of the most popular poems in English. He then wrote
The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, both much more
intense and “romantic” with a greater sense of the numinous
and the sublime. He travelled in the Lake District and
Scotland in search of sublime landscpaes and traditional poetry.
Thomas Gray : Elegy written in a Country Churchyard
1. The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
2. The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
3. The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
4. And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
5. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the
sight,
6. And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
7. Save where the beetle wheels his droning
flight,
8. And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
9. Save that from yonder ivy-mantled
tow'r
10. The moping owl does to the moon complain
11. Of such as, wand'ring near her secret bow'r,
12. Molest her ancient solitary reign.
13. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's
shade,
14. Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring
heap,
15. Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
16. The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
17. The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
18. The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built
shed,
19. The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing
horn,
20. No more shall rouse them from their lowly
bed.
21. For them no more the blazing hearth shall
burn,
22. Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
23. No children run to lisp their sire's return,
24. Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
25. Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
26. Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has
broke:
27. How jocund did they drive their team afield!
28. How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy
stroke!
29. Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
30. Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
31. Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
32. The short and simple annals of the poor.
33. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
34. And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er
gave,
35. Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:
36. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
37. Nor you, ye Proud, impute to These the
fault,
38. If Memory o'er their Tomb no Trophies raise,
39. Where through the long-drawn aisle and
fretted vault
40. The pealing anthem swells the note of
praise.
41. Can storied urn or animated bust
42. Back to its mansion call the fleeting
breath?
43. Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
44. Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of
death?
45. Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
46. Some heart once pregnant with celestial
fire;
47. Hands, that the rod of empire might have
sway'd,
48. Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
49. But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
50. Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er
unroll;
51. Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
52. And froze the genial current of the soul.
53. Full many a gem of purest ray serene
54. The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
55. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
56. And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
(. . . . . . . )
The first
novels
(Click here
for a full account of the development of the English novel)
(Those bolded remain popular today)
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) 1740 Pamela; 1748 Clarissa
: The History of a Young Lady; 1749 Sir Charles Grandison
Henry Fielding (1707-1754) 1742 Joseph Andrews; 1743
Jonathan Wild the Great; 1749 Tom Jones; 1751 Amelia
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) 1748 Roderick Random; 1751
Peregrine Pickle; 1771 The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker;
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) 1760 The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy; 1768 Sentimental Journey
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) 1766 The Vicar of Wakefield
Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) 1771 The Man of Feeling
Horace Walpole (1717-1797) 1765 The
Castle of Otranto
Frances Burney 1752-1840) 1778 Evelina; 1782 Cecilia; 1796
Camilla
Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) 1794 The Mysteries of Udolpho;
1797 The Italian
"Monk" Lewis (1775-1818) 1796 The Monk
William Godwin (1756-1836) 1794 Caleb Williams
William Beckford (1760-1844) 1786 The Caliph Vathek