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Unit 7: The Restoration Period or Beginning of Neoclassicism, Comedy of Manners

Here again, Rousseau is an important figure. He loved to go for long walks, Climb Mountains, and Notes
generally “commune with nature.” His last work is called Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire.
Europe had become more civilized, safer, and its citizens now felt freer to travel for the simple
pleasure of it. Mountain passes and deep woods were no longer merely perilous hazards to be
traversed, but awesome views to be enjoyed and pondered. The violence of ocean storms came to
be appreciated as an esthetic object in any number of paintings, musical tone poems, and written
descriptions, as in the opening of Goethe’s Faust.
None of this had been true of earlier generations, who had tended to view the human and the
natural as opposite poles, with the natural sometimes exercising an evil power to degrade and
dehumanize those who were to drawn to it. The Romantics, just as they cultivated sensitivity to
emotion generally, especially cultivated sensitivity to nature. It came to be felt that to muse by a
stream; to view a thundering waterfall or even confront a rolling desert could be morally improving.
Much of the nature writing of the 19th century has a religious quality to it absent in any other
period. This shift in attitude was to prove extremely powerful and long-lasting, as we see today in
the love of Germans, Britons and Americans for wilderness.
It may seem paradoxical that it was just at the moment when the industrial revolution was
destroying large tracts of woods and fields and creating an unprecedentedly artificial environment
in Europe that this taste arose; but in fact it could probably have arisen in no other time. It is
precisely people in urban environments aware of the stark contrast between their daily lives and
the existence of the inhabitants of the wild who romanticise nature. They are attracted to it precisely
because they are no longer unselfconsciously part of it.

Notes Faust, for instance, is powerfully drawn to the moonlit landscape outside his study at
the beginning of Goethe’s play largely because he is so discontented with the artificial
world of learning in which he has so far lived.

Self Assessment
Fill in the blanks:
1. Beginning in Germany and England in the 1770s, by the 1820s it had swept through Europe,
conquering at last even its most stubborn Foe, the .................... .
2. Beginning in the last decades of the 18th century, it transformed poetry, the novel, drama,
painting, sculpture, all forms of cocert music, and .................... .
3. The natural consequence of dwelling on creative Folk genius was a good deal of .................... .
4. But one of the early effects of this interest in the Folk arts seems particularly strange to us
moderns: the rise and spread of the reputation of .................... .
5. Academic critics at First scorned his indiscipline, his rejection of their concepts of drama
which were derived in part from ancient Roman and .................... .

7.3 Comedy of Manners

The comedy of manners is a genre of comedy that flourished on the English stage during the
Restoration period. Plays of this type are typically set in the world of the upper class, and ridicule
the pretensions of those who consider themselves socially superior, deflating them with satire.
With witty dialogue and cleverly constructed scenarios, comedies of manners comment on the
standards and mores of society and explore the relationships of the sexes. Marriage is a frequent
subject. Typically, there is little depth of characterization; instead, the playwrights used stock
character types—the fool, the schemer, the hypocrite, the jealous husband, the interfering old
parents—and constructed plots with rapid twists in events, often precipitated by
miscommunications. The roots of the comedy of manners can be traced back to Moliere’s
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