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History of English Literature

Notes completion of the reaction against Elizabethan romanticism. This reaction had started in the
seventeenth century with Denham, Waller, and Dryden. Pope and his contemporaries stood on the
other extreme to Elizabethan romanticists and ushered in “the age of prose and reason,” as Matthew
Arnold characterises the eighteenth century. Now, let us see how and how far the eighteenth
century was “an age of prose and reason.”

9.2.1 Dominance of Reason
Pope and his followers give much importance to reason in their modes of thinking and expressing.
Reason may variously manifest itself as good sense, rationalism, intellect, wit or just dry logicism,
but it is definitely against all excessive emotionalisms, sentimentalism, extravagance, eccentricity,
lack of realism, escapism, and even imagination. It is easy to see that in the eighteenth century
reason was exalted to a shibboleth. Cazamian maintains: “The true source and the real quality of
English classicism are of a psychological nature. It’s ideal, its characteristics, its method, all resolve
themselves into a general searching after rationality.” This search which started in the age of
Dryden culminated in the age of Pope. Cazamian maintains in this connexion: “One may say that
the age of Pope lives more fully, more spontaneously, at the pitch of that dominant intellectuality,
which during the preceding age was chiefly an irresistible impulse, a kind of contagious
intoxication.” This reign of reason and common sense continued into the middle of the century
when new ideas and voices appeared, and the precursors of the English romantics of the nineteenth
century appeared on the scene. All the important writers of the age--Swift, Pope, and Dr. Johnson—
glorified reason both in their literary and critical work and, conversely, made unreason and bad
sense the recurring targets of their satire. Swift in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, for
example, chastises Yahoos for being creatures of impulse, without reason or common sense. On
the other hand, Houyhnhnms are glorified as tenacious adherents of these qualities. The satire on
the human beings who resemble them so closely. Thus the fourth book is the most terrible satire
on human lack of good sense and reason.

9.2.2 Imitation of the Ancients

This glorification of reason also- manifests itself in the form of the stress laid on the imitation of
the “ancients,” that is, the Greek and Roman writers of antiquity. It was thought contrary to reason
to be led by one’s own impulses and eccentricities and to devise one’s own idiom for expression.
Too much of subjectivity was considered irrational. It was believed that a man should cultivate
unrefined and “natural” taste by subjecting it to the influence of classical writers. Much stress
was laid on controlling and disciplining one’s heady feelings and wild imagination and the
personal way of expression with the help of the study of the classics. We find in this century many
translations and adaptations of the classics as also their “imitations,” not to speak of their rich
echoes in most works of the century. The eighteenth century-particularly its first half-is also called
the classical age of English literature on account of two reasons which W. H. Hudson enumerates
as follows:
“...the poets and critics of this age believed that the works of the writers of classical antiq-
uity (really of the Latin writers), presented the best of models and the ultimate standards of
literary taste.”
“...like these Latin writers they had little faith in the promptings and guidance of indi-
vidual genius, and much in laws and rules imposed by the authority of the past.”
In 1700 Walsh wrote to Pope: “The best of the modern poets in all languages are those that have
nearest copied the ancients.” Swift in The Battle of the Books showed the supremacy of the ancients
over all the succeeding writers. Walsh’s expression copied the ancients should not lead one to
believe that eighteenth-century writers were no more than copyists and as such are open to the
charge of plagiarism. What they copied was only the good taste and reason of the ancients. Well

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