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Unit 9: The Augustan Age or the Triumph of Neoclassicism (Age of Prose and Reason)

did Pope observe: “Those who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Notes
Ancients’ may as well say our Faces are not our own because they are like our Fathers.” Thus the
ancients were to be respected as guides and models, not as tyrants. Among the ancients the most
respected were the Latin writers of the Age of Augustus and among them, too, particularly Virgil
and Horace. The one reason why this age is called the Augustan age is this. However, the English
“ancients” like Chaucer and Spenser were not respected. Addison in his critical poem Account of
the Greatest English Poets observes about The Faerie Queene:
.... But now the mystic tale mat pleased of yore
Can charm an understanding age no more
Chaucer is dismissed as a “rude barbarian” who tries in vain to make the readers laugh with his
jests in “unpolished strain.” Thomas Rymer savagely criticised Shakespeare.

First Follow Nature

A. R. Humphreys observes: “Basically, the critical injunction which gained the widest, indeed,
almost universal, acceptance was the call to “follow Nature”. In the famous lines from Pope’s
Essay oh Criticism advice is tendered to writers:
First follow Nature, and your judgement frame
By her just standard, which is still the same:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,

One clear unchanged and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of Art
Pope’s “Nature” was not the “Nature” of the romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge. The
Augustans were not much interested in forests, flowers, trees, birds, etc. which inspired poets like
Wordsworth. Nor did Pope and his contemporaries mean by “Nature” that Nature which, td use
the words of Louis I. Bredvold, “Sir Isaac Newton had recently interpreted in terms of mathematical
physics, in his Principia Mathematica (1687); they could hardly have gone to physics for a literary
standard, and they were moreover we Haware that their concept of Nature antedated
Newtefffeyienturies.” For them Nature indicated, what Bredvohtxalls, “a rational and intelligible
-moral order in theliniverse, according to which the various experiences of mankind could be
confidently and properly vahled.” Nature to them meant, in the words of A. R. Humphreys, “the
moral course of the world or as ideal truth by which art should be guided.” Man’s subjective
feelings were thus discreditediand sacrificed to “tne laws of Nature.” As Basil Willey observes in
The Nineteenth--Century Background, “the individual mind was carefully ruled out of the whole
scheme.” Even in the field of religion, reason and Nature ruled the roost. This was the age of the
spread of natural religion or Deism which believed in the existence of God but disbelieved in any
revealed religion, not excepting Christianity. People were also talking about, “natural morality.”
The doctrines of the reason-loving Deists were repudiated by orthodox theologists, not passionately
but with reason.

9.2.3 Rules
This eighteenth-century emphasis on Nature often took the form of the emphasis on the “rules”
formulated by the ancients. These rules were supposed to be of universal applicability. Nature was
the criterion of propriety, and the rules of the ancients were to be respected as they, in the words
of Pope, “are Nature still but Nature methodised.” And further,

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