Block-5 The Neoclassical Poets: Dryden and Pope

Unit-22 The Age of Dryden

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The objective of these units is to introduce you to the age of John Dryden (163 1- 1700) the most important mall of letters of Restoration England (1660-1700), and Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Dryden is said to have exercised a greater influence on the neoclassical age of English literature than any other poet and critic, and his own age exercised a greater influence on him than on any other poet of the time. It is, therefore, helpful to know the Age of Dryden.

British poetry of the Augustan Age known as the Age of Reason, Balance, Peace and Prosperity should be relevant to our appreciation of the new ingredients of our composite culture.

The modern conflict of religion, science and poetry had emerged in Dryden's England and Europe. Interestingly, the East India Company which contributed to the prosperity of eighteenth century England was also the beginning of Indo-British relations. What is more interesting is the parallel of the present-day ferment in Indian politics caused by communal and secular forces with the conflict of religion and politics in the England of Dryden and Pope. Of course there are differences, for example, the urge for social and economic justice is greater in modern India than in Augustan England. The most interesting parallel is literary. Literature in modern Indian languages is being influenced by English literature somewhat like English literature being influenced by' Roman in the time of Dryden and Pope. What Sanskrit was to traditional India, Latin was to Restoration England.

THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF RESTORATION AND EARLY 18TH CENTURY ENGLAND

The restoration of king, parliament and Law in place of the military dictatorship of the Puritans was the political aspect of the Restoration of 1660 in British history. The Bishops and the Prayer Book were restored to the Anglican church. The nobles and the gentry were restored to their hereditary place as the acknowledged leaders of local and national life. The Emergency which had lasted a full twenty years was over.

The upper class, however, soon divided into Whig and Tory. A secularisation of society and politics was evidently taking place. It was no mere coincidence that experimental science and the scientific attitude to the affairs of life emerged in England at this time. The Royal Society was founded under the patronage of King Charles I1 in 1662. Sir Isaac Newton (1 642-1 727) lived and died a christian, but his laws of gravitation, his optics and calculus spread the spirit of scientific inquiry. Superstitions began to be exposed and discarded. Poetry or verse yielded pride of place to prose in literature. Sceptical rationalism tended to prevail in intellectual and spiritual life. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) offended the clergy by describing the church as something-like a spiritual police force. The 'new philosophy' raised great hopes of progress. A comparative view of the respective attitudes of John Donne (1571-1631), John Dryden, Alexander Pope and William Blake (1757-1827) towards the new philosophy of science and reason is illuminating John Donne, an early seventeenth century poet.

Industry, agriculture and commerce all continued to expand. The peace and prosperity of Queen Anne's reign (1 702-1 714), the enclosing of fields, the rise of the business class which became the major ingredient of the middle class, are all reflected in the pamphlets and journalism of Defoe. London grew in all respects, and yet it was pre-industrial. To the writer, it provided the world of the city, the court, the coffee-house and the club. It became the symbol of national and civilized life. The exotic imports from remote countries including India made an imaginative impact on the people.

The victory of the common Law over the Prerogative courts was confirmed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It is a unique revolution in many senses. It is called 'glorious' because there was no bloodshed involved. The change in the ruling dynasty of England from Stuart to Hanoverian was no less than revolutionary. The law was now above the king. The supremacy of law and order made a deep impact on English society and mind. The Englishman felt proud and confident. England appeared to him to be the best country in the world.

The decline of the court started when the Hanoverians took over.Charles 1's court was not only the scene of much pleasure, liberty and scandal, it was also the centre of patronage for politics, fashion, literature, invention, company promoting etc. But after 1688, the glory of the court declined. Patronage was sought elsewhere, in the lobbies of Parliament, in the ante-chambers of Ministers, in the country houses of the pleasantest aristocracy in the world and finally in an appeal to the educated public. "Although the publisher became a worse patron than the earlier aristocrat, his role was only that of the middleman between the author and the common reader who had emerged with the newspapers and periodicals.

a) The Court and the City in Politics

The court was naturally on the Tory side; the city, which now re-entered the picture, rallied to the side of the Whigs. The light-hearted days of irresponsibility and jollity were soon over. Politics was forcing itself upon the attention of writers who had for nearly two decades concentrated only on amusing the court. Dryden was on the Tory side, and Shadwell on the Whig side.Mac Flecknoe is an attack on Shadwell the Whig postmaster. Religious and political factions created literary factions or camps. This reflects society not as a whole but fractured or divided. The later identity of the dominant middle class could not bridge the gulf.

b) Political and Religious Satire

Samuel Butler's Hudibras is a mock-heroic poem, satirising the Puritans. It is "the

most remarkable document of the reaction against Puritanism at the Restoration".

Butler attacked the self-righteous fools of his time. Moreover, his poem exposes

hypocrisy in all the ages.

The Theatre .

The playhouse was roofed in, and there were 'footlights; a drop certain and painted scenery. Women actresses played female roles. The drama was localised in London, and confined to court audiences and the fashionable society of the town. Plays by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were revived. Dryden's heroic drama adorned the theatre. The provincial theatre was to appear later in the eighteenth century.

The king had, during his exile in France, seen French tragedy in all its glory with Corneille. He brought back to England a passion for French drama. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poetry (1667) is classic discussion of the relative merits of the ancient Greek and Latin drama, the contemporary French neoclassical drama, the English drama of the age of Shakespeare and Jonson, and his own experiments in the serious heroic drama in rhyming verse.

The main types of Restoration drama are:

(1) Heroic drama often rhymed

(2) 'humour' comedy and

(3) Comedy of manners.

Players and audiences knew each other. Prologues and epilogues encouraged their intimacy. Dedications were also fashionable. The art of praise of flattery was practised to please, and appease, patrons on whose patronage the author depended for his subsistence.

The French influence inspired Dryden to write Heroic drama in which kings and queens, heroes and princesses, are characters, and their problems are the possession of a crown or the overthrow of an empire.

'The ladies are wonderfully pleased to see a man insulting kings, or affronting the gods, in one scene and throwing himself at the feet of his mistress in another'. Dryden and Lee, in several of their tragedies, practiced this secret with good success.

The Puritan attitude to the theatre was hostile. Around 1680, public interest shifted from the theatre to political problems, particularly the Popish plot, the Exclusion Bill and the question of succession to the British throne.

The Coffee-house and the Periodicals

From the reign of Charles to the early Georges, the London Coffee house was the centre of social life. It sharpened wit and conversation, and concretised ideas. Thanks to the East India Company, tea and coffee had become usual drinks among the wealthier classes. Coffee was introduced in England by a Turkish merchant who set up his coffee-house in Lombard street, London in 1657. Will's coffee house in Covent Garden was patronised by Dryden and Samuel Pepys, and was nicknamed the 'wits' coffee house. By Queen Anne's time the number of such houses multiplied. Tories and Whigs went to different coffee-houses. News could be most easily obtained at the coffee-house. Politicians met in coffee houses, but they also had little circles or clubs of their own. Sir Isaac Newton and Laurence Sterne, theologians, Scientists, men of letters or intellectuals did not disdain the coffee-house. It became the school of wit and dialectic. Smoking was allowed, and conversation was compulsory. Pope had met Dryden at a coffee-house.

Natural Calamities

Natural Calamities like the Plague of 1665 and the great Fire of London (1666) affected British social life considerably. The Great Fire had broken out on the morning of 2nd September 1666 in the northeast of London. By night it had spread along the river Thames, and far into the city. The incalculable loss was calculated as more than ten million sterling. Four city gates, eighty nine. churches, four hundred streets, and thirty thousand two hundred houses were.destroyed. The name of the great architect Christopher Wren (1632-1723) is associated with the rebuilding of London.

Social Change

The East India Company brought tea and coffee, silk and porcelain. It altered the drink, the habits of social intercourse, the dress and the artistic taste of the rich people. While religion divided, trade united the nation, and trade was becoming more important.

Trevelyan has described the changing Puritan thus: 'The Puritan, sixty years back, had been Cromwell, sword in hand; thirty years back, Bunyan, singing hymns in goal; but now the Puritan was to be found in the tradesman journalist Defoe'

A sensitivity to the needs and sufferings of others, particularly the poor, was seen in philanthropic work like the foundation of charity schools and Hospitals, The boundaries of race and colour were crossed in the humanitarian spirit

The Reformation of Manners was being actively pursued. Drinking was discouraged. Sunday observance was strict.

Learning and Education

Lord Chesterfield's letter to his son (1750) gives a fair idea of the education of aristocracy. He advises the young man to read Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Homer etc. Latin alone was not sufficient. Greek distinguished scholars. And the son was advised to mind the spelling of English words.

The famous symbols of the spider for new learning and the bee for old learning. Natural philosophy or,science and humanism were going their separate ways. The exhaustion of classical and Christian mythology and scholastic learning left a blank in the creative imagination.

Learning in the eighteenth century was 'general, and the specialisation of the modern learning of today was not there. Charity schools and the society for Promoting christian knowledge (1699) in particular did much to educate the poor.

THE INTELLECTUAL MILIEU

Science and Scepticism

Issaac Newton (1642-1727) and William Harvey (1578-1657) were the greatest British scientists of the seventeenth century.

Sprat asserted that the inductive method of inquiry was better than the deductive. He said that the greek Philosophers, and especially Aristotle, "made too much haste to seize the prize, before they were at the end of the Race: that they fixed and determined their judgements, on general conclusions too soon, and so could not afterwards them, by any new appearances, which might represent themselves'.

Bacon had said: 'If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties'.

Scepticism, the inductive method of enquiry, and a departure from the classical Aristotelian tradition of learning characterises science.

Secondly, truth was viewed in terms of fact verifiable by reason.

Thirdly, experimental and applied aspects of knowledge were valued above the speculative and merely theoretical or ideal knowledge of old philosophy. Scholasticism was replaced by scepticism, reason and experiment.

The starry spheres were replaced by the solar system. New scientific methods and instruments were being discovered. The telescope, the barometre, the thermometre, the microscope, were invented. The circulation of blood was discovered in advance in physiology.

In Shakespeare's time, wit had meant the faculty of knowing in general both rational and sensory. In the early seventeenth century it was synonymous with poetry or imagination. Judgement became more important, Fancy became of secondary importance. The writing of poetry did not, however, conform to the rationalist theory of composition. Dryden's analogical vision is more striking than Pope's but Pope's famous couplet too used illuminating analogy.

Imagination was confused with enthusiasm, passion and superstition. The enthusiasm of the Puritan had become suspect after the Civil war. The passion for God was restrained. Man-woman relationship was viewed cynically not romantically.

Writing or written texts became more important than the oral communication of language in human speech and conversation during the eighteenth century. The printing press has contributed much more than is commonly released to the transformation of the human mind from the traditional to the modern.

Science and Poetry in the Augustan Age

Basil Willey argued that the rise of science is causally linked with the fall of poetry which started in the second half of the seventeenth century. His hopes from experimental philosophy were great. It would turn into work. It will cure our minds of romantic swelling. It will free them from perversity, by not permitting them to be too peremptory in their conclusions.

The relation of science and poetry was also discussed by Wordsworth. Wordsworth described poetry as the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge. According to him, the poet writes' not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man. Notice the change in the view of poetry. It is a revaluation which had been started by Blake. Poetry, said Wordsworth, is "the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge." But, in the twentieth century, there has been a steady decline in the status and prestige of poetry and a proportionate elevation of science and technology. The two cultures - scientific, technological and humanistic were debated.

The print media are now a less powerful means of entertainment, instruction and communication than the audio visual modes like the film, the T.V., the radio, the video etc.

THE LITERARY CONTEXT

This age is known as the Augustan Age in English literature. Augustan is an adjective derived from the proper noun. Augustus the name of a Roman Emperor during whose reign around the beginning of the Christian era Latin literature achieved great heights. It was the age of Roman Classicism Virgil, the Latin epic poet, regarded the Greek epic poet Homer as his master or source of inspiration and so he is a classicist. Oxford English Dictionary describes 'Augustan' as a term 'applied to the period of highest refinement of any national literature. The English literature of the Age df Dryden and Pope is known by this term. . . The classical ideal had emerged during the Renaissance. Bacon, Milton and Ben Jonson foreshadow the neo classical tendency of Dryden, Pope and Johnson. The renaissance English poets and authors were inspired by the spirit and themes of classical literature.

The Neo Classical Age

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was the first English man of letters to present a nearly complete and consistent neo-classicism in his criticism. He vigorously announced the Rules which Dryden modified. The French neo-classical critics like Corneille had shown that the Rules worked. Racine had written plays disciplining his imagination to the three unities of time, place and action. Secondly, the imitation of ancient Greek and Latin literature was regarded as the height of achievement throughout the Augustan Age in English literature. Virgil, the greatest Latin poet who wrote the epic Aeneid, had imitated Homer, the Greek epic poet. Horace, the poet-critic, recommended imitation and wrote satires. The 'Rules' and imitation were the two neo-classical principles of literary criticism. Neo-classicism is differentiated from the Roman classicism of Horace and Longinus.

Dryden admired Ben Jonson as the greatest man of the last age, and a professed imitator of Horace. Dryden himself loved Latin and Greek poetry no less than English and French. In his criticism he constantly refers to the ancient Greek and Latin and the contemporary French masters of criticism Boileau Rapim, Le Bossu were some of the French neo-classical critics who influenced him. But English neoclassicism showed its distinctiveness in a supposed native dislike of abstract reasoning and system. In fact it is suggested that the English neo-classicism was never anti-romantic.

Eliot had mocked Arnold's description of the poetry of Dryden and Pope as not genuine poetry because while their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul. Notice that Eliot found both Milton and Dryden triumphing with a disregard of the soul, while Arnold found the poetry of Dryden and Pope soulless and merely witty.

Joseph Warton's essay on Pope (1756) is a famous attack on Wit. He asserted : 'Wit and Satire are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal According to him, Pope "stuck to describing modem manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, uniform, artificial and polished, are, in their very nature, unfit for any 10% effort of the muse."

Language

Dryden regretted that the English had no Academy as they had in France. The Royal Society appointed Dryden as a member of a sinall committee set up in the same year to consider means for improving the English language.

Shakespeare was believed by Johnson to have gathered his comic dialogue from the normal conversation of the common man. But Dryden had criticised the language of the age of Shakespeare as less elegant and refined than that of his own age. Johnson is closer to Wordsworth than to Dryden in his attitude to poetic diction and common speech, but in poetic practice Dryden was less abstract than Johnson. In other words, Dryden was more pragmatic both in his use and view of language, Johnson was more theoretical. However, Dr. Johnson admired Dryden for having refined the language. Matthew Arnold too conceded that "after the Restoration our nation felt the imperious need of a fit prose".

The Augustan Age was happy in its balance and the middle position, away from the wild extravagances of a Shakespeare's fantastic imagination or a Browne's or a Milton's pedantic prose periods as well as from the dull plainness of the uninspired I passages in Wordsworth's poetry. Elite and popular divisions of the language of poetry in fact led to two types of the impoverishment of spirit and imagination. The 'sentimental' prose fiction in English crippled the imagination of Dickens. However, greatest poets and writers achieve a classless character. Swift and Jane Austen are perhaps the examples from this period.

Poetic Diction

Thomas Gray said 'The language of the age is never the language of poetry'. William Wordsworth had, however, held a contrary view. According to him, the language of his poetry was 'the language of common speech, the very language of men'. He asserted that in humble and rustic life 'the essential passions of the heart . . . speak a plainer and more emphatic language'. He had criticised eighteenth century poetic diction as artificial, 'gaudy and inane phraseology', affected and lifeless language, in other words.

Do’s and Don'ts

After the Restoration, correctness and elegance, clear and graceful sentence structure, cadence in speech and writing were stressed as a necessary sign of good breeding. Affectation, pedantry, rusticity and crudeness were to be avoided. Language was required to be a useful, clear, easy and precise means of communication. Dryden suggested that words should be chosen not only for elegance but also for sound in poetry. Dialect forms were to be avoided. Archaisms were discouraged by him. Latin borrowings were encouraged. 'What I want at home I must seek abroad', he defended his borrowings or Latinisms. He disliked compound words. Technical terms were to be avoided. The use of general terms was recommended by him. He admired the introduction into English

Poetry-Verse-Prose-Prose Fiction Poets

Wordsworth believed that there was no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. According to hk, the antithesis of Poetry was "matter of Fact, or Science '', Verse was antithetical to prose, 'nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis'. But Arnold thought otherwise. He said that the rise of modern prose caused "some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul", and that the qualities of 'fit' prose (regularity, uniformity, precision and balance) involved "some repression and silencing of poetry". Moreover,he described Dryden and Pope as the classics of our prose and their poetry as the poetry "of the builders of an age of prose and reason". "Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose"

The Heroic Couplet

The most popular verse form of the age of Dryden and Pope is the heroic couplet, and they are its greatest masters. Dr. Johnson said that blank verse only 'looked' like verse. The music of the heroic couplet appealed to the Augustan taste. The blank verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton of the earlier times, and that of Wordsworth of the later times is the most important verse form in English, and the heroic couplet of the age of Dryden and Pope is second in importance. Milton had described Dryden as "a good rhymes, but no poet".

The ear which is attuned to blank verse finds the rhyming heroic couplet unmusical and mechanical, the ear which is attuned to the heroic couplet finds blank verse unmusical and prosaic.

Prose and Prose Fiction

Dryden, Defoe, and Swift were the early prose writers. Their prose is more inventive and vivid than later Augustan prose. The periodical essay, diary, memoir, letters, pamphlets, travels, biograay, autobiography, history, literary criticism and religious prose are among the most important literary forms of prose in this age. And above all there is the novel or prose of fiction.

Swift described satire as a ' sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets with iv the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

Literary Criticism

The breach between Elizabethan and Restoration English literature caused by the civil war is great. The dissociation of sensibility may be seen in the fact that the two greatest critics of the age of Dryden and Pope are Dryden and Pope . themselves. Matthew Arnold described poetry as a criticism of life. The literary , criticism of Dryden is in prose, while Pope's essay on criticism

RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY AND MORALITY

Religion and Science

The scientific spirit of the age demanded that christianity should be 'reasonable'.

Dryden too had suggested that the Old Testament should be searched for the 'machines' rather than the New Testament.Pope who had enjoyed the power or influence of a satirist in society was proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.

because the Pope had become more self-conscious. The poet satirist became his own hero. Conduct, not dogma, became the Christian creed in religion. The primary duty was the service of man, the middle class home, with its family worship, went out to convert the souls, educate the minds and care for the bodies of the neglected poor. 'The humanitarian spirit led to the democratic ideal of the next century.

Quakerism

After the civil war, the rise of the Quaker movement, which began with the public

the preaching of George Fox (1624-90), led to much literary activity. The Anglican

church regarded tradition as supreme, the puritans gave the Bible that supremacy, and

The quakers valued a direct experience of god above all. The Quakers were so called

because their leader Fox bade them tremble at the word of the Lord Fox founded the

Society of Friends. His Journal is a deeply moving mystic book. Gradually, the

The Quaker movement became a sect, and the initial glow faded.

Deism

Deism is an attempt to find a natural or rational religion-universal religion, in other words. It became fashionable. The identity of faith with knowledge has never satisfied people who love the mystic and the supernatural.

Mysticism

The universe was a machine to the new thinker of the age. God and religion were required to be proved. In such an age, a person like William Law (1 686- 176 I), author of a great English classic of religion, and the father of Methodism, i's interesting. His argument against rational deism was that man himself is a mystery, the universe a mystery, and that reason is not a sure and dependable guide to truth in life.

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The Neoclassical Poets: Dryden and Pope