THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

taken as indicative of honest geniality.
By the late 1690s, what the Victorian historian, Macaulay, later saw as the ‘hard-heartedness’ of ‘Restoration’
comedy was melting under the sun of benevolence. It was a form initially evolved to divert a jaded elite and to reflect
on their manners and morals (or their spectacular lack of the latter). It was a form
[p. 272]
that flourished both because of the accuracy of the reflection and because of the cultivated artificiality of high society
and the stage alike. When Dryden claimed that the new ‘refinement’ of conversation was a direct result of the
influence of Charles II and his court, he was in part thinking of the new ‘naturalism’ of the stage. The King, he
argued, had ‘awakened the dull and heavy spirits of the English from their natural reservedness’ and had loosened
‘their stiff forms of conversation, and made them easy and pliant to each other in discourse’. The ‘wit’ of the period
certainly follows the lead of the court in its ‘hard-heartedness’. It is in part a revolution against moral seriousness and
the kind of piety that is worn on the sleeve, in part an echo of a new respect for clarity and reason. The world of the
seventeenth century had been turned upside down; crowns and mitres had been knocked off heads only to be restored
in a world that looked more cynically and questioningly at all forms of authority. Many of the private convictions
which had been revolutionary in the 1640s seemed reactionary in the 1680s. The drama of the ‘Restoration’ period
ought, however, to be seen as an essential element in the literature of a revolutionary age. Unlike much of its satirical
poetry the comedies of the last forty years of the seventeenth century have retained an immediacy, a subversiveness,
and an ability to provoke the prejudices of audiences. If scarcely revolutionary in themselves, the plays of the period
are a response to revolution and to the seventeenth century's experimental reversal of values. The comedies do not
offer anything so pretentious as redefinitions but they do continue to irritate and laugh audiences into reaching out for
definitions.
[end of Chapter 4]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 273]
5
Eighteenth-Century Literature 1690-1780
ALEXANDER POPE’s epitaph for the monument erected to the memory of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey in
1731 succinctly proclaims the extraordinary intellectual virtue of the greatest scientific innovator of the age. A Latin
inscription witnesses to Newton’s immortality, an immortality triply safeguarded by Time, Nature, and Heaven; a
couplet in English, the sublime confidence of which has served to provoke later generations, unequivocally asserts
that the systematized vision which he offered was divinely inspired. ‘Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. |
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.’ Pope’s epitaph is more than a personal tribute to a great man; it is a
public statement displayed in a much frequented national church which sums up the gratitude of a proud civilization.
Newton (1642-1727), ‘the Miracle of the present Age’ as Joseph Addison called him, had given his eighteenthcentury
heirs a carefully reasoned theoretical framework on which a whole range of additional theories could be hung.
His Principia of 1687 and his Opticks of 1704 suggested that there were indeed intelligible laws in nature which
could be demonstrated by physics and mathematics, and, moreover, that the universe exhibited a magnificent
symmetry and a mechanical certainty. This universe, Newton had declared, could not have arisen ‘out of a Chaos by
the mere Laws of Nature’; such a ‘wonderful Uniformity in the Planetary System’ had to be the handiwork of an
intelligent and benevolent Creator. To the many eighteenth-century propagators of Newton’s thought, the great could
be related to the less the cosmic to the terrestrial, and the divine to the human by means of a properly tutored
understanding of the natural scheme of things. By interpretation, Newton’s heavens declared that there was order,
law, and indeed design in creation. Largely thanks to the propagandist work of the Royal Society in London and
European-wide advances in astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, physics, and optics, natural philosophy had shed the
taint of forbidden knowledge. Religious mystery could be enhanced, and sometimes even replaced, by rational wonder.
The revolution in scientific thought begun by Copernicus 150 years earlier was to be fulfilled as popular
enlightenment.