Neo-Classicism, Wit, Closed Heroic Couplets

Until this point, we’ve been focusing on the “Age of Reason” face of the Enlightenment. Today, we’ll consider this period from another angle.

Another of the names for this era, at least in England, is The Augustan Age. In part, this reflects the political order of the time. The dates of this particular literary/cultural period are 1660 – 1789; the starting date marks the restoration of the monarchy in England. As you may recall, the Puritans overthrew King Charles I during the English Revolution, but in 1660 his son Charles II was restored to the throne. The people of the time made a connection between political events in England and the reign of Augustus Caesar: following a time of intense civil war, a leader comes to power who brings peace, prosperity, and a flowering of the arts and culture. Some of this, to be sure, is propaganda, but it gives us an interesting insight into the mindset of the people who were writing during this time.

The era is also known as the Neo-Classical Period, a label that underscores the connection people of the time felt to classical Rome. In large part, this reflects the commitment that artists of the time had to following the models of great art that had survived from ancient Rome and Greece. Just as scientists and philosophers of the Enlightenment attempted to separate permanent, general truths about the world from local superstition, artists of the era wanted to create works of art that would transcend time and place. Therefore, they quite logically looked to the works that had survived from the classical era. If these works from centuries ago could still manage to fascinate and move people despite the great gulf between ancient pagan cultures and contemporary, Christian Europe, it meant that the classical artists had discovered universal, permanent truths about art, and seventeenth and eighteenth century artists should take these works as their models for how to create lasting works of art.

We can certainly see Enlightenment language and influence in the way that writers and artists of the time talked about art and poetry. In his poem/treatise “An Essay on Criticism,” Alexander Pope writes that the best advice for artists is to follow Nature:

First follow nature, and your judgment 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.

It’s pretty much the typical Enlightenment advice, no? Follow Nature, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to end up with results that are logical, moderate, accurate, and true.

What’s interesting about the advice, though, is that when Pope says “follow Nature,” what that means to him is “copy classical literature.”

You then whose judgment the right course would steer,
Know well each ancient’s proper character;
His fable, subject scope in ev’ry page;
Religion, country, genius of his age:
Without all these at once before your eyes,
Cavil you may, but never criticize.
Be Homer’s works your study and delight,
Read them by day and meditate by night;
Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring,
And trace the muses upward to their spring.

The idea being conveyed here is that just as Newton had discovered the natural, universal laws of gravity, ancient writers had discovered the natural, universal laws of art. Pope holds up the example of the Roman poet Virgil, who devoted himself to studying the works of Homer:

But when t’examine every part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.
* * *
Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
To copy nature is to copy them.

Obviously, then, if a person wanted to be a great artist, she or he needed to learn the laws of art by studying ancient works. In practical terms, this means that people wrote in the classical genres: tragedy, epic, comedy, pastoral, satire, and ode. And they tried to write in a classical style, using high, formal diction when writing tragedies or other works about high, formal subjects, and using lower, less formal language when writing comedies and other works about more commonplace, “low” subjects.

Obviously, audiences at this time didn’t value originality and creativity as much as we do in our era. The quality that’s prized in Neo-Classical writing is “Wit,” defined as “quickness of mind, inventiveness, readiness to perceive resemblances between things apparently unalike.” Again, quoting Alexander Pope:

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

Originality doesn’t come from the subject or the thought or the plot—it comes from the way something is said.

Keep in mind that Neo-Classicists have a few reservations about the use of wit: it needs to be balanced by judgment. The quotation above from Pope ends with the lines:

As shades more sweetly recommend the light,
So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.
For works may have more wit than does ‘em good,
As bodies perish thro’ excess of blood.

Too much wit, too much imagination, is a dangerous thing—it can lead away from reason and sanity to falsehood, unreasonableness, even madness.

Another characteristic of Neo-Classical poetics is what’s known as the closed heroic couplet. “Couplet,” of course, means that adjoining lines rhyme with each other, while “closed” means that the couplet ends with a period, semi-colon, exclamation point, or question mark: each couplet expresses a complete thought, and is therefore considered “closed.” “Heroic” means each line is written in iambic pentameter: each line has five iambs, which is the literary term for an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. “Iambic pentameter” is a multisyllabic way of saying that the line goes “daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM.” Pope, as usual, offers a good example:

Learn HENCE for ANcient RULES a JUST esTEEM;
To COpy NAture IS to COpy THEM.

The thought ends after two lines, the line is iambic pentameter, and while we don’t pronounce “esteem” and “them” as rhymes, we have to keep in mind that the pronunciation of words has changed remarkably since Pope’s time—for him, these words might have been perfect rhymes.

Something to keep in mind when reading Tartuffe is that even though Moliere is writing about a subject that gets him in trouble with the authorities, his play is written in a form that’s highly traditional. Tartuffe is written in verse because that’s the way people of the time write plays.

Tartuffe may also reflect its time in that some of us may find the ending unsatisfying. The protagonists are in great peril: Tartuffe has seized control of the household and is preparing to have Orgon carted off to prison . . . and then at the end there’s a sudden reversal and the officer whom we assumed was going to arrest Orgon instead arrests Tartuffe and gives a nice little speech explaining that the King recognized Tartuffe as a scoundrel and is setting things right. It’s a happy ending, but it seems pretty convenient—wouldn’t it have been more satisfying if Orgon or Dorine or Elmire had found a way to thwart Tartuffe’s evil schemes?

What Moliere has done is make use of a classical ending that’s referred to be the term deus ex machina, or “God from the machine.” The story is that at the end of classical plays, an actor playing a god would be lowered into the action using a crane-type machine; the god would then resolve everybody’s problems and bring the action of the play to a satisfying conclusion. Today, we use it to refer to any literary ending where the problem is resolved by an outside force that steps in at the last minute and wraps up all the problems. In some ways, this sort of ending may strike us as inappropriate for a play written during the Enlightenment: how could people consider such an ending logical, reasonable, or believable?

For discussion:

- What reasons might have motivated Moliere to give Tartuffe the ending that it has?

- How does the selection from Gulliver’s Travels assigned for today reflect Enlightenment ideas and values?

- If one of the precepts of Neo-Classicism is to avoid too much imagination, why is Jonathan Swift writing a story in which the main character encounters rational, philosophical talking horses and irrational, animalistic humans?