Periodizati

on
 The Neoclassical Period: 1660-1745
(a) 1660-1700: Restoration Age
(b) 1700-1745: Augustan Age

 Age of Sensibility: 1745-1789/1798

Reaction against Neoclassicism – proto-Romanticism

 The Romantic Period: 1789/1798-1832

 Neoclassical/
Neoclassicism
In the arts, the terms ‘neoclassical ‘ & ‘neoclassicism’ are
used to describe a work which displays a revival of interest
in and veneration for the classical attitudes & styles of
ancient Greece & Rome, and which is influenced by and/or
imitates such models in seeking to emulate their pursuit of
order, clarity, harmony, grace, humanity, self-discipline &
rational beauty.
 Main features of
Neoclassicism
 a tendency to be conservative in its view that contemporary culture
was necessarily inferior to that of the classical past (a fierce debate
between the ‘Ancients’ & the ‘Moderns’ raged throughout the 1690s
& 1700s).
 valuing & admiring the ‘proprieties’: regularity & simplicity of
form, order & proportion, elegance & polished wit.
 encouraging emotional restraint & rating most highly art which
displayed technical mastery.
 notions of ‘decorum’ (the harmony of form & content) – action,
character, thought & language all need to be appropriate to each
other – grand & important themes should be treated in a dignified &
noble style; the humble or trivial in a low style.
 use of stylized & stock epithets, classical references, artificial tropes,
etc. to ‘heighten’ the language of poetry.
NOTE: The critical tenets of Neoclassicism were (to some extent)
coterminous with the worldview of the Enlightenment.
 The
Enlightenment
 ‘Enlightenment’ is a term used to describe an intellectual
movement in Europe between c. 1660 & c. 1770.

 The movement was critical of traditional beliefs,

superstitions & prejudices, and placed its central faith in
human reason & strict scientific method.

 Enlightenment thinking embraced notions of human

progress, the rational perfectibility of humankind, and
the universe as governed by observable laws &
systematic principles.
 Major English Enlightenment
thinkers
 John Locke (1632-1704) [empirical philosopher]

 Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) [scientist &

mathematician]
 Enlightenment &
Neoclassicism
 Aspects of the Enlightenment cast of mind are to be found in
Neoclassical literature, although never comprehensively or
unproblematically.

 The rejection of the irrational & the distrust of feelings & the
imagination common to both led to a reaction at the end of the
18th cent in what has been called the ‘Age of Sensibility’.

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night,

God said, Let Newton be, and all was light.
Alexander Pope’s couplet captures a sense of the wonder and
respect Newton inspired in the poets of the period.
 Pre-Romantic Age or Age of
Sensibility?
For a time, literary historians called (some do even now) the
middle phase (the phase between Neoclassicism & Romanticism)
‘Pre-Romanticism’. Northrop Frye objected to this label.

“Not only did the ‘pre-Romantics’ not know that the

Romantic movement was going to succeed them, but there
has probably never been a case on record of a poet’s having
regarded a later poet’s work as the fulfillment of his own.” –
Northrop Frye

NOTE: Modern scholarship regards Romanticism as an

episode
within the larger & longer movement of Sensibility.
 Meaning of
 In the 18th
‘Sensibility’
cent, the term ‘sensibility’ did not mean ‘sensibleness’ – it
meant ‘sensitivity’ or ‘emotional responsiveness’, as opposed to
reasonableness or detachment – a capacity to identify with &
respond to the sorrows of others – it acquired the meaning of
‘susceptibility to tender feelings’ – it was part of a cluster of
closely related terms: ‘sensibility’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘sympathy’ &
‘sentiment’ were often interchangeable.

 This quality of empathy rose as a reaction against the view

expressed by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in
Leviathan (1651) that man is innately selfish & motivated by self-
interest & the drive for power & status.
 Philosophers of
Sensibility
 The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) [Anthony Ashley Cooper]
is generally regarded as the official philosopher of the ‘Age of
Sensibility’. Reacting against the views of Hobbes, Shaftesbury
proclaimed in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times
(1711) that “benevolence” – wishing other persons well – is an
innate human sentiment & motive, and that the central elements in
morality are the feelings of sympathy & ‘sensibility’ – that is,
responsiveness to another person’s distresses & joys.

 David Hume (1711-66) in Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) & Adam

Smith (1723-90) in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) also argued
that the heart, which prompts us without reflection, is a better source
of good character & right action than the intellect, which calculates
consequences or prudently obeys codes of conduct.
 Characteristics of the ‘Age of
Sensibility’
 A recoil from Neoclassical ‘correctness’ towards a stress on
spontaneity, an emphasis on humanitarian values, on the idea of
original genius, and the importance of the imagination.
 An admiration of the sublime as that power in nature & art which
inspires awe & deep emotion & which is manifest in grand & wild
natural scenes & in the writings of older, native British writers –
instead of Classical writers such as Virgil, Horace & Ovid there was a
turn to models such as Spenser, Shakespeare & Milton (“renaissance
of the Renaissance”) – along with these models came an interest in
ballads, folk literature & medieval romance.
 A taste for the exceptional rather than the conformable also revealed
itself in vogues for the Oriental & the Gothic.
 This liking for the thrills of unusual & uncharted psychological
territories was similarly apparent in the dwelling on mystery &
melancholy that typified what has been called ‘the poetry of night
and tombs’.
 Cult of the
sublime
Edmund Burke (1729-97) in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) popularized two aesthetic
terms: the sublime & the beautiful. The sublime in Burke’s
formulation is awe-inspiring and transports the viewer, recognizing in
the experience a power beyond themselves. The beautiful, however, is
soft & small, something which pleases but which the viewer feels s/he
has control; of rather than being controlled by it, as is the case in an
encounter with the sublime.
 Literature of
Sensibility
 Drama of Sensibility (Sentimental
Comedy)

 Novel of Sensibility (Sentimental

Novel)

 Poetry of Sensibility
 Sensibility
(Sentimental
Comedy)
• Richard Steele: The Conscious Lovers (1722)
• Hugh Kelly: False Delicacy (1768)
• Richard Cumberland: The Brothers (1769) ; The West Indian (1771)

Sentimental comedy was also called ‘weeping comedy’ – in France it

was called comédie larmoyante (‘tearful comedy’).
 Novel of
Sensibility
(Sentimental
 Samuel Richardson: Pamela;Novel)
or, Virtue Rewarded (1740); Clarissa; or,
History of a Young Lady (1747); Sir Charles Grandison (1754)
 Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
 Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768)
 Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling (1771)
 Henry Brooke: Juliet Grenville; or the History of the Human Heart
(1774)

Two famous European specimens:

 Rousseau: Julie, or the New Héloise: Letters of Two Lovers who live in a
Small Town at the Foot of the Alps (1761)
 Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
 In The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Goethe created a prototype of the
Romantic hero at odds with his world
and doomed to destroy himself
through his passionate, obsessive
nature. This novel made Goethe the
leader of the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm
and Stress’) movement in Germany.

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Illustration

 Poetry of Sensibility
(Precursors of Romanticism)
• James Thomson (1700-48): The • Thomas Warton, Jr. (1728-90):
Seasons (1726-30) “The Pleasures of
• Thomas Gray (1716-71): Melancholy”(1747)
“Elegy Written in a Country • Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74):
Churchyard” (1751); The “The Deserted Village”
Progress of Poesy (1757); The (1770)
Bard (1757) • William Cowper (1731-1800):
• William Collins (1721-59): Odes The Task (1785)
on Several Descriptive and • James Beattie (1735-1803): The
Allegoric Subjects (1746) Minstrel; or, the Progress of
• Mark Akenside (1721-70): Genius (1771-74)
The Pleasures of Imagination • George Crabbe (1754-1832):
(1744; 1772) The Village (1783), The Borough
• Joseph Warton (1722-1800): The (1810)
Enthusiast: or the Lover of • Robert Burns (1759-96):
Nature (1744) Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish
Dialect (1786)
 Two important books

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) The Works of Ossian (1765)

 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
Thomas Percy (1729-1811) Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)
 The Works of
Ossian
James Macpherson (1736-1796) The Works of Ossian (1765)
Danish painter, Nicolai Abildgaard (1743-1809)
Ossian Sang his Swan Song to the Harp, 1782
 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824)
Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of Fallen French Heroes, 1801-02
 François Pascal Simon Gérard (1770-1837)
Ossian Evoking Ghosts on the Edge of the Lora,
1801
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)
Ossian's Dream, 1813
 John Martin (1789-1854), The Bard, 1817
Inspired by Thomas Gray’s “The Bard” (1757)
 Cult of
Melancholy
The cultivation of ‘melancholy’ and the indulgence in its ‘pleasures’
[Thomas Warton, Jr (1728-90) wrote a poem called ‘The Pleasures of
Melancholy’ (1747)] developed into a cult. Wandering into groves or
ruins or graveyards at evening or sitting by the lamp in one’s study and
pondering the brevity and sorrows of life – these became common
settings and themes in poetry, novels, and paintings. The melancholic
soul was not simply sad or gloomy, however, but rich in wisdom,
benevolent towards frail fellow mortals, sometimes even ‘rapt’ or
‘transported’ by the religious vision evoked by the meditative mood.
James Thomson wrote of the “sacred influence” of the “Power / Of
Philosophic Melancholy” (‘Autumn’, 1730), and the term became almost
synonymous with philosophy itself, and with religious introspection.
Later Keats in ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1819) urged readers to drink in
“the melancholy fit” without trying to muffle it, for from it we gain, not
philosophic serenity, but sheer intensity of life.
 ‘Graveyard
Poets’
• Thomas Parnell (1679-1718): “Night-Piece on Death” (1721)
• Edward Young (1683-1765): The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life,
Death and Immortality (1742) ***
• Robert Blair (1699-1746): “The Grave” (1743)
• James Hervey (1714-58): “Meditations among the Tombs” (1748)
[Prose]
• Thomas Gray (1716-71): “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
(1751)

*** Young also wrote a highly influential prose tract called Conjectures
on Original Composition (1759). Translated into German in 1760, the
work was enthusiastically received by writers of the German Sturm und
Drang (Storm and Stress) movement .
 An interesting
fact!
Poems of many of the so-called ‘pre-Romantic’ poets were
translated into Bengali in 19th cent Bengal

Thomas Parnell, The Hermit

 Bholanath Mukhopadhyaya, Sanyaseer Oopakhyan, 1870.
James Beattie, Poems
Gangacharan Mukhopadhyaya, Kavita Kalap, 1876.
William Cowper, Selection of Poems
 Suresh Chandra Mitra, Padya Kusumavali, 1876.
Edward Young, Night Thoughts
Nimai Charan Gangyopadhyay, Nisitha Chinta, 1883.
Thomas Gray, Elegy
 Nabin Chandra Das, Shokagiti, 1900.
Trioson, Portrait of Chateaubriand
Meditating on the Ruins of Rome,
1809.

Considered the founder of

Romanticism in French literature,
Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
represented the melancholy school
in literature.