The eighteenth century concept of moderation in the works of Pope, Johnson, Voltaire and Rousseau

Abstract

One of the commonly accepted ideas of the eighteenth century, shared by writers as dissimilar as Pope and Johnson, Voltaire and Rousseau, is the concept of moderation, or of obedience to the Golden Mean, a concept that pervaded European literature from the end of the Baroque to the first strains of Romantic individualism. As Arthur Lovejoy points out, this “ethics of prudent mediocrity” arose as a consequence of the complex of ideas summed up in the cosmological conception of the Chain of Being, which tended “to make man not unbecomingly sensible of his littleness in the scheme of things, and to promote a not wholly unsalutary modesty and self-distrust.” (1) Following this line of thought, much of the satire that flourished in England in the first half of the century directs itself to the commonly observable abuses in social and intellectual pursuits, as Pope’s two mock-heroic poems -The Rape of the Lock and the Dunciad -clearly illustrate. In The Rape of the Lock Pope criticizes, through Belinda and her equally vain companions, the social mores and the futility of life in the English court at the time of Queen Anne. In brief snatches, among lighter verses, he