The Rise of English Classicism: Study in Methodology

Abstract

THE CLASSICAL movement in England, like the analogous movement in France, was from the beginning conscious of its restrictive purposes and was perpetually engaged in defining and promulgating its ideals and literary techniques. Its evolution has been described by recent scholars with considerable precision and an unusual degree of unanimity. It therefore offers a simpler problem to the historian than such concepts as baroque or romanticism. But one question is ever recurring in the studies devoted to it: the question of the decisiveness of the French influence. It is only natural that this should be the case. In the perspective of the last four centuries English classicism seems to fall into a distinctly secondary place as compared with the great French period of Louis XIV. The impression arises that it is not a natural expression of the English genius, as Racine and Boileau may be called (rightly or wrongly) typically French, or Beethoven and Goethe typically German. The literature of the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, as it is undeniably of greater inherent value, seems also more characteristically English. It seems native to the climate, the growth of English soil. Classicism, on the other hand, flourished at a time when Paris was frankly admitted to be the cultural capital of Europe, however deeply English patriotism may have been wounded by the forced admission. The poets and critics of the early nineteenth century, in their revolt against the dominance of classicism, popularized the idea that classicism in England was not merely the most French period in English literature, but the French period, and consequently not genuinely English, and therefore bad poetically. That was how Keats viewed it in some famous lines in Sleep and Poetry (1817):