IV.

The 17th and 18th Centuries

The climate of criticism changed with the arrival on the literary scene of such giants as Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Pedro Calderòn in Spain; William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Milton in England; and Pierre Corneille, Jean Baptiste Racine, and Molière in France. Most of these writers specialized or excelled in drama, and consequently the so-called battle of the ancients and moderns—the critical comparison of Greek and Roman authors with more recent ones—was fought chiefly in that arena.

In his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), English poet and playwright John Dryden presented the conflicting claims of the two sides as a debate among four friends, only one of whom favors the ancient over the modern theater. One modernist prefers the dignified “decorum” of French drama to the confusing “tumult” of actions and emotions on the English stage. By contrast, Dryden’s spokesman prefers the lifelike drama of English theater to French tragedy, which he considers beautiful but lifeless. All agree, however, that “a play ought to be a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humors, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.”

An Essay on Criticism (1711), by English poet Alexander Pope, put together in verse both ancient and modern opinions. Pope considered nature, including human nature, to be universal, and he saw no contradiction between the modern writer’s task of addressing a contemporary audience and the insistence by traditional critics that certain rules derived from the practice of the ancients be followed: “Those rules of old discovered, not devised, / Are nature still, but nature methodized.”

English writer Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, observed that “nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.” Accordingly, he praised Shakespeare for creating universal characters “who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion.” Yet Johnson could not help objecting to what he saw as the playwright’s “lack of obvious moral purpose” and “gross jests.” In an earlier essay, “On Fiction” (1750), Johnson cautioned against the unselective realism of popular novels written chiefly for “the young, the ignorant, and the idle.” In his view, such people are easily tempted to imitate the novelist’s portrayal of “those parts of nature” which are “discolored by passion, or deformed by wickedness.” Mindful of the impact of literature on the minds of all readers, Johnson demanded that vice, if it must be shown, should appear disgusting, and that virtue should not be represented in an extreme form because people would never emulate what they cannot believe—implausibly virtuous heroes or heroines, for example.

In her pioneering work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), English writer Mary Wollstonecraft addressed the specific situation of women readers. She denounced shallow novelists, who she felt knew little about human nature and wrote “stale tales” in an overly sentimental style. Since most women of her day received little education, Wollstonecraft feared that reading such novels would further hinder women’s “neglected minds” in “the right use of reason.”

In the third quarter of the 18th century, French philosopher, novelist, and outspoken autobiographer Jean Jacques Rousseau offered an alternative to the faith in universal human reason propounded by Pope, Johnson, and other writers. Opponents of excessive rationalism found in Rousseau an advocate of their own growing interest in the expression of emotion, individual freedom, and personal experience. But most 19th-century concepts of literature and criticism were to owe an even greater debt to a number of Germans who concluded or began their intellectual careers between 1770 and 1800: philosophers Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and writer-critics Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and the brothers August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Friedrich von Schlegel. All of these thinkers influenced an important 19th-century movement known as romanticism, which emphasized feeling, individual experience, and the divinity of nature.