One good result of the ascendancy of the intellect was seen in scientific investigation. The Royal Society was founded in 1662 to study natural phenomena and to penetrate into the hidden mysteries of philosophy and life.
The Advance of Prose.—In each preceding age, the masterpieces were poetry; but before the middle of the eighteenth century we find the prose far surpassing the poetry. Dryden, almost immediately after the Restoration, shows noteworthy advance in modern prose style. He avoids a Latinized inversion, such as the following, with which Milton begins the second sentence of his Areopagitica (1644):—
"And me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was whereon I entered, may have at other times variously affected …"
Here, the object "me" is eighteen words in advance of its predicate. The sentence might well have ended with the natural pause at "affected," but Milton adds fifty-one more words. We may easily understand by comparison why the term "modern" is applied to the prose of Dryden and of his successors Addison and Steele. To emphasize the precedence of these writers in the development of modern prose is no disparagement to Bunyan's style, which is almost as quaint and as excellent as that of the 1611 version of the Bible.
French influence was cumulative in changing the cumbersome style of Milton's prose to the polished, neatly-turned sentences of Addison. Matthew Arnold says: "The glory of English literature is in poetry, and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth century does not lie. Nevertheless the eighteenth century accomplished for us an immense literary progress, and its very shortcomings in poetry were an instrument to that progress, and served it. The example of Germany may show us what a nation loses from having no prose style… French prose is marked in the highest degree by the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance… The French made their poetry also conform to the law which was molding their prose… This may have been bad for French poetry, but it was good for French prose."
The same influence which gave vigor, point, and definiteness to the prose, necessary for the business of the world, helped to dwarf the poetry. If both could not have advanced together, we may be thankful that the first part of the eighteenth century produced a varied prose of such high excellence.
The Classic School.—The literary lawgivers of this age held that a rigid adherence to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of producing a masterpiece. Indeed, the belief was common that a knowledge of rules was more important than genius.
The men of this school are called classicists because they held that a study of the best works of the ancients would disclose the necessary guiding rules. No style that did not closely follow these rules was considered good. Horace, seen through French spectacles, was the classical author most copied by this school. His Epistles and Satires were considered models.
The motto of the classicists was polished regularity. Pope struck the keynote of the age when he said:—
"True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."[1]