Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England

The pervasive classicism of the Restoration is one of its most distinctive intellectual traits, one that, thanks to our postmodern relativism, creates a substantial barrier between the writers of the late seventeenth century and our time. Students now have difficulty taking seriously the claims of poets and critics who believe, as they do, that one timeless, uniform, and rational set of standards exists for art, and that those standards were discovered and met in ancient Greece and Rome. In the Restoration, these assumptions led to the conviction that the books, paintings, buildings, and other works of art that most closely obeyed the classic rules would always be best. The foundation of their canonical status was simply that they most fully achieved the aims of art, in particular the aims of Aristotelian mimesis, and as a result, rational humans who studied them would always find them to be the best. As Joseph Levine’s clear and detailed account demonstrates, the dream of attaining classic status, of knowing the secret of creating a work of art whose excellence would defy the ages, was irresistible and seemed tantalizingly possible to artists and theorists.

Of course, these Restorations artists and theorists soon found that the ideal of following a classical standard—or even of defining it precisely in modern contexts—was difficult if one wished to please contemporary audiences and patrons, whose tastes were worlds away from that of Sophocles or Homer. Nevertheless, the dream was powerful, as Levine shows, and “everyone was profoundly concerned about the authority of classical antiquity,” even to the point of “obsession with this single overriding problem” (viii). The struggle of artists and theorists with the difficulties of adhering to the ideals of classicism while addressing complex modern realities provides the dramatic tension in Levine’s account of the period’s ancienneté.

Levine’s “close and chronological reading of the evidence” (xiii) considers valuable interdisciplinary and biographical contexts for his account of four important figures, Evelyn, Dryden, Saint-Evremond, and Wren, all of whom were forced to negotiate between ancient and modern values. All four subjects experienced similar dilemmas. In a sense, they are all “ancients” by virtue of their classical education and their consequent belief that the ancients set the standards and established the norms for all aesthetic questions. Conversely, all are “moderns” as well in the sense that they know that contemporary artists must do more than simply copy ancient models or pedantically abide by the strictures of Aristotle, Horace, or Vitruvius. All are indeed so clearly between the two polarized elements made famous in the “battle of the books” that it scarcely seems possible to divide the field between the ancients and moderns with any certainty. And because the English figures of this period did not usually throw themselves into that largely French querelle, there is a consistent difficulty in giving them a satisfactory label.

Levine’s first chapter, on John Evelyn, illustrates this problem. A learned humanist with interests in the arts and a high sense of duty, Evelyn sought to invigorate contemporary English painting, sculpture, and architecture by translating authoritative continental works of ancienneté. Yet Evelyn also championed the work of Grinling Gibbons, declaring him “the greatest Master both for Invention and rareness of Worke that the world had ever had in any age” (20). Levine concludes, inevitably, that even Evelyn’s ancienneté was “adapted to modern life” (22). Like many of his contemporaries, Evelyn believed that a proper knowledge of ancient rules and models could spur modern artists to surpass the achievements of the ancients themselves.

A stance similar to Evelyn’s fence-sitting shows in the career of John Dryden, who undeniably struggled during his long career with defining the role of classical learning for the writers, especially playwrights, of his own time. While admitting that the evidence is complex and contradictory, Levine concludes that Dryden became increasingly committed to ancienneté. Even when Dryden defends modern drama, especially his own, his argument is, as Levine notes, “qualified and relative” (50). Dryden also champions his own use of rhyme, multiple plots, mixing of genres, and the emphasis upon love rather than pity and fear in tragedy, yet at the same time he honors the classical authors and the ideal of mimesis. After studying the French critics and the formidable Tragedies of the Last Age (1677) by Thomas Rymer, Dryden reexamines his critical doctrines, admitting to agreement with much of Rymer’s criticisms, which were based on the rigid application of classical rules, yet still wishing to maintain and justify his love for the irregular Shakespeare.

Levine argues, less convincingly, that as a result of these conflicting allegiances, Dryden must have been chastened by the publication of Samson Agonistes (1671), a closet tragedy constructed in a more uncompromisingly classical form than any tragedy that Dryden had written for the stage. Levine rashly concludes that Dryden, despite his classical education under Busby at Westminster School and at Cambridge, may not actually have read a Greek tragedy “through in the original” (63) or even in an available Latin translation at that time. Yet when Dryden and Lee came to adapt Sophocles’s Oedipus in 1678, when it is clear that Dryden had read the original, Dryden declines to follow the original’s classical form. Indeed, the resulting version honors Sophocles only at a considerable distance. Dryden and Lee add typically English elements such as a double plot, even while Dryden praises Sophocles’s methods in the preface as “the most natural and the best” (69). For Levine, this adaptation shows Dryden again “caught between two stools” (69f.) and intimidated by the excellence of the original. Nevertheless, perhaps influenced by his knowledge of the debased taste of the audience or by the inclinations his collaborator, Dryden was not intimidated enough to follow Sophocles closely. While he respects Sophocles and does not wish to claim parity with him, Dryden rejects the qualities of Sophocles that were alien to his own theater. Decisions such as this undermine the case for Dryden’s ancienneté, for his view is no different from that of the “modern” Saint-Evremond, who declares (as Levine reports) that Oedipus, no matter how well translated, would fail on the contemporary stage (141).

Thus it may be admitted that Levine’s account, persuasive as it is, still leaves a number of questions to be explored. Perhaps because he is frustrated by Dryden’s complex attitudes toward the classics, he makes little comment on Swift’s famous denigration of Dryden in The Battle of the Books (1704) as a puny modern who vainly hopes to share some of Virgil’s glory by translating him into English verse. Does Levine agree with Swift that translating Virgil is evidence of modernity? Perhaps Dryden’s ancienneté is ambiguous primarily because he desires to defend his own achievements. Levine calls that impulse his optimism; compared to Sir William Temple, Swift’s patron, Dryden was “the more hopeful of himself and his period” (108). Perhaps that optimism for the possibility of excellence for his own work, and that of this own country and century, is the ultimate reason for considering Dryden a modern. By contrast, a lacerating pessimism became the grim preserve of the ancients.

In moving to Saint-Evremond, Levine is able to broaden his account of the classical dilemma to include the debates taking place in France, because Saint-Evremond wrote about similar issues concerning the authority of the ancients, particularly in his defense of the contemporary plays of Corneille. The narrative of the modern Saint-Evremond’s intellectual life allows Levine the opportunity of showing how close his ideas were to Dryden’s on many aesthetic questions, demonstrating once more “how easy it is to exaggerate the distance between the ancients and the moderns at the end of the seventeenth century” (153). Discussing Saint-Evremond also allows Levine to widen his scope to include ideas about music and opera. The claim that early Italian operas were related to classical tragedy allowed critics inclined to ancienneté to condemn operatic recitative as unnatural in drama and operatic choral music as inauthentic for tragedy. Here Levine returns to Dryden, whose various operatic projects are chronicled as baroque inventions that soon lose their appeal once the eighteenth century’s neoclassicism became dominant.

And though opera has been described as the quintessentially baroque form, Levine, despite the book’s subtitle, disregards the opportunity, perhaps wisely, to explore this elusive term. His working definition, “simply the tension between modernity and ancienneté” (ix), is both narrow and vague, but it has the virtue of insisting upon a distinction between Restoration style compared to that of the later neoclassical period.

Levine’s final chapter, on Sir Christopher Wren, allows him to examine similar issues in architecture, as he shows Wren struggling to establish the classical style but forced to accommodate his ideas to the demands of his clients. As always, Levine is sensible and acute in establishing the intellectual context, particularly in his discussions of French thinkers such as Claude Perrault and Antoine Degodets. And he also includes an account of the emergence of large baroque paintings such as those by James Thornhill at Wren’s St. Paul’s and Greenwich Hospital. The book ends with a brief account of the rise of the stern Palladianism of Burlington and his circle, a group that regarded Wren and his followers as not nearly classical enough.

Levine does not provide a concluding chapter, but his argument does not require one. He has established and reiterated his thesis that Restoration aesthetics was characterized by the adoption of an uneasy middle ground between the claims of the ancients and the moderns. About the aesthetic and theoretical implications of these developments, however, Levine is reticent, and it is a tribute to his book’s scholarly solidity and narrative clarity that one leaves it wishing to see more of those implications examined. Subsequent studies have already taken up that challenge, and doubtless more will do so. As they do, their authors would be well advised to give careful attention to this book.