ABSTRACT
IN the last lecture we spoke of the great tides of thought flowing through Europe, and of the rising and breaking of individual waves. I warned you that all arbitrary dates were, in the last analysis, misleading; since all events have long fibrous roots reaching back into the past. But if we are to select any one determining date, the Restoration of 1660 shows as clear a break as any. Within a decade, the foundation of the Royal Society, with its demands for clarity and precision in common speech, sets a new standard of English prose. The discoveries in science are bearing fruit; the circulation of the blood, Cartesian mathematics, physics, electricity, and magnetism. Medical knowledge is developing rapidly, though man is as helpless before the Plague as he was three hundred years before. (Read, as an example of brilliant journalism of the time, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year: and for a sketch of the low life of London, his Moll Flanders.) There is wealth, and leisure for good talk and unlimited gossip; look at Aubrey’s Lives as well as Pepys’ Diary. The last of the metaphysical tradition, in poetry and the sermon, is ebbing away. The Court has brought back with it much of France, and continental travel becomes possible again on a large scale. Architects and painters turn largely to Italy, and acclimatize what they have learnt there to produce the great age of English building. In morals there is a reaction against Puritanism; so much so that a certain clergyman of the time, Jeremy Collier, published in 1698 A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage, a work containing a collection of immoral passages from the plays of the previous years. What Restoration Comedy could be at its best—brilliant, witty, quick-moving, yet with considerable insight into character— you can see from the frequent revivals now. In general these plays owe a good deal to Ben Jonson’s Comedy of Humours, itself a descendant of the Roman Comedy. Its characters present psychological abnormalities, which are to be shocked back into normality in the course of the play; and their idiosyncrasies are often apparent from their names. The tragedy of the period is narrower, concerned more with the almost geometrical balancing of claims that (in themselves just) prove in certain defined circumstances to be incompatible— Love versus Honour, Love versus Patriotism, and so forth. The system of rewards and punishments seems to be in part a relic of the Puritan tradition, in part the outcome of the hard logical thought of France. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203497395/fb6971ca-b5be-446b-b7df-8251875175e6/content/fig10_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
