As the seventeenth century progressed, it became clear to many educated members of French and British society that they were living through a period of great intellectual vitality. Descartes had created a new philosophy of reason premised on the rejection of all authority, including ancient philosophy; and with the development of such tools as the telescope and the microscope, knowledge of the natural world was expanding rapidly. The modern world was also in possession of entirely new technologies, from advances in shipbuilding and navigation to gunpowder and the printing press. French elites began the century hoping to emulate the splendor and sophistication of the Augustan court; by its close many felt that they had surpassed it. In 1687 Charles Perrault made the case for the superiority of the modern world in his poem Le Si'ecle de Louis le Grand (The age of Louis XIV). Perrault, though, was not content simply to press the claim for the achievements of modern art and science; he also denigrated the classical past. By the refined standards of modern taste, he says, Homer’s work is crude. In addition, Plato is boring and Aristotle’s physics is all wrong. Although the poem pleased many of his contemporaries, it offended Boileau, Racine, and La Fontaine, for whom the ancients remained an incomparable source of wisdom and beauty. For the next 13 years Boileau and Perrault kept up a running skirmish in verse and prose, sometimes defending their preferred authors, sometimes insulting their opponent’s taste, in what has come to be called the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.
Similar sentiments had been growing in England, where enthusiasm for Baconian ‘‘natural philosophy’’ had given birth to the Royal Society in 1660. Three years after the querelle began in France, Sir William Temple offered a new defense of the ancients in his Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning (1690). Temple, a former ambassador and one of the most respected men in England, had a gentleman’s knowledge of the classics; that is, he read the Roman writers for pleasure and moral instruction. He was skeptical by temperament and so did not believe that the new science was likely to improve the world in any significant way. The Essay betrayed many of the deficiencies of his learning, and it soon gave rise to a scholarly critique, William Wotton’s Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694). A new quarrel was about to commence and new contenders about to engage, for Wotton’s friend and supporter was the irascible scholar Richard Bentley, and Temple’s secretary an unknown young man named Jonathan Swift.
In his Essay Temple had stated that the oldest writing was often the best, offering the Epistles of Phalaris as a notable example. Bentley read such things with contempt, and when a second edition of Wotton’s Reflections appeared in 1697, it was accompanied by ‘‘A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris,’’ a scholarly demolition job of unmatchable learning. The Epistles, Bentley instructs us, were neither the work of the ancient tyrant Phalaris nor among the oldest Greek writings; they were trite and artificial, a rhetorical exercise by a Sophist of much later date. By now, though, the public had become interested in the quarrel, and the public had no means of evaluating Bentley’s scholarship. What they saw was a ‘‘pedant’’ (Bentley) impugning the taste of a gentleman (Temple); what was this but a breach of social decorum? This particular perception was reinforced a hundredfold when, after Temple’s death, Swift entered the fray with two great satires, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (1704), where modern learning is presented as pedantry, small-mindedness, and solipsism verging on madness. The ancients, it appeared, had triumphed.
The quarrels between the ancients and the moderns, in both France and England, embodied social and cultural tensions that are not always apparent. In both nations they pit the modern world - optimistic, scientific, progressive - against a world of traditional ideas and values. For Boileau the ancients offered crucial insights into art and life; to denigrate their achievements was to put at risk the recent strides in modern culture. Swift, like Temple before him, was deeply skeptical about progress: was the new learning, whether the scientific advances of the Royal Society or Bentley’s emendations of some classical text, likely to make men better? To men like these the ancients offered something else - education for character, and knowledge as a means to moral insight. Nevertheless, the scientific revolution would continue, and Bentley’s scholarship would be vindicated. In the end the game would go to the moderns.
World History
