The Age of Reason and Its Limits

The idea

The eighteenth century began by trusting reason and ended by questioning it. The Augustan writers, under Anne and the first Georges, prized order, decorum and classical models. Pope perfected the heroic couplet, mocked aristocratic triviality in The Rape of the Lock, set rules of taste in An Essay on Criticism and, in An Essay on Man, placed humanity on the chain of being and declared that whatever is, is right. Swift turned reason into a weapon: Gulliver's horses expose human pride, and "A Modest Proposal" uses calm logic to expose cruelty to Ireland. Addison and Steele's Spectator brought moral essays to the coffee-house. The age also made the novel. Defoe gave realistic detail to a castaway and a thief, Richardson told virtue's trials in letters, Fielding answered him with comic epic, and Sterne broke the form with digression, a story Ian Watt called the rise of the novel. Samuel Johnson, poet, lexicographer and critic, stood at the centre, and Boswell recorded him. Yet reason had limits. Johnson's own Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas doubt that happiness can be found; Gray's Elegy and the graveyard poets turned to death and feeling; the novel of sensibility prized tears; Walpole's Otranto began the Gothic's delight in terror; and Equiano's Narrative showed what the age's commerce in human beings cost. Women writers, Finch, Montagu and Burney, claimed the pen. To answer a question on the century, sort the work by genre and ask whether it trusts reason or tests it.