The Eighteenth Century Background [antikvár]

T CHAPTER I The Turn of the Century Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said. Let Newton be! and all was light! "'HE eighteenth century—'the silver age of the European Renaissance'—^virtually begins in the final decades of the seventeenth. When we enter those decades we recognize on all sides the familiar eighteenth century landmarks, lit by the familiar illumination of the time. Glory and loveliness may have passed away, but so also have the fogs and glooms of history; the common daylight which now descends upon a distracted world may be prosaic, but at least it is steady and serene, and has not yet become dark with excessive light. One meets everywhere a sense of relief and /escape, relief from the strain of living in a mysterious universe, and escape from the ignorance and barbarism of the Gothic centuries. Nature's laws had been explained by the New Philosophy; sanity, culture, and civilization had revived; and at last, across the vast gulf of the monkish and deluded past, one could salute the ancients from an eminence perhaps as lofty as their own. In England there was added to the general feeling of emancipation from historic spectres a sense of security from the upheavals of the Civil War period. 'We have been so long together bad Englishmen', wrote Dryden in 1668, 'that we had not leisure to be good poets'; but now, 'with the restoration of our happiness, we see revived Poesy lifting up its head, and already shaking off the rubbish which lay so heavy on it'. In this 'noble Eluctation of Truth, wherein, against the tenacity of Prejudice and Prescription, this Century now prevaileth', no conception played a more significant part than that of 'Nature', and in the present chapter it is