An Odious Infection: The Eighteenth Century Looks Back

By the second half of the eighteenth century, the Restoration was no longer the recent if deplorable past but rather a distinct historical era defined by its monarch, much like the time of good Queen Bess to which it was frequently compared. For those looking back, it was an age that represented not the ideal of "manly" English evoked by the mythical world of Elizabeth but rather a threat to all that England and the English held dear. In the eyes of the later eighteenth century, the Restoration was defined by its legendary licentiousness, licentiousness manifested in its artistic remains and embodied most horrifically in the creations of Wycherley, Etherege, Congreve and their fellow playwrights. Through the arts, the Restoration lives again, and in the rhetoric of the later eighteenth century, it represents an infection that jeopardizes the moral health of all who come in contact with it.

A core assumption of these moralists and critics was that the history of England and its values could not be separated from the history of its arts, and in their role as cultural markers, they were identified as harbingers of national change, for bad as well as good. In one of the more benign representations of the Restoration, Horace Walpole links the fate of the arts directly to English political history, explaining that "the arts were in a manner expelled with the royal family from Britain" during the Civil War. He sees the arts returning to England with the monarchy – but with a difference. As he explains, "the restoration of royalty brought back the arts, not taste … Charles II had seen Louis XIV countenance Corneille, Moliere, Boileau, La Sueur, who forming themselves on the models of the ancients, seemed by the purity of their writings to have studied only in Sparta. Charles found as much genius at home; but how licentious, how indelicate was the style he permitted or demanded!" A nation's culture cannot be separated from those who rule, thus France's literature derives its Spartan purity from the taste of its monarch while Charles II's personal degeneracy transfers itself directly to the cultural world around him. Walpole turns with relief to the Georgian era, remarking, "yet in a history of the arts, as in other histories, the times of confusion and barbarism must have their place, to preserve the connection, and to ascertain the ebb and flow of genius. One likes to see through what clouds broke forth the age of Augustus." For Walpole, then, the age of Charles II represented a clouded past, a past scoured clean by the bright light of the present day, an age, like that of seventeenth-century France, that was defined by an idealized classical past.

Although Walpole does not cite it directly, the literary form which his contemporaries saw as mostly directly corrupted by Charles and his court was drama. Worse yet, the stage, with its immediacy and broad appeal had the potential to influence Britons far removed from the world of the court. It is with these concerns in mind that Hugh Blair writes, "It was not till the aera of the Restoration of King Charles II that the licentiousness which was observed, at that period, to infect the court, and the nation in general, seized, in a peculiar manner, upon Comedy as its province, and, for almost a whole century, retained possession of it." Blair articulates two key issues: first, that the licentiousness of the Restoration court was "infectious," thus bad not just in itself but dangerous to anyone or anything that came in contact with it, so much so that an entire nation was made corrupt; and second, that it infected most horribly and most insidiously popular comedy. The national problem is thus epitomized in a single genre. Blair was not alone in believing that the sexual proclivities of the court permeated and perverted culture as a whole, nor was he alone in seeing this epidemic most horrifically embodied in the comedy of the era. James Beattie, like Blair, uses the Restoration as a means of illustrating the connection between national character and literature...