Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns

The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (French: querelle des Anciens et des Modernes) was a literary and artistic debate that heated up in the early 1690s and shook the Académie française.

Debate in France

On one side of the debate were the Ancients (Anciens), led by Boileau. They supported the merits of the ancient authors, and contended that a writer could do no better than imitate them. On the other side were the Moderns (Modernes), who opened fire first with Perrault's Le siècle de Louis le Grand ("The Century of Louis the Great," 1687), in which he supported the merits of the authors of the century of Louis XIV and expressed the Moderns' stance in a nutshell:

La docte Antiquité dans toute sa durée

A l'égal de nos jours ne fut point éclairée.

Learned Antiquity, through all its extent,
Was never enlightened to equal our times.

Fontenelle quickly followed with his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688), in which he took the Modern side, pressing the argument that modern scholarship allowed modern man to surpass the ancients in knowledge.

In the opening years of the next century Marivaux was to show himself a Modern in establishing a new genre of theatre, unknown to the Ancients, the sentimental comedy (comédie larmoyante). In it the impending tragedy was resolved at the end, amid reconciliations and floods of tears. By constraining his choice of subjects to those drawn from the literature of Antiquity, Jean Racine showed himself one of the Ancients. He also restricted his tragedies by the classical unities, derived by the classicists from Aristotle's Poetics: the unities of place, time, and action (one scene location, 24 hours, and consistent actions respectively).

Assessment

The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns was a cover, often a witty one, for deeper opposed views. The very idea of Progress was under attack on the one side, and Authority on the other. The new antiquarian interests led to critical reassessment of the products of Antiquity that would eventually bring Scripture itself under the magnifying glass of some Moderns. The attack on authority in literary criticism had analogues in the rise of scientific inquiry, and the Moderns' challenge to authority in literature foreshadowed a later extension of challenging inquiry in systems of politics and religion.^{[citation needed]}

Analogous British debate

In contemporary Britain, the quarrel was taken less seriously. Sir William Temple argued against the Modern position in his essay On Ancient and Modern Learning; therein he repeated the commonplace, originally from Bernard of Chartres, that we see more only because we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. Temple's essay prompted a small flurry of responses. Among others, two men who took the side opposing Temple were classicist and editor Richard Bentley and critic William Wotton.

The entire discussion in England was over by 1696, but it was revisited by Jonathan Swift, who saw in the opposing camps of Ancients and Moderns a shorthand of two general ways of looking at the world. He developed this in his satire A Tale of a Tub, composed between 1694 and 1697 and published in 1704 with the famous prolegomenon The Battle of the Books, long after the initial salvoes were over in France. Swift's polarizing satire provided a framework for other satirists in his circle of the Scriblerians.

See also

• Classicism

References

• Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siecle, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1997, ISBN 9780226141381.
• Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
• Levent Yılmaz, Le temps moderne : Variations sur les Anciens et les contemporains, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2004.

External links

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas Ancients and Moderns in the Eighteenth Century