LITERATURE, DRAMA, POETRY & PHILOSOPHY
Before comparing various works of different authors who wrote during the Romantic Age and the Neoclassic Age, it is useful to have a definition of the elements of each age which are quite distinct. The Neoclassic Age represents a revival of the classical style. Writers like Swift, Racine, and Moliere are considered to embody the elements of the Neoclassic Age, also known as the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment “Their connection with the classical past is exemplified by their emphasis on traditionally classic values, such as sense of form, balance, discipline, dominance of reason, restraint, unity of design and aim, clarity, proportion, and a view that art should be based on man” (Murphy 723).
The Romantic Age writers, like Rousseau, Tennyson, and Melville, were part of the movement against neoclassicism. This movement and age focused on the imagination and emotions as superior to intellect and reason. The romanticism movement embodies the following characteristics “A belief in the innate goodness of man in his natural state; individualism; reverence for nature; primitivism; philosophic idealism; a paradoxical tendency toward both free though and religious mysticism; revolt against authority and social convention; exaltation of physical passion; the cultivation of emotion and sensation for their own sakes; and an interest in the supernatural, the morbid, the melancholy” (Murphy 884). We shall now see how the six authors mentioned above exhibit elements of either romanticism or neoclassicism in their works.
Tartuffe demonstrates the supremacy of reason and man’s folly when he follows his own impulses and nature. When Tartuffe claims to find heavenly wisdom he is foolishly trying to rise above man’s abilities to know. To follow nature in Moliere’s world is to follow reason. When failure occurs it is because the perpetrator has refused to follow the dictates of reas...