1 - Tendencies in thought and literature

Summary

The factors involved in the relationship between the artistic achievement of a nation and success in its other endeavours are complex and often obscure: there have been great powers with little culture, more rarely great cultures with little power. There can be few periods in history, however, in which the cultural influence of the major European nations corresponded as closely to their political standing as the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first two of the next. The France of Louis XIV reached the summit of its power soon after 1680, and its ascent had been accompanied by a coruscation of literary and intellectual brilliance which continued to light up the European scene long after the decline of French political domination and the death of the Grand Monarque. The literary tradition perfected by Moliere and Racine, La Fontaine and Madame de la Fayette, La Rochefoucauld and Bossuet, provided aristocratic standards of taste which dominated the polite literature of Europe for the best part of a century: and the intellectual qualities of rationality, clarity and order implied by that tradition themselves lie at the root of much in the Enlightenment, however deep the gulf may seem between the piety of Fénelon and the irreverence of Voltaire. Alongside continuing French predominance, however, there emerges at this time a new intellectual and literary influence, that of England, characterized by a strong emphasis on factual observation and a new deference to middle-class tastes, which runs parallel with the steady growth of British wealth and power.